In an instant, almost mechanically, Michael's hand went to the pocket. He lifted the packet there and put his own in its place.
The blood was booming in his ears when he turned to the door. A sense of triumph unnerved him more than the execution of his inspiration. Charley muttered and called out in his sleep as Michael passed through the doorway.
Then the stars were over him. Michael drew a deep breath of the night air and crossed to his own hut, the package of opal under his coat. Just as he was entering he drew back, vaguely alarmed. A movement light as thistledown seemed to have caught his ear. He thought he had detected a faint shifting of the shingle nearby. He glanced about with quick apprehension, went back to Charley's hut, listened, and looked around; but Charley was still sleeping. Michael walked back to his own hut. There was no sight or sound of a living thing in the wan, misty moonlight of the dawn, except the white-tail which was still crying from a wilga near Charley's hut.
The package under his coat felt very heavy and alive when he returned to his own hut. Michael was disturbed by that faint sound he had heard, or thought he had heard. He persuaded himself he had imagined it, that in the overwrought state of his sensibilities the sound of his own breath, and his step on the stones, had surprised and alarmed him. The tin of opals burned against his body, seeming to scar the skin where it pressed. Michael sickened at the thought of how what he had done might look to anyone who had seen him. But he put the thought from him. It was absurd. He had looked; there was no one about—nothing. He was allowing his mind to play tricks with him. The success of what he had done made him seem like a thief. But he was not a thief. The stones were Rouminof's. He had taken them from Charley for him, and he would not even look at them. He would keep them for Paul.
If Charley got away without discovering the change of the packets, as he probably would, in the early morning and in his excitement to catch the coach, he would be considered the thief. Rouminof would accuse him; Charley would know his own guilt. He would not dare to confess what he had done, even when he found that his package of opal had been changed. He would not know when it had been changed. He would not know whether it had been changed, perhaps, before he took it from Rouminof.
Charley might recognise the stones in that packet he had done up, Michael realised; but he did not think so. Charley was not much of a judge of opal. Michael did not think he would remember the few scraps of sun-flash they had come on together, and Charley had never seen the mascot he had put into the packet, with a remnant of feeling for the memory of their working days together.
Michael did not light the candle when he went into his hut again. He threw himself down on the bed in his clothes; he knew that he would not sleep as he lay there. His brain burned and whirled, turning over the happenings of the night and their consequences, likely and unlikely. The package of opal lay heavy in his pocket. He took it out and dropped it into a box of books at the end of the room.
He did not like what he had done, and yet he was glad he had done it. When he could see more clearly, he was glad, too, that he had grasped this opportunity to control circumstances. A reader and dreamer all his days, he had begun to be doubtful of his own capacity for action. He could think and plan, but he doubted whether he had strength of will to carry out purposes he had dreamed a long time over. He was pleased, in an odd, fierce way, that he had been able to do what he thought should be done.
"But I don't want them.... I don't want the cursed stones," he argued with himself. "I'll give them to him—to Paul, as soon as I know what ought to be done about Sophie. She's not old enough to go yet—to know her own mind—what she wants to do. When she's older she can decide for herself. That's what her mother meant. She didn't mean for always ... only while she's a little girl. By and by, when she's a woman, Sophie can decide for herself. Now, she's got to stay here ... that's what I promised."
"And Charley," he brooded. "He deserves all that's coming to him ... but I couldn't give him away. The boys would half kill him if they got their hands on to him. When will he find out? In the train, perhaps—or not till he gets to Sydney.... He'll have my fiver, and the stones to go on with—though they won't bring much. Still, they'll do to go on with.... Paul'll be a raving lunatic when he knows ... but he can't go—he can't take Sophie away."
His brain surged over and over every phrase: his state of mind since he had seen Charley and Paul on the road together; every argument he had used with himself. He could not get away from the double sense of disquiet and satisfaction.
An hour or two later he heard Charley moving about, then rush off down the track, sending the loose stones flying under his feet as he ran to catch the coach.
Watty was winding dirt, standing by the windlass on the top of the dump over his and his mates' mine, when he saw Paul coming along the track from the New Town. Paul was breaking into a run at every few yards, and calling out. Watty threw the mullock from his hide bucket as it came up, and lowered it again. He wound up another bucket. The creak of the windlass, and the fall of the stone and earth as he threw them over the dump, drowned the sound of Rouminof's voice. As he came nearer, Watty saw that he was gibbering with rage, and crying like a child.
While he was still some distance away, Watty heard him sobbing and calling out.
He stopped work to listen as Paul came to the foot of Michael's dump. Ted Cross, who was winding dirt on the top of Crosses' mine, stopped to listen too. Old Olsen got up from where he lay noodling on Jun's and Paul's claim, and went across to Paul. Snow-Shoes, stretched across the slope near where Watty was standing, lifted his head, his turning of earth with a little blunt stick arrested for the moment.
"They've took me stones!... Took me stones!" Watty heard Paul cry to Bill Olsen. And as he climbed the slope of Michael's dump he went on crying: "Took me stones! Took me stones! Charley and Jun! Gone by the coach! Michael!... They've gone by the coach and took me stones!"
Over and over again he said the same thing in an incoherent wail and howl. He went down the shaft of Michael's mine, and Ted Cross came across from his dump to Watty.
"Hear what he says, Watty?" he asked.
"Yes," Watty replied.
"It gets y'r wind——"
"If it's true," Watty ventured slowly.
"Seems to me it's true all right," Ted said. "Charley took him home last night. I went along with them as far as the turn-off. Paul was a bit on ... and Archie asked me to keep an eye on him.... I was a bit on meself, too ... but Charley came along with us—so I thought he'd be all right.... Charley went off by the coach this morning.... Bill Olsen told me.... And Michael was reck'ning on him goin' to Warria to-day, I know."
"That's right!"
"It'll be hard on Michael!"
Watty's gesture, upward jerk of his chin, and gusty breath, denoted his agreement on that score.
Ted went back to his own claim, and Watty slid down the rope with his next bucket to give his mates the news. It was nearly time to knock off for the midday meal, and before long men from all the claims were standing in groups hearing the story from Rouminof himself, or talking it over together.
Michael had come up from his mine soon after Paul had gone down to him. The men had seen him go off down the track to the New Town, his head bent. They thought they knew why. Michael would feel his mate's dishonour as though it were his own. He would not be able to believe that what Paul said was true. He would want to know from Peter Newton himself if it was a fact that Charley had gone out on the coach with Jun and two girls who had been at the hotel.
Women were scarce on the opal fields, and the two girls who had come a week before to help Mrs. Newton with the work of the hotel had been having the time of their lives. Charley, Jun Johnson, and two or three other men, had been shouting drinks for them from the time of their arrival, and Mrs. Newton had made up her mind to send the girls back to town by the next coach. Jun had appropriated the younger of the two, a bright-eyed girl, and the elder, a full-bosomed, florid woman with straw-coloured hair, had, as the boys said, "taken a fancy to Charley."
Paul had already told his story once or twice when Cash Wilson, George, and Watty, went across to where he was standing, with half a dozen of the men about him. They were listening gravely and smoking over Paul's recital. There had been ratting epidemics on the Ridge; but robbery of a mate by a mate had never occurred before. It struck at the fundamental principle of their life in common. There was no mistaking the grave, rather than indignant view men of the Ridge took of what Charley had done. The Ridge code affirmed simply that "a mate stands by a mate." The men say: "You can't go back on a mate." By those two recognitions they had run their settlement. Far from all the ordinary institutions of law and order, they had lived and worked together without need of them, by appreciation of their relationship to each other as mates and as a fraternity of mates. No one, who had lived under and seemed to accept the principle of mateship, had ever before done as Charley had done.
"But Charley Heathfield was never one of us really," Ted Cross said. "He was always an outsider."
"That's right, Ted," George Woods replied. "We only stuck him on Michael's account."
Paul told George, Watty, and Cash the story he had been going over all the morning—how he had gone home with Charley, how he remembered going along the road with him, and then how he had wakened on the floor of his own hut in the morning. Sophie was there. She was singing. He had thought it was her mother. He had called her ... but Sophie had come to him. And she had abused him. She had called him "a dirty, fat pig," and told him to get out of the way because she wanted to sweep the floor.
He sobbed uncontrollably. The men sympathised with him. They knew the loss of opal came harder on Rouminof than it would have on the rest of them, because he was so mad about the stuff. They condoned the abandonment of his grief as natural enough in a foreigner, too; but after a while it irked them.
"Take a pull at y'rself, Rummy, can't you?" George Woods said irritably. "What did Michael say?"
"Michael?" Paul looked at him, his eyes streaming.
George nodded.
"He did not say," Paul replied. "He threw down his pick. He would not work any more ... and then he went down to Newton's to ask about Charley."
Two or three of the men exchanged glances. That was the way they had expected Michael to take the news. He would not have believed Paul's story at first. They did not see Michael again that day. In the evening Peter Newton told them how Michael had come to him, asking if it was true Charley had gone on the coach with Jun Johnson and the girls. Peter told Michael, he said, that Charley had gone on the coach, and that he thought Rouminof's story looked black against Charley.
"Michael didn't say much," Peter explained, "but I don't think he could help seeing what I said was true—however much he didn't want to."
Everybody knew Michael believed in Charley Heathfield. He had thought the worst that could be said of Charley was that he was a good-natured, rather shiftless fellow. All the men had responded to an odd attractive faculty Charley exercised occasionally. He had played it like a woman for Michael, and Michael had taken him on as a mate and worked with him when no one else would. And now, the men guessed, that Michael, who had done more than any of them to make the life of the Ridge what it was, would feel more deeply and bitterly than any of them that Charley had gone back on him and on what the Ridge stood for.
All they imagined Michael was suffering in the grief and bitterness of spirit which come of misplaced faith, he was suffering. But they could not imagine the other considerations which had overshadowed grief and bitterness, the realisation that Sophie's life had been saved from what looked like early wreckage, and the consciousness that the consequences of what Charley had done, had fallen, not on Charley, but on himself. Michael had lived like a child, with an open heart at the disposal of his mates always; and the sense of Charley's guilt descending on him, had created a subtle ostracism, a remote alienation from them.
He could not go to Newton's in the evening and talk things over with the men as he ordinarily would have. He wandered over the dumps of deserted rushes at the Old Town, his eyes on the ground or on the distant horizons. He could still only believe he had done the best thing possible under the circumstances. If he had let Charlie go away with the stones, Sophie would have been saved, but Paul would have lost his stones. As it was, Sophie was saved, and Paul had not lost his stones. And Michael could not have given Charley away. Charley had been his mate; they had worked together. The men might suspect, but they could not convict him of being what he was unless they knew what Michael knew. Charley had played on the affection, the simplicity of Michael's belief in him. He had used them, but Michael had still a lingering tenderness and sympathy for him. It was that which had made him put the one decent piece of opal he possessed into the parcel he had made up for Charley to take instead of Paul's stones. It was the first piece of good stuff he had found on the Ridge, and he had kept it as a mascot—something of a nest egg.
Michael wondered at the fate which had sent him along the track just when Charley had taken Paul's stones. He was perplexed and impatient of it. There would have been no complication, no conflict and turmoil if only he had gone along the track a little later, or a little earlier. But there was no altering what had happened. He had to bear the responsibility of it. He had to meet the men, encounter the eyes of his mates as he had never done before, with a reservation from them. If he could give the stones to Paul at once, Michael knew he would disembarass himself of any sense of guilt. But he could not do that. He was afraid if Paul got possession of the opals again he would want to go away and take Sophie with him.
Michael thought of taking Watty and George into his confidence, but to do so would necessitate explanations—explanations which involved talking of the promise he had made Sophie's mother and all that lay behind their relationship. He shrank from allowing even the sympathetic eyes of George and Watty to rest on what for him was wrapped in mystery and inexplicable reverence. Besides, they both had wives, and Watty was not permitted to know anything Mrs. Watty did not worm out of him sooner or later. Michael decided that if he could not keep his own confidence he could not expect anyone else to keep it. He must take the responsibility of what he had done, and of maintaining his position in respect to the opals until Sophie was older—old enough to do as she wished with her life.
As he walked, gazing ahead, a hut formed itself out of the distance before him, and then the dark shapes of bark huts huddled against the white cliff of dumps at the Three Mile, under a starry sky. A glow came from the interior of one or two of the houses. A chime of laughter, and shredded fragments of talking drifted along in the clear air. Michael felt strangely alone and outcast, hearing them and knowing that he could not respond to their invitation.
In any one of those huts a place would be eagerly made for him if he went into it; eyes would lighten with a smile; warm, kindly greetings would go to his heart. But the talk would all be of the stealing of Rouminof's opal, and of Charley and Jun, Michael knew. The people at the Three Mile would have seen the coach pass. They would be talking about it, about himself, and the girls who had driven away with Charley and Jun.
Turning back, Michael walked again across the flat country towards the Ridge. He sat for a while on a log near the tank paddock. A drugging weariness permeated his body and brain, though his brain ticked ceaselessly. Now and again one or other of Rouminof's opals flashed and scintillated before him in the darkness, or moved off in starry flight before his tired gaze. He was vaguely disturbed by the vision of them.
When he rose and went back towards the town, his feet dragged wearily. There was a strange lightness at the back of his head, and he wondered whether he were walking in the fields of heaven, and smiled to think of that. At least one good thing would come of it all, he told himself over and over again—Paul could not take Sophie away.
The houses and stores of the New Town were all in darkness when he passed along the main street. Newton's was closed. There were no lights in Rouminof's or Charley's huts as he went to his own door. Then a low cry caught his ear. He listened, and went to the back door of Charley's hut. The cry rose again with shuddering gasps for breath. Michael stood in the doorway, listening. The sound came from the window. He went towards it, and found Potch lying there on the bunk with his face to the wall.
He had not heard Michael enter, and lay moaning brokenly. Michael had not thought of Potch since the people at Newton's told him that a few minutes, after the coach had gone Potch had come down to the hotel to cut wood and do odd jobs in the stable, as he usually did. Mrs. Newton said he stared at her, aghast, when she told him that his father had left on the coach. Then he had started off at a run, taking the short cut across country to the Three Mile.
Michael put out his hand. He could not endure that crying.
"Potch!" he said.
At the sound of his voice, Potch was silent. After a second he struggled to his feet, and stood facing Michael.
"He's gone, Michael!" he cried.
"He might have taken you," Michael said.
"Taken me!" Potch's exclamation did away with any idea Michael had that his son was grieving for Charley. "It wasn't that I minded——"
Michael did not know what to say. Potch continued:
"As soon as I knew, I went after him—thought I'd catch up the coach at the Three Mile, and I did. I told him he'd have to come back—or hand out that money. I saw you give it to him the other night and arrange about going to Warria.... Mr. Ventry pulled up. Buthe... set the horses going again. I tried to stop them, but the sandy bay let out a kick and they went on again.... The swine!"
Michael had never imagined this stolid son of Charley's could show such fire. He was trembling with rage and indignation. Michael rarely lost his temper, but the blood rushed to his head in response to Potch's story. Restraint was second nature with him, though, and he waited until his own and Potch's fury had ebbed.
Then he moved to leave the hut.
"Come along," he said.
"Michael!"
There was such breaking unbelief and joy in the cry. Michael turned and caught the boy's expression.
"You're coming along with me, Potch," he said.
Potch still stood regarding him with a dazed expression of worshipful homage and gratitude. Michael put out his hand, and Potch clasped it.
"You and me," he said, "we both seem to be in the same boat, Potch.... Neither of us has got a mate. I'll be wanting someone to work with now. We'd better be mates."
They went out of the hut together.
Michael and Potch were at work next morning as soon as the first cuckoos were calling. Michael had been at the windlass for an hour or thereabouts, when Watty Frost, who was going along to his claim with Pony-Fence Inglewood and Bully Bryant, saw Michael on the top of his dump, tossing mullock.
"Who's Michael working with?" he asked.
Pony-Fence and Bully Bryant considered, and shook their heads, smoking thoughtfully.
Snow-Shoes, where he lay sprawled across the slope of Crosses' dump, glanced up at them, and the nickering wisp of a smile went through his bright eyes. The three were standing at the foot of the dump before separating.
"Who's Michael got with him?" Pony-Fence inquired, looking at Snow-Shoes.
But the old man had turned his eyes back to the dump and was raking the earth with his stick again, as if he had not heard what was said. No one was deafer than Snow-Shoes when he did not want to hear.
Watty watched Michael as he bent over the windlass, his lean, slight figure cut against the clear azure of the morning sky.
"It's to be hoped he's got a decent mate this time—that's all," he said.
Pony-Fence and Bully were going off to their own claim when Potch came up on the rope and stood by the windlass while Michael went down into the mine.
"Well!" Watty gasped, "if that don't beat cock-fighting!"
Bully swore sympathetically, and watched Potch set to work. The three watched him winding and throwing mullock from the hide buckets over the dump with the jerky energy of a new chum, although Potch had done odd jobs on the mines for a good many years. He had often taken his father's turn of winding dirt, and had managed to keep himself by doing all manner of scavenging in the township since he was quite a little chap, but no one had taken him on as a mate till now. He was a big fellow, too, Potch, seventeen or eighteen; and as they looked at him Watty and Pony-Fence realised it was time someone gave Potch a chance on the mines, although after the way his father had behaved Michael was about the last person who might have been expected to give him that chance—much less take him on as mate. Like father, like son, was one of those superstitions Ridge folk had not quite got away from, and the men who saw Potch working on Michael's mine wondered that, having been let down by the father as badly as Charley had let Michael down, Michael could still work with Potch, and give him the confidence a mate was entitled to. But there was no piece of quixotism they did not think Michael capable of. The very forlornness of Potch's position on the Ridge, and because he would have to face out and live down the fact of being Charley Heathfield's son, were recognised as most likely Michael's reasons for taking Potch on to work with him.
Watty and Pony-Fence appreciated Michael's move and the point of view it indicated. They knew men of the Ridge would endorse it and take Potch on his merits. But being Charley's son, Potch would have to prove those merits. They knew, too, that what Michael had done would help him to tide over the first days of shame and difficulty as nothing else could have, and it would start Potch on a better track in life than his father had ever given him.
Bully had already gone off to his claim when Watty and Pony-Fence separated. Watty broke the news to his mates when he joined them underground.
"Who do y' think's Michael's new mate?" he asked.
George Woods rested on his pick.
Cash looked up from the corner where he was crouched working a streak of green-fired stone from the red floor and lower wall of the mine.
"Potch!" Watty threw out as George and Cash waited for the information.
George swept the sweat from his forehead with a broad, steady gesture. "He was bound to do something nobody else'd 've thought of, Michael!" he said.
"That's right," Watty replied. "Pony-Fence and Bully Bryant were saying," he went on, "he's had a pretty hard time, Potch, and it was about up to somebody to give him a leg-up ... some sort of a start in life. He may be all right ... on the other hand, there may not be much to him...."
"That's right!" Cash muttered, beginning to work again.
"But I reck'n he's all right, Potch." George swung his pick again. His blows echoed in the mine as they shattered the hard stone he was working on.
Watty crawled off through a drive he was gouging in.
At midday Michael and Charley had always eaten their lunches in the shelter where George Woods, Watty, and Cash Wilson ate theirs and noodled their opal. They wondered whether Michael would join them this day. He strolled over to the shelter with Potch beside him as Watty and Cash, with a billy of steaming tea on a stick between them, came from the open fire built round with stones, a few yards from the mine.
"Potch and me's mates," Michael explained to George as he sat down and spread out his lunch, his smile whimsical and serene over the information. "But we're lookin' for a third to the company. I reck'n a lot of you chaps' luck is working on three. It's a lucky number, three, they say."
Potch sat down beside him on the outer edge of the shelter's scrap of shade.
"See you get one not afraid to do a bit of work, next time—that's all I say," Watty growled.
The blood oozed slowly over Potch's heavy, quiet face. Nothing more was said of Charley, but the men who saw his face realised that Potch was not the insensible youth they had imagined.
Michael had watched him when they were below ground, and was surprised at the way Potch set about his work. He had taken up his father's gouging pick and spider as if he had been used to take them every day, and he had set to work where Charley had left off. All the morning he hewed at a face of honeycombed sandstone, his face tense with concentration of energy, the sweat glistening on it as though it were oiled under the light of a candle in his spider, stuck in the red earth above him. Michael himself swung his pick in leisurely fashion, crumbled dirt, and knocked off for a smoke now and then.
"Easy does it, Potch," he remarked, watching the boy's steady slogging. "We've got no reason to bust ourselves in this mine."
At four o'clock they put their tools back against the wall and went above ground. Michael fell in with the Crosses, who were noodling two or three good-looking pieces of opal Archie had taken out during the afternoon, and Potch streaked away through the scrub in the direction of the Old Town.
Michael wondered where he was going. There was a purposeful hunch about his shoulders as if he had a definite goal in view. Michael had intended asking his new mate to go down to the New Town and get the meat for their tea, but he went himself after he had yarned with Archie and Ted Cross for a while.
When he returned to the hut, Potch was not there. Michael made a fire, unwrapped his steak, hung it on a hook over the fire, and spread out the pannikins, tin plates and knives and forks for his meal, putting a plate and pannikin for Potch. He was kneeling before the fire giving the steak a turn when Potch came in. Potch stood in the doorway, looking at Michael as doubtfully as a stray kitten which did not know whether it might enter.
"That you, Potch?" Michael called.
"Yes," Potch said.
Michael got up from the fire and carried the grilled steak on a plate to the table.
"Well, you were nearly late for dinner," he remarked, as he cut the steak in half and put a piece on the other plate for Potch. "You better come along and tuck in now ... there's a great old crowd down at Nancarrow's this evening. First time for nearly a month he's killed a beast, and everybody wants a bit of steak. Sam gave me this as a sort of treat; and it smells good."
Potch came into the kitchen and sat on the box Michael had drawn up to the table for him.
"Been bringing in the goats for Sophie," he jerked out, looking at Michael as if there were some need of explanation.
"Oh, that was it, was it?" Michael replied, getting on with his meal. "Thought you'd flitted!"
Potch met his smile with a shadowy one. A big, clumsy-looking fellow, with a dull, colourless face and dingy hair, he sat facing Michael, his eyes anxious, as though he would like to explain further, but was afraid to, or could not find words. His eyes were beautiful; but they were his father's eyes, and Michael recoiled to qualms of misgiving, a faint distrust, as he looked in them.
It was Ed. Ventry, however, who gave Potch his first claim to the respect of men of the Ridge.
"How's that boy of Charley Heathfield's?" was his first question when the coach came in from Budda, the following week.
"All right," Newton said. "Why?"
"He was near killed," Mr. Ventry replied. "Stopped us up at the Three Mile that morning I was taking Charley and Jun down. He was all for Charley stopping ... getting off the coach or something. I didn't get what it was all about—money Charley'd got from Michael, I think. That's the worst of bein' a bit hard of hearin' ... and bein' battered about by that yaller-bay horse I bought at Warria couple of months ago."
"Potch tried to stop Charley getting away, did he?" Newton asked with interest.
"He did," Ed. Ventry declared. "I pulled up, seein' something was wrong ... but what does that god-damned blighter Charley do but give a lurch and grab me reins. Scared four months' growth out of the horses—and away they went. I'd a colt I was breakin' in on the off-side—and he landed Potch one—kicked him right out, I thought. As soon as I could, I pulled up, but I see Potch making off across the plain, and he didn't look like he was much hurt.... But it was a plucky thing he did, all right ... and it's the last time I'll drive Charley Heathfield. I told him straight. I'd as soon kill a man as not for putting a hand on me reins, like he done—on me own coach, too!"
Snow-Shoes had drifted up to them as the coach stopped and Newton went out to it. He stood beside Peter Newton while Mr. Ventry talked, rolling tobacco. Snow-Shoes' eyes glimmered from one to the other of them when Ed. Ventry had given the reason for his inquiry.
"Potch!" he murmured. "A little bit of potch!" And marched off down the road, a straight, stately white figure, on the bare track under the azure of the sky.
"Give y' three," Watty said.
"Take 'em." George Woods did not turn. He was carefully working round a brilliantly fired seam through black potch in the shin cracker he had been breaking through two or three days before.
It was about lunch time, and Watty had crawled from his drive to the centre of the mine. Cash was still at work, crouched against a corner of the alley, a hundred yards or so from George; but he laid down his pick when he heard Watty's voice, and went towards him.
"Who d'you think Michael's got as third man?"
"Snow-Shoes?"
"No."
"Old Bill Olsen?"
Watty could not contain himself to the third guess.
"Rum-Enough!" he said.
"He would." George chipped at the stone round his colour. "It was bound to be a lame dog, anyhow—and it might as well've been Rummy as anybody."
"That's right," Cash conceded.
"Bill Andrews told me," Watty said. "They've just broke through on the other side of that drive I'm in...."
"It would be all right," he went on, "if Paul'd work for Michael like he did for Jun. But is Michael the man to make him? Not by long chalks. Potch is turning out all right, the boys say.... Michael says he works like a chow ... has to make him put in the peg ... but they'll both be havin' Rum-Enough on their hands before long—that's a sure thing."
Watty's, George's, and Cash's mine was one of the best worked and best planned on the fields.
Watty and Cash inspected the streak George was working, and speculated as to what it would yield. George leaned his pick against the wall, eager, too, about the chances of what the thread of fire glittering in the black potch would lead to. But he was proud of the mine as well as the stone it had produced. It represented the first attempt to work a claim systematically on the Ridge. George himself had planned and prospected every inch of it; and before he went above ground for the midday meal, he glanced about it as usual, affirming his pride and satisfaction; but his eyes fell on the broken white stone about his pitch.
"As soon as we get her out, I'll shift that stuff," he said.
When they went up for their meal, Michael did not join Watty, George, and Cash as usual. He spread out his lunch and sat with Paul and Potch in the shade of some wilgas beside his own mine. He knew that Rouminof would not be welcome in George and Watty's shelter, and that Paul and Potch would bring a certain reserve to the discussions of Ridge affairs which took place there.
Potch saw Michael's eyes wander to where George was sitting yarning with his mates. He knew Michael would rather have been over there; and yet Michael seemed pleased to have got his own mine in working order again. He talked over ways of developing it with Paul, asking his opinion, and explaining why he believed the claim was good enough to stick to for a while longer, although very little valuable stone had come out of it. Potch wondered why his eyes rested on Paul with that faint smile of satisfaction.
The Ridge discussed Michael and his new partnership backwards and forth, and back again. Michael knew that, and was as amused as the rest of the Ridge at the company he was keeping. Although he sat with his own mates at midday, he was as often as not with the crowd under Newton's veranda in the evening, discussing and settling the affairs of the Ridge and of the universe. After a while he was more like his old self than he had been for a long time—since Mrs. Rouminof's death—people said, when they saw him going about again with a quiet smile and whimsical twist to his mouth.
The gossips had talked a good deal about Michael and Mrs. Rouminof, but neither she nor he had bothered their heads about the gossips.
Michael and Mrs. Rouminof had often been seen standing and talking together when she was going home from the New Town with stores, or when Michael was coming in from his hut. He had usually walked back along the road with her, she for the most part, if it was in the evening, with no hat on; he smoking the stubby black pipe that was rarely out of his mouth. There was something in the way Mrs. Rouminof walked beside Michael, in the way her hair blew out in tiny strands curling in the wind and taking stray glints of light, in the way she smiled with a vague underlying sweetness when she looked at Michael; there was something in the way Michael slouched and smoked beside Mrs. Rouminof, too, which made their meeting look more than any mere ordinary talking and walking home together of two people. That was what Mrs. Watty Frost said.
Mrs. Watty believed it was her duty in life to maintain the prejudices of respectable society in Fallen Star township. She had a constitutional respect for authority in whatever form it manifested itself. She stood for washing on Monday, spring-cleaning, keeping herself to herself, and uncompromising hostility to anything in the shape of a new idea which threatened the old order of domesticity on the Ridge. And she let everybody know it. She never went into the one street of the township even at night without a hat on, and wore gloves whenever she walked abroad. A little woman, with a mean, sour face, wrinkled like a walnut, and small, bead-bright eyes, Mrs. Watty was one of those women who are all energy and have no children to absorb their energies. She put all her energy into resentment of the Ridge and the conditions Watty had settled down to so comfortably and happily. She sighed for shops and a suburb of Sydney, and repeatedly told Watty how nice it would be to have a little milk shop near Sydney like her father and mother had had.
But Watty would not hear of the milk shop. He loved the Ridge, and the milk shop was an evergreen bone of contention between him and his wife. The only peace he ever got was when Mrs. Watty went away to Sydney for a holiday, or he went with her, because she would rarely go away without him. She could not be happy without Watty, people said. She had no one to growl to and let off her irritation about things in general at, if he were not there. Watty grew fat, and was always whistling cheerily, nevertheless. Mrs. Watty cooked like an archangel, he said; and, to give her her due, the men admitted that although she had never pretended to approve of the life they led, Mrs. Watty had been a good wife to Watty.
But everybody, even Mrs. Watty, was as pleased as if a little fortune had come to them, when, towards the end of their first week, Michael and his company came on a patch of good stone. Michael struck it, following the lead he had been working for some time, and, although not wonderful in colour or quality, the opal cut out at about ten ounces and brought £3 an ounce. Michael was able to wipe out some of his grocery score, so was Paul, and Potch had money to burn.
Paul was very pleased with himself about it. The men began to call him a mascot and to say he had brought Michael luck, as he had Jun Johnson. There was no saying how the fortunes of the new partnership might flourish, if he stuck to it. Paul, responding to the expressions of goodwill and the inspiration of being on opal, put all his childish and bullocky energy into working with Michael and Potch.
He still told everybody who would listen to him the story of the wonderful stones he had found when he was working with Jun, and how they had been stolen from him. They grew in number, value, and size every time he spoke of them. And he wailed over what he had been going to do, and what selling the stones would have meant to him and to Sophie. But the partnership was working better than anybody had expected, and people began to wonder whether, after all, Michael had done so badly for himself with his brace of dead-beat mates.
In a few weeks thought of the robbery had ceased greatly to disturb anybody. Michael settled down to working with his new mates, and the Ridge accepted the new partnership as the most natural thing in the world.
Life on the Ridge is usually as still as an inland lake. The settlement is just that, a lake of life, in the country of wide plains stretching westwards for hundreds on hundreds of miles, broken only by shingly ridges to the sea, and eastwards, through pastoral districts, to the coastal ranges, and the seaboard with its busy towns, ports, and cities.
In summer the plains are dead and dry; in a drought, deserts. The great coolebahs standing with their feet in the river ways are green, and scatter tattered shade. Their small, round leaves flash like mirrors in the sun, and when the river water vanishes from about their feet, they hold themselves in the sandy shallow bed of the rivers as if waiting with imperturbable faith for the return of the waters. The surface of the dry earth cracks. There are huge fissures where the water lay in clayey hollows during the winter and spring. Along the stock routes and beside the empty water-holes, sheep and cattle lie rotting. Their carcasses, disembowelled by the crows, put an odour of putrefaction in the air. The sky burns iron-grey with heat. The dust rises in heavy reddish mist about stockmen or cattle on the roads.
But after the rains, in the winter or spring of a good season, the seeds break sheath in a few hours; they sprout over-night, and a green mantle is flung over the old earth which a few days before was as dead and dry as a desert. In a little time the country is a flowering wilderness. Trefoil, crow's-foot, clover, mallow, and wild mustard riot, tangling and interweaving. The cattle browse through them lazily; stringing out across the flowering fields, they look in the distance no more than droves of mice; their red and black backs alone are visible above the herbage. In places, wild candytuft in blossom spreads a quilt of palest lavender in every direction on a wide circling horizon. Darling pea, the colour of violets and smelling like them, threads through the candytuft and lies in wedges, magenta and dark purple against the sky-line, a hundred miles farther on. The sky is a wash of pale, exquisite blue, which deepens as it rises to the zenith. The herbage glows beneath it, so clear and pure is the light.
Farther inland, for miles, bachelor's buttons paint the earth raw gold. Not a hair's breadth of colour shows on the plains except the dull red of the road winding through them and the blue of the sky overhead. Paper daisies fringe the gold, and then they lie, white as snow, for miles, under the bare blue sky. Sometimes the magenta, purple, lavender, gold and white of the herbage and wild flowers merge and mingle, and a tapestry of incomparable beauty—a masterpiece of the Immortals—is wrought on the bare earth.
During the spring and early summer of a good season, the air is filled with the wild, thymey odour of herbs, and the dry, musky fragrance of paper daisies. The crying of lambs, the baa-ing of ewes, and the piping of mud-larks—their thin, silvery notes—go through the clear air and are lost over the flowering land and against the blue sky.
Winter is rarely more than a season of rains on the Ridge. Cold winds blow from the inland plains for a week or two. There are nights of frost and sparkling stars. People shiver and crouch over their fires; but the days have rarely more than a fresh tang in the air.
The rains as often as not are followed by floods. After a few days' steady downpour, the shallow rivers and creeks on the plains overflow, and their waters stretch out over the plains for thirteen, fourteen, and sometimes twenty miles. Fords become impassable; bridges are washed away. Fallen Star Ridge is cut off from the rest of the world until the flood waters have soaked into the earth, as they do after a few days, and the coach can take to the road again.
As spring passes into summer, the warmth of the sunshine loses its mildness, and settles to a heavy taciturnity. The light, losing its delicate brilliance, becomes a bared sword-blade striking the eyes. Everything shrinks from the full gaze and blaze of the sun. Eyes ache, the brain reels with the glare; mirages dance on the limitless horizons. The scorched herbage falls into dust; water is drawn off from rivers and water-holes. All day the air is heavy and still; the sky the colour of iron.
Nights are heavy and still as the days, and people turn wearily from the glow in the east at dawn; but the days go on, for months, one after the other, hot, breathless, of dazzling radiance, or wrapped in the red haze of a dust storm.
Ridge folk take the heat as primitive people do most acts of God, as a matter of course, with stiff-lipped hardihood, which makes complaint the manifestation of a poor spirit. They meet their difficulties with a native humour which gives zest to flagging energies. Their houses, with roofs whitened to throw off the heat, the dumps of crumbling white clay, and the iron roofs of the billiard parlour, the hotel, and Watty Frost's new house at the end of the town, shimmer in the intense light. At a little distance they seem all quivering and dancing together.
Men like Michael, the Crosses, George Woods, Watty, and women like Maggie Grant and Martha M'Cready, who had been on the Ridge a long time, become inured to the heat. At least, they say that they "do not mind it." No one hears a growl out of them, even when water is scarce and flies and mosquitoes a plague. Their good spirits and grit keep the community going through a trying summer. But even they raise their faces to heaven when an unexpected shower comes, or autumn rains fall a little earlier than usual.
In the early days, before stations were fenced, Bill M'Gaffy, a Warria shepherd, grazing flocks on the plains, declared he had seen a star fall on the Ridge. When he went into the station he showed the scraps of marl and dark metallic stone he had picked up near where the star had fallen, to James Henty, who had taken up Warria Station. The Ridge lay within its boundary. James Henty had turned them over curiously, and surmised that some meteoric stone had fallen on the Ridge. The place had always been called Fallen Star Ridge after that; but opal was not found there, and it did not begin to be known as the black opal field until several years later.
In the first days of the rush to the Ridge, men of restless, reckless temperament had foregathered at the Old Town. There had been wild nights at the shanty. But the wilder spirits soon drifted away to Pigeon Creek and the sapphire mines, and the sober and more serious of the miners had settled to life on the new fields.
The first gathering of huts on the clay pan below the Ridge was known as the Old Town; but it had been flooded so often, that, after people had been washed out of their homes, and had been forced to take to the Ridge for safety two or three times, it was decided to move the site of the township to the brow of the Ridge, above the range of the flood waters and near the new rush, where the most important mines on the field promised to be.
A year or two ago, a score or so of bark and bag huts were ranged on either side of the wide, unmade road space overgrown with herbage, and a smithy, a weather-board hotel with roof of corrugated iron, a billiard parlour, and a couple of stores, comprised the New Town. A wild cherry tree, gnarled and ancient, which had been left in the middle of the road near the hotel, bore the news of the district and public notices, nailed to it on sheets of paper. A little below the hotel, on the same side, Chassy Robb's store served as post-office, and the nearest approach to a medicine shop in the township. Opposite was the Afghan's emporium. And behind the stores and the miners' huts, everywhere, were the dumps thrown up from mines and old rushes.
There was no police station nearer than fifty miles, and although telegraph now links the New Town with Budda, the railway town, communication with it for a long time was only by coach once or twice a week; and even now all the fetching and carrying is done by a four or six horse-coach and bullock-wagons. The community to all intents and purposes governs itself according to popular custom and popular opinion, the seat of government being Newton's big, earthen-floored bar, or the brushwood shelters near the mines in which the men sit at midday to eat their lunches and noodle—, go over, snip, and examine—the opal they have taken out of the mines during the morning.
They hold their blocks of land by miner's right, and their houses are their own. They formally recognise that they are citizens of the Commonwealth and of the State of New South Wales, by voting at elections and by accepting the Federal postal service. Some few of them, as well as Newton and the storekeepers, pay income tax as compensation for those privileges; but beyond that the Ridge lives its own life, and the enactments of external authority are respected or disregarded as best pleases it.
A sober, easy-going crowd, the Ridge miners do not trouble themselves much about law. They have little need of it. They live in accord with certain fundamental instincts, on terms of good fellowship with each other.
"To go back on a mate," is recognised as the major crime of the Ridge code.
Sometimes, during a rush, the wilder spirits who roam from one mining camp to another in the back-country, drift back, and "hit things up" on the Ridge, as the men say. But they soon drift away again. Sometimes, if one of them strikes a good patch of opal and outstays his kind, as often as not he sinks into the Ridge life, absorbs Ridge ways and ideas, and is accepted into the fellowship of men of the Ridge. There is no formality about the acceptance. It just happens naturally, that if a man identifies himself with the Ridge principle of mateship, and will stand by it as it will stand by him, he is recognised by Ridge men as one of themselves. But if his ways and ideas savour of those the Ridge has broken from, he remains an outsider, whatever good terms he may seem to be on with everybody.
Sometimes a rush leaves a shiftless ne'er-do-well or two for the Ridge to reckon with, but even these rarely disregard the Ridge code. If claims are ratted it is said there are strangers about, and the miners deal with rats according to their own ideas of justice. On the last occasion it was applied, this justice had proved so effectual that there had been no repetition of the offence.
Ridge miners find happiness in the sense of being free men. They are satisfied in their own minds that it is not good for a man to work all day at any mechanical toil; to use himself or allow anyone else to use him like a working bullock. A man must have time to think, leisure to enjoy being alive, they say. Is he alive only to work? To sleep worn out with toil, and work again? It is not good enough, Ridge men say. They have agreed between themselves that it is a fair thing to begin work about 6.30 or 7 o'clock and knock off about four, with a couple of hours above ground at noon for lunch—a snack of bread and cheese and a cup of tea.
At four o'clock they come up from the mines, noodle their opal, put on their coats, smoke and yarn, and saunter down to the town and their homes. And it is this leisure end of the day which has given life on the Ridge its tone of peace and quiet happiness, and has made Ridge miners the thoughtful, well-informed men most of them are.
To a man they have decided against allowing any wealthy man or body of wealthy men forming themselves into a company to buy up the mines, put the men on a weekly wage, and work them, as the opal blocks at Chalk Cliffs had been worked. There might be more money in it, there would be a steadier means of livelihood; but the Ridge miners will not hear of it.
"No," they say; "we'll put up with less money—and be our own masters."
Most of them worked on Chalk Cliffs' opal blocks, and they realised in the early days of the new field the difference between the conditions they had lived and worked under on the Cliffs and were living and working under on the Ridge, where every man was the proprietor of his own energies, worked as long as he liked, and was entitled to the full benefit of his labour. They had yarned over these differences of conditions at midday in the shelters beside the mines, discussed them in the long evenings at Newton's, and without any committees, documents, or bond—except the common interest of the individual and of the fraternity—had come to the conclusion that at all costs they were going to remain masters of their own mines.
Common thought and common experience were responsible for that recognition of economic independence as the first value of their new life together. Michael Brady had stood for it from the earliest days of the settlement. He had pointed out that the only things which could give joy in life, men might have on the Ridge, if they were satisfied to find their joy in these things, and not look for it in enjoyment of the superficial luxuries money could provide. Most of the real sources of joy were every man's inheritance, but conditions of work, which wrung him of energy and spirit, deprived him of leisure to enjoy them until he was too weary to do more than sleep or seek the stimulus of alcohol. Besides, these conditions recruited him with the merest subsistence for his pains, very often—did not even guarantee that—and denied him the capacity to appreciate the real sources of joy. But the beauty of the world, the sky, and the stars, spring, summer, the grass, and the birds, were for every man, Michael said. Any and every man could have immortal happiness by hearing a bird sing, by gazing into the blue-dark depths of the sky on a starry night. No man could sell his joy of these things. No man could buy them. Love is for all men: no man can buy or sell love. Pleasure in work, in jolly gatherings with friends, peace at the end of the day, and satisfaction of his natural hungers, a man might have all these things on the Ridge, if he were content with essentials.
Ridge miners' live fearlessly, with the magic of adventure in their daily lives, the prospect of one day finding the great stone which is the grail of every opal-miner's quest. They are satisfied if they get enough opal to make a parcel for a buyer when he puts up for a night or two at Newton's. A young man who sells good stones usually goes off to Sydney to discover what life in other parts of the world is like, and to take a draught of the gay life of cities. A married man gives his wife and children a trip to the seaside or a holiday in town. But all drift back to the Ridge when the taste of city life has begun to cloy, or when all their money is spent. Once an opal miner, always an opal miner, the Ridge folk say.
Among the men, only the shiftless and more worthless are not in sympathy with Ridge ideas, and talk of money and what money will buy as the things of first value in life. They describe the Fallen Star township as a God-forsaken hole, and promise each other, as soon as their luck has turned, they will leave it for ever, and have the time of their lives in Sydney.
Women like Maggie Grant share their husband's minds. They read what the men read, have the men's vision, and hold it with jealous enthusiasm. Others, women used to the rough and simple existence of the back-country, are satisfied with the life which gives them a husband, home, and children. Those who sympathise with Mrs. Watty Frost regard the men's attitude as more than half cussedness, sheer selfishness or stick-in-the-mudness; and the more worthy and respectable they are, the more they fret and fume at the earthen floors and open hearths of the bark and bagging huts they live in, and pine for all the kick-shaws of suburban villas. The discontented women are a minority, nevertheless. Ridge folk as a whole have set their compass and steer the course of their lives with unconscious philosophy, and yet a profound conviction as to the rightness of what they are doing.
And the Ridge, which bears them, stands serenely under blue skies the year long, rising like a backbone from the plains that stretch for hundreds of miles on either side. A wide, dusty road crosses the plains. The huts of the Three Mile and Fallen Star crouch beside it, and everywhere on the rusty, shingle-strewn slopes of the Ridge, are the holes and thrown-up heaps of white and raddled clay or broken sandstone—traces of the search for that "ecstasy in the heart of gloom," black opal, which the Fallen Star earth holds.
Darling pea was lying in purple and magenta patches through the long grass on the tank paddock when Sophie went with Ella and Mirry Flail to gather wild flowers there.
Wild flowers did not grow anywhere on Fallen Star as they did in the tank paddock. It was almost a place of faery to children of the Ridge. The little ones were not allowed to go there by themselves for fear they might fall into the waterhole which lay like a great square lake in the middle of it, its steep, well-set-up banks of yellow clay, ruled with the precision of a diagram in geometry. The water was almost as yellow as the banks, thick and muddy looking; but it was good water, nothing on earth the matter with it when you had boiled it and the sediment had been allowed to settle, everybody on Fallen Star Ridge was prepared to swear. It had to be drawn up by a pump which was worked by a donkey engine, Sam Nancarrow, and his old fat roan draught mare, and carted to the township when rain-water in the iron tanks beside the houses in Fallen Star gave out.
During a dry season, or a very hot summer, all hands turned out to roof the paddock tank with tarpaulins to prevent evaporation as far as possible and so conserve the township's water supply. On a placard facing the roadway a "severe penalty" was promised to anyone using it without permission or making improper use of it.
Ella and Mirry were gathering sago flower—"wild sweet Alice," as they called candytuft—yellow eye-bright, tiny pink starry flowers, bluebells, small lavender daisies, taller white ones, and yellow daisies, as well as Darling pea; but Sophie picked only long, trailing stalks of the pea. She had as many as she could hold when she sat down to arrange them into a tighter bunch.
Mirry and Ella Flail had always been good friends of Sophie's. Potch and she had often gone on excursions with them, or to the swamp to cart water when it was scarce and very dear in the township. And since Potch had gone to work Sophie had no one to go about with but Mirry and Ella. She pleased their mother by trying to teach them to read and write, and they went noodling together, or gathering wild flowers. Sophie was three or four years older than Mirry, who was the elder of the two Flails; she felt much older since her mother's death nearly a year ago, and in the black dress she had worn since then. She was just seventeen, and had put her hair up into a knot at the back of her head. That made her feel older, too. But she still liked to go for walks and wanderings with Ella and Mirry. They knew so much about the birds and flowers, the trees, and the ways of all the wild creatures: they were such wild creatures themselves.
They came running to her, crying excitedly, their hands filled with flowers, shedding them as they ran. Then, collapsing in the grass beside Sophie, Mirry rolled over on her back and gazed up into the sky. Ella, squatting on her thin, sunburnt little sticks of legs, was arranging her flowers and glancing every now and then at Sophie with shy, loving glances.
Sophie wondered why she had nothing of her old joyous zest in their enterprises together. She used to be as wild and happy as Mirry and Ella on an afternoon like this. But there was something of the shy, wild spirit of a primitive people about Mirry and Ella, she remembered, some of their blood, too. One of their mother's people, it was said, had been a native of one of the river tribes.
Mirry had her mother's beautiful dark eyes, almost green in the light, and freckled with hazel, and her pale, sallow skin. Ella, younger and shyer, was more like her father. Her skin was not any darker than Sophie's, and her eyes blue-grey, her features delicate, her hair golden-brown that glinted in the sun.
"Sing to us, Sophie," Mirry said.
Sophie often sang to them when she and Ella and Mirry were out like this. As she sat with them, dreaming in the sunshine, she sang almost without any conscious effort; she just put up her chin, and the melodies poured from her. Hearing her voice, as it ran in ripples and eddies through the clear, warm air, hung and quivered and danced again, delighted her.
Ella and Mirry listened in a trance of awe, reverence, and admiration. Sophie had a dim vision of them, wide-eyed and still, against the tall grass and flowers.
"My! You can sing, Sophie! Can't she, Ella?"
Ella nodded, gazing at Sophie with eyes of worshipping love.
"They say you're going away with your father ... and you're going to be a great singer, Sophie," Mirry said.
"Yes," Sophie murmured tranquilly, "I am."
A bevy of black and brown birds flashed past them, flew in a wide half-circle across the paddock, and alighted on a dead tree beyond the fence.
"Look, look!" Mirry started to her feet. "A happy family! I wonder, are the whole twelve there?"
She counted the birds, which were calling to each other with little shrill cries.
"They're all there!" she announced. "Twelve of them. Mother says in some parts they call them the twelve apostles. Sing again, Sophie," she begged.
Ella smiled at Sophie. Her lips parted as though she would like to have said that, too; but only her eyes entreated, and she went on putting her flowers together.
As she sang, Sophie watched a pair of butterflies, white with black lines and splashes of yellow and scarlet on their wings, hovering over the flowered field of the paddock. She was so lost in her singing and watching the butterflies, and the children were so intent listening to her, that they did not hear a horseman coming slowly towards them along the track. As he came up to them, Sophie's rippling notes broke and fell to earth. Ella saw him first, and was on her feet in an instant. Mirry and she, their wild instinct asserting itself, darted away and took cover behind the trunks of the nearest trees.
Sophie looked after them, wondering whether she would follow them as she used to; but she felt older and more staid now than she had a year ago. She stood her ground, as the man, who was leading his horse, came to a standstill before her.
She knew him well enough, Arthur Henty, the only son of old Henty of Warria Station. She had seen him riding behind cattle or sheep on the roads across the plains for years. Sometimes when Potch and she had met him riding across the Ridge, or at the swamp, he had stopped to talk to them. He had been at her mother's funeral, too; but as he stood before her this afternoon, Sophie seemed to be seeing him for the first time.
A tall, slightly-built young man, in riding breeches and leggings, a worn coat, and as weathered a felt hat as any man on the Ridge wore, his clothes the colour of dust on the roads, he stood before her, smiling slightly. His face was dark in the shadow of his hat, but the whole of him, cut against the sunshine, had gilded outlines. And he seemed to be seeing Sophie for the first time, too. She had jumped up and drawn back from the track when the Flails ran away. He could not believe that this tall girl in the black dress was the queer, elfish-like girl he had seen running about the Ridge, bare-legged, with feet in goat-skin sandals, and in the cemetery on the Warria road, not much more than a year ago. Her elfish gaiety had deserted her. It was the black dress gave her face the warm pallor of ivory, he thought, made her look staider, and as if the sadness of all it symbolised had not left her. But her eyes, strange, beautiful eyes, the green and blue of opal, with black rings on the irises and great black pupils, had still the clear, unconscious gaze of youth; her lips the sweet, sucking curves of a child's.
They stood so, smiling and staring at each other, a spell of silence on each.
Sophie had dropped half her flowers as she sprang up at the sound of someone approaching. She had clutched a few in one hand; the rest lay on the grass about her, her hat beside them. Henty's eyes went to the trees round which Mirry and Ella were peeping.
"They're wild birds, aren't they?" he said.
Sophie smiled. She liked the way his eyes narrowed to slits of sunshine as he smiled.
"Are you going to sing, again?" he asked hesitatingly.
Sophie shook her head.
"My mother's awfully fond of that stuff," Henty said, looking at the Darling pea Sophie had in her hand. "We haven't got any near the homestead. I came into the paddock to get some for her."
Sophie held out her bunch.
"Not all of it," he said.
"I can get more," she said.
He took the flowers, and his vague smile changed to one of shy and subtle understanding. Ella and Mirry found courage to join Sophie.
"Where's Potch?" Henty asked.
"He's working with Michael," Sophie said.
"Oh!" he exclaimed, and stood before her awkwardly, not knowing what to talk about.
He was still thinking how different she was to the little girl he had seen chasing goats on the Ridge no time before, and wondering what had changed her so quickly, when Sophie stooped to pick up her hat. Then he saw her short, dark hair twisted up into a knot at the back of her head. Feeling intuitively that he was looking at the knot she was so proud of, Sophie put on her hat quickly. A delicate colour moved on her neck and cheeks. Arthur Henty found himself looking into her suffused eyes and smiling at her smile of confusion.
"Well, we must be going now," Sophie said, a little breathlessly.
Henty said that he was going into the New Town and would walk along part of the way with her. He tucked the flowers Sophie had given him into his saddle-bag, and she and the children turned down the track. Ella, having found her tongue, chattered eagerly. Arthur Henty strolled beside them, smoking, his reins over his arm. Mirry wanted to ride his horse.
"Nobody rides this horse but me," Henty said. "She'd throw you into the middle of next week."
"I can ride," Mirry said; "ride like a flea, the boys say."
She was used to straddling any pony or horse her brothers had in the yard, and they had a name as the best horse-breakers in the district.
Henty laughed. "But you couldn't ride Beeswing," he said. "She doesn't let anybody but me ride her. You can sit on, if you like; she won't mind that so long as I've got hold of her."
The stirrup was too high for Mirry to reach, so he picked her up and put her across the saddle. The mare shivered and shrank under the light shock of Mirry's landing upon her, but Arthur Henty talked to her and rubbed her head soothingly.
"It's all right ... all right, old girl," he muttered. "Think it was one of those stinging flies? But it isn't, you see. It's only Mirry Flail. She says she's a flea of a rider. But you'd learn her, wouldn't you, if you got off with her by yourself?"
Ella giggled softly, peering at Mirry and Henty and at the beautiful golden-red chestnut he was leading. Ed. Ventry had put Sophie on his coach horses sometimes. He had let her go for a scamper with Potch on an old horse or a likely colt now and then; but she knew she did not ride well—not as Mirry rode.
They walked along the dusty road together when they had left the tank paddock, Mirry chattering from Beeswing's back, Sophie, with Ella clinging to one hand, on the other side of Henty. But Mirry soon tired of riding a led horse at a snail's pace. When a sulphur-coloured butterfly fluttered for a few minutes over a wild tobacco plant, she slid from the saddle, on the far side, and was off over the plains to have another look at the butterfly.
Ella was too shy or too frightened to get on the chestnut, even with Henty holding her bridle.
"How about you, Sophie?" Arthur Henty asked.
Sophie nodded, but before he could help her she had put her foot into the stirrup and swung into the saddle herself. Beeswing shivered again to the new, strange weight on her back. Henty held her, muttering soothingly. They went on again.
After a while, with a shy glance, and as if to please him, Sophie began to sing, softly at first, so as not to startle the mare, and then letting her voice out so that it rippled as easily and naturally as a bird's. Henty, walking with a hand on the horse's bridle beside her, heard again the song she had been singing in the tank paddock.
Ella was supposed to be carrying Sophie's flowers. She did not know she had dropped nearly half of them, and that they were lying in a trail all along the dusty road.
Henty did not speak when Sophie had finished. His pipe had gone out, and he put it in his pocket. The stillness of her audience of two was so intense that to escape it Sophie went on singing, and the chestnut did not flinch. She went quietly to the pace of the song, as though she, too, were enjoying its rapture and tenderness.
Then through the clear air came a rattle of wheels and jingle of harness. Mirry, running towards them from the other side of the road, called eagerly:
"It's the coach.... Mr. Ventry's got six horses in, and a man with him!"
Six horses indicated that a person of some importance was on board the coach. Henty drew the chestnut to one side as the coach approached. Mr. Ventry jerked his head in Henty's direction when he passed and saw Arthur Henty with the Flail children and Sophie. The stranger beside him eyed, with a faint smile of amusement, the cavalcade, the girl in the black dress on the fine chestnut horse, the children with the flowers, and the young man standing beside them. The man on the coach was a clean-shaved, well-groomed, rather good-looking man of forty, or thereabouts, and his clothes and appearance proclaimed him a man of the world beyond the Ridge. His smile and stare annoyed Henty.
"It's Mr. Armitage," Mirry said. "The young one. He's not as nice as the old man, my father says—and he doesn't know opal as well—but he gives a good price."
They had reached the curve of the road where one arm turns to the town and the other goes over the plains to Warria. Sophie slipped from the horse.
"We'll take the short cut here," she said.
She stood looking at Arthur Henty for a moment, and in that moment Henty knew that she had sensed his thought. She had guessed he was afraid of having looked ridiculous trailing along the road with these children. Sophie turned away. The young Flails bounded after her. Henty could hear their laughter when he had ridden out some distance along the road.
From the slope of a dump Sophie saw him—the chestnut and her rider loping into the sunset, and, looking after him, she finished her song.
"Caro nome che il mio cor festi primo palpitar,Le delizie dell' amor mi dei sempre rammentar!Col pensier il mio desir a te sempre volerà,A fin l'ultimo sospir, caro nome, tuo sarà!"Dear name forever nursed in my memory thou shalt be,For my heart first stirred to the delight of love for thee!My thoughts and my desire will always be, dear name, toward thee,And my last breath will be for thee, dear name.
The long, sweet notes and rippled melody followed Arthur Henty over the plains in the quiet air of late afternoon. But the afternoon had been spoilt for him. He was self-conscious and ill at ease about it all.