“There's plenty more fish on it yet. We'll be troubling you to stop for a couple of months yet.”
“You won't be making a very early start to-morrow if we jerk your boat much further,” remarked Captain Andrews, with a smile.
“Come,” urged Bill. “We'll hunt up Charley and cut away back.”
The well-contented partners strolled on deck, anticipating a very tipsy Charley, whom neither steward nor bo'sun could discover.
The sun had just set. A bewildering blank astern excited a wide and comprehensive survey, and there in the blue-grey of the south-east Black Charley's big white-winged cutter was fast fading from view.
When the partners got back to the reef, via Thursday Island and Cooktown, a fortnight later, the boys were there, looking somewhat jaded. The NAUTILUS was as trim as ever, for which the owners were sufficiently thankful; but cute Black Charley, working both crews day and night like galley slaves, had mopped up the patch as clean as the floor of a hospital ward.
“We've bin had proper, Bill, old fellow. Let's up and away for Cooktown. Mammerroo moans for that mouth-organ!”
And the Christian in Billy Boolah smiled as he hummed “Left blooming Alone.”
“Whence has the man the balm that brightens all?”
Though not popular, perhaps Tsing Hi was the best known of his contemporaries on the tableland through which the Palmer River wanders a hundred miles from the Gulf of Carpentaria. Short, slimly made as a fourteen-year-old boy, nimble, fussy, plausible, he stood out from among his countrymen as one having authority, while he posed among the Europeans as a kind of diplomatic agent, explaining away misunderstandings, conciliating grievances, and generally comporting himself as the chartered representative of the horde of yellow new-chums which invaded the most sensational of all Australian goldfields. He appeared to have cousins among every fresh shipload from China, as well as among the hundreds who ferreted in the gullies. There was not a white man, from the Police Magistrate to Frank Deester's off-sider, with whom he was not on terms of easy familiarity.
Had he not often confidentially consulted the Warden when a cousin had blundered into the hands of the police, embarrassing that flustered official with torrents of half intelligible speech, the purport of which generally was to flout the proceedings with evidence of indubitable alibi? All this he translated to his countrymen as proof of personal influence with court authorities, and, what was more to the point, made them pay for it.