Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

__ confront the untrained, hardly educated man of near forty, I was harder at work than ever, hunting another. , But if I was free, I was not at ease. I could see, after the first few days, that there was not much in the mine—worse, that there was never likely to be. I had worked copper before, and I judged that the worst of it was better than the best of this, once the surface show had been removed. In fact, it was nothing but a pocket. And how was a mere pocket going to give me a brick bungalow with an arched veranda, in Bondi or Coogee, and a garden be- hind it and a little touring-car, and a tobacconist’s business somewhere near the surf beaches, to keep all going; and in the garden, behind the window- panes of the bungalow, in a long chair on the veranda, at the wheel of the car, Or swimming brown and bonny through the surf—always there, in my heart and in my life, the girl of my hopeless dreams. 3 No, I had not told France all the truth. He is a good fellow, but one does Aot give him confidences. Being broke was nothing new to me; being alone, the spice of it, the strangeness, I could have done without. But Rafferty’s Luck offered the one and only chance I had of making my dream come true, and I would have taken it if it had led halfway to hell. : Instead, it seemed to lead to nothing. I was so disappointed, so sore against France—whom I now perceived to be engaged in the familiar trick of unloading a hopeless venture upon a public too far away to understand—that I set my teeth, and resolved to hunt the island from coast to coast—to comb it through for a better show, and if found, to take that show myself. I don’t know that this was moral; I only Know I was prepared to do it. By this time, I had forgotten all about the “shadow,” and the suicides. Men who have roughed it, who own little, are not particularly shocked at suicide, or sudden death of any kind. You must have much to lose before you shudder at the passing breath of the storm that has swept another from his hold on life, and that will one day sweep you too. So I did not think about Rafferty, or about Wilder—until the day when I found the cave; and after that it all began. I had been prospecting over the summit of the island, without much suc- cess. On this day, I went down to the beach, and began patiently to circle the whole place, resolving, literally, to leave no stone unturned in the search for something better than Rafferty’s Luck. It takes longer to walk all around an island than you’d think, even if the island is no more than a mile or two across. I spent all day upon the job, eating a biscuit for dinner, and drinking, once or twice, from the little streams that ran out of the crevices. If any of them had tasted ill I should have been glad; but they were all fresh as milk, no tinge of metal in them. Toward sunset I came upon something that I hadn’t noticed before—a cave. It was at the foot of an immense wall of rock; you could not have seen it from above, and the only way of reaching it was the way by which I had come, a painful climb along the narrow glacis of stones on the wind- ward side. The beach and the anchorage were of course on the lee side. 16 comicaoo