ped the tea--post and rails we used to call it--into our tin
pannikins, and proceeded to boil part of a cabbage in the billy for the
invalid. I laugh now when I think that in those days we counted a
common cabbage a luxury fit to tempt a sick man's appetite; but, indeed,
luxuries of all kinds were scarce, and as for that cabbage it had been
procured with infinite pains and at great cost; and the odour that rose
from the pot--the very offensive odour of boiled cabbage, as I now think
it--appeared to us most appetising.

I went with Dick to give poor Bob Wilson his breakfast. It was a
very thin, white, pinched face that looked out from among the rough
bedclothes, and a skeleton hand that grasped mine.

He appreciated the cabbage, however. I have been told since that it
ought to have killed him, but it didn't.

"By Jove!" he said, "it's splendid, splendid. It must have cost a lot to
get it. You fellows are good to me. If it hadn't been for you two, I 'd
have died like a dog,"--not quite true, for if we hadn't looked after him
someone else would--"and before the next year's out I 'll try and show
you how grateful I am."

And before the next year was out the poor boy was dead--murdered by some
miscreant for the handful of gold in his possession, down in the lonely
bush about Reedy Creek.

Wilson's wants being attended to, Dick and I began our preparations for
the all important dinner. This was to consist of roast scrub turkey and
plum pudding, washed down by Battle axe brandy. And here the good old
cookery-book adage came into play, for as yet our bird was running wild
in the scrub, and it was a case of first catch your turkey. The morning
was hot, but not too hot, with just a pleasant breeze stirring in the
bush, and I rather desired to go on the shooting expedition. I ventured
to suggest mildly that Dick was a better hand at pudding than I was, but
he saw through my little game. Pudding was not an absolute necessary
of life, he said, which the turkey really was, and as I was a bad
shot--there was no denying the fact, I was a very bad shot--he had
better go while I stopped at home and manipulated the pudding.

Dick always had his own way in the end, and I watched him enviously as
he tramped up the opposite hill-side until he was lost to view, and then
I set to work on the pudding.

The whole camp was astir by now--some busy preparing their morning meal,
some like me, beginning on dinner, and many too sick and seedy t