t, say from Coolgardie, to
ride seventy miles east and return, then perhaps sixty to the north, and
from that point ride across to their seventy-mile point with great
ease and certainty, having no notion of the distance or point of the
compass.

A good many prospectors, depending on their black-boys almost entirely,
wander from one range of hills to another, dodge here and there for water,
keep no count or reckoning, and only return by the help of their guide
when the "tucker-bags" are empty; others make a practice of standing two
sticks in the ground on camping at night, to remind them of the course
they have travelled during the day and must resume in the morning. To such
men as these a map or compass is useless and therefore of no value; and
yet they are often spoken of by the ignorant as "best bushmen in
Australia."

In my time I have seen and mixed with most prospectors in the West, and as
far as my experience goes the best bushmen not only use the compass, but
keep a reckoning, rough though it may be, of their day's travel. Such a
man is Billy Frost, to quote a well-known name on the goldfields, a man
who has had no chance to learn any of the rudiments of surveying, and who
started life as a boundary rider on a cattle station. He has shown me a
note-book in which he has jotted down directions and distances from water.

In mountainous country where landmarks are numerous the traveller may
manage it; but no man could travel for any length of time without keeping
some sort of reckoning, in a flat country like the interior of Western
Australia, where for days together one sees no hill or rise, without
before long becoming hopelessly lost.

Paddy Egan had been content to travel in this haphazard way, and it was
long before he would acknowledge the benefits of a compass and map. That
he could travel straight there was no gainsaying, for if, as I sometimes
did, I pointed out our line and sent him ahead, he would go as straight as
a die, with now and then a glance at the sun, and a slight alteration in
his course to allow for its altered position, and require but little
correction. Indeed, even when using a compass, one instinctively pays as
much and more attention to the sun or the stars, as the case may be.

The rock-hole at Beri was dry, so we pushed on for Lake Roe, and, though
we worked sinking holes until past midnight, and nearly the whole of the
next day, we were unable to find water. It was only salt water we