by Lucy Walker
‘Is Mr. Malin at this camp, or has he gone farther out?’ she asked. ‘Actually, I’m a guest at his house and I thought ‒’
‘Any trouble back there at the Outpost?’ the man holding the horse asked. His words, and his way of saying them carried the overtones of an unnecessary question. He knew the answer before she gave it.
Katie shook her head.
‘No. Everything is all right. This is Mr. Malin’s Number Five camp, isn’t it? Mr. and Mrs. Potts were here until I came to Malin’s Outpost. They’re all right. Everything’s all right; even Secretary.’
The second man stirred for the first time. He bent down, picked up a stick from the ground, and hurled it into the coals of the fire.
‘Could have told you that,’ he said.
‘Oh, could you?’ Katie lifted her head. ‘Smoke signals, or do the aborigines play the didgeridoo in these parts?’
‘No call for sarcasm, young lady,’ the first man ‒ the one holding Brownie ‒ said. ‘This camp happens on a private claim. Seems reasonable to know who comes and goes. Same thing in a house, if you happen to own one. You like to know who’s visiting‒’
Katie nodded.
‘I quite understand,’ she agreed. ‘But I was surprised you were not asleep. Isn’t sunup to sundown the rule on the diggings too?’
‘For some. All depends.’
A tall black shadow stirred over by the fire as someone was putting short logs on the coals to liven them up. The firelight showed the unmistakable outline of an aborigine.
‘Not Secretary ‒’ Katie cried in dismay.
‘Guess Secretary was told to stay along Malin’s Outpost, in which case that’s where Secretary would stay,’ the man said. ‘That feller over there is Jack Bean ‒ that name being his because he’s a tall slim feller ‒ like long beans. You know the kind?’
The shadow that had gone through the bush beside her? No mopoke ‒ just Jack Bean.
Katie’s heart fell, not because the aborigine had heard her and come out to investigate and bring the news back, but because she guessed now that to find Gideon Dent alone might be terribly difficult. The aborigines always knew when there was someone in the bush.
Then her thoughts brightened.
But that didn’t matter. Gideon might even be glad she had come. He hadn’t been able to come to her but he would be glad she had come to him. It had been Bern Malin who had kept them apart; perhaps on account of having put his own pegs on the old Gideon’s claims. Oh, no! She mustn’t think that. She couldn’t believe that.
‘You haven’t told me if Bern Malin is here, or nearby,’ she said, looking up into the man’s shadowy expressionless face.
‘He’s outback.’ The man jerked his head indicating the hinterland. ‘Outback’ could mean anything up to a thousand miles; and Katie said so.
She sighed.
‘That doesn’t tell me a thing. Do you mean near, or far?’
‘Wouldn’t know, lady. He didn’t say.’
The other man had gone to the fire which was beginning to spring to life under the aborigine’s ministrations. He came back now.
‘Guess you’d better come and have a billy of tea,’ he said in a voice that had the sing-song of the diphthongs in it
‘Guess I’d better,’ Katie replied falling into the idiom. ‘I’d love it. ’Specially if it’s hot. It’s kind of you to ask me.’ She turned to the man still holding Brownie’s cheek-strap.
‘I don’t think I’ll unsaddle Brownie yet. He might like a drink though. I have fed him‒’
‘I’ll fix him,’ the man said and he led the horse away, around the camp, into the shadow of trees on the far side.
Over by the fire, which was now blazing and throwing crackling lights all over the ground and into the trees, she could see the whole geography of the camp.
There were several galvanised-iron huts ‒ the kind that could be stripped down and taken away in an hour. Sheets of iron leaned against the wood structure behind. Sheets of iron lay flat on top making some kind of a roof. She wondered if this was a typical diggers’ camp.
The men gave her some hot billy tea, and damper made earlier in the evening. It was still warm from the hot coals heaped on the camp oven.
‘I hope I’m not eating to-morrow’s breakfast,’ Katie said apologetically. ‘Thank you very much for being so kind. The damper is wonderful.’
‘You best tell that to Jack Bean. He’s cook since Mrs. Potts went back to civilisation. Butter’s out of a tin ‒ no cows round hereabouts.’
Katie laughed. She couldn’t help laughing. The man speaking had been dead serious. Malin’s Outpost, alone in the bush except for Ryde’s Place fifteen miles away, was civilisation to him. Clearly he was a real bushman ‒ someone who had probably not seen a town, even a small one like Malley’s Find, in months.
‘Old Potts would sooner be back here, I can tell you that, lady,’ the man said. ‘Never did have any time for soft life ‒ not Potts.’
‘What is your name please?’ Katie asked.
‘Best ask you what’s yours. Guess mine happens to be Sam. Don’t know the rest. Never did, but I put Smith on the paper I get from the State Battery about tax and such things. Though what for I don’t know. Seems like, even in the bush, you got to pay for somebody somewhere else. Smith’s as good as any other name and most people I know gets called that anyway.’
‘Mine’s Katie James. Mrs. Potts is looking after us at Malin’s Outpost. That is, Andrew and me. Mr. Potts is looking after Mrs. Potts.’
Both men relaxed and grinned. The aborigine’s teeth were a dazzling white flash in his face as he too saw Katie’s little joke.
‘Please,’ she said quickly, feeling she had made friends now. ‘Will you tell me ‒ where can I find Gideon Dent?’
Even the fire seemed to stop crackling. In the sudden silence she expected to see the heavens open and lightning come down with the crack of a thousand whips.
‘I’m his cousin,’ she added hastily, in order to still whatever quick suspicions they had in their minds. ‘That is ‒ second cousin. I can prove it if you like. I know Bern Malin and his friends don’t want any strange person bothering Gideon just now. Please don’t think I’m stupid or ignorant, but I’m his relative. I wouldn’t do anything that would bring him disaster.’
The silence continued except for Jack Bean throwing more wood on the fire.
Katie began to search in the wallet she had brought with her and which she had slung in her shoulder-bag together with the water-bottle to keep safe.
‘I have a letter from him with his signature on,’ she said, very calmly; determined to still their suspicions. ‘I have my birth certificate, my father’s birth certificate, which has on it his mother’s name. It was Dent and she was the child of a Nathaniel Gideon Dent ‒’
‘Look, lady!’ Sam interrupted. ‘That don’t just mean a thing to me and Fred. Me, if I had a birth certificate, and maybe I did ‒ I’m not saying not ‒ I don’t know. Fred here wouldn’t tell if he did know. Such things in the bush don’t count. If you stick to your mate ‒ that counts. If you can strike a find in the diggings, that counts. If a stranger does the right thing by you, and you do the right thing by him ‒ that counts. That’s about all, eh Fred?’
‘That and some regular tucker and a good water-soak here and there to keep you alive.’
Katie stopped feeling for folded papers in her shoulder bag. She let her hands drop to her lap.
What the men had said was not only true it was the one real law of the bush. Food, water, your mate and luck! Life in the diggings was down to the bare essentials. You had subsistence and you had to know when to believe in people.
‘Do you trust me?’ she asked quickly ‒ pleading a little, though not meaning to.
The firelight had been playing on her face a long time. The men ‒ including Jack Bean ‒ had not missed an expression, nor the candour of her eyes, now dark now bright according to how and when the fire shot flames into th
e darkness around. Furthermore there were red lights in her hair and that would have softened the hearts of fiends out of hell had she known how the men would have put it into words.
What’s more they had known Bern Malin had a young woman and a boy staying over at Malin’s Outpost. They knew she’d asked for Gideon Dent in Malley’s Find too. It had taken them one week to hear that news by the bush telegraph; though wild animals would never have drawn from them how the bush telegraph worked, and why.
‘Tell you what, lady ‒’ Fred said after a long ruminative silence.
‘Call me Katie, please. Katie James.’
‘You have all that on that birth certificate! You wouldn’t believe it would you, Sam? The things some people get written down about themselves! Not safe, I reckon. Never put anything in writing ‒’
‘Me neither.’
‘Well,’ Fred went on slowly. ‘I guess the best thing for you to do is turn in, Katie James. In the morning maybe Sam and me might figure a way to send word back into the bush. Someone out there might get it to Gideon Dent. One never knows ‒ one jes’ waits in case. Sort-of, if you know what I mean.’
‘Please don’t tell Bern Malin yet ‒’ Katie pleaded. ‘Please don’t misunderstand me. It won’t really matter if he does hear I’ve come this far because I am still going to see my cousin. That is ‒ second cousin. It would make it that much easier if I didn’t have to have an argument with Bern first. You do understand, don’t you?’
‘He’s not a chap that argues,’ Sam said noncommittally. ‘I guess we’d best leave it and see what happens next, Katie James. It sounds kind-of funny callin’ someone Katie James. Two names. You wouldn’t believe it would you, Fred? Why two? That’s what bothers me.’
They were putting her off. Katie could see that. They really said things but were stalking round and round the point ‒ not getting to it. If they could send word back into the bush to Gideon Dent they could send her.
They implied they believed she was who she said she was; and that they trusted her. But did they?
Perhaps they were under orders. She hadn’t thought of that before. Someone ‒ Bern Malin ‒ might have ordered them to let no one past this point.
‘No one’ to these men who lived an ethical code that was stripped down to bones, meant no one. It didn’t mean anyone and it didn’t mean Katie James.
She stared into the coals of the fire thoughtfully while the men waited in a patient silence for the answer her head-work would give her.
‘Very well,’ she said at last. ‘You don’t mean me to go on, unless someone else gives you permission first.’
‘Permission? What’s that? Fred, you know what that is?’
‘You know very well what it is,’ Katie said crossly. Then she was sorry. She was an intruder, a stranger; yet they were giving her fire, food and something to drink; bush hospitality. She had an obligation to be polite in return.
‘Yes, I’ll turn in,’ she said, suddenly resigned because she was very, very tired. She’d been at a picnic all day and only now realised the human body could take only so much in a day. ‘I’ve my own rug. Perhaps in the morning we could talk about it again. In the meantime I’d better unsaddle Brownie’
‘Jack Bean’s been and done it,’ Sam said with a faint scoffing note in his voice. ‘You’re bush trained all right, and your eyes looking into that fire, an’ across it at us, don’t miss much. But that you did. Jack Bean’s unsaddled the horse an’ put a halter on him and railed him up in a bit of a paddock over there behind the salmon gums ‒’
Katie, if she had been standing, could have stamped her foot.
She had told herself not to miss a thing; not a single thing. And she had missed a major event. One of the three men had left the fire and had led her horse away, paddocked him for the night, then come back to drink the last of the billy tea. And she hadn’t even noticed.
All three men were watching her across the fire. Though their faces were dead-pan she knew they were laughing at her.
‘One point up to you,’ she said with a smile, trying to put a good face on it. ‘To-morrow or the next day it will be my turn. Then we’ll be evens.’
‘That’s a bet,’ Sam said solemnly.
‘Taken!’ Fred agreed.
‘Two against one,’ said Katie. ‘How do we pay?’
‘I’ll stake the lady,’ Jack Bean said in his soft liquid voice. ‘This way make it two against two.’
‘Evens,’ said Sam. ‘Okay! You go fetch your rug, Katie James, and you can sleep in the bunkhouse over there by the big tree ‒ end of the line. That’s Bern Malin’s shack and since he keeps it pretty tidy, with or without the Pottses around, it won’t be too bad for you. You’d better leave it the way you find it too for he’s a regular one for knowing things: ’specially if someone’s dossed down in his bunkhouse.’
It was three days and two nights before Katie found a way to go to Gideon Dent from the Number Five diggings.
She had slept late, by the diggers’ rising time, that first morning. The picnic the day before, then the two and a half hour ride from Malin’s Outpost, had taken its toll. She slept deeply and dreamlessly on Bern’s bunk in his small but scrupulously neat shack.
The sun was up and hot when she came out into the morning, still in the shirt and slacks of yesterday. She had to hoard her clean clothes until she could see how she could wash and dry what she had on.
She blinked her eyes at the wonderful world around her. Gone was the long endless sweep of the sand-plain, the low scrub-wattle country, and the ancient twisted tormented trees that had endured in it for hundreds of years. She had come into the salmon-gum country last night while riding the track. She had known that, but it took the light of day and a bright sun to show her how wonderful it was.
Here and there were magnificent tall trees. Others were of medium height, their thick stems fanning upwards from the ground. Their trunks were pink; a radiant glowing pink with brown and white blotches here and there. The leaves were a shining green.
In and out of them flitted madly a host of jewelled parrots ‒ all green and blue and gold. To and from the bough shelter over the men’s eating-place flew hundreds of other tiny birds; white-billed, pink-billed, brown-billed. The air was filled with the sounds of their wings and their shrill tweeping voices.
Everywhere between the trees and low scrub bushes the ground was an ochre red: here and there thrown up were the mullock heaps of shafts sunk long ago: and some sunk more recently.
Katie, in delight, held out her hands to the sound and movement in the air; to the colour, as a child might to the wonder of a rainbow.
It was invitation enough for the tiny birds. In seconds they whirred around her head and shoulders; pecked delicately at the palms of her hands expecting the morsels given them by the men.
‘Put your hands in your pockets, Katie James,’ Fred advised her. ‘Thataway you’re misleading Sam’s pals. He wouldn’t like it one bit, he wouldn’t.’
‘Old Gideon Dent ‒ dead and gone now ‒ got him some nice gold findings down and around these shafts in his day,’ Sam told her, ignoring the bird-circus round Katie. ‘Maybe there’s more, some place. What we found here, lookin’ for gold, was pyrites. That is, in this mine right here.’
‘Pyrites? That’s copper, isn’t it? What about the precious things in the mineral sands? Ilmenite and zircons?’
‘That’s farther along,’ Sam said shortly, not pleased with Katie’s questions now. ‘That’s Bern Malin’s big show. Him, and Gideon Dent!’ He laughed when he said this last as if it were some joke. He was almost cynical, Katie thought.
This worried her on and off all day as she wandered between the trees, did some cleaning up around the camp for the men, and cooked their evening dinner for them. The meat was kangaroo steak and they had advised her to steam it well in simmering water for an hour before roasting it slowly in the camp oven, sandwiched between coals under the bed of the smouldering fire.
‘Can’t c
ook that stuff quick,’ Fred said. ‘But it’s mighty nice cooked long and sure. Plenty of flavour. Game-like, but kinda nice when you’re usta it like me and Sam and Jack Bean.’
Jack Bean had disappeared from the camp so Katie guessed he was the ‘word that would go outback’. Later in the day he reappeared as if he had gone no more than a few miles on the shaggy horse he kept in the paddock where Brownie was now out to grass. He brought a fine goanna home for his own supper.
This quick reappearance puzzled and bothered Katie but she determined to wait and see.
A little later Sam said ‒ ‘Don’t you worry about that lot back at Malm’s Outpost, Katie James, because they’re not worrying about you. They know we got you safe here; and you’re likely to stop a bit.’
‘Why are you so sure, Sam? I did leave Mrs. Potts a note, I know. But ‒’
‘That’s what Jack Bean said. Guess he must have sent word back.’
‘To Malin’s Outpost? I thought he was to take word outback ‒ to Gideon Dent? How could he go both ways at once? I mean, opposite ways?’
‘Dunno ‒ unless he has friends doing half his work for him. You never can tell about Jack Bean. He’s got that many relatives scattered through the outback from here to the Never it’s past counting. I never was any good at counting anyway.’
Katie realised it wasn’t any good asking Sam questions. He dodged the answers. All the same, she was glad they knew back at Malin’s Outpost where she was, and that she was in safe hands. There were moments when she felt she had done a silly thing ‒ running out on them like that. She could not have explained convincingly her need to do something about Andrew before other people did it, wrongly. She did not want to highlight to Mrs. Potts the fact that she, Katie, being a minor and not yet earning a stable living, was balanced night and day on the terrible tight-rope of insecurity. Authority, abiding in legal regulations, could take Andrew from her.
The men were kind without putting themselves too much in Katie’s way. They showed her how they worked the winch over the square shaft dug hundreds of feet down, till even sound was soundless. The shaft had been timbered with cross-pieces all the way to stop the ground caving in. She watched the mullock coming up in the kibble, then Fred, the winch-man, helped by Sam, and later, Jack Bean, sift and separate it.