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We were tramping down in Canterbury, Maoriland, at the time, swagging it–me and Bill–looking for work on the new railway line. Well, one afternoon, after a long, hot tramp, we comes to Stiffner’s Hotel–between Christchurch and that other place–I forget the name of it–with throats on us like sunstruck bones, and not the price of a stick of tobacco.

We had to have a drink, anyway, so we chanced it. We walked right into the bar, handed over our swags, put up four drinks, and tried to look as if we’d just drawn our cheques and didn’t care a curse for any man. We looked solvent enough, as far as swagmen go. We were dirty and haggard and ragged and tired-looking, and that was all the more reason why we might have our cheques all right.

This Stiffner was a hard customer. He’d been a spieler, fighting man, bush parson, temperance preacher, and a policeman, and a commercial traveller, and everything else that was damnable; he’d been a journalist, and an editor; he’d been a lawyer, too. He was an ugly brute to look at, and uglier to have a row with–about six-foot-six, wide in proportion, and stronger than Donald Dinnie.

He was meaner than a gold-field Chinaman, and sharper than a sewer rat: he wouldn’t give his own father a feed, nor lend him a sprat–unless some safe person backed the old man’s I.O.U.

We knew that we needn’t expect any mercy from Stiffner; but something had to be done, so I said to Bill:

“Something’s got to be done, Bill! What do you think of it?”

Bill was mostly a quiet young chap, from Sydney, except when he got drunk–which was seldom–and then he was a customer, from all round. He was cracked on the subject of spielers. He held that the population of the world was divided into two classes–one was spielers and the other was the mugs. He reckoned that he wasn’t a mug. At first I thought he was a spieler, and afterwards I thought that he was a mug. He used to say that a man had to do it these times; that he was honest once and a fool, and was robbed and starved in consequences by his friends and relations; but now he intended to take all that he could get. He said that you either had to have or be had; that men were driven to be sharps, and there was no help for it.

Bill said:

“We’ll have to sharpen our teeth, that’s all, and chew somebody’s lug.”

“How?” I asked.

There was a lot of navvies at the pub, and I knew one or two by sight, so Bill says:

“You know one or two of these mugs. Bite one of their ears.

“So I took aside a chap that I knowed and bit his ear for ten bob, and gave it to Bill to mind, for I thought it would be safer with him than with me.

“Hang on to that,” I says, “and don’t lose it for your natural life’s sake, or Stiffner’ll stiffen us.”

We put up about nine bob’s worth of drinks that night–me and Bill–and Stiffner didn’t squeal: he was too sharp. He shouted once or twice.

By-and-by I left Bill and turned in, and in the morning when I woke up there was Bill sitting alongside of me, and looking about as lively as the fighting kangaroo in London in fog time. He had a black eye and eighteen pence. He’d been taking down some of the mugs.

“Well, what’s to be done now?” I asked. “Stiffner can smash us both with one hand, and if we don’t pay up he’ll pound our swags and cripple us. He’s just the man to do it. He loves a fight even more than he hates being had.”

“There’s only one thing to be done, Jim,” says Bill, in a tired, disinterested tone that made me mad.