TWO BOAT DATS AT PRESERVATION INLET.

Otago Witness, Issue 2206, 11 June 1896, Page 42

TWO BOAT DATS AT PRESERVATION INLET.

By Cecil Thornton. NO. I.— (Continued.) If Mrs Sherlock's room was crowded before, it is more so now that there are letters to answer. More new-comers enter; hearty welcomes greet them—welcomes heartily responded to. There is a scene that attracts the attention of an unoccupied onlooker. An old man, tall, with snow-white beard, has evidently some shares to sell. Two men press him — one with gentle argument, one with noiee and bluster. Tbe oLI fellow does not know what to do. Funds are low, .but his belief in the claim is strong. He trembles on the horns of a dilemma. He is moved now by greed, and now is obstinate through hope. His old trembling fingers clutch the pen, but the hand will not write. His long white whiskers wave as he.turng from one to the other of his tempters, his ateel-blue eyes under the grey lashes and the high, wrinkled forehead trying to read their minds. He will not sign ; his mind is made up. He rises, but the louder of the pair bends to his ear and whispers. The old face pales and grows full of alarm. Silently he sits down again, and silently he does what he is bid. Then he leaves the room. The others laugh as they fold np the paper. But to the onlookers it seems from the dread — the fear— expressed in the old man's face that a story lies hidden there. There are several new chums by the boat who hang around the hotel. An eager BeekU'g-for-iuformation young man applies to a bearded lesident for advice. He has read the exaggerated reports of the Wilson River goldfields in a northern paper — exaggerated, perhaps, on aooount of the- unemployed who hang about in a certain city,— and had come to give his luck a chance. So he endeavours to pump the miner, and he obtains — the truth. Wilsoa River is not a poor man's ground. The advice will not be taken ; the adviser is put down as a liar ; the new chum is to be heard telling his mates " 'ow e weren't goin' to 'are me ; there ain't no flies on me." A delicate-looking young man sits on Bradshaw'a pier, sadly gazing at the water. His wife and child are at Invarcargill, to come on by the next boat, in the hope that he would make a living and more at the Inlet. He had a friend there who bad told him to "Go back," so he was g-ang back. True, his pockets were not as empty as when he landed. If you ask his friend and his friend's mates how that came to pass, they will not tell you. But the young man grieves for the caatle that hw fallen into as many fragments as there are bubbles in the wake of that advancing boat. Of a different type indeed are these two — this swaggering yourg fellow, stalwart in body, with his hard hat cocked over his head, ■ and his mate, with a round face and a half deprecating way with him, who looks at you cunningly as he talks. They are Australians — you know them by the silly Australian slang they use — the " patter " of low Melbourne or the "lingo" of Ballarat, They do not stay long, and when they leave they have no very high opinion of tbe miners. " Lor' bless me, they ain't up to Bnuff " — that is the verdict of one of them whose knowledge of the wajs and customs of prisoners in Australia seemed rather too detailed to be the result of ordinary reading. But he may have had special advantages. There is a new chum who bad been farming evidently he had failed on one of the village settlements in tbe north. He expresses an opinion that the bush can easily be felled as he looks upon tbe steep hillsides before him. " Worse than that where I come from," he says. " I shall get a section, and fell it, and burn it." " How would you burn it ? " asked a listener— an old identity in the lulet, a stern, resolute man with a heavy moustache. " With a match," says the brilliant one, who laughs uproariously at bis own wit, while his gruff questioner strides majestically away. He does not stay long. He wants shares in the few paying claims and wants to get them for nothing. Then he shakes off the mud of Preservation, and says he will go up to Wellington and gat " Dick " to look at them mining laws. Who " Dick "is we only suppose — some great philanthropist is our conjecture. There is a rattle of chains on board the boat as the- heavy boom swings round and the hatches are opened. The captain is supercargo, captain, and agent all rolled into one. The steamer's boats are laden again and again, and pass heavily to the shore with their heaped-up loads of rice, oatmeal, I flour, &c. Willing hands bear these commodities out of reach of the tide. The tumult grows. The representative of a company of miners has lost some of his stores ; Mrs Fox ha? come in her " flatty " for her tea and sugar ; this new chum has lost a pickaxe, and braves death in the attempt to regain it; the good-natured sailors laugh with this one or tender their sympathies with that. By this time it is 9 o'clock, and a message comes from the hotel that Sherlock wants his sheep. These poor animals had been cooped up on the " foc'sl'e " cramped in huge crates of wickerwoik. By some means one of these had been broken, and its inmates were tied hind and fore leg together, thus to land or be landed at tbe Inlet. A stalwart sailor takes one of these from the boat on the beach, and proceeds to carry him up to the pen where the other wet, draggled crosabredsare cooped, to wait, like Ulysses and his companions, a daily-approaching fate. The tie slips. Is it the unexpected freedom or a premonition that makes the poor beast kick rigorously in tbe hands of his bearer} I know not ,* All I Imoff is that the sailor, more

used to the deck and the ropes than to the handling of "jumbuks," suddenly lets the animal slip from his grasp, tearing him sprawling in the mad sheepless, bat very far indeed from epeeohleas. He ia mad— the peaty mad of the Inlet— ail over his shirt, and his faca is blackened on one side. He presents a comical spectacle, and the miners laugh. The sheep is not allowed to get off scot free, however. There is a rash of men around the esoaped animal. He butts at one and slips by him — tho miner never having been used to that treatment,— bat at last is recaptured, and, amid cheers, is borne to the pen, whence he will never emerge alive. So for two or three hours the work of unloading goes on. The early breakfast we have had in our smoke-grimed camps has given place to a very natural craving, and when Sherlock's bell rings, there is a rush along the narrow passage to where " fresh " mutton awaits us— not the canned meats which our souls abhor, but real fresh mutton, a little bit fcougb, it is true, but chops fried to a nicety and legs only a little underdone. Dinner is served in a narrow little room that is lit, even in this noonday, with the dazzling sun, outside beating down upon land and sea, by a lamp. Why a lamp 1 Once that room revelled in pure daylight, but the store was built, obstructing its view, and now it needs the humbler light of kerosene in order to allow" the miners to find the way, to their, mouths. There is perfect, order there. The girl who is waiting is mistress of the situation. No one would offend her, for his hunger's sake alone. Outside the door stand hungry mortals waiting patently for their turn, «nd bsyond them are men whose hope is long deferred. After dinner, when a more pleasant exI pression of countenance may generally be observed, the posting of letters becomes more frequent, the inquiry for stamps more incessant, and the men who are going by the boat gather together their goods and chattels and transact the business they bare in hand. Old Duohsrty is going — Dooherty and his dog. The poor old man 1 Ha has since gone to a land which will have no joys for him unless there is gold in plenty and mountains of manganese ore, unless the conversation is of sohist and mica and upon the theory of gold deposits. The poor old fellow in drasaed neatly in his old threadbare suit, with the osmforter around his neck, and his bag of specimens beside him. He has left his boat in charge of a friend, and is rowed to the steamer by Peter, the fisherman. "Here, Peter," says the old man, bending his straight form over the railing, " have a nip to my success)," and he hands him a coin — one o£ hla last, if rumour be true. Poor old Docherty— thy deeds, thy memory, catching up all that ever man said to thae, thy love of exploring, thy secret mines that never yielded thee wealth— these, and the rumour of them, will carry on thy fame. Thou "will! live in many a miner's memory though for ever taken from his sight. So with Dooherty, and with others on pleasure and those cm business bent on board, the InvGtcargill puffs oub of her funnel the thick black smoke, rattles up her anchor, and steams sway, leaving a vacancy in the bay where her propeller had stirred up tbe bottom ; and the thought in the minds of tbe miners on the sand; beach and those clustered on Bradshaw's pier is that for a month perhaps they shall not see her again, nor will they hear from those loved ones with whom that fast receding spot of zed and black and white, showing out so plainly against the dull greenish blue of Goal Island, was the only link.- " Come boys," says aloud stentorian voice, " let's have a drink ! rt (To be continued.) — Bobby : " Why do people call an nnmarried woman a spinster, pa 1 " Pa :, " Because she is spinning a web for an unmarried man, Bobby." — Kite (acidly): "Hit did you get Jack to propose w you dear i " M*ry :" I told him that you were madly iv love with him, and were determined to have him at any cost, dearest." — Terrible Child : "Mrs Mries was praising you to-day, mamma, to Mrs Brownson. I was on the other side of fcho garden 'wall, and heard 'etn." Mimma : " W-iat did she say 1 " Terrible Child : " She said there were worse old gossips than you in the neighbourhood after all."