The Gold-Stealers - Edward Dyson (best color ereader txt) 📗

alluvial mine working two levels, and there were close upon a hundred hands below on each shift. All these he could not watch; but he was working in the same drive and with the set of men Frank had worked with, and was always alert for hint or sign that would give him a clue, whilst at the same time being careful not to set the thieves on their guard. He must watch closely without letting it be seen that he was watching at all. Keen as he was in the pursuit of his object, he found, with some self-resentment, that his mind frequently reverted to another subject altogether; and that subject was Miss Christina Shine. When he caught himself absorbed in a reverie in which Miss Chris was the centre of interest, he metaphorically took himself by the neck and shook himself up, and during the next few minutes reviewed with quite extravagant ferocity the excellent reasons he had for hating Chris for her father's sake. It was a melancholy pleasure to him to see the searcher pawing his clothes about, digging into his pockets and his billy, and examining his boots. His old instinct would have prompted him to attack Ephraim on the floor of the shed, but now, with lamentable unreason and injustice, he nursed the insult as good and sufficient cause for contemning the daughter. He had seen Chris once since Sunday, and then only from the recesses of a clump of scrub into which he had retreated on seeing her approach; but he felt, without admitting the knowledge even to himself, that he would need all the excuses he could find, just or unjust, reasonable or otherwise, to battle with something that was rising up within him to drive him on his knees to the feet of this grey-eyed girl, a humble and abject penitent.

For an hour or two each day Harry was fossicking in the creek on the spot where Frank had been working, with the idea of satisfying himself whether or not such gold as Frank had sold was obtainable there; and here the searcher's daughter came upon him one morning shortly after the incident of the Sunday School. Harry had his cradle pitched near the crossing, and to ignore the young woman would be an avowal of enmity. Here was his opportunity. Harry set his face over the hopper and cradled industriously. He thought he was displaying proper firmness, but his hand trembled, his heart beat like a plunger, and he was the victim of an ignoble bashfulness. Chris approached with some timidity; but Maori bounded up to the young man, making elephantine overtures of friendliness, which were resented by Harry's cattle-dog Cop, who walked round and round the mastiff in narrowing circles, bristling like a cat and snarling hoarsely. Maori treated the challenge with a lordly indulgence. Cop went further, he snapped and brought blood. There were some things Maori could not stand: this was one. Out of a small storm of pebbles, chips, leaves, and dust, the two dogs presently came into view again, Cop on his back, pawing wildly at the unresisting air, and Maori at his throat, pinning him with a vice-like grip.

Harry rushed to the rescue, tore his dog free, and held back the furious animal up-reared and exposing vicious fangs. Chris laid a trembling hand on the collar of the penitent Maori, and in this way the young people faced each other. Their eyes met for a moment, Harry's frowning blackly, hers anxious and beseeching.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'Is he hurt?'

'No,' replied Harry sulkily. 'No thanks to that brute of yours, though.'

'Oh!' This very reproachfully.

Harry looked up and encountered her eyes again, and they shattered him, as they had done in chapel, giving him a sense of having exerted his strength to hurt something sweet and tender as a flower; and yet the girl seemed to tower above him. Nature, in putting the fresh sympathetic soul of a child into the grand body of a Minerva, had set a problem that was too deep for Harry Hardy.

'Beg pardon,' he said, humbly; ''twas my dog started it. Down, Cop! To heel--!'

He checked himself suddenly on a 'stock term.' There were tones of his master's that Cop never dared to disobey; he went down at full length and lay panting, regarding Maori fixedly with a sidelong and malevolent eye. Harry returned to his cradle, and Chris approached the stepping-stones and paused there.

'Did Dickie Haddon give you my message?' she asked in a low voice.

Harry nodded.

'It's all right,' he said.

There was another pause, broken at length by Chris.

'You ought not to be angry with me. It isn't fair.'

She was thinking of the day years ago when she was carried, all tattered and torn, from the midst of that mob of sportive cattle. She was a very little girl then, but the incident had remained fresh and vivid in her mind, and ever since Harry Hardy had been a hero in her eyes. He only remembered the affair casually and without interest.

'I am really very grateful to you for--for going away, because I know you had good cause for your anger.'

Oh, that's all right,' said Harry again, inaptly.

'But you ought not to be angry with me. It pained me very much--the trial and your mother's sorrow, and all the rest. It hurt me because it seemed to set me on the side that was against Mrs. Hardy, and I--I always admired her. I knew she was a good woman, and it was easy to see the trouble cut into her heart although she bore it so proudly.'

'Oh, that's all right.' Harry was fumbling with the gravel in the hopper. He was conscious that his replies were foolish and trivial, but for the life of him he could do no better.

She waited a few moments, then bade him good morning and went across the creek and away amongst the trees beyond; and Harry, resting upon the handle of his cradle, watched her, absorbed, a prey to a set of new emotions that bewildered him hopelessly. He was still in this position when Chris looked back from the hill, and half an hour later Dick Haddon found him day-dreaming amongst the tailings.

Day-dreams were not possible in the vicinity of Richard Haddon. The boy was an ardent fossicker, and loved to be burrowing amongst old tailings, or groping in the sludge of an auriferous creek after little patches. He was soon peering into the ripples of Harry's cradle.

'Poor,' he commented, with the confidence of an expert.

'Not up to much, Dick,' said Harry. 'I've just been prospectin' a bit round here.'

'Frank was tryin' that bank. 'Tain't no good. Say, I can lay you onter somethin' better not far from here.'

'Yes--where is it?'

'Tellin's. What'll you give us?

'Depends. What's it worth?'

'Got half a pennyweight prospect there onst. Look here, you lend me yer dog t'-night, an' I'll show where.'

'What do you want with Cop?'

'You won't split? Well, some coves down to Cow Flat come up an' stole my goat, Butts, an' a lot of others, an' me an' some other fellers is goin' after 'em t'-night, late. A good sheep-dog what's a quiet worker 'd be spiffin. Cop's all right. He'd work fer me.'

Harry had not forgotten the time when a lordly billy was the pride and joy of his own heart, and his sympathies were with Dick; so Cop accompanied the band of youthful raiders that assembled with much mystery in the vicinity of the schoolhouse late that night. The desperadoes had stolen from their beds while their parents slept, and were ripe for adventure. Dick, who had Cop in charge, put himself at the head of the rising with his customary assurance, and gave his orders in a low, stern voice. According to his authorities, a low, stern voice was proper to the command of all such midnight enterprises.

But before starting for Cow Flat it was necessary to forage for ammunition. Two or three of the boys were provided with bags. It was proposed to fill these with such vegetables as would serve to allure the coy but gluttonous goat, and a silent, systematic descent was made upon several kitchen gardens of Waddy.

Go fer carrots an' cabbages, specially carrots,' whispered the commandant, whose experience of goats was large and varied, and taught him that the average nanny or billy would desert home and kindred and go through fire and water in pursuit of a succulent young carrot not larger than a clothes-peg.

When the boys turned their backs on Waddy the expedition carried with it vegetables enough to bribe all the goats in the province. The garden of Michael Devoy was a waste place, desolation brooded over the carrot beds of the Canns and the Sloans, and Mrs. Ben Steven's cabbage-patch lay in ruins.

For this night only Dick had assumed the role of Moonlighter Ryan, a notorious Queensland cattle duffer, recently hanged for his part in a disputation with a member of the mounted police. The dispute ended with the death of the policeman, who succumbed to injuries received. As Moonlighter Dick was characteristically remorseless, his courage and cunning were understood to verge upon the inhuman, and his band was composed of the most utterly abandoned ruffians the history of the country afforded; only two of them had not been hanged, and these two justified their inclusion by having richly deserved hanging several times over.

Across the flat and past the toll-bar, where the light sleep of Dan, the tollman, was not disturbed by the creeping band, Moonlighter led his outlaws warily, then struck the long bush road between two lines of straggling fence running with all sorts of lists and bends, going on and on endlessly, according to the belief of the boys of Waddy. The road was overhung by tall gums and nourished many clumps of fresh green saplings, about which the tortuous cart-track wound in deep yellow ruts, baked hard in summer, washed into treacherous bog in winter. Here caution was not necessary, and there were divers fierce hand-to-hand attacks on clumps of scrub representing a vindictive and merciless police, out of which Moonlighter and his men issued crowned with victory and covered with glory. A scarecrow in a wayside orchard was charged with desperate valour, and only saved from instant destruction as a particularly hateful police spy by the sudden intervention of the leader.

'Back, men!' he cried imperiously. 'Moon lighter never makes war on women!'

He pointed to the protecting skirt in which the scarecrow was clad, and his bold bad men drew off and retired abashed.

For the next half-mile Moonlighter led his men in stealthy retreat from an overwhelming force of troopers armed to the teeth. Tracks had to be covered and diversions created, and there was much hiding behind logs and in clumps of scrub; indeed, the police were only foiled at length by the exertion of that subtle strategy for which Moonlighter was notorious.

It was after one o'clock in the morning when Cow Flat was reached. The little township slept, steeped in darkness, beside its sluggish strip of creeping 'slurry' miscalled a creek. Beyond, on the rise, a big mine clattered and groaned, and puffed its glowing clouds of steam against the sky; but Cow Flat had settled down into silence after the midnight change of shifts, and a mining township sleeps well. For all that it was a stealthy and cautious band Moonlighter led down to the old battered engine-house by the edge of the common, where the goats of Cow