Joe died of consumption on the track. When he was dying uncle asked: “Is there anything you would like?”
And Joe said: “I'd like a lilly drap o' rum, boss.”
Which were his last words, for he drank the rum and died peacefully.
I was the first to hear the news at home, and, being still a youngster, I ran to the house, crying “Oh, mother! aunt's Joe is dead!”
There were visitors at our place at the time, and, as the eldest child of the maternal aunt in question had also been christened Joe--after a grandfather of our tribe (my tribe, not Black Joe's)--the news caused a sudden and unpleasant sensation. But cross-examination explained the mistake, and I retired to the rear of the pig-sty, as was my custom when things went wrong, with another cause for grief.
“Seems to me that honest, hard-working men seem to accumulate the heaviest swags of trouble in this world.”--Steelman.
We were coming back from West Australia, steerage--Mitchell, the Oracle, and I. I had gone over saloon, with a few pounds in my pocket. Mitchell said this was a great mistake--I should have gone over steerage with nothing but the clothes I stood upright in, and come back saloon with a pile. He said it was a very common mistake that men made, but, as far as his experience went, there always seemed to be a deep-rooted popular prejudice in favour of going away from home with a few pounds in one's pocket and coming back stumped; at least amongst rovers and vagabonds like ourselves--it wasn't so generally popular or admired at home, or in the places we came back to, as it was in the places we went to. Anyway it went, there wasn't the slightest doubt that our nearest and dearest friends were, as a rule, in favour of our taking away as little as we could possibly manage with, and coming back with a pile, whether we came back saloon or not; and that ought to settle the matter as far as any chap that had the slightest consideration for his friends or family was concerned.
There was a good deal of misery, underneath, coming home in that steerage. One man had had his hand crushed and amputated out Coolgardie way, and the stump had mortified, and he was being sent to Melbourne by his mates. Some had lost their money, some a couple of years of their life, some their souls; but none seemed to have lost the heart to call up the quiet grin that southern rovers, vagabonds, travellers for “graft” or fortune, and professional wanderers wear in front of it all. Except one man--an elderly eastern digger--he had lost his wife in Sydney while he was away.