A WINDFALL
The pair had passed the place where they had waved farewell to Moseley,
and were in sound but not quite in sight of all that one of them had
never expected to see or to hear again, when a voice hailed them in the
rear, and they found that a buggy and pair had crept upon them while
they talked. Doherty was filled with apprehension. He had not been so
happy for two months. But Denis was much interested in the driver of the
buggy, who drove alone, and who looked as though he might have been got
up in Bedford Row, what with his black silk stock, his high hat still
shining through its layer of yellow dust, and his spectacled face
clean-shaven to the lips.
"May I ask if you are Ballarat diggers," said he, "or new arrivals like
myself?"
"We are diggers," replied Denis, "and Ballarat's just over that hill."
"So I should suppose," observed the gentleman from afar, and proceeded
to weigh the couple with a calculating eye. "Been at it long?" he added
as one who did not find them altogether wanting.
"A couple of months."
"H'mph! Not so long as I should have liked, but there's just a chance
that you can help me, as I am sure you will, sir," nodding at Denis, who
nodded back, "if you can. Perhaps the lad will be so kind as to hold my
horse. Thanky. Not that it's mine at all," the incongruous gentleman
went on, as he flung down the reins and addressed himself to the
contents of a small black bag. "I couldn't afford twenty-four hours in
Melbourne waiting for the coach, so I had to hire, with all sorts of
arrangements for changing horses on the way. But my coachman was in
liquor before midnight, and when I left him, appropriately enough at
Bacchus Marsh, early this morning, I wasn't going to trust myself to
another. If you have a tongue in your head, sir, you can find your own
way from Lincoln's Inn to John o' Groats. Ah, now I have it!" and he
produced a photograph, of the carte-de-visite size then alone in vogue,
and shook it playfully at Denis before putting it into his outstretched
hand. "There, sir!" he wound up. "If you happen to know that face, just
say so; and if you do not know it, have the goodness not to pretend you
do. The answer to the question is Yes or No."
Denis looked upon the full-length presentment of a very tall gentleman,
in a frock-coat, a white waistcoat, and an attitude as stiff as the
heart of early Victorian photographer could desire. An elbow rested on
the pedestal of a draped pillar, and the thumb of that hand in the
watch-pocket; but the handsome face looked contemptuously conscious of
its own self-consciousness, only it was the very gentlest contempt, and
Denis recognized the expression before the face. Strip off his muddy
rags, re-apparel him thus, shave his chin and nick his beard into
flowing whiskers, and there was their friend the deep-sinker, hardly a
day younger than when Denis had last seen him on his claim in Rotten
Gully.
"The answer is Yes," he said, returning the likeness.
"You are sure of that?"
"Quite."
"You don't want the lad to confirm your view?"
"As you like; but he has only seen him once, and I have twice. It's the
deep-sinker, Jimmy," added Denis over his shoulder.
The shaven gentleman pulled a wry face.
"May I ask if that's the only name you know him by?"
"I have never heard his name; but that's what he is, and the most
scientific one I've come across."
The wry face went into a dry smile.
"And do you know where to find him?"
"Well, I know his claim."
"Would you very much mind getting up beside me and directing me how to
drive there?"
"I should be delighted to have the lift."
"Thanky. There'll be room for your young friend behind. This is one of
those happy coincidences which almost give one back one's childish
belief in luck!"
The diggings were in the state of suspended animation which was their
normal condition from twelve to three. The latest pilgrim blinked about
him through his spectacles, more interested than impressed with what he
saw. Denis took the reins, turned off the road at once, found a ford in
the northern bend of the Yarrowee, and drove straight into an outpost of
windsails and windlasses hidden away behind the hill. In another minute
the buggy drew up beside the deep-sinker's solid little hut, in whose
shade his soured assistant sat asleep, with his eyebrows up and the
corners of his mouth turned down, even in his dreams.
"Where's your master?" demanded the visitor, causing Denis and Doherty
to exchange glances; but the other merely opened a long-suffering eye,
pointed indoors, and had closed it again before the gentleman descended.
At his request, the partners remained in the buggy, where they spent an
interval of a few minutes in covetous admiration of the neat hut with
its bark roof, the iron windlass, the stack of timber slabs for lining
the shaft, and the suggestively solid opening of the shaft itself. They
agreed to look down, if not to descend, with the deep-sinker's
permission, before departure. Meanwhile his quiet voice was not to be
heard outside, but the visitor's was, and eventually the pair emerged.
"But I'm just going to touch bottom," the tall digger expostulated.
"After weeks and months I'm all but on it, and now you want to carry me
off!"
The visitor whispered some smiling argument, which elicited a shrug of
familiar and restrained contempt.
"It isn't the money," said the tall man. "It's the fun of the thing,
don't you know."
The visitor took out his watch as though they could just catch a train.
"I've arranged for fresh horses all along the road," said he. "These
have only done ten miles, and they can do the same ten back again. I
hope I made it plain about the first ship. It may sail the day after
to-morrow."
The digger sighed inevitable acquiescence. He looked rather sadly, yet
with some quiet amusement, at his rude little home, at the good windlass
on its staging stamped against the sky. His assistant had meanwhile
risen from his slumbers, and was standing respectfully at hand.
"Charles," said the digger, "I've got to go home. Are you coming with
me, or will you stay out here and make your fortune out of the hole?
I'll make you a present of it if you will."
But the look of splendid disgust had vanished as if by magic from the
assistant's face. "I'll go home with you, sir!" he said emphatically,
and then looked from one gentleman to the other, as though he might
have committed a solecism. He was forthwith ordered into the hut to put
his master's things together, with a grim smile on the master's part,
who proceeded at last to notice Denis, or at any rate to record such
notice with his fraction of a nod.
"So it's to you I owe my prompt discovery," said he. "'Pon my word I'm
not as grateful to you as I ought to be! Doing any better on Black Hill
Flat?"
"I've left it," said Denis, rather shortly.
"Where are you now?"
"Nowhere. We have sold up and are going to start again. Your friend has
given us a lift, for which we're much obliged, but I think the horses
would stand all right without us."
"Would _you_ like to take over this claim and hole?"
"I have no money," said Denis. Behind him Doherty had given a gasp,
followed by something like a sob of disappointment. But the deep-sinker
wore the broadest smile they had ever seen upon his languid countenance.
"My dear good fellow, I don't want money for it!" cried he. "I want a
worthy inheritor with energy and ideas, somebody a cut above the stupid
average, and by Jove you're my very man! Come on: if you don't the whole
thing will be jumped by the nearest ruffian. I don't say there's much in
the hole; but it's a good, sound hole as far as it goes, and it can't
have to go much further. We've worked through the light clays and
through the sand, and we're well in the red; when you get through that
you can start washing, and I wish you the luck you deserve. Thank me?
What for? If you don't come in some one else will. I am only too glad to
leave the little place in such good hands. It was pretty carefully
chosen, and if it isn't plumb over the gutter it ought to be."
So the reconstructed firm of Dent and Doherty became possessed of one of
the deepest holes and best-appointed claims on the celebrated Eureka
Lead, and all within a few minutes; for it took the man Charles no
longer to collect such chattels as were worth his master's while to take
away with him. Thus, ere the diggings were astir again for the
afternoon, the new owners were alone in their unforeseen glory, and one
of them at least was still capering and singing in his joy. But over
Denis a cloud had already fallen; and there was a blacker cloud on Jimmy
when he grasped the cause.
"It's Moseley," said Denis. "This is horribly unfair on him."
"Unfair! How?"
"Suppose we should have as good luck here as we had bad luck on the
flat!"
"Well? Didn't he want to be out of it? Wasn't he longing to go home?"
"I don't like it," persisted Denis. "I played a trick on him, but I
never thought it would turn out like this. I thought we should spend
months doing what we've after all had done for us." He raised his
brooding eyes from the ground, and there was the buggy still in view,
labouring in and out among the tents. "Jimmy, you stay on the claim!" he
cried, and dashed after it on the spur of the moment.
"What's happened?" asked the late sinker, pleasantly. "We haven't
forgotten anything, have we?"
"No, but I have," panted Denis, "and if you can help me I'll be as
grateful again to you. There's a chum of ours who left us only this
morning. He was sick of it; but he little knew the luck that was in
store for us. His name's Moseley, and he was going home in the first
ship, which will be your ship, but you will probably overtake him on the
road to-night."
"What's he like?" asked the spectacled gentleman, who no longer drove;
and when Denis told him he was sure he had met Moseley in the forenoon,
and felt confident of recognizing him again.
"Then will you tell him exactly what has happened to us, and that he
shall come in on the old shares if only he'll come back? Say we changed
our mind about Bendigo; and say we must be two men and a boy, and we'd
far rather he was the other man than some stranger, especially if
there's a fortune in it. Tell him there probably is; and if you will
tell it him all from his friend, Denis Dent, gentlemen, I can't say how
grateful I shall be to you!"
Denis had an odd reward for his trouble and this outburst. The tall
digger shook hands with him for the first and last time.
But the climax of the business was to come long before Moseley's answer.
Denis had not been five minutes absent, yet on his return to the new
claim it was surrounded by a fringe of diggers embellished by a posse of
mounted men in spruce uniform.
"What on earth is it?" cried Denis, rushing up in alarm.
"The old story," answered a digger. "Joe! Joe! Joe!"
"Traps," added another; but Denis had not been on the diggings two
months without learning the meaning of both words. Either was the
diggers' danger signal, and signified a raid by the police in search of
their licenses; in fact, that very sport whose praises Lieutenant
Rackham had sung in the ear of his old crony Captain Devenish.
And it was Rackham who led the present field; dismounted, he had run his
man to earth in the bark-roofed hut; and his man was no more of a man
than the unfortunate Doherty, who was clinging tooth and nail to the
door-post, while Rackham himself, a full-blooded negro in his rage,
tugged like a terrier at his ankles.
"Stick to it, little 'un!" cried one in good-humoured encouragement.
"If you don't, the claim'll be jumped afore your mate gets back."
"Hold your row," growled another with an oath. "It's a fine deep hole,
and I have a jolly good mind to jump it myself."
Denis burst through them at that moment.
"What's the matter?" he demanded of Rackham; but he had the sense not to
lay a hand on the fellow's uniform, and the black devil let go one of
Doherty's ankles.
"He's not got his license, and he's going to the Logs," says Rackham,
showing his white teeth in the sun. "Who are you?"
"His mate," said Denis. "Do you mind letting go his other leg?"
"And where's your license?" added Rackham, turning on him as he
complied.
Denis was feeling in his breast pocket with a smile; before quitting the
flat Jimmy had proposed to destroy his Ballarat license as of no further
use, but Denis knowing better had got it from him on some pretext.
"Here is my license and his, too," said he, and handed both to Rackham,
who now stood livid and trembling with mortification, under a derisive
cross-fire of "Joe! Joe! Joe!" from all sides of the claim. "If you will
examine them," added Denis, with the politeness he could afford, "you
will find that they both have about a week to run; and after this you
may trust us to take out the new ones in very good time."