t.

'Simple as striking matches,' said Dave Regan, Bushman; 'but it gave me
the biggest scare I ever had--except, perhaps, the time I stumbled in
the dark into a six-feet digger's hole, which might have been eighty
feet deep for all I knew when I was falling. (There was an eighty-feet
shaft left open close by.)

'It was the night of the day after the Queen's birthday. I was sinking a
shaft with Jim Bently and Andy Page on the old Redclay goldfield, and
we camped in a tent on the creek. Jim and me went to some races that was
held at Peter Anderson's pub., about four miles across the ridges, on
Queen's birthday. Andy was a quiet sort of chap, a teetotaller, and
we'd disgusted him the last time he was out for a holiday with us, so he
stayed at home and washed and mended his clothes, and read an arithmetic
book. (He used to keep the accounts, and it took him most of his spare
time.)

'Jim and me had a pretty high time. We all got pretty tight after the
races, and I wanted to fight Jim, or Jim wanted to fight me--I don't
remember which. We were old chums, and we nearly always wanted to fight
each other when we got a bit on, and we'd fight if we weren't stopped. I
remember once Jim got maudlin drunk and begged and prayed of me to fight
him, as if he was praying for his life. Tom Tarrant, the coach-driver,
used to say that Jim and me must be related, else we wouldn't hate each
other so much when we were tight and truthful.

'Anyway, this day, Jim got the sulks, and caught his horse and went home
early in the evening. My dog went home with him too; I must have been
carrying on pretty bad to disgust the dog.

'Next evening I got disgusted with myself, and started to walk home. I'd
lost my hat, so Peter Anderson lent me an old one of his, that he'd worn
on Ballarat he said: it was a hard, straw, flat, broad-brimmed affair,
and fitted my headache pretty tight. Peter gave me a small flask of
whisky to help me home. I had to go across some flats and up a long dark
gully called Murderer's Gully, and over a gap called Dead Man's Gap,
and down the ridge and gullies to Redclay Creek. The lonely flats
were covered with blue-grey gum bush, and looked ghostly enough in the
moonlight, and I was pretty shaky, but I had a pull at the flask and a
mouthful of water at a creek and felt right enough. I began to whistle,
and then to sing: I never used to sing unless I thought I was a couple
of miles out of earshot of any one.

'Murderer's