“Down the river, I suppose, to some public house. If we put ’em away to the pleece they’d be fined a hundred quid, an’ their still took an’ broke up. We’d get a reward, too!”
“Because,” said Tom, emphatically, “we ain’t informers, we’re pirates! If a poor cove is makin’ a drop of grog out of his maize on the quiet, let ’im. It ain’t no business of ours. Besides, we’d be putting ourselves away. An’, besides, if we did a thing like that we wouldn’t get no credit for it neither. They’re all in the same boat about here.”
“What’s became of the cove that hid it?” asked Dave.
“I followed his trail, all right,” replied Tom. “I never knowed about this track, either. They ain’t bin usin’ the island for a plant long, I reckon. The cove went off in a boat quiet. There’s a regular pathway wore where they been rollin’ in the casks; but it don’t take long to make a road like that.”
“Not to-day, he won’t,” observed Tom Pagdin, sagaciously. “He just brings the stuff acrost ’ere an’ leaves it. Somebody else knows where to come, and they take it away at night. It’s a moral they don’t come in the daytime.”
“I’m as hungry as old Nick,” remarked Dave, rubbing his stomach.
“So’m I,” said Tom; “I’m as hungry as ole Nick’s mother. Let’s go an’ get a feed.”
They went back, and carried their swags in under the fig tree, and Tom, after due consideration, pronounced it safe to light a small fire to boil the billy, providing they didn’t use brushwood, because brushwood makes too much smoke, and providing, also, that they put the fire out as soon as the water was boiled.
So Dave gathered the wood, and Tom went down and filled the billy, and they made tea and brought out some cold corned meat and bread, which Dave had abstracted from the paternal safe, the paternal safe being a flour-bag split at one end and fastened up with a strip of greenhide to exclude flies, with a piece of bark in the bottom to stand the plates on.
It seemed to both youths that it was the sweetest meal they had ever had in all their lives, and after it was through they lay on the ground feeling good and brave, and Tom unfolded a plan of campaign.
“We can’t stay here no longer than to-day,” he explained. “One thing, it’s too close to home, an’ another thing, we can’t make a camp, because these fellars that has the still would be sure to see it. We got to get right down the river to-night after those other coves come back with out boat. We got to get right down far as we can before daylight. There’s lots of islands in the river where we can make a headquarters camp, an’ if we don’t get an island we kin get in the bush on the mainland. There’s all sorts o’ bays an’ creeks an’ lagoons, an’ we’ll explore ’em all. We’ll go digging for buried treasure, an’ lookin’ fer gold, an’ we’ll have an all-right time. But, first of all, we got to organise things. You got to organise things if you want to make this piratin’ game pay.”