A kind of natural cellar had been made by scooping out the soft sandstone behind a ledge. From this father took a bag of flour and corn-meal. We very soon made some cakes in the pan, that tasted well, I can tell you. Tea and sugar, too, and quart pots, some bacon in a flour-bag; and that rasher fried in the pan was the sweetest meat I ever ate in all my born days.

Then father brought out a keg and poured some rum into a pint pot. He took a pretty stiff pull, and then handed it to us. “A little of it won’t hurt you, boys,” he said,“after a night’s work.”

I took some—not much; we hadn’t learned to drink then—to keep down the fear of something hanging over us. A dreadful fear it is. It makes a coward of every man who doesn’t lead a square life, let him be as game as he may.

Jim wouldn’t touch it. “No,” he said, when I laughed at him, “I promised mother last time I had more than was good for me at Bargo Races that I wouldn’t touch it again for two years; and I won’t either. I can stand what any other man can, and without the hard stuff, either.”

“Please yourself,” said father. “When you’re ready we’ll have a ride through the stock.”

We finished our meal, and a first-rate one it was. A man never has the same appetite for his meals anywhere else that he has in the bush, specially if he has been up half the night. It’s so fresh, and the air makes him feel as if he’d ate nothing for a week. Sitting on a log, or in the cave, as we were, I’ve had the best meal I’ve ever tasted since I was born. Not like the close-feeling, close-smelling, dirty-clean graveyard they call a gaol. But it’s no use beginning on that. We were young men, and free, too! Free! By all the devils in hell, if there are devils and there must be to tempt a man, or how could he be so great a fool, so blind a born idiot, as to do anything in this world that would put his freedom in jeopardy? And what for? For folly and nonsense. For a few pounds he could earn with a month’s honest work and be all the better man for it. For a false woman’s smile that he could buy, and ten like her, if he only kept straight and saving. For a bit of sudden pride or vanity or passion. A short bit of what looks like pleasure, against months and years of weariness, and cold and heat, and dull half-death, with maybe a dog’s death at the end!

I could cry like a child when I think of it now. I have cried many’s the time and often since I have ‘been shut up here, and dashed my head against the stones till I pretty nigh knocked all sense and feeling out of it, not so much in repentance, though I don’t say I feel sorry, but to think what a fool, fool, fool I’d been. Yes, fool, three times over—a hundred times—to put my liberty and life against such a miserable stake—a stake the devil that deals the pack is so safe to win at the end.