Page:A New Zealand verse (1906).pdf/112

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76
While the Billy Boils.
I mind the time when the snow was drifting and Billy  and me was out for the night—We lay in the lee of a rock, and waited, hungry and cold,  for the morning light.Then he went one way and I the other—we’d been like  brothers for half a year;He said: “I’ll see you again in town, mate, and we’ll  blow the froth off a pint of beer.”
He went to a job on the plain he knowed of and I went  poisoning out at the back,And I missed him somehow—for all my looking I never  could knock across his track.The same with Harry, the bloke I worked with the time  I was over upon the coast,He went for a fly-round over to Sydney, to stay for a  fortnight—a month at most!
He never came back, and he never wrote me—I wonder  how blokes like him forget;We had been where no one had been before us, we had  starved for days in the cold and wet;We had sunk a hundred holes that was duffers, till at last  we came on a fairish patch,And we worked in rags in the dead of winter while the  ice bars hung from the frozen thatch.
Yes, them was two, and I can’t help mind them—good  mates as ever a joker had;But there’s plenty more as I’d like to be with, for half of  the blokes on the road is bad.It sets me a-thinking the world seems wider, for all we  fancy it’s middling small,When a chap like me makes friends in plenty and they  slip away and he loses them all.
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