Читать книгу The Last Chance: A Tale of the Golden West онлайн

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‘Yes, Captain, yonder’s the Black Peak! I was pretty near told out when I struck it, and that done when I got there that I never expected to see home again. I’d been walking half the night, and all day—my water-bag was empty—I’d had nothing to eat to speak of for a week past, just a morsel of biscuit now and then. My boots was wore through, my feet bleedin’, and that sore I could hardly drag myself along. By George! if a digger wants to have the heart of a lion, as people say, what must a prospector? Heat and cold, hunger and thirst—blacks to fight, off and on—whites if he’s got a bit of gold, nigh hand as bad, perhaps worse, as they’re more cunning. ssss1 How many a heap of bones lies bleaching in the sun, between here and Kurnalpi! Sometimes they’re found, and there’s papers on ’em that tells where the only son, or the favourite youngest one, laid down to die, and never come home, all the years they was expecting of him to open the door of the old place and say, “Here I am, with a brown face and a bag of nuggets”—as the story-writers tell us. Well, well! I’m ramblin’ away, just like a chap I did hear once, as I come on just in time to give him a bite and a sup, and save his precious life. How he was a-talkin’ and goin’ on! I heard him a matter of half a mile afore I got to him. He talked and talked—thought he saw his people again, and they wouldn’t let him in. Then he’d scream and yell, and curse frightful, and say the devil was coming for him—just for all the world like a man with the jim-jams—the D.T.s, or whatever doctors call it. There ain’t so much difference between what men and women say when once they’re off their head. We’re all queer animals—larned or unlarned—and that’s a fact.