The jewel thieves…

He writes about how later in life he joined a droving plant, travelling on horseback, walking cattle over long distances. He was camped out with some other drovers when they met two other guys camped out nearby. The two became very sick after drinking salty corned beef water for soup.

The following day, the drovers asked the two strangers about themselves. He writes: They indicated that they wanted to go to Windorah and try to get a mob of cattle into the trucks [wagons of the train] at Quilpie, and then they could go home to Charleville where they lived…

They all travelled together for a while.

He writes: One morning Snow [one of the strangers] was about to roll his swag when someone sang out, “Snake!” and all eyes tried to see where it was. It was then that it happened. Snow had a brown paper bag in his hand and in his anxiety to see where the snake was, he dropped the paper bag on his blankets. The next thing there were diamonds and all sorts of rings scattered over his blankets. He explained this away by saying to the ringers that he was a hawker, and as soon as he got over the grog [alcohol] and his corned beef soup he was going to start selling them to the squatters’ [land owners] wives and daughters.

We didn’t have any occasion not to believe him, but I remember that I was a bit suspicious. But to me he didn’t look like that type of bloke.

Anyhow, to cut a long story short, they picked up another droving plant going right to Quilpie, so they altered their plans and went with old Ted to Quilpie. We heard about six months later that they both got picked up in Charleville by the police as they were a very noted pair of jewel thieves. The police recovered about five thousand pounds of rings from the two of them.

Blimey, you never knew who you were rubbing shoulders with out there, but I reckoned from the first night we met them that they weren’t bushmen or they wouldn’t have drank salty corned beef water for soup…

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-readersvoice.com