z they was waitin' for you--an' I
want my crimson money out o' some one!"

'"What was they like?" asks the boss.

'"Like?" shouted Poisonous, swearin' all the time. "One was a blanky
long, sandy, sawny feller, and the other was a short, slim feller with
black hair. Your blanky men knows all about them because they had the
blanky billy o' beer."

'"Now, what's this all about, you chaps?" sez the boss to us.

'So we told him as much as we knowed about them two fellers.

'I've heard men swear that could swear in a rough shearin'-shed, but I
never heard a man swear like Poisonous Jimmy when he saw how he'd been
left. It was enough to split stumps. He said he wanted to see those
fellers, just once, before he died.

'He rode with us into Mulgatown, got mad drunk, an' started out along
the road with a tomahawk after the long sandy feller and the slim dark
feller; but two mounted police went after him an' fetched him back. He
said he only wanted justice; he said he only wanted to stun them two
fellers till he could give 'em in charge.

'They fined him ten bob.'

The Ghostly Door.

Told by one of Dave's mates.

Dave and I were tramping on a lonely Bush track in New Zealand, making
for a sawmill where we expected to get work, and we were caught in one
of those three-days' gales, with rain and hail in it and cold enough to
cut off a man's legs. Camping out was not to be thought of, so we
just tramped on in silence, with the stinging pain coming between our
shoulder-blades--from cold, weariness, and the weight of our swags--and
our boots, full of water, going splosh, splosh, splosh along the
track. We were settled to it--to drag on like wet, weary, muddy working
bullocks till we came to somewhere--when, just before darkness settled
down, we saw the loom of a humpy of some sort on the slope of a
tussock hill, back from the road, and we made for it, without holding a
consultation.

It was a two-roomed hut built of waste timber from a sawmill, and was
either a deserted settler's home or a hut attached to an abandoned
sawmill round there somewhere. The windows were boarded up. We dumped
our swags under the little verandah and banged at the door, to make
sure; then Dave pulled a couple of boards off a window and looked in:
there was light enough to see that the place was empty. Dave pulled
off some more boards, put his arm in through a broken pane, clicked the
catch back, and then pushed up the window and got in.