"And when you think it's all serene—Pop goes the weasel!"
"And when you think it's all serene—Pop goes the weasel!"
It was the latest song from England, and was vociferously encored; but not for the first time, it seemed, and the mountebank would only bow and scrape. In an instant the rank air was yellow withflying orange-peel. But Bullocky handed Jim a nugget to throw for him, which Mr. Doherty discharged with such effect that it hit the performer on one leg and sent him hopping round the stage on the other, until the nature of the projectile was discovered, and the song given yet again. At its close the plutocrat's party were accorded a table in front, and more drink ordered to Denis's embarrassment. "Careful, Jimmy," he contrived to whisper, and received a reassuring kick under the table by way of reply.
A poor painted girl, with a voice that had some little sweetness left, and a pathos all its own, came next with a song just old enough to have associations for some of those who heard. It was, however, a sweet song in itself, and in a few bars a hush had fallen on the audience; even Bullocky sat back in his chair, his huge beard leveled at the singer.
"You are going far away, far away from poor Jeannette;There's no one left to love me now, and you too will forget;But my heart will be with you wherever you may go—Can you look me in the face and say the same, Jeannot?When you wear the jacket red, and the beautiful cockade,Oh! I fear you will forget all the promises you made.With a gun upon your shoulder and a bayonet by your side,You'll be taking some proud lady and be making her your bride—You'll be taking some proud lady and be making her your bride!"
"You are going far away, far away from poor Jeannette;There's no one left to love me now, and you too will forget;But my heart will be with you wherever you may go—Can you look me in the face and say the same, Jeannot?When you wear the jacket red, and the beautiful cockade,Oh! I fear you will forget all the promises you made.With a gun upon your shoulder and a bayonet by your side,You'll be taking some proud lady and be making her your bride—You'll be taking some proud lady and be making her your bride!"
So it ran; and Denis caught himself pressing his dear new amulet to his heart. He was so saddenedthat he did not see Bullocky until he heard him roar, "No, he won't, my dear! I'll stretch him stiff and stark if he do!" at which one behind gave a laugh, and so brought that formidable fist within an inch of his nose, while with the other paw the gorilla dashed away a tear that ought to have filled a wineglass. Denis lost half the next verse in watching him. Bullocky was now sprawling across the table, his great face hidden in the hirsute folds of his powerful arms.
"Oh! if I were King of France, or still better Pope of Rome,I'd have no fighting men abroad, no weeping maids at home.All the world should be at peace, or, if kings must show their might,Why, let them who make the quarrel be the only ones to fight—Yes, let them who make the quarrel be the only ones to fight!"
"Oh! if I were King of France, or still better Pope of Rome,I'd have no fighting men abroad, no weeping maids at home.All the world should be at peace, or, if kings must show their might,Why, let them who make the quarrel be the only ones to fight—Yes, let them who make the quarrel be the only ones to fight!"
Bullocky's shoulders were heaving with vinous sobs. He did not join in the tempest of applause, and before the last verse had been repeated his emotions reached their anti-climax in a sounding snore. Denis gave Doherty a nod, and they deserted under cover of the final furore.
Near the exit of the marquee a degenerate sailor reeled into them; and it shocked Denis slowly to identify the blurred features of his late shipmate, the chief officer of theNorth Foreland. It was but a week since he had given evidence as clear as it was creditable at the inquest in Mr. Kitto's wool-shed.
"Seen you come in," said the mate. "Thought you was in blue water by this time."
"How so?" asked Denis.
"Homeward bound," hiccoughed the mate.
"I'm not going home yet," said Denis. "I'm going to try my luck on the diggings first."
The chief swayed incredulous. "Thought that was all plain sailin'?" said he. "Thought you was to go home with 'em, an' marry her at t' other end if not at this? Well, well, you might just as well have taken my advice!"
"What advice?" asked Denis, coldly.
"It was just as you was swep' overboard," explained the mate. "You didn't hear it; and if you had it wouldn't've been no use without the boat; but I was goin' to tell you to stand out to sea like I did; and you might as well, don't you see? Drawn your pay at the agent's yet?" he added as Denis was turning away.
"Not yet; that's what I've come for; but I only got here to-night."
"Ah," said the chief, "I have! I wish I was you!" And Denis left him with the tears in his eyes.
Outside the marquee a crowd had collected, and with reason, for in the centre stood a blacksmith with a shod horse whose four hoofs he was displaying in turn; and it was shod with pure gold, which he rubbed with a leather until the horseshoes shone again in the glare of the naked flame that lit theentrance to the booth. Denis knew it must be Bullocky's steed, and they had not to ask a question to gather that it was.
"How about the dark side now?" whispered Doherty, slipping an arm through his hero's as they walked away.
Where they were to sleep was now the question. Doherty, who had still some sovereigns in his pocket, was strongly in favour of good beds at any reasonable price; but this did not commend itself to the son of the dales, whose hard head was always less sanguine for the day than for the far event. Dent was to draw his due next day; he was not very certain how much there would be to draw. He had assured Mr. Merridew that he had plenty of money, when he was really at his last gold piece. The squatter, on the other hand, had insisted on giving each adventurer a pair of blankets with his blessing; with these in tight rolls about their shoulders, they had made their march; and Denis now announced his intention of sleeping under a tree in his as soon as he had found the bed for Doherty. Their first quarrel nearly ensued. The boy had to shed a tear before Denis would hear of anything different; and then they had to find their tree.
After a fright from a spurred police cadet with drawn sabre, who threatened the pair with a five-pound fine apiece for attempting their ablutions inthe Yarra, back they went across the river to the chartered squalors of Canvas Town; but instead of keeping as before to the main streets of tents, struck off at a tangent for the nearest open country. And this led them through worse places still; now wading knee-deep in baleful filth, and now through its moral equivalent in the most rampant and repulsive form. In these few dark minutes they saw much misery, more selfishness, and very little decency indeed. Jim slipped his hand through Denis's arm with a timidity that spoke volumes in his case; and Denis drew his deepest breath that day when the lights lay all behind them, save a single camp-fire far ahead in the bush.
Dent and Doherty were wandering toward this light, neither actually intending to go so far, nor yet knowing quite how far they would go, when a mild voice hailed them from under just such a tree as should have met their needs.
"I say," it said, "you fellows!"
"Hullo?" cried Denis, stopping in his stride.
"Steady!" returned the voice in an amused undertone. "Mum's the word—if you don't mind coming nearer."
The pair stole up to the tree. A slight young man stood against the trunk in the shaded starlight; it was his voice that conveyed his youth; they could barely see him at arm's length.
"Thanks awfully," he went on. "I have no idea who you are, but I should like awfully to shakehands with you; unfortunately, I haven't a hand at liberty—feel."
What Denis felt was a coil of rope, and another, and another, as he ran his hand up and down.
"Tied up!" he whispered.
"And robbed," added the complacent young man.
"Of much?" asked Denis, getting out his knife.
"Only the result of five months' hard labour on Bendigo; only my little all," the young man murmured with a placid sigh. "But it might be worse: they sometimes truss you up with all your weight on your neck, and then you can't make yourself heard if you try. Isn't there a fire somewhere behind me?"
"A good way off there is."
"It's not so far as you think. I heard them light it. But it would be just as well not to let them hear us."
"Why shouldn't they?" asked Denis, as he worked a flat blade between the young man's middle and the rope; whereupon Doherty put in his first word in an excited whisper.
"Don't you savvy? They're the blokes what done it, mister!"
"Exactly," said the mild young man. "And that's about all I know of them, though I've been in their company all day. But my name is Moseley; you might make a note of it, in case anythinghappens. My father's Rector of Much Wymondham, in Silly Suffolk—as you might expect from his imbecile son."
"I don't see where the imbecility comes in, much less what can happen now," said Denis, encouragingly; as he spoke, he loosened the severed coil, and the late captive stumbled stiffly into the open.
"I ought to be ashamed to own it," he went on in whispers, squatting in the grass to bend his limbs in turn, "but I met these chaps on the way into town—with my poor little pile, heigho!—and took them for father and son, as they professed to be. I thanked Providence for putting me in such respectable hands, and stuck to them like a leech till they lured me out here to camp with the result you found. As for nothing happening now, they swore they'd murder me if I uttered a sound; they've camped within earshot to be handy for the job; and I give them leave to do it, if I don't get even with them now."
Doherty rubbed his hands in glee; but Denis was quite unprepared for this spirited resolution, voiced as it was in the spiritless tone which distinguished the other young man; and he asked Moseley whether he was armed.
"I should be," was the reply, "but they took my pistol with my pile, confound them."
"Then how on earth do you propose to get even with them?"
"Oh, I may wait till the blackguards are asleep; I shall steal a squint on them presently, and then decide. But don't you fellows bother to stay. I'm awfully obliged to you as it is."
It did not require this generous (and evidently genuine) discharge to retain their services to the death. In Denis the Celt had long been uppermost, and, like Doherty, he was in a glow for the glowing work. Apart from that, Denis was rather fascinated by the rueful humour and the chuckle-headed courage of a temperament at once opposite and congenial to his own.
"Either we stand by you, Moseley," he muttered, "or we all three run for it; and I'll be shot if we do that just yet! Luckily, one of us can supply the firearm, and the other can use it if the worst comes to the worst."
Doherty was already at his pack. The polished oak case shone in the starlight like a tiny tank, until the lid stood open and its contents gave a fitful glitter. Wadded bullets, percussion caps and a powder-horn had baize-lined compartments to themselves; in their midst lay a ponderous engine with a good ten inches of barrel. Denis was some time capping and loading it in all five chambers, while one companion watched with languid interest, and the other in silent throes of triumph.
A minute later they were all three creeping on the fire, like Indian scouts. The two rascals sat over it still. One had his back turned to the advancing enemy; and it was so broad a back that they caught but occasional glimpses of his vis-a-vis, who had a rather remarkable face, pale, shaven, and far more typical of the ecclesiastic than of the footpad.
"That's the dangerous one," whispered Moseley. "The other beggar's twice his age."
"Wait, then," said Denis—"what a hawk he looks! Hadn't we better work right round and take them in his rear?"
"As you like," said Moseley, light-heartedly.
And they had decided on this when quite another decision was rendered imperative by the younger robber suddenly bounding into the air and flinging something from him with an oath. For one cold instant the three imagined they were caught. They had halted unwisely, where there was little cover, some fifty yards from the fire and perhaps a hundred yards from Moseley's tree. It became immediately apparent that there was only one thing to be done.
"Why, it's more than half silver!" the rascal shouted, white with rage. "It's a cursed fake; he's got the rest somewhere else—I'll hack his head off for this!"
A clump of bushes lay nearer the fire than the crouching trio. "Run for them!" whispered Denis, and led the way with his nose between his knees. They reached the cover just in time.The man passed within a yard of them. His mate remained squatting over the fire.
"Now you take this," said Denis, handing Jimmy a length of the cut rope which he had brought with him, "and you this," giving Moseley the Deane and Adams. "Now both follow me—like mice—and do exactly what I tell you."
So they crept up to the fire in the formation of an isosceles triangle.
"Where are you? Where's your tree? If you don't answer I'll carve your head off!" they heard one ruffian threatening with subdued venom in the distance; his voice was at its furthest and faintest when Denis leaped on the other from behind and nipped an enormous neck with all ten fingers.
"I'm not going to choke you, but you'll be shot dead if you make one sound. Here, Moseley, stick it to his ear. You understand, do you? One sound. There, then; now you'll be gagged. Jimmy, the rope."
Denis felt rather sorry for his man as he went to work; he was such an elderly miscreant, so broad and squat (rather than obese), as one who had been pressed like a bale of wool. But he held his peace with stolid jowl until gagged by a double thickness of the rope that soon held him hand and foot.
"Now for your mate," said Denis. As he spoke, the fellow could be heard shouting that their bird was flown; thereupon the three withdrew behind trees. "And remember," said Denis, who went lastwith the revolver, "if you make a sign to send him back you'll be the first."
They had not a minute to wait. Their second victim came back cursing their first for sitting so unmoved over the fire. Denis peeped and saw the lean, ascetic face advancing white-hot with passion; in the last ten yards he stopped, suspicious, but not yet of the truth, for the untended fire had declined to a mere red and white remnant in his absence.
"Good God, man, are you dead?" he cried, and then came running at the thought. At the same instant Denis stepped from behind his tree.
"Throw up your hands before I fire!"
And up they both went, but one barked and flashed on the way, and the ball whispered in Denis's ear as he took deliberate aim and shot the scoundrel down.
"Take care!" he shouted to the others, rushing up. "I aimed low. He isn't dead. Don't trust him an inch!"
But the man had been drilled through the sciatic nerve, and he leaped where he lay like a landed fish. He had let fall the pistol in his pain, and Moseley had the pleasure of picking up his own.
"Has anybody any brandy?" asked Denis, for the wounded man looked ghastly, writhing in the starlight, and he was bearing his torments without a word; but when Moseley produced a flask, and Denis held it to him, the unbeaten brute only seized the opportunity of snatching at the revolver in his other hand.
"The blackguard!" piped Doherty, as Denis disengaged without a shot. "I'd finish him for that!"
"No, you wouldn't, Jimmy; but if he wants to grin and bear it, why, he's welcome—till they come for him! Come on, Moseley," added Denis, as that placid person characteristically took his time, under the gagged man's nose, over his stolen belongings. But in a few moments the three were off at the double, and in a few more the contents of a third revolver followed them without effect.
"I expected that," said Denis as they ran. "But what a fine villain! Not a word in his pain. Educated man, I should say."
"Mean to put the police on 'em to-night or in the morning?" called Moseley, with languid interest, as he jogged along last.
"Not at all," said Denis.
"Not at all?" panted Doherty.
"We want to get to the diggings, not to cool our heels in this nice place. We've winged one and taught them both a lesson, and wasted quite enough time on such carrion as it is."
They were now in full view of the lights of Canvas Town. Moseley, far behind, petitioned for a more civilized pace in the most strenuous tone the others had yet heard from him. And while they waited Denis returned the revolver to its rightful owner.
"I'm heartily ashamed of myself, Jimmy," said he: "first I blame you for buying the one thing we want more than another, and then I take it from you and use it myself! But the credit's every bit of it yours; but for you those villains would have gone scot-free with this fellow's fortune; but for you he would be a poor man to-night, and he's got to know it. I hope you recovered everything?" added Denis, as Moseley came up with them at his leisure, and all three proceeded toward the lights.
"I don't know," was the reply. "I ought to have thirty-eight pound, twelve and six, but there's over a pound of it in silver, and you didn't give me time to count it."
A few paces were covered in silence; then Denis gave a grim little laugh. "So we've all risked our lives for thirty-eight pounds odd!"
"It was my all," said Moseley, rather hurt. "I never said it was much, and never asked you to risk your lives."
Denis took his arm with a heartier laugh.
"My dear fellow, we weren't going to let you risk yours alone, and I wouldn't undo it if I could. It wasn't a question of amount, either; if you had told us the figure it would have made no difference. But you did say it was your pile, you know, that you were taking back to England!"
"It wasn't much of one, certainly," the other admitted on reflection, with his own ingenuous candour. "I am not so sure, now, that it would havepaid my passage home. I never thought of that before. So you two are going up to the diggings, just as I come down?" he added rather wistfully, after a pause.
"We start to-morrow if we can."
"Much capital, may I ask?"
"Not much more than half your pile between us, I'm afraid."
"It needs more capital than you'd think," said Moseley, in a pensive way.
"I dare say."
And Denis sighed.
"Ballarat or Bendigo?"
"I thought of tossing for it."
They were back again on the foul fringe of the sail-cloth suburb. Moseley stood still in the mud. And the bright southern stars discovered a pleasing diffidence in a wholly amiable face.
"Have you really no choice?" he asked.
"Absolutely none."
"Well, then, I hardly know how to put it," stammered Moseley; "but I've some experience, if I haven't much to show for it; and if Ballarat would do for you—I should be sorry to turn up again in Bendigo; I'm afraid I did pretend I'd done a little better there—but Ballarat's really the place, and if you could do with a third—well, there's my poor little pile, it would go into the pool, and—well I don't mind saying I should be proud, after the way you've stood by me to-night."
"So should I!" cried Denis, seizing Moseley's hand. His warm heart was touched. "So would Jimmy," he added, for the lad was standing aloof as he always would when they were three. "It's the natural thing, and your experience will be more valuable than even your money, not that we can take more than your share of that. Come, laddie, and give him your hand on it, too; and then for the best three beds we can afford, and three good glasses of ale to seal the partnership."
Doherty turned to Denis rather quickly when he had shaken the new partner's hand. "You see," he said, "it is a case of beds, after all!"
But his tone was reproachful rather than triumphant, as though Denis might have listened to him before.
The firm of Dent, Moseley, and Doherty, gold-diggers, was formally established next day, in a clump of trees a few miles out of Melbourne. Denis had experienced no difficulty in obtaining his paltry dues from the shipping agents, but even so he and Doherty could not muster twenty pounds between them. Moseley, on the other hand, was for putting in nearly double this amount, and yet only receiving his one-third of the profits. He argued that but for the others he would have had nothing to put in at all. It was long before Denis would listen to him, and Doherty took no part in the discussion. But eventually a compromise was agreed upon, and thus entered by Denis in a new pocketbook purchased for the nonce:—
This pocketbook, with its blue-lined sheaf of glorious possibilities, represented Denis's one disbursement in Melbourne beyond bed, board, and the glasses of beer overnight. A rigid economy was his watchword; they must walk to Ballarat; so let their packs be light, and if kits were dearer on the diggings, they would still have saved.
Doherty agreed with every word; but as they resumed their journey, and Moseley fell a few paces behind, he reminded Denis of the nuggets which Bullocky had forced upon them at the inn.
"I said we'd keep them for luck," replied Denis; "but, of course, I could only speak for myself; you must do what you like with yours."
"I do what you do," said the boy.
"And you both do well!" added Moseley, catching them up. "I'm all in favour of a fetish; that's what I never had on Bendigo. But nuggets—decoy nuggets—set a nugget to catch a nugget, eh? That's a fetish and a half! I suppose they're only little bits of things? Do you mind letting me see them?"
When he did see them, he changed his tune.
"Good heavens! But these must be over a pound between them, if not getting on for three figures in the other kind of pounds; do you mean to say you had these given you? I say, I'm not sure that my affection for a fetish would hold out against one of these."
"Well, mine will," said Denis, smiling with setteeth. "I don't turn presents into money, Moseley, till the devil drives!"
"But who on earth made you such presents as these?"
"Oh, a rough diamond with a beard to his middle, and a voice like a bull, who did his best to stand on his head in a bucket of champagne."
"By Jove! I believe it must have been old Bullocky himself."
"It was. Do you know him?"
"Know him? No one was ever yet on Bendigo without knowing old Bullocky; he's cock of the walk in Ironbark Gully, finds gold every time, by a sort of second sight, as some of these chaps find water. Why, the first time I ever saw him he was sitting picking nuggets out of a lump of earth like plums from a pudding!"
And Moseley beguiled a mile or more with tales of the great gorilla; he had, indeed, a very passable gift of anecdote, and an easy, idle, fanciful wit which made up in rarer qualities what it lacked in brilliance and virility. He had not a foul or an unkind word in his vocabulary; and Denis had been too long at sea to undervalue either merit. Moseley was not only a gentleman, but a man of refinement and no little charm, whose companionship might well be prized by such another at that wild end of the earth. And yet Denis forgot to listen as one entertaining tale led light-heartedly to another, forit was only the humours of the life that Moseley seemed to have absorbed.
"But I might as well save my breath," said Moseley, with more truth than he supposed. "It's bound to be the same on Ballarat, only more of it; the one thing I can promise you is plenty of compensation if the fetish doesn't do his duty."
Denis smiled without replying. "I suppose you don't know what sort of soil it is at Ballarat?" he asked at length.
"At Ballarat?" cried Moseley, greatly amused. "Why, my dear fellow, I couldn't tell you what sort it was at Bendigo!"
"But you were digging there five months."
"Digging, exactly; not studying the soil."
"They seemed to you to find it anywhere, did they?"
"Anywhere and everywhere, my dear fellow! Are you a geologist, Dent?" The question came after a pause.
"Not as yet," said Denis; and Doherty, who had no notion what a geologist was, glanced at him sidelong as at one who could soon be it or anything else he chose.
So the time passed, and the miles were mounting up when Moseley, who ought to have known the way to a certain point, found that he had overshot it by as many miles again. It was a trying moment for the height and heat of the afternoon; but so savage was the mild Moseley with himself, sounusually animated with his contrition, that Denis slapped him on the back, and they turned back laughing to an inn where they had drunk beer a couple of hours before. This beer-drinking was an extravagance resented by Denis, yet not a point on which he cared to oppose the man who had contributed so freely to the common fund. Nothing could have been more wholesome for active young fellows, but their beer alone cost them eight and threepence the first day, bread three and six, billy-can two and six, tea and sugar two and six, and their beds at this inn six shillings. One pound two and nine-pence for the first nine miles.
Denis did not grumble, but in his heart he resented the beds almost as much as the beer; there was more to be said for them, however, especially in a country teeming with desperate characters; and the beds at least were cheap, few travelers breaking their journey so near its beginning or its end. Denis, however, sat late in the bar, listening to the conversation of all and sundry who stopped to drink, and learning much in an unobtrusive way: he had never in his life been quite such a Dent, so canny, so calculating, and so cool. As a first step toward the accomplishment of his great resolve, he had already overcome the romantic spirit of its inception; thus the next night, at Bacchus Marsh, he thought nothing of foregathering with an odious little man, who consulted Denis as to the best place to get a "white 'igh 'at and a diamond ring" immediately on landing in London, but who gave him much valuable information in return. And the night after that, when they were fifty miles from Melbourne, there was a landlord with gold-dust sticking to the palms of his hands, who only needed plying with his own liquor to talk by the hour. By this time Moseley was keeping them all back with a sore heel; and the nearer the diggings, the greater each day's expenses; but Denis no longer grudged the money, for he was gaining much that money could not buy.
Often they were overtaken and left behind by more dashing adventurers, aggressively mounted and armed, and what was more galling, once or twice by swifter pedestrians than themselves; but Moseley preferred hobbling with his companions to boarding the scarlet coach which passed them, pitching like a ship on its leather springs. The partners met with no moving accident on the road. Rumours of bushrangers were never followed by their appearance. It was not the less delightful to meet the Ballarat gold-escort coming down, in its sparkling cordon of sabres and lace, for it made the braver show in those sombre wilds, and left a reassuring sense of law and order in its yellow wake.
The fourth night they camped out but ten miles from the diggings, where they hoped to arrive by noon next day; but the blister on Moseley's heel broke and bled, and though either Denis or Jim carried his pack thereafter, while the other gavehim an arm, the last and most exciting stage of their journey was also the slowest. The deep-cut bullock-track led them all morning by open flat and shallow gully, between low hills timbered like an English park; from noon on, as the track converged with others, the party received more than one cheery invitation to drain a pannikin of tea at wayside encampments; but even the lame man would not stop again, and the light in his eyes was as bright as any. The three drew close together as they walked. It was as though each made it a point of honour neither to lead by an inch nor to keep the others back; it was also as though all three had lost their tongues and found new eyes, for the gold-light was in them all.
"Hush!" exclaimed Denis, stopping suddenly.
A deep though distant hum came to their ears, faintly at first, but in a steady boom as they stooped and listened without a breath between them.
"It's like the streets of London, from the docks, after a voyage," whispered Denis, raising a puzzled face a little.
"It's a creek," said Doherty. "I never knew they had a creek like that."
"Nor I."
And as one man they turned to Moseley, to stand upright on the spot; for so he was standing, and grinning at them both from ear to ear.
"That's not traffic, nor yet a creek," said he."It was the same when you got near Bendigo. It's the gold in the cradles. It's the gold!"
The broad brown track rose before them, scored by a myriad wheels, backed by hard blue sky. In an instant they were racing skyward between the ruts. Jimmy had given a whoop, and Moseley his light-hearted laugh, but Denis led without a word until the deep hum had risen to a rumble. Then he looked round, and Jimmy passed him with a yell. Moseley was running very lame. Denis waited for him.
"Jump on my back!" said he. "I won't leave you, and I can't wait."
"You certainly can't carry me."
"We'll see."
"Then you sha'n't."
"Come on!"
And Denis was soon staggering in Doherty's steps, a lean shin protruding from the crook of either arm, a good ten stone upon his back. As he stumbled on, in the last hundred yards, the rumble resolved itself into the roar of ten thousand cradles rocking as one. And on the hill's crest Doherty stood waving his wideawake against the blue.
Denis reeled up to him, breathing hard, with Moseley still protesting on his back. But for the next few minutes it might have been a bronze group that crowned the hill.
Under their eyes, in a single smooth green basinof the sere and wooded ranges, were the tents and earthworks of all nations, joined for once in unnatural war upon the earth that bore them. White were the tents of that unparalleled encampment, gleaming coolly in the sun, and pitched in patches like the scent from a paper-chase; and for every tent there was a red-lipped shaft, with men like ants crawling out and in, and muddy pools here and there between the heaps, with more ants busy at their brim. Here a few cradles rocked, like great square-toed shoes; but they blackened either bank of the yellow stream that picked its way between the tents and the ant-heaps of gravel and of clay; and thence the noise, as of a giant foundry, which could be heard a mile away. The squeak of a windlass was a variation at closer quarters; the deeper claims were thus distinguished; the deepest of all had windsails, too, that rose from the earth like tall ghosts, with lantern jaws and arms like fins.
"Anything like Bendigo?" whispered Doherty to the seasoned digger, who was standing between the other two.
"More compact," replied Moseley. "And not half the trees."
"This must be Black Hill Flat, this open ground on our right," said Denis. "And that should be Bakery Hill over there on the left."
His tone made the others look from the landmarks indicated to Denis himself; and he was consulting a dirty bit of cardboard.
"What have you got there?" asked Moseley, edging up to him.
"A map, a map!" cried Jimmy, who had run round to his other side.
"Where on earth did you get hold of that, Dent?"
"Aha!" chuckled Denis. "I suppose you don't remember the man I told you about at Bacchus Marsh, who wanted the white hat and the diamond ring? He gave it to me, and I'd rather have it than the fifty pounds he said he'd give for his ring! I make that the Gravel Pits right ahead across the stream; you can see the sun on the pools of water; they say it's the wettest bit on the diggings. And you see the trim tent to the right on the green mound? That's Commissioner's Flat, where we shall go first thing on Monday morning for our licenses."
"You've been here before," said Moseley, with an amused shake of the head. "You were here last voyage—don't tell me!"
"My last voyage was to Calcutta," said Denis, laughing as they walked on; "but if you like I was here most nights on the way up, more especially the one we spent at Bacchus Marsh."
The first pair of diggers actually at work in their hole thrilled Denis none the less, and it was he who led the way to have a better look at them. They were quite close to the road on Black Hill Flat, which was an attractive part for new hands, withfewer claims and more trees than there seemed to be further on. These men's tent stood out of the grass like a roof in a flood; and beyond the tent a red night-cap bobbed above ground, as one man plied the pick while the other leaned on the shovel awaiting his turn. The new chums halted at a respectful distance, but the man with the shovel made them welcome with a friendly oath, and chatted good-humouredly in the Tyneside tongue as they all stood looking down into the hole.
"You'd bettaw come and peg out alongside of us," he said. "We come from Newcassel, and we're new chums ourselves."
"And why did you choose this place?" asked Denis.
The man with the shovel gave a happy-go-lucky shrug.
"Howt!" said he. "One pudding's as good as anothaw until you eat it;" and Moseley added, "Quite true," with an experienced nod.
"But we'd gotten a good account o' 't," put in the man with the red night-cap, burying his pick in the upper earth, and scrambling out of the hole with its aid. "The wash-dirt's close to top, an' dry as a slag-heap; what's more, a parcel of Frenchmen have made their fortunes here this very year; an' it's a queer thing if we can't do as well as them beggaws."
The man with the shovel was now doing his part below ground with great vigour. Shovelfuls of ahard conglomerate of quartz, ironstone, sand and clay, were flying in all directions. As the newcomers withdrew, Moseley took Denis by the arm.
"We might find a worse place to camp: what do you say to that gum-tree further on toward the hill? I tell you what—I'll borrow an axe from these chaps, and cut fire-wood and tent-poles if you two will go for some rations and a dozen yards of canvas. It'll be dark in another hour; don't be much longer, and you'll find a fire on, and everything ready for pitching the tent."
"We don't want to settle on the first place we come to," said Denis, between dubiety and a natural attraction to the spot.
"Or anywhere else, in a hurry," agreed Moseley; "but we've got to spend the night somewhere, and a quiet Sunday while we look about us; and for that I don't think you could do better."
So the site of their first encampment came to be selected; it was marked by a solitary and rather stately blue gum-tree, of which Denis took due note as Doherty and he regained the track.
On the road they fell in with a long-legged digger, in the muddy remnants of a well-cut pair of trousers, which telescoped into top-boots of a more enduring excellence; the man was further distinguished by a certain negligent finesse of beard and moustache, a very quiet blue eye, and a voice as quiet when he stopped in his stroll to address the pair.
"Surfacing, I suppose?" said he, with a slight but sufficient indication of the Tynesiders' claim.
"I beg your pardon?" said Denis, out of his depth at once.
"I ought to beg yours," the tall man responded, opening his blue eyes a little wider, and regarding Denis with quiet interest. "I merely saw you come away from that claim over there, and I take rather an interest in Black Hill Flat. That is it, you know."
Denis nodded.
"You aren't a new chum, then?" the other added, smiling over the term.
"Oh, yes, I am. This is our first sight of the diggings."
"Then it's no use asking you a technical question; but surfacing, of course, means going no deeper than the surface—some ten or twenty feet, don't you know. Very few do go deeper, and I am not sure that it would pay on this flat."
Denis explained that the Tynesiders had only got about five feet down.
"So many of them give it up at that," said the tall man, with a faint smile, and would have gone on with the least little nod; but Denis quickly asked him how deep he would go himself and what he thought of Black Hill Flat.
"I'm a deep-sinker," was the reply; "but if I wasn't, and was one of a party, there's nowhere I would sooner try my luck than over there. The drawback is than you can't go very near the water, because the lead doesn't; so you have a long way to carry your wash-dirt, and it wants three or four to keep the pot boiling. On the other hand that's what keeps off the average digger, who's the most impatient person in the world, and so you have the place more or less to yourself. Still, of course, the fewer there are to seek the longer they will take to find, unless some one is very fortunate. A lucky man, though," said the tall digger, looking back toward the Tynesiders' camp—"a lucky man with two hard-working mates might make his fortune there as soon as anywhere."
"Didn't some Frenchmen?" asked Denis, remembering what he had heard at the claim.
"Ah, that was on the hill, and quartz; how they crushed it I can't conceive; for the ordinary man it would be more ruinous than deep sinking, which is saying a great deal."
The tall digger was turning away again, with rather more of a smile, but Denis's eager face detained him a little longer.
"Then which do you recommend," asked Denis, "surfacing or deep-sinking?"
"Oh, come," laughed the other, "I'll be shot if I recommend either! It depends on yourself and your resources. One's quick and cheap and easy, but nearly all a matter of luck; the other's far slower and more expensive, but also far surer for a man of intelligence, as I can see you are. If you go in for surfacing, you might give Black Hill Flat a trial; but I shouldn't tackle it less than three strong."
And with a last good-humoured and yet distant nod, a mixture of courtesy and condescension alike inbred, the tall man went his way, as it might have been down Pall Mall—at the same pace, and with the same carriage—in his deplorable trousers and his long-suffering top-boots.
"I wonder who he is," said Doherty, on whom the still blue eyes had not rested for a moment.
"I wonder where he is," returned Denis, "and how much good he's doing there." Nor would he discuss the man, with Doherty, as a man at all, but only as the most superior digger thus far withintheir ken. It was nevertheless a new type to Denis; he did not belong to it himself, neither did Moseley, nor yet Ralph Devenish with all his airs. But it was as a digger of transparent parts that the tall man returned to a mind from which the general impression soon blotted the particular.
The general impression on the banks of the Yarrowee was a strident chaos in extreme tints. The rocking of the countless cradles made a distracting chorus at close quarters. The vividness of the picture helped to daze a newcomer. The sky was bright blue overhead; the mud on all sides was the very brightest mud; the tiny patches of green were as bright as emeralds. Grass and mud sparkled with a rank dew of empty bottles. Nearly everything was wet and glistening in the level sunlight. The hairy miners shone with their own moisture and their own sunshine of enthusiasm, for the gold-light lit up every face. Nor was it an ignoble face as Denis saw it over and over again. It was full of the hearty virile hope that expanded his own soul. And it was every vivid tint of red and brown, as the mud was every bright shade of brown and yellow; and to each red face there was a redder shirt, and to every red shirt a pair of moleskin trousers, often snow-white, never the less picturesque for the clots of splendid mud that plastered and spattered it. For to Denis the mud was gold at first sight, molten gold that should have nipped off his foot when he sank ankle deep in it, as it was liquid gold thatwound in and out among the tents, and was seen piecemeal through the strings of moleskin legs and rocking cradles, between the banks of the Yarrowee.
The famous cradle really was like a great wooden boot on rockers; the ankle was a raised and perforated tray into which they threw a bucketful of earth and then a balerful of water; the foot was a trough which received the muddy fluid and its precious sediment. As Denis watched the operation for the first time, he imagined the gold-dust pouring through the perforations like pepper from a caster; yet all that was ultimately taken out of the toe of the cradle, and good-naturedly thrust under the new chums' noses in the hollow of a horny palm, would have been a small helping of salt. Denis could have taken his hat off to it, nevertheless, and in another moment Doherty did throw his into the air.
"Not a bad tub," the digger had informed them. "Very near an ounce, I'll wager, or four good quid while you've been watching."
Some claims were so near the water that the newcomers saw exactly how the labour was divided in parties of three. One man was busy in the hole, digging and filling bucket after bucket; another carried the buckets to and fro, emptying the full one into the tray of the cradle; the third did the rocking and supplied the water. The deeper claims were crowned by a windlass mounted on a framework of logs; and Denis supposed it was a fourth man who stood thereon to raise and lower thebuckets. But nothing was more fascinating to watch than the most primitive operation of all, namely the use of the tin wash-pan by certain old diggers who still preferred it to the cradle: there was downright legerdemain in the whirlpool of earth and water that they made in a mere hand-basin, but especially in the way they got rid of both, slop by slop, until only the gold-dust tinkled in the tin.
The pair picked their way between the heaps of mud and gravel known as the Gravel Pits. They walked up to Commissioner's Flat, and saw the Commissioner himself, in his gold-lace cap, seated at a table in his tent, like an ordinary general in the field. On the table were a pair of scales that Denis undertook to trouble before long. "Those are what they weigh it with," he whispered to Doherty; and they watched a happy miner go in with a leathern bag and come out gloating over his receipt. This was the most populous part of the diggings. There was some speaking sight or some striking face at every turn. All the men were bearded like the pard; they might have lost a nugget while they scraped a chin; and the community seemed devoid of women. On one claim, however, a whole family were at work, the father digging, the mother rocking as she nursed her babe, an elder infant toddling with its share of grist, the eldest pouring water into the mill.
As man and boy wandered and looked on, oblivious of their errand, the day's work ended as by amiracle at six o'clock to the minute. Perhaps they had missed some warning shot or signal in their absorption; it certainly was as though a second Big Ben had clanged the hour from which no man might rock a cradle or fill a tub. One minute the cradles roared their loudest; then, a lull that grew into a widespread human hum; and within a quarter of an hour, a thousand crackling fires, each with its wreath of bluish smoke, its steaming pot for the centre of the firelit circle. The bewildered pair had meanwhile set about their business by an effort; and it tided them into a world of yellow and translucent tents, a simple world presently enlivened by blurting cornets, squeaking fiddles, and the ubiquitous concertina.
It was a Saturday night, and the scene was very like a gigantic fair; here was a small, ill-lighted tent, sibilant with the suppressed excitements of sly grog; but here, there, and everywhere were large, well-lighted, over-crowded store-tents, with flags flying honestly against the stars. Yet even in these a Hogarth might have reveled. Diggers of the stamp of Bullocky pitched bank-notes right and left, nor ever counted the change; or instead of change, lengths of calico or bars of soap were tossed across the counters. Yet Denis had managed at last to get more or less of what was wanted at comparatively reasonable prices. He paid only eighteen pence a yard for thirteen yards of canvas, three shillings for a pound of cheese, tenpence a poundfor potatoes, and four-and-sixpence for a hindquarter of mutton. He was struggling out of the tent, holding the meat aloft, with Doherty at his heels, when a cold thrill ran down him. Two other men were struggling in, and the four met so fairly as to block each other's way. One of the newcomers had a grayish beard badly dyed, and little eyes under a peaked cap; the other was smoking a meerschaum pipe with a Turk's face, as unmistakable as his own, yet Denis had to hear him speak before he could believe his eyes.
"Well met, Dent! I suppose I'm about the last person you expected to see here, eh?"
"You are."
"Why, I passed you on the road, man, passed you in the coach, and you never saw us! I changed my mind before the pilot left us; didn't see why you should do all the fortune-making, Dent, my boy; so here I am." And the bold eyes of Ralph Devenish gleamed with a sudden malice that pierced the man's gay crust, while those of his companion seemed smaller, closer, and yet merrier than before.
"Good!" said Denis, looking his cousin steadily in the face. "I hope we may both make our fortunes, Devenish—and then go home together in the same ship!"
Ralph Devenish was the eldest son of doting parents who had done their duty by him according to their lights. They were well-to-do folk, though the homely epithet would have insulted the blood which was their boast; they were not, however, really wealthy, and they had the vast family of their generation. It was therefore something of a sacrifice to send Ralph to his public school, and a distinct one to support his subsequent commission in the Guards. It is true that the sacrifice fell principally upon a long line of younger brethren, who could scarcely have filled the parental eye less if they had stood all their lives in Indian file behind the first-born. But many was the time the father paid some debt with hardly a murmur, or the mother pinched herself to make surreptitious additions to the gay lad's allowance; for man and boy he was the first consideration in their minds, and consequently the sole consideration in his own.
In return this criminal couple had a brilliant and successful son, who was a favourite wherever he went, especially among strangers, and who fraternized to their satisfaction with the more direct issueof families almost as old as their own; the only disappointment was that Ralph was nearing his thirties without having married into one or other of them. It was time, for many reasons, that he made the marriage that was only to be expected of him, and settled down. The marriage that was only to be expected of Ralph Devenish declined in brilliance as the years went on; but the prospect finally resolved itself into no regrettable alliance with a beautiful and charming girl, who was also quite a little heiress in her way. Then Ralph and Nan had known each other all their lives. The families were allied in business. There was nothing in the world against the inferior family, except that invidious juxtaposition. It was therefore a sound choice, if it was nothing more.
Yet Ralph became a company officer without getting engaged even to Nan Merridew. Some said she had refused him. Mr. and Mrs. Devenish could afford to smile. Nevertheless, the attachment became obvious on his side and not on hers. Then Ralph had an illness at Portman Street; it developed into a malignant typhus which nearly killed him; and the shattered officer was given a year's leave in which to recruit from the day he got about again. It seemed certain that this episode would bring matters to a crisis; and when the convalescent was ordered a health voyage in one of the firm's vessels, and Mr. and Miss Merridew accompanied him, it was quite understood that theengagement would be announced on their return.
Nan alone did not so understand it; and in exceptional circumstances already set forth, her father was the next to relinquish an idea which he had cherished as much as anybody. Devenish, however, was naturally no prey to the sentiment to which he attributed his reverse in one quarter and its acceptance in the other. He had never regarded it as a defeat, and he was certainly not the man to do so as he saw the last of Denis against an Australian sky from theMemnon'spoop. On the contrary, the gallant Ralph had never been nearly so much in love as with the ardent and disheveled girl, nobly careless of appearances, who wept and waved within a few feet of him until the last.
His tact, however, was not equal to his passion, and it was a breach of tact that sent Ralph Devenish ashore with the pilot.
"Ah, well!" he had said at last. "He has the best of it, after all!"
"What do you mean?" cried Nan, as she turned on him with fiery tears, but not one in her voice.
"He has all the fun of the fair," replied Devenish, lightly. "They say it's the biggest fair ever held on earth."
"You mean the gold-fields, I suppose?"
"Yes. I shouldn't blame him for wanting to have his fling on them."
"I don't understand you," said the girl, very coldly. "Pray who is blaming him?"
"Well, Dent is rather in Mr. Merridew's bad books for insisting on staying out, you know; and I thought he might be in yours, too."
"Did you, indeed! Then let me tell you I am proud of him—for what he has done, and for what he's going to do. But if he were here now, standing in your shoes, though I would give anything to have him here, I should still be ashamed of him in my heart!"
Devenish winced, and his dark, clear skin was stained a deeper shade; as for Nan, she was so heated that every tear had dried upon her angry blushes.
"If you are thinking of me," he said, "you certainly aren't thinking of what you are saying, or you would remember that a year's leave is a year's leave."
"And that yours isn't up till May," she added with ironic levity. "It's no business of mine, of course; only you shouldn't start comparisons between the man who stays and the man who turns back."
"I am also in less need of money," he told her through his teeth.
"Money!" she cried in unrestrained contempt. "I wasn't thinking of the money—I was thinking of the fun and adventure and romance that would have enticed every man worth calling a man, once he had got so far—except you!"
"From their sweethearts even!" he hissed out, with a devilish nod—"from the girls they pretend they want to marry!"
Nan was stung in her turn; and hers was a poisonous sting. The blood drained from her face. It was some moments before she could speak.
"That is their business," she whispered at last. "At all events you know what I should have thought of Denis if he hadn't stayed; but if you want to know what I think of him now, you shall." And with trembling lips, before Ralph, before the man at the wheel, before the officer and the midshipman of the watch, Miss Merridew kissed the bloodstone signet ring upon the third finger of her left hand. That was what happened on theMemnonwhile Denis watched her dipping out of sight.
What happened next was that Devenish nearly knocked his servant, Jewson, from top to bottom of the companion hatch; the man just managed to clutch the rail, and was called roughly into his master's cabin forthwith.
"Sorry I upset you, Jewson, but you should have got out of my way. You were listening, of course?"
"I couldn't help hearing that last, sir."
"No, I suppose the whole ship heard that. Nice, isn't it?"
"I know what I'd do in your place, sir."
Devenish looked fiercely into the cunning, elderly face, with the dyed beard and the foxy eyes.
"You do, do you?"
"I do, sir; but don't look at me like that, Captain Devenish, sir, or I shall never dare to tell you. There's something else I'd as lief tell you first; but how can I when you look like giving me a horse-whipping if I so much as open my mouth?"
"Go on, you old humbug," said Ralph, relaxing a little; "give me some brandy and water, and let's have it."
Jewson gave him the brandy and water first. Ralph took a gulp, and nodded for the news.
"Well, sir, you see what he give her; but do you know what she give him?" asked Jewson, in a vile undertone, half-gloating, half-afraid.
"No. What?"
"Another ring."
"He's not wearing it."
"That's just it; he is, round his neck. And what do you suppose he's wearing it on?"
"Out with it."
"It's one of her own rings," said Jewson, bringing his small eyes so close together that they seemed to touch. "And he's wearing it round his neck on a lanyard she made him out of her own hair!"
Ralph's comment did him some credit.
"You brute!" he said at last.
"Captain Devenish, sir, it's the four gospels."
"But you've been listening to them too."
"I couldn't help it, sir; really I couldn't. She only give it 'im to-day when he come aboard to bidgood-bye. They went into the after saloon, and I was only in here with the door open. I couldn't help hearing every word."
And the wretch displayed his obvious longing, with the cunning light in the little eyes and the grin amid the dyed hair on the wizened face; but with all his faults Ralph Devenish was still something of a gentleman, and, Nan notwithstanding, even more of a man.
"You will never dare to repeat one of them," said he. "If you ever do, and I hear of it, you will get what you yourself suggested just now. That'll do, Jewson; not another word about that."
The old steward accepted his rebuff with aplomb.
"Very well, sir. Of course my feelings ain't like a gentleman's; a gentleman wouldn't expect it. But this I do promise, never to tell anybody if I don't tell you. And now, sir, I should like to tell you, if I may make so bold, what I'd do in your place."
"If it amuses you, by all means."
"It does, sir; but it'd amuse me more if you'd do it, and there's time enough still. I'd take Miss Merridew at her word, and ashore I'd go with the pilot, and to Ballarat by the first coach!"
Ralph sipped his brandy on the settee. It was finished before he spoke.
"I should never make my fortune there," he said.
"You might if you took me with you. I was in Californy in 'forty-nine. And I'd cook for ye,"added the steward, his face shining with its least evil light; "I'd cook as not many can in Australia, let alone the diggings. That's what I used to ship as; but it's heart-breaking work at sea."
"If I did make my pile," added Ralph, shrewdly, "it wouldn't alter matters one way or the other."
"Perhaps not. But you'd be able to see whether he made his!"
That was all Jewson said; that was all Devenish heard. But the words were spoken with so subtle an intonation that the tantalizing prospect held out sounded the most solid satisfaction in the world; and they turned the scale. Captain Devenish's portmanteaux were not even unstrapped; within a few hours he had bag and baggage aboard the pilot's cutter, with Nan's last ironic wishes ringing unkindly in his ears, and the chief steward of theNorth Foreland, whom the second mate had been instrumental in disrating, at his elbow. The next day but one they passed Denis and his companions on the Ballarat Road, and had pegged out a claim in the palpitating heart of the Gravel Pits before the week was out.
The encounter in the crowded tent was not a solitary experience of the kind in Ralph's case; being a public-school boy, he had not been an hour on the diggings before he recognized an old schoolfellow. It was, indeed, the old schoolfellow who first recognized Ralph Devenish; but that was not Ralph's fault. Nigger Rackham was the very fellow whomhis old friends would have expected to find up to the bare neck in wash-dirt, but perhaps the last whom they would have looked for in spruce uniform at the head of a jingling mob of mounted troopers. He came of an old West Indian stock, thickly tinctured with native blood, and had been expelled from school for a hearty, natural blackguard who was only good at games. His present employment suggested extensive reformation, but that impression was soon removed over a bottle of brandy in Rackham's tent, and the pair cracked another in Ralph's on the Saturday night.
"You ought to join us," says Rackham. "Talk of me being out of my element! I'm more in mine than ever you'll be in yours as a licensed miner. You've neither the turn nor the patience, as I remember you; and what do you want with a few extra thousand, which is all you'll make with the luck of the devil?"
"They will come in very useful when I get back to town. You breathe money in the Guards, Nigger."
"But you won't make enough to feel the difference. I know you won't. You're not the sort. Whereas, if you were to join us, I could promise you the best sport on earth, better than fox-hunting, and plenty of it."
"What's that, Nigger?"
"Digger-hunting!" says Rackham, his white teeth gleaming in a grin, his bright eyes brighterthan ever in his cups. "You look upset: we won't hunt you; but you want to be one of them, and I want you to be one of us."
"But how and why do you hunt them, Nigger?"
"To see their licenses; half of them don't take a license out; you did, because your man knows the ropes. But of course I wouldn't have let an old chum get into trouble."
"But what trouble can it get you into?"
"If you're caught digging without a license on you, whether you have it elsewhere or no," said Rackham, with a gleam and a glitter from his negroid teeth and eyes, "you may get run down and run in, and shut up in the Logs till all's blue. The Logs is the camp lock-up. You sha'n't see the inside of 'em—unless you want, out of curiosity—but that's what happens to the ordinary digger-devil. I've had a fine fellow chained up to a tree all night for his cheek. I rather like 'em like that. But when they don't go to ground in their claims, and break for the bush with you after them, boot and saddle, spurs and sabre, then you know what hunting is!"
"It seems a bit unfair," said Devenish, blowing a reflective cloud from the Turk's head.
"Unfair as you like," says Rackham under his breath, "but the best fun going! I'd rather put up one well-nourished digger than all the foxes in Leicestershire; but there you are, and now you know, not that it applies to you; only, if you should happen to make any enemies (and they're a precious rough crowd to do with), you pass the word and I'll do the rest for the sake of old times."
Devenish coloured a little, and looked to see whether Jewson was within earshot outside the tent; and he was; but just then a diversion was caused by a pistol-shot in the distance, then another, and then so many more, both far and near, that it was as though battle and murder were taking place on no small scale.
"You'd better empty yours, too," said Rackham, pointing to Ralph's revolver in answer to his look. "Some do it most nights, but every mother's son does it on Saturday night, to load up again and start the week with fresh powder and shot. Now's your time, old fellow, while the night's young and your hand steady; then fill up my can, for to-morrow's the Day of Rest!"
The brandy had been obtained at a sovereign the bottle from one of the numerous sly-grog tents at which a digger-hunting constabulary was delighted to wink. But neither Devenish nor Rackham was a drunkard; they were merely congenial and convivial spirits whose incongruous environment promoted a mutual warmth. And the guardsman's contribution to the common fusillade, which still continued, was heard with the rest not a mile away, in the other new tent on Black Hill Flat, where Moseley was making the like explanations to his equally inexperienced comrades, and the redoubtable Deane and Adams was duly emptied in its turn.