Читать книгу Hands Up! онлайн

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But things were not so bad as I had prepared to find them at the Gravel Pit. Black Kettle lay seven miles away and to my imagination the place was quite cut off from the world!

The passage of occasional freight-trains served but to emphasise the loneliness of the country; for, after they had gone screaming past, even before the dust swirls by the track side had settled, the silence came again. Facing a great hill, a little west of the pit, a steam shovel had been set. That steam shovel, in its own little siding, that steam shovel, all covered with tarpaulins, seemed a melancholy sight. I could hardly believe that white men would be coming anon to get steam up in it and set it nosing and scooping into the hill. It wore the air of having been left there for the Spirit of the Dry Belt to cover over with sand, and blot out, and forget.

The camp consisted of two old freight-cars, one used for a store-house and dining-room and kitchen and sleeping-room for a Chinaman; the other used for a "bunk-house" for the men, with bunks fitted up inside it and just the end partitioned off as a boss's room. In the boss's room were two bunks, and one of them he told me I could occupy.