"Nor the hussy," the little woman snapped, apparently at the mud-
hens paddling on the surface of the lagoon.

"I've been travelling toward the nugget right along--"

"There was never no reason for you to stay in that dangerous
country," his wife snapped in on him.

"Now, Sarah," he appealed. "I was working for you right along."
And to me he explained: "The risk was big, but so was the pay.
Some months I earned as high as five hundred gold. And here was
Sarah waiting for me back in Nebraska--"

"An' us engaged two years," she complained to the Tower of Jewels.

"--What of the strike, and me being blacklisted, and getting
typhoid down in Australia, and everything," he went on. "And luck
was with me on that railroad. Why, I saw fellows fresh from the
States pass out, some of them not a week on their first run. If
the diseases and the railroad didn't get them, then it was the
Spiggoties got them. But it just wasn't my fate, even that time I
rode my engine down to the bottom of a forty-foot washout. I lost
my fireman; and the conductor and the Superintendent of Rolling
Stock (who happened to be running down to Duran to meet his bride)
had their heads knifed off by the Spiggoties and paraded around on
poles. But I lay snug as a bug under a couple of feet of tender
coal, and they thought I'd headed for tall timber--lay there a day
and a night till the excitement cooled down. Yes, I was lucky.
The worst that happened to me was I caught a cold once, and another
time had a carbuncle. But the other fellows! They died like