ng seen from the shore, the natives, surmising that they were in a
drunken sleep, called loudly to them to awake; but only the roaring of
the flames broke the silence of the ocean. Not daring to go nearer, the
natives remained in the vicinity till the brigantine was nothing but a
mastless, glowing mass of fire.

Towards midnight she sank; and the last of the beachcombers of Kuria
sank with her.

NELL OF MULLINER'S CAMP

Mulliner's Camp, on the Hodgkinson, was the most hopeless-looking spot
in the most God-forsaken piece of country in North Queensland, and
Haughton, the amalgamator at the "Big Surprise" crushing-mill, as he
turned wearily away from the battery-tables to look at his "retorting"
fire, cursed silently but vigorously at his folly in staying there.

It was Saturday night, and the deadly melancholy of Mulliner's was, if
possible, somewhat accentuated by the crash and rattle of the played-out
old five-head battery, accompanied by the wheezings and groanings of its
notoriously unreliable pumping-gear. Half a mile away from the decrepid
old battery, and situated on the summit of an adder-infested ironstone
ridge, the dozen or so of bark humpies that constituted Mulliner's Camp
proper stood out clearly in the bright starlight in all their squat
ugliness. From the extra display of light that shone from the doorway of
the largest and most dilapidated-looking of the huts, Haughton knew
that the Cooktown mailman had come in, and was shouting a drink for the
landlord of the "Booming Nugget" before eating his supper of corned
beef and damper and riding onward. For Mulliner's had gone to the bad
altogether; even the beef that the mailman was eating came from a beast
belonging to old Channing, of Calypso Downs, which had fallen down a
shaft the previous night. Perhaps this matter of a fairly steady beef
supply was the silver lining to the black cloud of misfortune that had
so long enshrouded the spirits of the few remaining diggers that
still clung tenaciously to the duffered-out mining camp, for whenever
Mulliner's ran out of meat a beast of Channing's would always--by some
mysterious dispensation of a kindly goldfield's Providence--fall down a
shaft and suffer mortal injuries.

*****

Just at the present moment Haughton, as he threw a log or two into the
retort furnace and watched the shower of sparks fly high up over the
battery roof, was thinking of old Channing's daughter Kate, and
the curious state of a