Denis Dent Part 14

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 gra.s.s 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 Newca.s.sel, 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.

CHAPTER XII

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. Gra.s.s 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 suns.h.i.+ne of enthusiasm, for the gold-light lit up every face. Nor was it an ign.o.ble 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 s.h.i.+rt, and to every red s.h.i.+rt 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 h.o.r.n.y 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 windla.s.s 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 pa.s.sed you on the road, man, pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+p!"

CHAPTER XIII

THE ENEMY'S CAMP