ooked solvent enough, as far as swagmen go. We were dirty and haggard
and ragged and tired-looking, and that was all the more reason why we
might have our cheques all right.

This Stiffner was a hard customer. He'd been a spieler, fighting man,
bush parson, temperance preacher, and a policeman, and a commercial
traveller, and everything else that was damnable; he'd been a
journalist, and an editor; he'd been a lawyer, too. He was an ugly brute
to look at, and uglier to have a row with--about six-foot-six, wide in
proportion, and stronger than Donald Dinnie.

He was meaner than a gold-field Chinaman, and sharper than a sewer rat:
he wouldn't give his own father a feed, nor lend him a sprat--unless
some safe person backed the old man's I.O.U.

We knew that we needn't expect any mercy from Stiffner; but something
had to be done, so I said to Bill:

"Something's got to be done, Bill! What do you think of it?"

Bill was mostly a quiet young chap, from Sydney, except when he got
drunk--which was seldom--and then he was a customer, from all round. He
was cracked on the subject of spielers. He held that the population of
the world was divided into two classes--one was spielers and the other
was the mugs. He reckoned that he wasn't a mug. At first I thought he
was a spieler, and afterwards I thought that he was a mug. He used to
say that a man had to do it these times; that he was honest once and
a fool, and was robbed and starved in consequences by his friends and
relations; but now he intended to take all that he could get. He said
that you either had to have or be had; that men were driven to be
sharps, and there was no help for it.

Bill said:

"We'll have to sharpen our teeth, that's all, and chew somebody's lug."

"How?" I asked.

There was a lot of navvies at the pub, and I knew one or two by sight,
so Bill says:

"You know one or two of these mugs. Bite one of their ears.

"So I took aside a chap that I knowed and bit his ear for ten bob, and
gave it to Bill to mind, for I thought it would be safer with him than
with me.

"Hang on to that," I says, "and don't lose it for your natural life's
sake, or Stiffner'll stiffen us."

We put up about nine bob's worth of drinks that night--me and Bill--and
Stiffner didn't squeal: he was too sharp. He shouted once or twice.

By-and-by I left Bill and turned in, and in the morning when I woke up
there was Bill sitting alongside of me, and looking about as lively
as