The Great Crushing at Mount Sugar-Bag by Louis Becke
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The Great Crushing at Mount Sugar-Bag
A Queensland Mining Tale
by Louis Becke
"Let's sling it, boys. There's no fun in our bullocking here day after day and not making tucker! I'm sick to death of the infernal hole, and mean to get out of it."
"So am I, Ned. I was sick of it a month ago," said Harry Durham, filling his pipe and flinging himself down at full length upon his luxurious couch--a corn-sack suspended between four posts driven into the earthen floor of the hut. "I'm ready to chuck it up to-morrow and drive a mob of nanny-goats to the Palmer, like young Preston did the other day."
"How much do we owe that old divil Ikey now?" said Rody Minogue, the third man of the party, who sat at the open doorway looking out upon the disreputable collection of bark humpies that constituted the played-out mining township of Mount Sugar-bag.
"About £70 now," said Durham; "but against that he's got our five horses. The old beast means to shut down on us, I can see that plainly enough.
When I went to him on Saturday for the tucker he had a face on him as long as a child's coffin."
"Look here, boys," said Buller, the pessimsit, "let the infernal old vampire keep our three saddle-horses--they are worth more than seventy quid--and be hanged to him. We'll have the two pack-horses left. Let us sell one, and with the other to carry our swags, we'll foot it to Cleveland Bay, or Bowen, I don't care which."
"An' what are we goin' to do whin we get there?" asked Rody.
Buller shrugged his shoulders. "Dashed if I know, Rody; walk up and down Bowen jetty watch the steamer