Then Allen was on Milne, gripping him as Milne delivered short jabs to the taller man’s stomach, then Allen got a punch away with his left fist, and Milne fell to the ground, stunned.
In the jeers of the crowd, something landed at Colin’s feet. He bent to pick it up, only to find a heavy boot crushing his hand into the broken tussock.
‘Leave it, boy,’ said Regan, scooping up the object, before removing his foot from Colin’s hand.
Colin rubbed his hand, tall enough to stare into the eyes of Regan.
‘Be a man and keep your mouth shut,’ Regan said, slipping the chunk of metal into his pocket.
It didn’t matter, Colin had seen what it was — a crudely fashioned knuckleduster, brass knuckles, guaranteed to knock an opponent out.
Regan turned away, rattling the pennies in the pan, and allocated the winnings, pocketing the leftovers.
No one bothered with Milne on the ground, barely coherent and making no effort to get up.
Colin wanted to join the crowd carousing around the fire, the grog flowing freely. He wasn’t a stranger to drink, but his mam had beaten the joy out of it once when she’d caught him swigging from his brother’s leftovers, well before Issac had come to New Zealand, which seemed a lifetime ago, and didn’t bear thinking about too much. But his decent morality won out over the booze.
‘You okay, Mister Milne?’ Colin asked, kneeling beside the bleeding man.
Milne’s face looked funny in the firelight, like he’d had too much to drink himself, his mouth floppy.
‘Are you drunk?’ Colin asked, incredulous that a man that drunk could have fought as he did.
Milne tried to speak but slurred his words while blood dribbled down his chin.
‘Here, sit up,’ Colin said, tugging on Milne’s shoulders, heaving him into a lopsided sitting position.
Again, Milne tried speaking but nothing but gibberish came out.
‘You need to sleep it off,’ Colin said, echoing the words he’d heard his mam say time and time again.
Milne’s strong right arm lay useless in his lap and when Colin walked off, he tried grabbing for him with his left arm. Unbalanced, he toppled over. Unable to right himself, Milne lay crying into the earth, the tussock grass tickling his ears and scratching his face, and there was nothing he could do about it.
The Licence
The next morning dawned with clear skies and birdsong, and no other noise.
Something woke him, and Colin stirred under his blanket, shivering in the dawn chill and looked around for his companions. Most of the miners lay fast asleep, their alcohol soaked brains requiring a few more hours to recover. But not all of them were asleep. Colin watched through half-closed eyes as Allen and Regan, moving like ballerinas, rifled through the bags of their sleeping companions extracting handfuls of coins or anything else small and portable. When they got to the immobile form of Milne still lying where he fell the night before, the men conversed in close quarters, whispering so softly that Colin couldn’t hear a word they exchanged.
Colin saw Allen kneel at Milne’s side, his hand on Milne’s shoulder. Milne moaned as Allen pushed him onto his back. Half of Milne’s face looked as if a fire had melted it, drooping in a grotesque caricature of what it had once been. Milne reached up with one hand, his words indistinct. Regan leapt forward, placing his palm over Milne’s mouth.
‘Just find it,’ Regan whispered.
Allen rifled through Milne’s pockets, the older man trying to push Allen’s hands away, but there was no strength behind his struggles.
Allen pulled a piece of paper from Milne’s pocket, Milne’s Miner’s Right, his legitimate licence to prospect at Bruce Bay. An official licence, one which neither Allen nor Regan had bothered paying for.
Allen pocketed the licence and Regan moved his hand to cover both Milnes drooping mouth, and his nose.
Colin stuffed the blanket into his mouth to stop from crying out as he watched Milne’s weakened body struggle briefly before falling still. Regan held his hand over Milne’s face for a moment longer, before finally stripping the man of his thin wedding band and rolling him back onto his side and covering him up with a blanket from Milne’s own bag.
With the licence in hand, Regan and Allen vanished across the tussock covered hills. Whether killing Milne had always been their intention, Colin couldn’t be sure, but it was in that moment that he finished doing his growing up, and the moment he realised there was no one he could trust, no one other than his family.
Apart from when they were under the influence of greed or cheap grog, the miners were a friendly group. When they discovered that Milne had passed away they buried the man and divvied up his belongings according to need amongst the remaining men. Wisely, Colin kept silent on the cause of death, and thus found himself the uncomfortable owner of a canvas bag containing a blanket, a gold pan, an enamel bowl and a too-big waistcoat. He kept the waistcoat despite its size as it added an extra layer of warmth to his meagre wardrobe.
Surprised murmurs filled the campsite as the diggers noticed Regan and Allen’s absence, but that was the way of things and after a few minutes no one thought any more of it. Miners were notoriously flighty, and men with horses were prone to leaving at first light, eager to get to the gold fields as fast as possible — and there was no time to waste developing friendships. And unless you were travelling with a friend, the momentary friendships you made on the rough road were fleeting and ethereal.
The rest of the men followed in their wake, knowing that by nightfall, their campsite would contain a whole new set of miners — men and, if they were lucky, some small number of hardy female miners. Enthusiastic miners were making their way to the West Coast from all over New Zealand, and from further afield - Australia, America, England, even China.
Colin plodded along the barren landscape, the unfamiliar pack chaffing at his shoulders. He didn’t know the way, so followed the backs of the men in front of him. He’d been walking for days and still couldn’t get the image of Regan’s hand over Milne’s face out of his mind. It was the one thing which made him grateful he didn’t have a horse to carry him to Bruce Bay and faster. The last thing he wanted was to see them again.
Milne wasn’t the only dead body Colin saw on his travels, men were dropping faster than flies. Ill health, old age, poor nutrition, untreated infections, the list was endless. They stripped the corpses of anything valuable or useful, divvying the goods up amongst those who stopped help give the poor sod a Christian burial. Which was how, by the time Colin made it to Bruce Bay, he looked liked every other miner there, albeit a younger version, but one just as world weary.
Bruce Bay wasn’t what Colin expected. He’d imagined a place more like Dunedin, with shops and hotels and, well, buildings. More buildings than those he could see from the ridge. And he expected more people. There were few people in streets — older men for the most part, but none of the younger men he’d encountered on the way.
Colin limped over the last ridge and made his way down the hill, passing a church with its simple cross on its apex. A graveyard dwarfed the tiny building, and Colin tried not to think about why so they’d buried many people in a place which boasted only a handful of buildings, and a flattened field with a few dozen tents and lopsided shacks.
He’d jarred his ankle after catching it in a hole in the ground. One miner telling him it was the burrow of a kiwi bird. He didn’t know what a kiwi bird was, or why it burrowed underground like a mole. He’d never seen so many strange-looking birds as he had since landing in New Zealand. Birds should be in trees, instead of walking the earth and making holes in the ground.
Because of the fall, his ankle was the size of an apple, and tender to the touch. He’d loosened his boot, but that only made him walk like a drunk on a trapeze. Colin stopped to lean against the porch railings of one of the better looking buildings lining the main street, when he spied a woman emerge from a building further down the road. He spied her just as he saw Regan sauntering u
p the road towards the very same building. Colin tried tucking himself into the railings to avoid catching the eye of the other man. Why wasn’t Regan out digging his claim?
But it wasn’t Colin the other man had his eye on, it was the girl. And the set of her shoulders and the tilt of her head made it obvious Regan’s presence bothered her.
‘Hey there,’ Regan said.
The girl changed the angle of her journey.
‘Oi, I’m talking to you, pretty lady,’ Regan said, shuffling his feet, mirroring her new direction.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
She kept walking, her disinterest obvious even to Colin who had had little experience with any girl apart from his mother, and his brief flirtation with the girl rescued from the harbour with him. Their dalliance cut short when her family found out he was Welsh with nothing to his name. He wasn’t someone they wanted for their daughter, and so there’d been no further communication.
Colin pushed off from the painted railings and hobbled after the pair. She was heading towards the jetty he could see pushing out into the waves of the bay. Regan had matched his pace to hers, and even Colin could hear him becoming increasingly vocal in his complaints that she wasn’t answering him.
Other eyes watched the proceedings, men crushed by failure, who could hardly lift a finger to save themselves, let alone save anyone else. They watched Regan with empty eyes and even emptier pockets.
‘Please, leave me alone,’ said the girl, stopping in the street to face Regan.
‘Give me a kiss, and I’ll leave you alone, I promise,’ Regan replied, insincerity oozing from his lips.
The girl turned to head back towards the beach, and Regan grabbed her.
‘I said, give us a kiss.’
The girl pulled away from him.
‘What? You think you’re too high and mighty to give a man a kiss? You’re a bloody girl in a mining town, you’ve probably had every man here between your legs, and all before breakfast. I’m only asking for a kiss. Now be a good girl and give me what I asked for.’
Regan puckered up, his thin lips looking more like the arse of a monkey than the mouth of a potential lover.
And in wonderment, Colin watched her hurl her basket into Regan’s head, before turning tail and running back up the hill.
‘You little slut, I’ll kill you,’ Regan shouted, grabbing for the girl.
The girl was fast, but Regan was faster as he jerked her off her feet and onto the ground, dragging her towards the very building Colin had stopped at. A building more ramshackle than the last — the glass in the front window as splintered as the railings on the porch, but enough to conceal him.
The girl struggled, twisted like an eel, but Regan’s strength overpowered her, his filthy hand clamped tightly against the lips she refused to kiss him with.
‘I only wanted a kiss. Should have kissed me you little tart, because now I’ll be taking more than a kiss from you. You owe me,’ Regan said, pinning her to the wooden floorboards of the abandoned mining cottage.
It wasn’t just the cottage which had been abandoned, the former occupant had left a long handled shovel standing sentinel in the corner. Absently forgotten perhaps in the shadow of their departure.
Colin remembered only too well Regan killing Milne, and his viciousness at the mining camp, but the girl wasn’t another miner. Dressed well, and armed only with her shopping basket, she was someone’s daughter, well cared for and in clean. There was no way she was a prostitute, and even if she were, no one deserved the fate Regan had in mind.
Shuffling silently from his hidden doorway, Colin reached for the spade. Only one chance existed to get this right. If he missed, Regan would kill him. Colin had no skills to defend himself from Regan’s violence.
The battled continued on the porch, with the girl bucking and twisting to avoid Regan’s hands. Then Regan swore as she found purchase against the skin of his palm, and he pulled his hand away to slap her.
In that instance, she rolled to the side and Colin swung downwards with the shovel, the sharp metal edge connecting with the soft skin of Regan’s temple. The wiry miner slumped to the ground, pinning the girl under his weight. Silence descended. Colin lifted the shovel to prepare for a second strike, not trusting his luck. Adrenaline masking the pain in his ankle for the moment.
The girl shrugged Regan’s inert body from her own and scrambled to her feet, pulling down her skirt. She paused as she caught Colin’s eye, before hightailing it back up the hill and into a much larger building. From this angle Colin could only just read the professional sign on the building which had swallowed the girl — Sweeney’s Bar.
No one emerged from the bar to investigate the attack and the miners loitering in the street had returned to their previous activities, the entertainment over. Colin nudged Regan’s body with the shovel, and the man rolled over, his eyes open but unseeing. He’d just killed a man. Not with his bare hands, but he may as well have. This wasn’t the adventure he’d imagined when he’d first left Wales. But curiously he felt no guilt. He’d done the right thing, and in an obscure way, he’d avenged the death of Milne, as well as saving the girl.
Satisfied the coast was clear, he adjusted the pack on his back and limped to the tavern, twitching, as if he expected the dead man to leer up behind him at any stage.
Colin stepped into the darkened interior, dumping his pack on the nearest table, stretching his shoulders as he approached the bar. The room was empty, with no sight of the girl, although he could hear a heated discussion coming from the other side of the door behind the bar.
Not wanting to interrupt the discussion, Colin surveyed the bar which looked no different to the one he’d lived above in Wales with his mam and brothers. Bottles of booze lined the shelves behind the bar, and an assortment of mismatched glassware. There were suggestions of a woman’s touch everywhere, with artwork on the walls and a vase of flowers positioned under a gilt-framed mirror.
The door swung open, and the man blustered in surprise when he saw Colin standing at the bar.
‘Sorry, didn’t hear you come in,’ the man said.
Colin shrugged. He wasn’t sure why he came in, just looking at the booze unsettled him. He’d seen too many drunkards on the road that he’d decided that being a teetotaller was a far more sensible decision, at least until he found his brother Isaac.
‘You got permission from your parents to be in here?’ the publican laughed. ‘Unless you’re here to make a delivery get along with you,’ Frederick Sweeney said, a smile on his face.
‘No, sir, I’m not here to drink. Thought this might be the best place to ask if you might know where my brother is?’ Colin said.
‘There’s too many men gone through this town for me to keep track of them. He’s long gone, like the rest of them have, as you can see for yourself,’ Sweeney said, sweeping his arm around the empty bar.
It was then that Colin noticed the film of undisturbed dust on the floor, unmarred by any boots save his own and a small set of footprints which must belong to the girl.
Colin tried a different tack, ‘And I thought I’d see if the lady was okay after what happened outside. Might be that I broke my ankle otherwise I would have got to her in time to stop the attack,’ he fibbed, stretching the truth a dash.
‘You saw what happened out there?’ Sweeney asked. ‘You’re the one who killed the man who attacked Felicity? Friends are you?’
‘No, sir. Truth is that I shared a campsite with him a few days out of Dunedin and had hoped not to bump into him again.’
‘So not a great loss. I’m surprised anyone bothers coming here at all, you included. There’s no more gold, boy, not here anyway—’
‘But everyone in Dunedin says Bruce Bay is where the gold is, the motherlode,’ Colin interrupted.
‘Last weeks news. Everyone’s gone north, your brother too I expect. Everyone except those who arrived too late and those old hatters who don’t have the cash to buy their way out. They don’t even have e
nough money to drink in here anymore. Your brother is long gone.’
‘But maybe you remember him?’ Colin pleaded, eyes wide with hope.
‘Hundreds of men have been through here. If he’s not gone north, or sucking on an opium pipe down in the Chinese camp, check the graveyard by the church.’
‘You stop that talk, Fred,’ said Margaret Sweeney, emerging from the back room, with Felicity in tow.
‘Sit down and let me look at your ankle,’ Margaret said, escorting Colin to the nearest chair.
‘Fred remembers them all, we all do. Because half of them probably still owe us money,’ Margaret laughed, her easy nature an exact mirror of her husband’s. ‘He’s too generous by far. Go on then, what’s your brother’s name?’
‘My brother is Isaac Lloyd. I’m Colin Lloyd. And we’ve not heard from him for a long time… so I came to look for him.’
The room had fallen silent, the two women looking to Fred for guidance, who shook his head.
‘Do you know who he was travelling with? Was he on his own or with a friend?’ Fred asked, delaying the inevitable.
Colin wracked his memory. Mam had only read out the letters and there were parts he had paid little attention to given that Isaac was prone to harping on about the fantastical sea creatures surrounding New Zealand, which didn’t really interest Colin. At the time he’d been more interested in hearing about the gold and whether the natives ate people like they said in church.
‘I can’t remember sorry, I think he’d made a friend. Simon? Or Stewart? It began with an ‘s’.’
‘Maybe Seth?’ Margaret asked softly.
Colin rolled the name over his tongue, giving it due consideration.
‘That’s it, I think I remember Mam reading that name. She probably muttered something about hoping Isaac was careful about who he hung out with. Mam always said Isaac was a real follower, and it’d get him into trouble if he wasn’t careful. Half the time I didn’t know whether that was what she said she’d read in Isaac’s letters or whether she was adding her own words in. She worries.’
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