What splendid pluck and daring to wrest gold from
the earth under such circumstances! What general would fight an enemy so
far from his food supply?
We seemed to be no time being raced and shaken over the flat sand basin,
meeting and passing more teams on the way, and twice a petrol and drink
station of one board shed, and a man with a jolly Irish face and a gun
openly in his belt, to attend to it. We had no breakdowns, and just at
sunset got into the one and only street of Moonbeams. But there were no
stone houses or anything but sheds of one storey, generally, and more
often rows of tents. The Moonbeams is not three months old! So quickly
do these places grow when a rush for newly discovered rich gold is made.
We had passed quantities of "claims" on the way; piles of stones like
little cairns marking their four corners; and I wonder if in five
hundred years the socialists of that day will scream and try to
demonstrate that the descendants of those brave adventurers have no
right to their bit of land, but should give it up to them, who only talk
and fume and do no work upon it.
Everyone was in from the mines, which are all close, shafts sticking
up from every hill and heaps of broken rock and earth rising like mole
hills.
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