And we, the men who braved this task, were outcasts of the world. A blind fate, a vast merciless mechanism, cut and shaped the fabric of our existence. We were men flogged to the work which we had to do, and hounded from the work which we had accomplished. We were men despised when we were most useful, rejected when we were not needed, and forgotten when our troubles weighed upon us heavily. We were the men sent out to fight the spirit of the wastes, rob it of all its primeval horrors, and batter down the barriers of its world-old defences. Where we were working a new town would spring up some day; it was already springing up, and then, if one of us walked there, "a man with no fixed address," he would be taken up and tried as a loiterer and vagrant.
Even as I thought of these things a shoulder of jagged rock fell into a cutting far below. There was the sound of a scream in the distance, and a song died away in the throat of some rude singer. Then out of the pit I saw men, red with the muck of the deep earth and redder still with the blood of a stricken mate, come forth, bearing between them a silent figure. Another of the pioneers of civilisation had given up his life for the sake of society.
I returned to the shack, and, full of the horror of the tragedy, I wrote an account of it on a scrap of tea-paper. I had no design, no purpose in writing, but I felt compelled to scribble down the thoughts which entered my mind. I wrote rapidly, but soon wearied of my work. I was proceeding to tear up the manuscript when my eye fell on a newspaper which had just come into the shack wrapped around a chunk of mouldy beef. A thought came to me there and then. I would send my account of the tragedy to the editor of that paper. It was the _Dawn_, a London halfpenny daily. I had never heard of it before.
I had no envelope in my possession. I searched through the shack and found one, dirty, torn, and disreputable in appearance. Amongst all those men there was not another to be found. I did not rewrite my story. Scrawled with pencil on dirty paper, and enclosed in a dirtier envelope, I sent it off to Fleet Street and forgot all about it. But, strange to say, in four days' time I received an answer from the editor of the _Dawn_, asking me to send some more stories of the same kind, and saying that he was prepared to pay me two guineas for each contribution accepted.