Durton himself, or “Bones,” as he had been christened with the rude
heraldry of the camp. He was sitting in front of the great wood fire,
gazing moodily into its glowing depths, and occasionally giving a fagot
a kick of remonstrance when it showed any indication of dying into a
smoulder. His fair Saxon face, with its bold simple eyes and crisp
yellow beard, stood out sharp and clear against the darkness as the
flickering light played over it. It was a manly, resolute countenance,
and yet the physiognomist might have detected something in the lines
of the mouth which showed a weakness somewhere, an indecision which
contrasted strangely with his herculean shoulders and massive limbs.
Abe’s was one of those trusting, simple natures which are as easy to
lead as they are impossible to drive; and it was this happy pliability
of disposition which made him at once the butt and the favorite of the
dwellers in the Sluice. Badinage in that primitive settlement was of a
somewhat ponderous character, yet no amount of chaff had ever brought a
dark look on Bones’s face, or an unkind thought into his honest heart.
It was only when his aristocratic partner was, as he thought, being put
upon, that an ominous tightness about his lower lip and an angry light
in his blue eyes, caused even the most irrepressible humorist in the
colony to nip his favorite joke in the bud, in order to diverge into
an earnest and all-absorbing dissertation upon the state of the weather.
“The Boss is late to-night,” he muttered, as he rose from his chair,
and stretched himself in a colossal yawn. “My stars, how it does rain
and blow! Don’t it, Blinky?” Blinky was a demure and meditative owl,
whose comfort and welfare was a chronic subject of solicitude to its
master, and who at present contemplated him gravely from one of the
rafters. “Pity you can’t speak, Blinky,” continued Abe, glancing up
at his feathered companion. “There’s a powerful deal of sense in your
face. Kinder melancholy too. Crossed in love, maybe, when you was
young. Talkin’ of love,” he added, “I’ve not seen Susan to-day;” and
lighting the candle which stood in a black bottle upon the table, he
walked across the room and peered earnestly at one of the many pictures
from stray illustrated papers, which had been cut out by the occupants
and posted up upon the walls.
The particular picture which attracted him was one which represented a
very tawdrily dressed actress simpering over a bouquet at an imaginary
audience. This sketch had, for some inscrutable reason, made a deep
impression upon the susceptible heart of the miner. He had invested the
young lady with a human interest by solemnly, and without the slightest
warrant, christening her as Susan Banks, and had then installed her as
his standard of female beauty.
“You see my Susan,” he would say, when some wanderer from Buckhurst, or
even from Melbourne, would describe some fair Circe whom he had left
behind him. “There ain’t a girl like my Sue. If ever you go to the old
country again, just you ask to see her. Susan Banks is her name, and
I’ve got her picture up at the shanty.”
Abe was still gazing at his charmer, when the rough door was flung
open, and a blinding cloud of sleet and rain came driving into the
cabin, almost obscuring for the moment a young man who sprang in and
proceeded to bar the entrance behind him, an operation which the force
of the wind rendered no easy matter. He might have passed for the
genius of the storm, with the water dripping from his long hair and
running down his pale, refined face.
“Well,” he said, in a slightly peevish voice, “haven’t you got any
supper?”
“Waiting and ready,” said his companion cheerily, pointing to a large
pot which bubbled by the side of the fire. “You seem sort of damp.”
“Damp be hanged! I’m soaked, man, thoroughly saturated. It’s a night
that I wouldn’t have a dog out, at least not a dog that I had any
respect for. Hand over that dry coat from the peg.”
Jack Morgan, or Boss, as he was usually called, belonged to a type
which was commoner in the mines during the flush times of the first
great rush than would be supposed. He was a man of good blood,
liberally educated, and a graduate of an English university. Boss
should, in the natural course of things, have been an energetic curate,
or struggling professional man, had not some latent traits cropped
out in his character, inherited possibly from old Sir Henry Morgan,
who had founded the family with Spanish pieces of eight gallantly won
upon the high seas. It was this wild strain of blood no doubt which
had caused him to drop from the bedroom window of the ivy-clad English
parsonage, and leave home and friends behind him to try his luck with
pick and shovel in the Australian fields. In spite of his effeminate
face and dainty manners, the rough dwellers in Harvey’s Sluice had
gradually learned that the little man was possessed of a cool courage
and unflinching resolution, which won respect in a community where
pluck was looked upon as the highest of human attributes. No one ever
knew how it was that Bones and he had become partners; yet partners
they were, and the large, simple nature of the stronger man looked with
an almost superstitious reverence upon the clear, decisive mind of his
companion.
“That’s better,” said the Boss, as he dropped into the vacant chair
before the fire and watched Abe laying out the two metal plates, with
the horn-handled knives and abnormally pronged forks. “Take your mining
boots off, Bones; there’s no use filling the cabin with red clay. Come
here and sit down.”
His gigantic partner came meekly over and perched himself upon the top
of a barrel.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Shares are up,” said his companion. “That’s what’s up. Look here,” and
he extracted a crumpled paper from the pocket of the steaming coat.
“Here’s the _Buckhurst Sentinel_. Read this article--this one here
about a paying lead in the Conemara mine. We hold pretty heavily in
that concern, my boy. We might sell out to-day and clear something--but
I think we’ll hold on.”
Abe Durton in the mean time was laboriously spelling out the article in
question, following the lines with his great forefinger, and muttering
under his tawny mustache.
“Two hundred dollars a foot,” he said, looking up. “Why, pard, we hold
a hundred feet each. It would give us twenty thousand dollars! We might
go home on that.”
“Nonsense!” said his companion; “we’ve come out here for something
better than a beggarly couple of thousand pounds. The thing is bound to
pay. Sinclair the assayer has been over there, and says there’s a ledge
of the richest quartz he ever set eyes on. It is just a case of getting
the machinery to crush it. By the way, what was to-day’s take like?”
Abe extracted a small wooden box from his pocket and handed it to his
comrade. It contained what appeared to be about a teaspoonful of sand
and one or two little metallic granules not larger than a pea. Boss
Morgan laughed, and returned it to his companion.
“We sha’n’t make our fortune at that rate, Bones,” he remarked; and
there was a pause in the conversation as the two men listened to the
wind as it screamed and whistled past the little cabin.
“Any news from Buckhurst?” asked Abe, rising and proceeding to extract
their supper from the pot.
“Nothing much,” said his companion. “Cockeyed Joe has been shot by
Billy Reid in McFarlane’s Store.”
“Ah!” said Abe, with listless interest.
“Bushrangers have been around and stuck up the Rochdale station. They
say they are coming over here.”
The miner whistled as he poured some whiskey into a jug.
“Anything more?” he asked.
“Nothing of importance, except that the blacks have been showing a bit
down New Sterling way, and that the assayer has bought a piano and is
going to have his daughter out from Melbourne to live in the new house
opposite on the other side of the road. So you see we are going to
have something to look at, my boy,” he added as he sat down, and began
attacking the food set before him. “They say she is a beauty, Bones.”
“She won’t be a patch on my Sue,” returned the other decisively.
His partner smiled as he glanced round at the flaring print upon the
wall. Suddenly he dropped his knife and seemed to listen. Amid the wild
uproar of the wind and the rain there was a low rumbling sound which
was evidently not dependent upon the elements.
“What’s that?”
“Darned if I know.”
The two men made for the door and peered out earnestly into the
darkness. Far away along the Buckhurst road they could see a moving
light, and the dull sound was louder than before.
“It’s a buggy coming down,” said Abe.
“Where is it going to?”
“Don’t know. Across the ford, I s’pose.”
“Why, man, the ford will be six feet deep to-night, and running like a
mill-stream.”
The light was nearer now, coming rapidly round the curve of the road.
There was a wild sound of galloping with the rattle of the wheels.
“Horses have bolted, by thunder!”
“Bad job for the man inside.”
There was a rough individuality about the inhabitants of Harvey’s
Sluice, in virtue of which every man bore his misfortunes upon his own
shoulders, and had very little sympathy for those of his neighbors. The
predominant feeling of the two men was one of pure curiosity as they
watched the swinging, swaying lanterns coming down the winding road.
“If he don’t pull ’em up before they reach the ford he’s a goner,”
remarked Abe Durton resignedly.
Suddenly there came a lull in the sullen splash of the rain. It was but
for a moment, but in that moment there came down on the breeze a long
cry which caused the two men to start and stare at each other, and then
to rush frantically down the steep incline toward the road below.
“A woman, by Heaven!” gasped Abe, as he sprang across the gaping shaft
of a mine in the recklessness of his haste.
Morgan was the lighter and more active man. He drew away rapidly from
his stalwart companion. Within a minute he was standing panting and
bareheaded in the middle of the soft muddy road, while his partner was
still toiling down the side of the declivity.
The carriage was close on him now. He could see in the light of the
lamps the raw-boned Australian horse as, terrified by the storm and
by its own clatter, it came tearing down the declivity which led to
the ford. The man who was driving seemed to see the pale set face in
the pathway in front of him, for he yelled out some incoherent words
of warning, and made a last desperate attempt to pull up. There was
a shout, an oath, and a jarring crash, and Abe, hurrying down, saw a
wild infuriated horse rearing madly in the air with a slim dark figure
hanging on to its bridle. Boss, with the keen power of calculation
which had made him the finest cricketer at Rugby in his day, had
caught the rein immediately below the bit, and clung to it with silent
concentration. Once he was down with a heavy thud in the roadway as
the horse jerked its head violently forward, but when, with a snort
of exultation, the animal pressed on, it was only to find that the
prostrate man beneath its forehoofs still maintained his unyielding
grasp.
“Hold it, Bones,” he said, as a tall figure hurled itself into the road
and seized the other rein.
“All right, old man, I’ve got him;” and the horse, cowed by the sight
of a fresh assailant, quieted down, and stood shivering with terror.
“Get up, Boss, it’s safe now.”
But poor Boss lay groaning in the mud.
“I can’t do it, Bones.” There was a catch in the voice as of pain.
“There’s something wrong, old chap, but don’t make a fuss. It’s only a
shake; give me a lift up.”
Abe bent tenderly over his prostrate companion. He could see that he
was very white, and breathing with difficulty.
“Cheer up, old Boss,” he murmured. “Hullo! my stars!”
The last two exclamations were shot out of the honest miner’s bosom as
if they were impelled by some irresistible force, and he took a couple
of steps backward in sheer amazement. There at the other side of the
fallen man, and half shrouded in the darkness, stood what appeared
to Abe’s simple soul to be the most beautiful vision that ever had
appeared upon earth. To eyes accustomed to rest upon nothing more
captivating than the ruddy faces and rough beards of the miners in the
Sluice, it seemed that that fair, delicate countenance must belong to
a wanderer from some better world. Abe gazed at it with a wondering
reverence, oblivious for the moment even of his injured friend upon the
ground.
“Oh, papa,” said the apparition, in great distress, “he is hurt, the
gentleman is hurt;” and with a quick feminine gesture of sympathy, she
bent her lithe figure over Boss Morgan’s prostrate figure.
“Why, it’s Abe Durton and his partner,” said the driver of the buggy,
coming forward and disclosing the grizzled features of Mr. Joshua
Sinclair, the assayer to the mines. “I don’t know how to thank you,
boys. The infernal brute got the bit between his teeth, and I should
have had to have thrown Carrie out and chanced it in another minute.
That’s right,” he continued, as Morgan staggered to his feet. “Not much
hurt, I hope.”
“I can get up to the hut now,” said the young man, steadying himself
upon his partner’s shoulder. “How are you going to get Miss Sinclair
home?”
“Oh, we can walk!” said that young lady, shaking off the effects of her
fright with all the elasticity of youth.
“We can drive and take the road round the bank so as to avoid the
ford,” said her father. “The horse seems cowed enough now; you need not
be afraid of it, Carrie. I hope we shall see you at the house, both of
you. Neither of us can easily forget this night’s work.”
Miss Carrie said nothing, but she managed to shoot a little demure
glance of gratitude from under her long lashes, to have won which
honest Abe felt that he would have cheerfully undertaken to stop a
runaway locomotive.
There was a cheery shout of “Good-night,” a crack of the whip, and the
buggy rattled away in the darkness.
“You told me the men were rough and nasty, pa,” said Miss Carrie
Sinclair, after a long silence, when the two dark shadows had died away
in the distance, and the carriage was speeding along by the turbulent
stream. “I don’t think so. I think they are very nice.” And Carrie
was unusually quiet for the remainder of her journey, and seemed more
reconciled to the hardship of leaving her dear friend Amelia in the
far-off boarding school at Melbourne.
That did not prevent her from writing a full, true, and particular
account of their little adventure to the same young lady upon that very
night.
“They stopped the horse, darling, and one poor fellow was hurt. And oh,
Amy, if you had seen the other one in a red shirt, with a pistol at his
waist! I couldn’t help thinking of you, dear. He was just your idea.
You remember, a yellow mustache and great blue eyes. And how he did
stare at poor me! You never see such men in Burke Street, Amy;” and so
on, for four pages of pretty feminine gossip.
In the mean time poor Boss, badly shaken, had been helped up the hill
by his partner and regained the shelter of the shanty. Abe doctored him
out of the rude pharmacopœia of the camp, and bandaged up his strained
arm. Both were men of few words, and neither made any allusion to what
had taken place. It was noticed, however, by Blinky, that his master
failed to pay his usual nightly orisons before the shrine of Susan
Banks. Whether this sagacious fowl drew any deductions from this,
and from the fact that Bones sat long and earnestly smoking by the
smouldering fire, I know not. Suffice it that as the candle died away
and the miner rose from his chair, his feathered friend flew down upon
his shoulder, and was only prevented from giving vent to a sympathetic
hoot by Abe’s warning finger, and its own strong inherent sense of
propriety.
* * * * *
A casual visitor dropping into the straggling township of Harvey’s
Sluice shortly after Miss Carrie Sinclair’s arrival would have
noticed a considerable alteration in the manners and customs of its
inhabitants. Whether it was the refining influence of a woman’s
presence, or whether it sprang from an emulation excited by the
brilliant appearance of Abe Durton, it is hard to say--probably
from a blending of the two. Certain it is that that young man had
suddenly developed an affection for cleanliness and a regard for the
conventionalities of civilization, which aroused the astonishment and
ridicule of his companions. That Boss Morgan should pay attention
to his personal appearance had long been set down as a curious and
inexplicable phenomenon, depending upon early education; but that
loose-limbed easy-going Bones should flaunt about in a clean shirt
was regarded by every grimy denizen of the Sluice as a direct and
premeditated insult. In self-defence, therefore, there was a general
cleaning up after working hours, and such a run upon the grocery
establishment, that soap went up to an unprecedented figure, and a
fresh consignment had to be ordered from McFarlane’s store in Buckhurst.
“Is this here a free minin’ camp, or is it a darned Sunday-school?”
had been the indignant query of Long McCoy, a prominent member of the
reactionary party, who had failed to advance with the times, having
been absent during the period of regeneration. But his remonstrance met
with but little sympathy; and at the end of a couple of days a general
turbidity of the creek announced his surrender, which was confirmed by
his appearance in the Colonial Bar with a shining and bashful face, and
hair which was redolent of bear’s grease.
“I felt kinder lonesome,” he remarked apologetically, “so I thought
as I’d have a look what was under the clay;” and he viewed himself
approvingly in the cracked mirror which graced the select room of the
establishment.
Our casual visitor would have noticed a remarkable change also in the
conversation of the community. Somehow, when a certain dainty little
bonnet with a sweet girlish figure beneath it was seen in the distance
among the disused shafts and mounds of red earth which disfigured the
sides of the valley, there was a warning murmur, and a general clearing
off of the cloud of blasphemy, which was, I regret to state, an
habitual characteristic of the working population of Harvey’s Sluice.
Such things only need a beginning; and it was noticeable that long
after Miss Sinclair had vanished from sight there was a decided rise in
the moral barometer of the gulches. Men found by experience that their
stock of adjectives was less limited than they had been accustomed to
suppose, and that the less forcible were sometimes even more adapted
for conveying their meaning.
Abe had formerly been considered one of the most experienced valuators
of an ore in the settlement. It had been commonly supposed that he
was able to estimate the amount of gold in a fragment of quartz
with remarkable exactness. This, however, was evidently a mistake,
otherwise he would never have incurred the useless expense of having
so many worthless specimens assayed as he now did. Mr. Joshua Sinclair
found himself inundated with such a flood of fragments of mica, and
lumps of rock containing decimal percentages of the precious metals,
that he began to form a very low opinion of the young man’s mining
capabilities. It is even asserted that Abe shuffled up to the house one
morning with a hopeful smile, and, after some fumbling, produced half a
brick from the bosom of his jersey, with the stereotyped remark, “that
he thought he’d struck it at last, and so had dropped in to ask him to
cipher out an estimate.” As this anecdote rests, however, upon the
unsupported evidence of Jim Struggles, the humorist of the camp, there
may be some slight inaccuracy of detail.
It is certain that what with professional business in the morning and
social visits at night, the tall figure of the miner was a familiar
object in the little drawing-room of Azalea Villa, as the new house
of the assayer had been magniloquently named. He seldom ventured upon
a remark in the presence of its female occupant; but would sit on the
extreme edge of his chair in a state of speechless admiration while she
rattled off some lively air upon the newly imported piano. Many were
the strange and unexpected places in which his feet turned up. Miss
Carrie had gradually come to the conclusion that they were entirely
independent of his body, and had ceased to speculate upon the manner
in which she would trip over them on one side of the table while the
blushing owner was apologizing from the other. There was only one
cloud on honest Bones’s mental horizon, and that was the periodical
appearance of Black Tom Ferguson, of Rochdale Ferry. This clever young
scamp had managed to ingratiate himself with old Joshua, and was a
constant visitor at the villa. There were evil rumors abroad about
Black Tom. He was known to be a gambler, and shrewdly suspected to be
worse. Harvey’s Sluice was not censorious, and yet there was a general
feeling that Ferguson was a man to be avoided. There was a reckless
_élan_ about his bearing, however, and a sparkle in his conversation,
which had an indescribable charm, and even induced the Boss, who was
particular in such matters, to cultivate his acquaintance while forming
a correct estimate of his character. Miss Carrie seemed to hail his
appearance as a relief, and chattered away for hours about books
and music and the gayeties of Melbourne. It was on these occasions
that poor simple Bones would sink into the very lowest depths of
despondency, and either slink away, or sit glaring at his rival with
an earnest malignancy which seemed to cause that gentleman no small
amusement.
The miner made no secret to his partner of the admiration which he
entertained for Miss Sinclair. If he was silent in her company, he
was voluble enough when she was the subject of discourse. Loiterers
upon the Buckhurst road might have heard a stentorian voice upon the
hill-side bellowing forth a vocabulary of female charms. He submitted
his difficulties to the superior intelligence of the Boss.
“That loafer from Rochdale,” he said, “he seems to reel it off kinder
nat’ral, while for the life of me I can’t say a word. Tell me, Boss,
what would _you_ say to a girl like that?”
“Why, talk about what would interest her,” said his companion.
“Ah, that’s where it lies!”
“Talk about the customs of the place and the country,” said the Boss,
pulling meditatively at his pipe. “Tell her stories of what you have
seen in the mines, and that sort of thing.”
“Eh? You’d do that, would you?” responded his comrade more hopefully.
“If that’s the hang of it I am right. I’ll go up now and tell her about
Chicago Bill, an’ how he put them two bullets in the man from the bend
the night of the dance.”
Boss Morgan laughed.
“That’s hardly the thing,” he said. “You’d frighten her if you told her
that. Tell her something lighter, you know; something to amuse her,
something funny.”
“Funny?” said the anxious lover, with less confidence in his voice.
“How you and me made Mat Houlahan drunk and put him in the pulpit of
the Baptist church, and he wouldn’t let the preacher in in the morning.
How would that do, eh?”
“For Heaven’s sake don’t say anything of the sort,” said his Mentor, in
great consternation. “She’d never speak to either of us again. No, what
I mean is that you should tell about the habits of the mines, how men
live and work and die there. If she is a sensible girl that ought to
interest her.”
“How they live at the mines? Pard, you are good to me. How they live?
There’s a thing I can talk of as glib as Black Tom or any man. I’ll try
it on her when I see her.”
“By the way,” said his partner listlessly, “just keep an eye on that
man Ferguson. His hands arn’t very clean, you know, and he’s not
scrupulous when he is aiming for anything. You remember how Dick
Williams, of English Town, was found dead in the bush. Of course it was
rangers that did it. They do say, however, that Black Tom owed him a
deal more money than he could ever have paid. There’s been one or two
queer things about him. Keep your eye on him, Abe. Watch what he does.”
“I will,” said his companion.
And he did. He watched him that very night. Watched him stride out of
the house of the assayer with anger and baffled pride on every feature
of his handsome swarthy face. Watched him clear the garden paling
at a bound, pass in long rapid strides down the side of the valley,
gesticulating wildly with his hands, and vanish into the bushland
beyond. All this Abe Durton watched, and with a thoughtful look upon
his face he relit his pipe and strolled slowly backward to the hut upon
the hill.
* * * * *