“What tart?”
“The one with whiskers. I saw her the other day. She looked at me as if I made her mouth water.”
“Ah,” Cabell said brightening, “then you saw my little girl too, did you?”
“That funny looking kid dressed up like. . .” He checked himself. “Yes, I saw her in the jinker. Pretty.”
“Too pretty for this hole,” Cabell said. “I'm sending her home to England. That's what I need money for now, if you want to know. Not for myself—for her.”
“Some bloke'll be lucky,” Cash said, packing the last bag of gold into a sweat-stained valise and snapping the lock on it.
“Yes,” Cabell said, “some lucky young devil,” and sighed. Again the grimy chaos of dirt and toiling men faded and left him staring at the ever more vivid picture of a girl and a boy clinging to each other under a canopy of lilac blossoms.
“That reminds me,” Cash was saying, “you ought to keep an eye on that other kid of yours.”
“What other kid?”
“The little fat one. He was down at the races with Shaftoe last Saturday. I don't like that kind of crook.”
“I know. I know,” Cabell said. Then his eye lighted on the bag and he picked it up. “How much?”
“About nine hundred quids' worth. Buying's been good.”
“Ah!” He balanced the weight of it in his two hands, slightly huddled, turning his predatory beak and staring eye from Cash to the open door and back to the bag like an old jealous hawk. “Ah!”
By the middle of February there were three thousand men on the field. Larsen's Bakehouse was a town now. Twenty miles off across the valley you could tell where it lay from the clouds of dust always whorling redly up under Black Mountain. In Larsen Street there were ten grog shanties, four general stores, a bank, butchers' shops, embowered in rusty leaves, one for each station in the valley, and a post office where a wild-eyed postmaster received the mailbags from the coach, dumped the contents into a heap on the floor, and rushed back to his claim yelling, “Mail's in. Help yourself.”
Burrowing, indomitable, destructive, like a plague of insects that would soon eat the place out and depart, the men swarmed in the gullies, along the vanishing, viscous creek, and about their tentative homes and resorts. Day and night the creak of drays, caulked up lest a handful of their load escape, carrying dirt to the creek; the crack of whips urging wagons and packhorses up and down the stony road to the valley; the shouts of men; the agglomerate mad roar in the pubs; the clang of blacksmiths' hammers sharpening picks; the melancholy wails of drunken blacks enriched by selling bark and firewood; the hysterical gabble of Chinese, working over deserted tailings, since they were forbidden to take up claims of their own, with the multitudinous and incomprehensibly nourishing industry of white ants in a dry log; fights; celebrations around a bucketful of champagne; and above everything the rustle, like a quiet sea, of gravel in the cradles at the creek-side.
These were the lawless days. A fight on St Patrick's Day, which began through Kyle strolling into the Miners' Arms, calling for Scotch whisky, and whistling “Boyne Water” reflectively on his way out, ended with everybody going down to set fire to Chinatown. Next morning Sergeant Flaherty arrested Kyle on a charge of feloniously wounding. The Sergeant had lost the top joint of his right-hand forefinger, and he gave evidence that Kyle had bitten it off and swallowed it. The O'Connors had to use their influence again.
Two miners had an argument about a shovel and fought a duel around a shed with shot-guns. The fight went on all day until one of them threw a jam tin with a plug of dynamite in it. When they were both recovered with brandy, the owner of the shed took them down and threw them in the lagoon.
A miner came in and spread a rumour that he had found gold in a gully about two days' journey away. At once there was a rush to the new prospect. The miner looked over the deserted claims and jumped the best. Legally he was entitled to it, but a week later the man who had left it returned with his friends, and the claim-jumper would have been lynched only he took refuge in Cabell's store. Cabell recognized the man who had given him a cup of tea when he was riding up from Pyke's Crossing. Cash soothed the mob. The claim-jumper's name was Custard, a north countryman with a mean, pinched face and a cunning eye. He knew a lot about mining fields. He told Cabell that hundreds of pounds' worth of gold was being stolen from Larsen's claim and sold to the Chinese. Cabell gave him a job. Soon Cabell was buying the stolen gold. It was midsummer now. The ragged shard of sky over their heads was the colour of sand. At midnight the rocks were still warm. The miners awoke and looked out and saw the stars. Reassured they dropped off to sleep again. In the day a distant rumble paralysed them, and they stood, faces uplifted, their uproar hushed with an uncanny, insect-like spontaneity. From across the ridges to which they had driven it flowed the waiting silence of the bush, where birds and cicadas were hushed like themselves in expectation of something hovering behind the hills to the north-east. And then, more clamorous than ever, more fiercely burrowing, indomitable, and destructive, they returned to work. In the afternoon a black cloud thrust an edge over the valley and withdrew behind Black Mountain to make the stars shudder with the St Vitus's twitch of its lightnings.
But at last, inevitably, the rain came—the cloud-burst of the wet season that lifted rivers twenty feet in a night and turned the bone-dry valley to an islanded lagoon. Just before dawn the creek broke through their dam and rushed down Larsen's Bakehouse like a fury bent on cleaning the valley of their pollution. At sunrise the sky was cloudless, and the only assurance that they had not heard it all in a bad dream was the broad ribbon of creek flowing with a soft purr of satiated anger. The piles of dirt that might have made them rich men were gone, with a blacksmith's forge, the road to the valley, and a few Chinamen. Their sluices and cradles had disappeared too and their shafts were flooded. The rain seemed to have washed a thick fur of rust off the sky but it had only cleaned the air.
The grog shanties did good business that day.
The storm that night was longer and more savage. It razed bark humpies, pounded the roof off the Ningpo station's butcher shop and left sides of beef buried in the mud a quarter of a mile away, scoured the earth from the treeless gully as a knife cuts butter, washed a side out of Cabell's slaughter-yard and stampeded fifty prime stores into the hills, then settled down into its well-known perpendicular drizzle, which cased off of an afternoon to let the sun steam the marrow out of every living bone in Larsen's Bakehouse. The green bark walls of the humpies buckled like paper in a fire and the town fell to pieces about its soaked and dejected inhabitants. Flour caked in its bags, tools rusted, the creek crept farther across the gully, whirling more and more of the precious unbound earth away, and finally an epidemic of fever began. The carpenter turned from making cradles to making coffins and David Kyle from taking the miners down with crooked scales to tramping the flooded gully night and day with physic for the sick, a top-hat on his head and a Bible under his arm, to give a “decent Chreestian burial” wherever it might be needed by the way. “Earning merit,” Cash said, against the time when there would be more gold to buy.
Cabell earned merit too. He got a drayload of beef through bog and torrent and landslide, and half-starved miners and miners' wives poured from the hovels and mobbed him, women in gunny-sacks for skirts, children, men shaking with fever whom a few weeks before he had seen in his store with nuggets and gold-dust, overbearing with success. The sight of them now scared him. Not because he was afraid they would rush his dray and rob the beef he expected to get high prices for, but because of their abject lack of spirit to do more than stumble along beside the dray and beg. So potent was the ever-imminent malice of Chance. He trembled for his own fortunes. To placate evil powers he distributed twenty pounds' worth of beef.
They cheered him. “A thousand blessings go with ye,” an old woman called.
“Go to blazes,” Cabell muttered, and drove on, calculating how much more he would have to wring out of his cus
tomers to get back that twenty pounds.
Chapter Five: Sambo Looks for the Stores
The store was locked up. Cash, as usual of late, was over the road at Joe O'Connor's Golden Sunrise, a rickety shack with a tattered calico sign now rain-smudged. The patrons were not making so much noise today, and as he backed the wagon up to the door and took the tarpaulin off, Cabell could hear Cash roaring out one of his yarns.
“I only had fever once,” he was saying, “when I was gullyraking with a mate in the mountains at the back of Richmond, down south. We had a mob of horses planted. Then me and my mate went down with fever together. I couldn't hardly move an eyelid and the only living thing in fifteen miles was our dog. We kept him starved and chained up in the hut to make him savage. And wasn't he, by Christ! Turn your back and he'd be up on it like grease lightning. I must've been out to it about eight days. I lost count. Used to stagger up and get a drink and tear my duds out of the mongrel's teeth and fall down and lie there dreaming he was eating me. And by God when I came to and looked round damned if he hadn't. Not me, but my mate. He'd slung his hook and the dog had chewed his right leg clean off.”
Their interest was lethargic. He gave them up and lurched to the door to look at the rain, like a great rat slowly eating the town away. Up the street a wagon, with a dead bullock beside it, was bogged to the axletrees and abandoned. Outside Kyle's Aberdeen Emporium a youth was auctioning picks and shovels. “'Ere ladies and gents, we 'ave a bran' new pick, shovel, and cradle—never turned an ounce of gold. Carried all the way from Pyke's Crossing on this 'ere bloke's back, ladies and gents. A pick and shovel to start a market garden with and supply the Chows with greens, ladies and gentlemen. 'Ere's your chance.” A week ago a pick and shovel would have brought twenty-five shillings the set. Now no one would bid even five.
Cash scowled at the wreckage of the town. The scene, no longer pregnant of that sensational action in which his spirit found its only assurance of being, made him restless. “Dead as meat,” he muttered, and staggered through the mud to the shelter of the Goldbuying Agency, where he found Cabell, to whom all action, all toil and sweat and violence, had long ago become slightly unreal, dreamlike, against the conviction of the fantasies they served, hard at work unloading his dray. “Here,” Cash said, “it's a caution to snakes in this dump. I'm clearing out. Give me my dough and we'll call it quits.”
“Clearing out?” Cabell's jaw went down. Why, Cash was his lucky token. Hadn't he prospered more than ever before in his life with this man at his side? Besides, Cash's clearing out must mean that the gold was nearly done. “But there's a ton of gold here yet,” he protested. “Larsen told me. He says the top's hardly been scraped off.”
“To hell with the gold. I've got enough. I want a change of scenery.”
“I'll give you a cheque to-morrow,” Cabell hedged. He hoped Cash might be sober and reasonable by then. For, all other considerations apart, the business would suffer if it lost Cash, a man knowing in the ways and means of goldfields—how to spot dosed gold, how to coax a miner with a tight fist on his bag of dust, whom to back with credit, whom to watch.
“See you do,” Cash said, then laughed and slapped Cabell's shoulder. “Old Rusty Guts, eh? Well, I reckon you're not a bad bastard, Cabell. I've seen plenty worse and better thought of.”
And there, strangely enough, was not the least of the reasons which made Cabell regret losing Cash. He liked nobody and nobody liked him. When he walked into a bar men stopped talking and looked round at him. He knew they called him skinflint and Rusty Guts, and that there was a new generation in the land who had never known the old days and therefore could never, never understand. That young prig James for example. Dressed up like a sore finger and going round the house with his nose in the air. He'd been hearing things from a parcel of nincompoops at school, and now he was beginning to look down his nose at his father. From the loneliness of his shame and bad conscience Cabell took refuge in the robust amorality of Cash, who had seen so much life and concluded that he was not a “bad bastard” after all. Not that he felt any affection for Cash. That pottery face and derisive eye invited no tributes of gentle regard and Cabell was many, many stressful years past feeling them, past feeling for anything except the kindly phantoms of his brain; but he did feel a sort of gratitude to a man who thought less badly of him than others.
Next day Cash was dead drunk on the floor of the Sunrise. That was better for Cabell's purposes than having him sober. He remained drunk for three weeks, and by that time the first stage in the history of Black Mountain was past. Discouragement, as rabid as hope, had emptied Larsen's Bakehouse. Even many of the regular miners, who knew that there was gold in the place, had departed—a strange legion tied, like Cabell, to no steadfast star and therefore with no use whatever for gold when they found it. A kind of rakish joy in seeking moved their arduous lives, but the treasure itself they fled from at the first excuse as though they were afraid that it would seduce them to quiet days. About fifty of them were fossicking around the hills and another fifty were waiting in the pubs for the flood to go down. Apart from these only Cabell, Larsen, Ike the hawker, Joe O'Connor, sole remaining representative of his clan, John Flagg the warden, a couple of troopers, some storekeepers, a horde of Chinamen, and Kyle—fixed to the spot not by any faith in its potentialities now but, more obstinately, by the efforts of O'Connors to lure him back to the Crossing—were left under the sagging roofs of the mushroom town. The rain had cleared and the river was still several feet deep over the claims, though it had fallen enough for the old hands to come back from their fossicking and start to potter about the debris when the second phase of the story opened.
That was on a sunny day in April 1884, when Sambo and Monaghan were riding across a spur of Black Mountain in search of the fifty prime stores which had broken out of Cabell's slaughter-yard the night the rains began. They had pulled up in a fern gully, cooled by waterfalls, to rest and light their pipes.
“They bin coming down here for a drink,” Sambo said, examining some cattle tracks in the rocky ground. Then he bent and picked up a piece of stone, about as big as his head, which had broken recently from a weatherworn and moss-grown outcrop. “Cripes!” he said, letting the reins slither off his arm. “Stone the crows! Whatya make of that, Mon?”
Monaghan took the stone and examined it, and instinctively held it away from Sambo, reaching over to point at a delicate line of reddishyellow, veining its crystals like a chain of lightning. “I seed one of these here gold specimens down Larsen's,” Sambo said. “If that ain't one. . . Here, give it here, I found it.”
“What're you going to do with it?”
“Sell it. Whatya think? Boss'll give you a fiver for that.” He gathered his reins and prepared to mount.
“Wait a bit,” Monaghan said. “There might be more.”
So they tied the horses up and spent the afternoon chipping lumps off the outcrop. Some had gold in them but not much that they could see. The shadow of Black Mountain, intruding on their rapt research, made Sambo look up and say, “Four o'clock! Cripes! Them stores. Boss'll be sore.”
“To hell with the boss 'n' his stores,” Monaghan said, then looked at Sambo slyly. “Unless you want to go and look for them. I ain't working for him no more.”
“You ain't. . .” Sambo gaped at a changed Monaghan. The sagging lines of his sun-blackened face had tightened as a rope tightens in the dew. His lack-lustre eyes, like the neglected knobs of a door long closed on disused vacancy, were shining and alert, concealing a cunning idea. But at last it had dawned on Sambo too. “Gawd stiffen the crows. Why, we could start a goldmine of our own!”
“We could,” Monaghan admitted grudgingly. “Suppose we DID both discover it.”
Sambo was in the saddle. “We oughta be gettin' back soon's we find them stores. Tell the boss. . .”
“Tell HIM! What for?”
“We don't know nothing about goldmines. He'll put us wise.”
“Here, wait a bit. You'r
e barmy. Look, we'll take this,” Monaghan picked up the first piece of rock Sambo had found, “and we'll cover all the rest over in case any of those prospector blokes come bummin' around, and we'll go and tell the warden and no one else, see? Or by Jeez, Sambo, they'll grab it offen us like a dinger grabs the lights offen a bogged cow.”
Sambo glanced round and licked a leathery tongue over his lips. “Cripes, Mon, but the boss'll be dead sore.”
Chapter Six: Waterfall
Cabell was angry, but with a wordless, helpless anger when, called from the Reach by an urgent message from Cash, he arrived on the new field, which had depopulated Larsen's Bakehouse as completely as the Bakehouse had depopulated Pyke's Crossing, and found Monaghan, in top-hat, monocle, and new elastic-sided boots, entertaining a select company of advisers to champagne in his tent. The top-hat was once an accessory of David Kyle's “Chreestian burials,” and Monaghan had been overcome to discover that it could be his for the mere trouble of signing an IOU. He was sitting in an arm-chair acquired on the same terms from the postmaster, and his tent was stuffed with odds and ends of apparel, furniture, and toilet articles wherewith he fulfilled a lifetime's yearning for commodities hitherto as remote, in the fables of newspaper advertisement, as the Grand Cham's treasure.
Brian Penton Page 11