‘You’ll be at the King’s School next week,’ said his mother, with quiet emphasis, ‘so I advise you to make the most of your time for a few days. I can’t have you idling about town, and losing precious opportunities.’
Reggie’s face fell just the least bit at this announcement, but soon recovered its uniformly cheerful expression.
‘Can’t we stay till we go into the new house; that won’t be long, I suppose?’
‘Not a day longer than I can help, my boy. School is your most important affair for the next three or four years, and your father expects you to distinguish yourselves—that is, you and Eric; Jack must stay with Miss Charters for another year. Just fancy what a fine time you’ll have! Ever so many playfellows—cricket and football, hare and hounds, steeplechases, all kinds of games. You’ll be so happy after the first week that you won’t want to come home.’
‘I shall never feel like _that_, mother!’ said the boy feelingly. ‘Don’t make any mistake.’
The eventful step was fully carried out; a comfortable house in one of the picturesque suburbs of Sydney was rented and furnished; the father’s farewells were made—those adieus sometimes temporary, but which the heart is prone to suggest may be eternal; and as the mail-boat majestically moved on her course through the great sandstone gates of the landlocked haven, the tears fell fast from the eyes of more than one of the little party as her smoke faded from view behind the lofty headland.
Again the week-long voyage—the sighting of the far western ports—the hasty landing—the railway crowding—the short stay at Perth—the uneventful, uninteresting overland journey through country which nothing but the possession of goldfields could render interesting, though occasionally touching upon patches more or less agricultural or pastoral. The motley crowd of pilgrims to the Mecca of Mammon was indeed a medley, as are all goldfields crusades. Runaway sailors, deserting soldiers, shepherds, stockriders, navvies, nobodies, gentlemen ‘formerly in the army,’ Cambridge and Oxford graduates, ex-Queensland squatters—some with two horses, some with a packhorse only, but by far the greater number depending entirely upon the all-sufficing ‘bluey’ (or blue blanket) carried on the shoulders, and containing the owner’s food, wardrobe, cooking utensils, and worldly possessions generally. Southern Cross, a year-old town, was not materially different in architecture, dust, flies, banks, and blasphemy, from ‘rushes’ with which the Commissioner had been familiar, only ‘more so,’ perhaps—every discomfort and departure from civilised life being strongly accentuated. A much-begrudged hour or two was spent, or rather wasted here, and through the clear, starlit night the expedition pushed silently onward. Taking counsel of past experience, the leader had left little to the chances of the journey. He had provided a substantial waggonette, heavier than the first vehicle in which he and old Waters had travelled to the Pilot Mount; a forty-gallon cask for water—a good-sized condenser, in case they ran short of the indispensable element—chaff and oats sufficient for their four horses, with tinned meat and fish to ensure a variety of ‘cuisine’; rifles, repeaters, and double-barrels, with revolvers in good order, and plenty of ammunition; also a fair-sized tent, with folding-table and seats, as a lengthened stay at the claim, which was now a certainty, would need these accessories for reasonable comfort, now that there was no doubt of the reef being permanent, rich, wide, and going down equally so—indeed better the deeper it went down. After leaving Southern Cross the desert journey recommenced, but now there was no difficulty in finding the road. Every kind of track was printed in large type upon the broad sheet of the Waste. Carts and waggons, horses and bullock teams, had been there. The camels, following one behind the other, had left their soft, narrow paths through sand-hill and spinifex plain, salt lake and clay pan. This they could note as they went through mulga and low acacia scrub until Pilot Hill, as the eminence had been named, was sighted. Some of the ‘soaks’ emptied by the horses and camel trains had not refilled, but their reserve of cask water stood well to them in temporary need. And after a journey neither protracted nor arduous, they greeted old Jack and Southwater, who had managed to put up a comfortable shanty, and pointed proudly to a ‘township’ of tents, and hessian edifices, occupying a considerable stretch of country.