EL DORADO
On the road they fell in with a long-legged digger, in the muddy
remnants of a well-cut pair of trousers, which telescoped into top-boots
of a more enduring excellence; the man was further distinguished by a
certain negligent finesse of beard and moustache, a very quiet blue eye,
and a voice as quiet when he stopped in his stroll to address the pair.
"Surfacing, I suppose?" said he, with a slight but sufficient indication
of the Tynesiders' claim.
"I beg your pardon?" said Denis, out of his depth at once.
"I ought to beg yours," the tall man responded, opening his blue eyes a
little wider, and regarding Denis with quiet interest. "I merely saw you
come away from that claim over there, and I take rather an interest in
Black Hill Flat. That is it, you know."
Denis nodded.
"You aren't a new chum, then?" the other added, smiling over the term.
"Oh, yes, I am. This is our first sight of the diggings."
"Then it's no use asking you a technical question; but surfacing, of
course, means going no deeper than the surface--some ten or twenty feet,
don't you know. Very few do go deeper, and I am not sure that it would
pay on this flat."
Denis explained that the Tynesiders had only got about five feet down.
"So many of them give it up at that," said the tall man, with a faint
smile, and would have gone on with the least little nod; but Denis
quickly asked him how deep he would go himself and what he thought of
Black Hill Flat.
"I'm a deep-sinker," was the reply; "but if I wasn't, and was one of a
party, there's nowhere I would sooner try my luck than over there. The
drawback is than you can't go very near the water, because the lead
doesn't; so you have a long way to carry your wash-dirt, and it wants
three or four to keep the pot boiling. On the other hand that's what
keeps off the average digger, who's the most impatient person in the
world, and so you have the place more or less to yourself. Still, of
course, the fewer there are to seek the longer they will take to find,
unless some one is very fortunate. A lucky man, though," said the tall
digger, looking back toward the Tynesiders' camp--"a lucky man with two
hard-working mates might make his fortune there as soon as anywhere."
"Didn't some Frenchmen?" asked Denis, remembering what he had heard at
the claim.
"Ah, that was on the hill, and quartz; how they crushed it I can't
conceive; for the ordinary man it would be more ruinous than deep
sinking, which is saying a great deal."
The tall digger was turning away again, with rather more of a smile, but
Denis's eager face detained him a little longer.
"Then which do you recommend," asked Denis, "surfacing or deep-sinking?"
"Oh, come," laughed the other, "I'll be shot if I recommend either! It
depends on yourself and your resources. One's quick and cheap and easy,
but nearly all a matter of luck; the other's far slower and more
expensive, but also far surer for a man of intelligence, as I can see
you are. If you go in for surfacing, you might give Black Hill Flat a
trial; but I shouldn't tackle it less than three strong."
And with a last good-humoured and yet distant nod, a mixture of courtesy
and condescension alike inbred, the tall man went his way, as it might
have been down Pall Mall--at the same pace, and with the same
carriage--in his deplorable trousers and his long-suffering top-boots.
"I wonder who he is," said Doherty, on whom the still blue eyes had not
rested for a moment.
"I wonder where he is," returned Denis, "and how much good he's doing
there." Nor would he discuss the man, with Doherty, as a man at all, but
only as the most superior digger thus far within their ken. It was
nevertheless a new type to Denis; he did not belong to it himself,
neither did Moseley, nor yet Ralph Devenish with all his airs. But it
was as a digger of transparent parts that the tall man returned to a
mind from which the general impression soon blotted the particular.
The general impression on the banks of the Yarrowee was a strident chaos
in extreme tints. The rocking of the countless cradles made a
distracting chorus at close quarters. The vividness of the picture
helped to daze a newcomer. The sky was bright blue overhead; the mud on
all sides was the very brightest mud; the tiny patches of green were as
bright as emeralds. Grass and mud sparkled with a rank dew of empty
bottles. Nearly everything was wet and glistening in the level sunlight.
The hairy miners shone with their own moisture and their own sunshine of
enthusiasm, for the gold-light lit up every face. Nor was it an ignoble
face as Denis saw it over and over again. It was full of the hearty
virile hope that expanded his own soul. And it was every vivid tint of
red and brown, as the mud was every bright shade of brown and yellow;
and to each red face there was a redder shirt, and to every red shirt a
pair of moleskin trousers, often snow-white, never the less picturesque
for the clots of splendid mud that plastered and spattered it. For to
Denis the mud was gold at first sight, molten gold that should have
nipped off his foot when he sank ankle deep in it, as it was liquid gold
that wound in and out among the tents, and was seen piecemeal through
the strings of moleskin legs and rocking cradles, between the banks of
the Yarrowee.
The famous cradle really was like a great wooden boot on rockers; the
ankle was a raised and perforated tray into which they threw a bucketful
of earth and then a balerful of water; the foot was a trough which
received the muddy fluid and its precious sediment. As Denis watched the
operation for the first time, he imagined the gold-dust pouring through
the perforations like pepper from a caster; yet all that was ultimately
taken out of the toe of the cradle, and good-naturedly thrust under the
new chums' noses in the hollow of a horny palm, would have been a small
helping of salt. Denis could have taken his hat off to it, nevertheless,
and in another moment Doherty did throw his into the air.
"Not a bad tub," the digger had informed them. "Very near an ounce, I'll
wager, or four good quid while you've been watching."
Some claims were so near the water that the newcomers saw exactly how
the labour was divided in parties of three. One man was busy in the
hole, digging and filling bucket after bucket; another carried the
buckets to and fro, emptying the full one into the tray of the cradle;
the third did the rocking and supplied the water. The deeper claims were
crowned by a windlass mounted on a framework of logs; and Denis supposed
it was a fourth man who stood thereon to raise and lower the buckets.
But nothing was more fascinating to watch than the most primitive
operation of all, namely the use of the tin wash-pan by certain old
diggers who still preferred it to the cradle: there was downright
legerdemain in the whirlpool of earth and water that they made in a mere
hand-basin, but especially in the way they got rid of both, slop by
slop, until only the gold-dust tinkled in the tin.
The pair picked their way between the heaps of mud and gravel known as
the Gravel Pits. They walked up to Commissioner's Flat, and saw the
Commissioner himself, in his gold-lace cap, seated at a table in his
tent, like an ordinary general in the field. On the table were a pair of
scales that Denis undertook to trouble before long. "Those are what they
weigh it with," he whispered to Doherty; and they watched a happy miner
go in with a leathern bag and come out gloating over his receipt. This
was the most populous part of the diggings. There was some speaking
sight or some striking face at every turn. All the men were bearded like
the pard; they might have lost a nugget while they scraped a chin; and
the community seemed devoid of women. On one claim, however, a whole
family were at work, the father digging, the mother rocking as she
nursed her babe, an elder infant toddling with its share of grist, the
eldest pouring water into the mill.
As man and boy wandered and looked on, oblivious of their errand, the
day's work ended as by a miracle at six o'clock to the minute. Perhaps
they had missed some warning shot or signal in their absorption; it
certainly was as though a second Big Ben had clanged the hour from which
no man might rock a cradle or fill a tub. One minute the cradles roared
their loudest; then, a lull that grew into a widespread human hum; and
within a quarter of an hour, a thousand crackling fires, each with its
wreath of bluish smoke, its steaming pot for the centre of the firelit
circle. The bewildered pair had meanwhile set about their business by an
effort; and it tided them into a world of yellow and translucent tents,
a simple world presently enlivened by blurting cornets, squeaking
fiddles, and the ubiquitous concertina.
It was a Saturday night, and the scene was very like a gigantic fair;
here was a small, ill-lighted tent, sibilant with the suppressed
excitements of sly grog; but here, there, and everywhere were large,
well-lighted, over-crowded store-tents, with flags flying honestly
against the stars. Yet even in these a Hogarth might have reveled.
Diggers of the stamp of Bullocky pitched bank-notes right and left, nor
ever counted the change; or instead of change, lengths of calico or bars
of soap were tossed across the counters. Yet Denis had managed at last
to get more or less of what was wanted at comparatively reasonable
prices. He paid only eighteen pence a yard for thirteen yards of canvas,
three shillings for a pound of cheese, tenpence a pound for potatoes,
and four-and-sixpence for a hindquarter of mutton. He was struggling out
of the tent, holding the meat aloft, with Doherty at his heels, when a
cold thrill ran down him. Two other men were struggling in, and the four
met so fairly as to block each other's way. One of the newcomers had a
grayish beard badly dyed, and little eyes under a peaked cap; the other
was smoking a meerschaum pipe with a Turk's face, as unmistakable as his
own, yet Denis had to hear him speak before he could believe his eyes.
"Well met, Dent! I suppose I'm about the last person you expected to see
here, eh?"
"You are."
"Why, I passed you on the road, man, passed you in the coach, and you
never saw us! I changed my mind before the pilot left us; didn't see why
you should do all the fortune-making, Dent, my boy; so here I am." And
the bold eyes of Ralph Devenish gleamed with a sudden malice that
pierced the man's gay crust, while those of his companion seemed
smaller, closer, and yet merrier than before.
"Good!" said Denis, looking his cousin steadily in the face. "I hope we
may both make our fortunes, Devenish--and then go home together in the
same ship!"