How We Pegged Buchanan
Hughes had beautiful sentiments and a faraway look in his eyes. Sometimes he washed and shaved at such times, he was quite good looking. Then again, sometimes he didn't, this generally after a drunk. His drunks occurred on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, with one occasion every four years the 29th of February, his birthday—on which he did himself proud. Hughes had a standard joke that he was only eight, because he had lived the round of only eight leap-years. He was really thirty-three and regretted that he hadn't had thirty-three real birthdays to celebrate.
When he told you all his beautiful thoughts about honest dealing with his fellowmen and such like, you felt a certain qualm over the fifty acre lease you pegged out the day before he intended to take it up himself, but then, "you were the only man he cared to see hold ground near his, and anyway it wasn't of any value as the reef didn't dip that way, so it didn't matter."
When Hughes clapped you on the shoulder, "old man," and told you this your conscience left off bothering, but you knew you had better keep your weather eye on Hughes. He never wore socks, but he was very kind to Isaac Brown's kids, and he had a pet possum which nestled inside his shirt and seemed fond of him. Possums are very hardy.
I believe Hughes was married, but he never had any wife on the diggings. His clothes were worse than most of us wore, and he generally went round without a hat. The sun-never seemed to affect him, though "next morning" he always said it had.
His strong point, he thought, was geology, so the boys brought his wonderful bits of rock which he duly
