The Hair of the Dog

The Adventures of Will Jones by Greg Barron

Will Jones woke with a sore hip, a numb hand, pounding head and lips dry as chalk. He opened his eyes but did not otherwise move. Not yet. He was remembering where he was. Remembering how he got there, and what he had done the night before. He removed his hand from under his side, realised that he had been lying on it, opened his fingers and closed them, over and over until the blood flowed again.

Memories from the previous night filled his head. There had been plenty of drinking. He’d watched fights between mine workers and prospectors, that he had seen no reason to involve himself in, then joined a ‘shout’ with a couple of men who supplied red gum shoring timbers for the mines – big raw-boned fellows with hands like tree roots.

Will learned a bit about the town, and was interested to learn that the gold diggings here had begun when a Mrs Foster, cook for a gang of burr-cutters, had found a lump of quartz streaked with gold on this very street, sparking the rush that extended out into the hills beyond the town.

After that he’d chatted with the barmaid, out the front, in view of the lake. Her name was Charlotte, and she was from Cardiff, near Newcastle. She’d moved out west to find herself a well-to-do squatter. She was still looking, and Will understood that he wasn’t the type of man she was seeking. Drifters were in steady supply. Charlotte wanted a new, steady life.

Satisfied that he hadn’t embarrassed or disgraced himself, Will opened his eyes and was surprised to see sunlight shining through the open curtains. It was late, maybe nine o’clock, much later than he was used to sleeping.

He focussed his eyes on Clarkie’s bed. The sheets and grey blanket had been thrown to one side. It had been slept in but was now unoccupied. His gear was still stacked on the floor at the foot of the bed.

Will sat up, rubbed his hands over his face and through his hair. Then, wearing only underwear, he walked out the door and down the corridor to the bathrooms. He used the WC, then grabbed the jug of water that sat beside the washbasin. He drank deeply, straight from the jug, washed his face, and wiped it with a hand towel.

Then, back in his room, he stood in front of the window, taking in the view down Foster Street, the lake foreshore, then the lake itself, ruffled by the breeze. Out of sight, but given away by the rhythmic beat of iron, and the skyward flow of coal smoke, a stamp mill was running, crushing ore from the mines.

There were, Will noticed, people idling around the foreshore and jetty, including at least one constable in a dark serge uniform. It seemed like a strange assembly, and he wondered at the reason for it.

Befuddled by his hangover, it was only then that he recalled that he and Clarkie were supposed to meet Cyril Lowe at dawn for a sail on his boat. That, he decided, must be where Clarkie had gone.  

‘Why didn’t ya wake me?’ he said to the empty bed, then dressed in a clean shirt and yesterday’s dungarees.

Walking downstairs, Will ignored the smell of bacon from the kitchen, headed out the front doors and down towards the lake, a stiff westerly breeze on his back. The group of people on the foreshore had grown, and there was activity on the water. The big boat that belonged to Cyril Lowe was on the far eastern shore of the lake, and it looked like it was being towed by a small steam launch, out of the shallows.

Will joined the loose rank of spectators. ‘What’s goin’ on?’ he asked.

A gentleman, dressed like a banker in a three-piece suit, turned. ‘Mister Lowe from the big mine, and another fellow has went missin’ off the boat. She blew fair to shore on t’other side with no-one aboard. Two coves seen ‘em head out together, raise the sails and that’s the last anybody knew until she were grounded on the eastern bank.’

Will felt his head begin to pound, but walked closer to the water’s edge, where the police constable was standing with a very distressed lady wearing a pink dressing gown. He was going to approach them, then thought better of it and turned away. There was no point drawing attention to himself or panicking. He couldn’t be sure that Clarkie had been on board. Even now, his mate could be at the hotel, eating breakfast. That, he decided, would be the first place to check.

Back at the hotel in a minute of brisk walking, Will entered the dining room. At this hour there were plenty of unoccupied tables. Clarkie was nowhere to be seen, but Will had to eat. He ordered a full plate of breakfast and a coffee. The food helped to settle his stomach and the hot beverage to clear his head.

When his plate was clean of all but the thickest sections of bacon rind, he belched softly, then went back up to his room. Clarkie was still not present. He looked out the window. The steam launch was halfway back across the lake, with Cyril Lowe’s boat in tow. Very few of the smaller boats that had been moored near the town remained in place. The rest were out on the lake, powered by oars or wind. Will felt increasingly uneasy.

He lay on the bed for a quarter hour, staring at the ceiling and thinking. Then, back down the stairs, heading to the lake to watch Cyril Lowe’s boat come alongside the jetty, listening to scuttlebutt from the spectators.

The boats, people said, were all out on the lake, because they were looking for bodies.

For half an hour Will wandered the streets, looking through windows into draper’s shops, and provedores, along with the offices of everyone from bookkeepers to stock and station agents. He walked to the site of the big mine, where Cyril Lowe was one of the owners. The men there seemed to have stopped work, standing around in rudderless groups, talking. There was no sign of Clarkie anywhere.

Back at the hotel the constable was waiting, talking to the barman, and they called Will across.

‘What’s your name, lad?’ asked the constable. He was a heavy-shouldered character with a style of moustache often called a Hungarian. The skin of his face and neck was marked with old smallpox scars, and there seemed to be little humour in him.

‘I’m Will Jones.’

‘So, you and your mate were talking to Cyril Lowe last night?’

‘Yes, we was. We arksed him about the diggin’s here.’

‘Your mate’s name, according to the hotel register, is John Clarke. Is that correct?’

‘So far as I know.’

‘Can you tell me his whereabouts?’

Will shook his head, ‘I ain’t seen him since he went up to bed last night. I um, stayed up late, never seen him in the dark, and he were gone this morning.’

‘Righto,’ said the constable. ‘I’ll need to talk to you again. Don’t go anywhere at all.’

When the constable had gone, Will accepted the barman’s kind offer of ‘hair of the dog,’ in the form of a pot of dark stout. He sat at the bar, drinking morosely, unable to rid his gut of the fluttering insects that had spawned and swarmed inside it.

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© Greg Barron 2026

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Image Credit: Ian Dillon via Memories of Lake Cargelligo Facebook Page