ou leave it all to me
till you're born again with brains.'

Dave's schemes were always elaborate, and that was why they so often
came to the ground. He logged up his windlass platform a little higher,
bent about eighty feet of rope to the bole of the windlass, which was a
new one, and thereafter, whenever a suspicious-looking party (that is
to say, a digger) hove in sight, Dave would let down about forty feet of
rope and then wind, with simulated exertion, until the slack was taken
up and the rope lifted the bucket from the shallow bottom.

'It would look better to have a whip-pole and a horse, but we can't
afford them just yet,' said Dave.

But I'm a little behind. They drove straight in under the cemetery,
finding good wash all the way. The edge of Jimmy Middleton's box
appeared in the top corner of the 'face' (the working end) of the drive.
They went under the butt-end of the grave. They shoved up the end of the
shell with a prop, to prevent the possibility of an accident which might
disturb the mound above; they puddled--i.e., rammed--stiff clay up round
the edges to keep the loose earth from dribbling down; and having given
the bottom of the coffin a good coat of tar, they got over, or rather
under, an unpleasant matter.

Jim Bently smoked and burnt paper during his shift below, and grumbled a
good deal. 'Blowed if I ever thought I'd be rooting for gold down among
the blanky dead men,' he said. But the dirt panned out better every
dish they washed, and Dave worked the 'wash' out right and left as they
drove.

But, one fine morning, who should come along but the very last man
whom Dave wished to see round there--'Old Pinter' (James Poynton),
Californian and Victorian digger of the old school. He'd been
prospecting down the creek, carried his pick over his shoulder--threaded
through the eye in the heft of his big-bladed, short-handled shovel that
hung behind--and his gold-dish under his arm.

I mightn't get a chance again to explain what a gold-dish and what
gold-washing is. A gold washing-dish is a flat dish--nearer the shape
of a bedroom bath-tub than anything else I have seen in England, or the
dish we used for setting milk--I don't know whether the same is used
here: the gold-dish measures, say, eighteen inches across the top. You
get it full of wash dirt, squat down at a convenient place at the edge
of the water-hole, where there is a rest for the dish in the water just
below its own depth. You sink the d