iggings on the West Coast
were only two years old at that date, and although it was not uncommon
for prospecting parties cutting their way, axe in hand, through the
thick bush, to come upon skeletons of men in lonely places, still
it might be taken for granted that these were the remains of early
explorers or travellers who had got lost and starved to death within
the green tangled walls of this impenetrable forest. The scenery of that
part of the Middle Island is far more beautiful than in the agricultural
or pastoral districts. Giant Alps clothed half up their steep sides
with evergreen pines,--whose dark forms end abruptly where snow and ice
begin,--stand out against a pure sky of more than Italian blue, and only
when a cleared saddle is reached can the traveller look down over the
wooded hills and vallies rolling away inland before him, or turn his
eyes sea-ward to the bold coast with its many rivers, whose wide mouths
foam right out to where the great Pacific waves are heaving under the
bright winter sun.

Such, and yet still more fair must have been the prospect on which
Burgess, Kelly, Levy, and Sullivan's eyes rested one June morning in the
mid-winter of 1866. They were, one and all, originally London thieves,
and had been transported years before to the early penal settlements of
Australia. From thence they had managed, by fair means and foul, to work
their way to other places, and had latterly been living in the Middle
Island, earning what they could by horse-breaking and divers odd jobs.
But your true convict hates work with a curiously deadly hatred, and
these four men agreed to go and look round them at the new West Coast
diggings. They found, however, that there, as elsewhere, it would be
necessary to work hard, so in disgust at seeing the nuggets and dust
which rewarded the toil of more industrious men, they left Hokitika and
reached Nelson on their way to Picton, the chief town of the adjoining
province of Marlborough. Most of the gold found its way under a strongly
armed escort to the banks in both these towns, but it was well-known
that fortunate diggers occasionally travelled together, unarmed,
and laden with "dust." So safe had been the roads hitherto, that the
commonest precautions were not taken, nor the least secrecy observed
about travellers' movements.

It was therefore no mystery that four unarmed diggers, carrying a
considerable number of ounces of gold-dust with them, were going to
start fr