STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
The firm of Dent, Moseley, and Doherty, gold-diggers, was formally
established next day, in a clump of trees a few miles out of Melbourne.
Denis had experienced no difficulty in obtaining his paltry dues from
the shipping agents, but even so he and Doherty could not muster twenty
pounds between them. Moseley, on the other hand, was for putting in
nearly double this amount, and yet only receiving his one-third of the
profits. He argued that but for the others he would have had nothing to
put in at all. It was long before Denis would listen to him, and Doherty
took no part in the discussion. But eventually a compromise was agreed
upon, and thus entered by Denis in a new pocketbook purchased for the
nonce:--
October, 19, 1853. L s. d.
Dent and Doherty Cash 19 12 10
Moseley " 19 14 6
" Loan to Company 18 10 0
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L57 17 4
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This pocketbook, with its blue-lined sheaf of glorious possibilities,
represented Denis's one disbursement in Melbourne beyond bed, board, and
the glasses of beer overnight. A rigid economy was his watchword; they
must walk to Ballarat; so let their packs be light, and if kits were
dearer on the diggings, they would still have saved.
Doherty agreed with every word; but as they resumed their journey, and
Moseley fell a few paces behind, he reminded Denis of the nuggets which
Bullocky had forced upon them at the inn.
"I said we'd keep them for luck," replied Denis; "but, of course, I
could only speak for myself; you must do what you like with yours."
"I do what you do," said the boy.
"And you both do well!" added Moseley, catching them up. "I'm all in
favour of a fetish; that's what I never had on Bendigo. But
nuggets--decoy nuggets--set a nugget to catch a nugget, eh? That's a
fetish and a half! I suppose they're only little bits of things? Do you
mind letting me see them?"
When he did see them, he changed his tune.
"Good heavens! But these must be over a pound between them, if not
getting on for three figures in the other kind of pounds; do you mean to
say you had these given you? I say, I'm not sure that my affection for a
fetish would hold out against one of these."
"Well, mine will," said Denis, smiling with set teeth. "I don't turn
presents into money, Moseley, till the devil drives!"
"But who on earth made you such presents as these?"
"Oh, a rough diamond with a beard to his middle, and a voice like a
bull, who did his best to stand on his head in a bucket of champagne."
"By Jove! I believe it must have been old Bullocky himself."
"It was. Do you know him?"
"Know him? No one was ever yet on Bendigo without knowing old Bullocky;
he's cock of the walk in Ironbark Gully, finds gold every time, by a
sort of second sight, as some of these chaps find water. Why, the first
time I ever saw him he was sitting picking nuggets out of a lump of
earth like plums from a pudding!"
And Moseley beguiled a mile or more with tales of the great gorilla; he
had, indeed, a very passable gift of anecdote, and an easy, idle,
fanciful wit which made up in rarer qualities what it lacked in
brilliance and virility. He had not a foul or an unkind word in his
vocabulary; and Denis had been too long at sea to undervalue either
merit. Moseley was not only a gentleman, but a man of refinement and no
little charm, whose companionship might well be prized by such another
at that wild end of the earth. And yet Denis forgot to listen as one
entertaining tale led light-heartedly to another, for it was only the
humours of the life that Moseley seemed to have absorbed.
"But I might as well save my breath," said Moseley, with more truth than
he supposed. "It's bound to be the same on Ballarat, only more of it;
the one thing I can promise you is plenty of compensation if the fetish
doesn't do his duty."
Denis smiled without replying. "I suppose you don't know what sort of
soil it is at Ballarat?" he asked at length.
"At Ballarat?" cried Moseley, greatly amused. "Why, my dear fellow, I
couldn't tell you what sort it was at Bendigo!"
"But you were digging there five months."
"Digging, exactly; not studying the soil."
"They seemed to you to find it anywhere, did they?"
"Anywhere and everywhere, my dear fellow! Are you a geologist, Dent?"
The question came after a pause.
"Not as yet," said Denis; and Doherty, who had no notion what a
geologist was, glanced at him sidelong as at one who could soon be it or
anything else he chose.
So the time passed, and the miles were mounting up when Moseley, who
ought to have known the way to a certain point, found that he had
overshot it by as many miles again. It was a trying moment for the
height and heat of the afternoon; but so savage was the mild Moseley
with himself, so unusually animated with his contrition, that Denis
slapped him on the back, and they turned back laughing to an inn where
they had drunk beer a couple of hours before. This beer-drinking was an
extravagance resented by Denis, yet not a point on which he cared to
oppose the man who had contributed so freely to the common fund. Nothing
could have been more wholesome for active young fellows, but their beer
alone cost them eight and threepence the first day, bread three and six,
billy-can two and six, tea and sugar two and six, and their beds at this
inn six shillings. One pound two and nine-pence for the first nine
miles.
Denis did not grumble, but in his heart he resented the beds almost as
much as the beer; there was more to be said for them, however,
especially in a country teeming with desperate characters; and the beds
at least were cheap, few travelers breaking their journey so near its
beginning or its end. Denis, however, sat late in the bar, listening to
the conversation of all and sundry who stopped to drink, and learning
much in an unobtrusive way: he had never in his life been quite such a
Dent, so canny, so calculating, and so cool. As a first step toward the
accomplishment of his great resolve, he had already overcome the
romantic spirit of its inception; thus the next night, at Bacchus Marsh,
he thought nothing of foregathering with an odious little man, who
consulted Denis as to the best place to get a "white 'igh 'at and a
diamond ring" immediately on landing in London, but who gave him much
valuable information in return. And the night after that, when they were
fifty miles from Melbourne, there was a landlord with gold-dust sticking
to the palms of his hands, who only needed plying with his own liquor to
talk by the hour. By this time Moseley was keeping them all back with a
sore heel; and the nearer the diggings, the greater each day's expenses;
but Denis no longer grudged the money, for he was gaining much that
money could not buy.
Often they were overtaken and left behind by more dashing adventurers,
aggressively mounted and armed, and what was more galling, once or twice
by swifter pedestrians than themselves; but Moseley preferred hobbling
with his companions to boarding the scarlet coach which passed them,
pitching like a ship on its leather springs. The partners met with no
moving accident on the road. Rumours of bushrangers were never followed
by their appearance. It was not the less delightful to meet the Ballarat
gold-escort coming down, in its sparkling cordon of sabres and lace, for
it made the braver show in those sombre wilds, and left a reassuring
sense of law and order in its yellow wake.
The fourth night they camped out but ten miles from the diggings, where
they hoped to arrive by noon next day; but the blister on Moseley's heel
broke and bled, and though either Denis or Jim carried his pack
thereafter, while the other gave him an arm, the last and most exciting
stage of their journey was also the slowest. The deep-cut bullock-track
led them all morning by open flat and shallow gully, between low hills
timbered like an English park; from noon on, as the track converged with
others, the party received more than one cheery invitation to drain a
pannikin of tea at wayside encampments; but even the lame man would not
stop again, and the light in his eyes was as bright as any. The three
drew close together as they walked. It was as though each made it a
point of honour neither to lead by an inch nor to keep the others back;
it was also as though all three had lost their tongues and found new
eyes, for the gold-light was in them all.
"Hush!" exclaimed Denis, stopping suddenly.
A deep though distant hum came to their ears, faintly at first, but in a
steady boom as they stooped and listened without a breath between them.
"It's like the streets of London, from the docks, after a voyage,"
whispered Denis, raising a puzzled face a little.
"It's a creek," said Doherty. "I never knew they had a creek like that."
"Nor I."
And as one man they turned to Moseley, to stand upright on the spot; for
so he was standing, and grinning at them both from ear to ear.
"That's not traffic, nor yet a creek," said he. "It was the same when
you got near Bendigo. It's the gold in the cradles. It's the gold!"
The broad brown track rose before them, scored by a myriad wheels,
backed by hard blue sky. In an instant they were racing skyward between
the ruts. Jimmy had given a whoop, and Moseley his light-hearted laugh,
but Denis led without a word until the deep hum had risen to a rumble.
Then he looked round, and Jimmy passed him with a yell. Moseley was
running very lame. Denis waited for him.
"Jump on my back!" said he. "I won't leave you, and I can't wait."
"You certainly can't carry me."
"We'll see."
"Then you sha'n't."
"Come on!"
And Denis was soon staggering in Doherty's steps, a lean shin protruding
from the crook of either arm, a good ten stone upon his back. As he
stumbled on, in the last hundred yards, the rumble resolved itself into
the roar of ten thousand cradles rocking as one. And on the hill's crest
Doherty stood waving his wideawake against the blue.
Denis reeled up to him, breathing hard, with Moseley still protesting on
his back. But for the next few minutes it might have been a bronze group
that crowned the hill.
Under their eyes, in a single smooth green basin of the sere and wooded
ranges, were the tents and earthworks of all nations, joined for once in
unnatural war upon the earth that bore them. White were the tents of
that unparalleled encampment, gleaming coolly in the sun, and pitched in
patches like the scent from a paper-chase; and for every tent there was
a red-lipped shaft, with men like ants crawling out and in, and muddy
pools here and there between the heaps, with more ants busy at their
brim. Here a few cradles rocked, like great square-toed shoes; but they
blackened either bank of the yellow stream that picked its way between
the tents and the ant-heaps of gravel and of clay; and thence the noise,
as of a giant foundry, which could be heard a mile away. The squeak of a
windlass was a variation at closer quarters; the deeper claims were thus
distinguished; the deepest of all had windsails, too, that rose from the
earth like tall ghosts, with lantern jaws and arms like fins.
"Anything like Bendigo?" whispered Doherty to the seasoned digger, who
was standing between the other two.
"More compact," replied Moseley. "And not half the trees."
"This must be Black Hill Flat, this open ground on our right," said
Denis. "And that should be Bakery Hill over there on the left."
His tone made the others look from the landmarks indicated to Denis
himself; and he was consulting a dirty bit of cardboard.
"What have you got there?" asked Moseley, edging up to him.
"A map, a map!" cried Jimmy, who had run round to his other side.
"Where on earth did you get hold of that, Dent?"
"Aha!" chuckled Denis. "I suppose you don't remember the man I told you
about at Bacchus Marsh, who wanted the white hat and the diamond ring?
He gave it to me, and I'd rather have it than the fifty pounds he said
he'd give for his ring! I make that the Gravel Pits right ahead across
the stream; you can see the sun on the pools of water; they say it's the
wettest bit on the diggings. And you see the trim tent to the right on
the green mound? That's Commissioner's Flat, where we shall go first
thing on Monday morning for our licenses."
"You've been here before," said Moseley, with an amused shake of the
head. "You were here last voyage--don't tell me!"
"My last voyage was to Calcutta," said Denis, laughing as they walked
on; "but if you like I was here most nights on the way up, more
especially the one we spent at Bacchus Marsh."
The first pair of diggers actually at work in their hole thrilled Denis
none the less, and it was he who led the way to have a better look at
them. They were quite close to the road on Black Hill Flat, which was an
attractive part for new hands, with fewer claims and more trees than
there seemed to be further on. These men's tent stood out of the grass
like a roof in a flood; and beyond the tent a red night-cap bobbed above
ground, as one man plied the pick while the other leaned on the shovel
awaiting his turn. The new chums halted at a respectful distance, but
the man with the shovel made them welcome with a friendly oath, and
chatted good-humouredly in the Tyneside tongue as they all stood looking
down into the hole.
"You'd bettaw come and peg out alongside of us," he said. "We come from
Newcassel, and we're new chums ourselves."
"And why did you choose this place?" asked Denis.
The man with the shovel gave a happy-go-lucky shrug.
"Howt!" said he. "One pudding's as good as anothaw until you eat it;"
and Moseley added, "Quite true," with an experienced nod.
"But we'd gotten a good account o' 't," put in the man with the red
night-cap, burying his pick in the upper earth, and scrambling out of
the hole with its aid. "The wash-dirt's close to top, an' dry as a
slag-heap; what's more, a parcel of Frenchmen have made their fortunes
here this very year; an' it's a queer thing if we can't do as well as
them beggaws."
The man with the shovel was now doing his part below ground with great
vigour. Shovelfuls of a hard conglomerate of quartz, ironstone, sand
and clay, were flying in all directions. As the newcomers withdrew,
Moseley took Denis by the arm.
"We might find a worse place to camp: what do you say to that gum-tree
further on toward the hill? I tell you what--I'll borrow an axe from
these chaps, and cut fire-wood and tent-poles if you two will go for
some rations and a dozen yards of canvas. It'll be dark in another hour;
don't be much longer, and you'll find a fire on, and everything ready
for pitching the tent."
"We don't want to settle on the first place we come to," said Denis,
between dubiety and a natural attraction to the spot.
"Or anywhere else, in a hurry," agreed Moseley; "but we've got to spend
the night somewhere, and a quiet Sunday while we look about us; and for
that I don't think you could do better."
So the site of their first encampment came to be selected; it was marked
by a solitary and rather stately blue gum-tree, of which Denis took due
note as Doherty and he regained the track.