“Yes,” answered Ned, mechanically.  He was looking at the frank, open, intelligent face and well-made limbs of the half-naked lad opposite and wondering what he was doing here with this grizzled drunkard.  The said grizzled drunkard being the broken-down swell, whose highly-coloured face, swollen nose and slobbery eyes told a tale that his slop-made clothes would have concealed.  “How old are you?” he asked the lad, the drunkard having fallen asleep in the middle of a discourse concerning a great invention which would bring him millions.

“I’m nineteen.”

“You look older,” remarked Ned.

“Most people think I’m older,” replied the lad proudly.

“You’re not a native.”

“No.  I’m from the west of England.”

“Which county?”

“Devon.”

“My father’s Devon,” said Ned, at which the poor lad looked up eagerly, as though in Ned he recognised an old friend.

“That’s strange, isn’t it?  How you meet people!” he remarked.

“I’ve never been there, you know,” explained Ned.  “Fact is I don’t think it would be well for me to go.  If all my old dad used to say is true I’d soon get shipped out.”

“How’s that?”

“Why, they transport a man for shooting a rabbit or a hare, don’t they?  My dad told me a friend of his was sent out for catching salmon and that his mother was frightened nearly to death when she knew he’d been off fishing one night.  Of course, they don’t transport to here any more.  We wouldn’t have it.  But they do it to somewhere still, I suppose.”

“I don’t know, I’m sure,” answered the lad.  “I never heard much about that.  I came out when I was fourteen.”

“How was that?”

“Well, there was nothing to do in England that had anything in it and everybody was saying what a grand country Australia was and how everybody could get on and so I came out.”

“Your folks come?”

“My father was dead.  I only had a stepfather.”

“And he wanted to get rid of you, eh?” enquired Ned, getting interested.

“I suppose he did, a little,” said the lad, colouring.

“You came out to Sydney?”

“No.  To Brisbane.  That didn’t cost anything.”

“You hadn’t any friends?”

“No.  I got into a billet near Stanthorpe, but when I wanted a raise they sacked me and got another boy.  Then I came across to New South Wales.  It wasn’t any use staying in Queensland.  I wish I’d stayed in England,” he added.

“How’s that?”

“I can’t get work.  I wouldn’t mind if I could get a job but it’s pretty hard when you can’t.”

“Can’t you get work?”

“I haven’t done a stroke for ten weeks.”

“Well, are you hard up?” enquired Ned, to whose bush experience ten weeks out-of-work meant nothing.

“Look here,” returned the lad, touching the front of his white shirt and the cuffs.  Ned saw that what he had taken for white flannel in the dim candle-light was white linen, guileless of starch, evidently washed in a hand-basin at night and left to dry over a chair till morning.  “A man’s pretty hard up—­ain’t he?—­when he can’t get his shirt laundried.”