[
 {
  "chunk": 125,
  "story": 24,
  "summary": "Golden Gully is an abandoned goldfield, its mullock heaps and shafts slowly being reclaimed by scrub under three lone pines.",
  "predicament": "A place that once promised fortunes lies abandoned and scarred, and the wilderness is slowly closing back over it."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 126,
  "story": 24,
  "summary": "Only the stragglers remain, men too poor, old or disheartened to follow the rushes, fossicking in old claims; a boy sits writing on a slate beside a newly rigged windlass.",
  "predicament": "Those too poor, old or disheartened to follow the next opportunity stay behind to scratch a living from what others abandoned."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 127,
  "story": 24,
  "summary": "Little Isley Mason, called His Father's Mate, labours over his copybook; he has always been a favourite of the diggers.",
  "predicament": "A motherless child raised among hard, lonely men becomes everyone's favourite as he works at his lessons beside his father."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 128,
  "story": 24,
  "summary": "Isley winds up the wash-dirt for his father below, insisting he can take bigger loads, and is told to send down the slate for sums.",
  "predicament": "A small boy proud to do a man's share of the work insists on hauling more than he should to help his father."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 129,
  "story": 24,
  "summary": "Tom Mason, a silent hard worker of sixty, stayed on after his wife died; digging by candlelight he is lost in painful memories.",
  "predicament": "A silent, hardened worker who stayed on after every loss keeps at his work while old griefs rise up in his mind."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 130,
  "story": 24,
  "summary": "He remembers sailing out to the goldfields with his brother, full of hope, and the brother's arrest at Ballarat for a killing done in drink and jealousy.",
  "predicament": "A man remembers the hopeful start he shared with a brother, and the night drink and jealousy ended it for good."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 131,
  "story": 24,
  "summary": "He remembers troopers taking his seventeen-year-old son for armed robbery while he went on digging, unable to look up.",
  "predicament": "A father watches the law take away his son, and keeps working mechanically because he cannot bear to look up."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 132,
  "story": 24,
  "summary": "His wife died of shame after the trial and hard times; he fears the same fate for Isley and prays for the boy to die before it can come; Long Tom Hopkins is introduced.",
  "predicament": "A man who has lost a brother and a son to disgrace dreads the same end for his last child more than death itself."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 133,
  "story": 24,
  "summary": "Long Tom, a good-natured one-eyed digger, stops to chat with Isley and tells him education is a failure.",
  "predicament": "A kindly old hand who has taken to a hard man's child sits down to talk with the boy about his lessons."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 134,
  "story": 24,
  "summary": "Isley proudly winds alone; Tom asks about Isley's lost brother and his father's brother, and takes a newspaper from the father's coat.",
  "predicament": "A family friend quietly questions a child about the relatives nobody speaks of, keeping his own tie to them hidden."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 135,
  "story": 24,
  "summary": "Leaning over the shaft to hear his father, Isley falls when the windlass slips; hauled up, he says goodbye to Tom and his father and dies.",
  "predicament": "A child eager to help at dangerous work falls to his death, and the hard men around him can do nothing to save him."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 136,
  "story": 24,
  "summary": "Tom says 'He never knowed' and Mason answers 'What does it matter?'; the neighbours make a shroud and a woman gives up her prized table for the coffin.",
  "predicament": "A poor community gives up the few things it prizes to bury a child decently for a grieving, stony father."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 137,
  "story": 24,
  "summary": "The women cover the coffin with a riding-skirt and the little funeral leaves in a dray; months later Tom brings a tall young man to Mason's hut, who calls him father.",
  "predicament": "An old companion brings a disgraced son home to the bitter father who disowned him, and leaves the two face to face."
 }
]