The Black Opal - Katharine Susannah Prichard (open ebook .TXT) 📗

man to make him? Not by long chalks. Potch is turning out all right, the boys say.⁠ ⁠… Michael says he works like a chow⁠ ⁠… has to make him put in the peg⁠ ⁠… but they’ll both be havin’ Rum-Enough on their hands before long⁠—that’s a sure thing.”

Watty’s, George’s, and Cash’s mine was one of the best worked and best planned on the fields.

Watty and Cash inspected the streak George was working, and speculated as to what it would yield. George leaned his pick against the wall, eager, too, about the chances of what the thread of fire glittering in the black potch would lead to. But he was proud of the mine as well as the stone it had produced. It represented the first attempt to work a claim systematically on the Ridge. George himself had planned and prospected every inch of it; and before he went above ground for the midday meal, he glanced about it as usual, affirming his pride and satisfaction; but his eyes fell on the broken white stone about his pitch.

“As soon as we get her out, I’ll shift that stuff,” he said.

When they went up for their meal, Michael did not join Watty, George, and Cash as usual. He spread out his lunch and sat with Paul and Potch in the shade of some wilgas beside his own mine. He knew that Rouminof would not be welcome in George and Watty’s shelter, and that Paul and Potch would bring a certain reserve to the discussions of Ridge affairs which took place there.

Potch saw Michael’s eyes wander to where George was sitting yarning with his mates. He knew Michael would rather have been over there; and yet Michael seemed pleased to have got his own mine in working order again. He talked over ways of developing it with Paul, asking his opinion, and explaining why he believed the claim was good enough to stick to for a while longer, although very little valuable stone had come out of it. Potch wondered why his eyes rested on Paul with that faint smile of satisfaction.

The Ridge discussed Michael and his new partnership backwards and forth, and back again. Michael knew that, and was as amused as the rest of the Ridge at the company he was keeping. Although he sat with his own mates at midday, he was as often as not with the crowd under Newton’s veranda in the evening, discussing and settling the affairs of the Ridge and of the universe. After a while he was more like his old self than he had been for a long time⁠—since Mrs. Rouminof’s death⁠—people said, when they saw him going about again with a quiet smile and whimsical twist to his mouth.

The gossips had talked a good deal about Michael and Mrs. Rouminof, but neither she nor he had bothered their heads about the gossips.

Michael and Mrs. Rouminof had often been seen standing and talking together when she was going home from the New Town with stores, or when Michael was coming in from his hut. He had usually walked back along the road with her, she for the most part, if it was in the evening, with no hat on; he smoking the stubby black pipe that was rarely out of his mouth. There was something in the way Mrs. Rouminof walked beside Michael, in the way her hair blew out in tiny strands curling in the wind and taking stray glints of light, in the way she smiled with a vague underlying sweetness when she looked at Michael; there was something in the way Michael slouched and smoked beside Mrs. Rouminof, too, which made their meeting look more than any mere ordinary talking and walking home together of two people. That was what Mrs. Watty Frost said.

Mrs. Watty believed it was her duty in life to maintain the prejudices of respectable society in Fallen Star township. She had a constitutional respect for authority in whatever form it manifested itself. She stood for washing on Monday, spring-cleaning, keeping herself to herself, and uncompromising hostility to anything in the shape of a new idea which threatened the old order of domesticity on the Ridge. And she let everybody know it. She never went into the one street of the township even at night without a hat on, and wore gloves whenever she walked abroad. A little woman, with a mean, sour face, wrinkled like a walnut, and small, bead-bright eyes, Mrs. Watty was one of those women who are all energy and have no children to absorb their energies. She put all her energy into resentment of the Ridge and the conditions Watty had settled down to so comfortably and happily. She sighed for shops and a suburb of Sydney, and repeatedly told Watty how nice it would be to have a little milk shop near Sydney like her father and mother had had.

But Watty would not hear of the milk shop. He loved the Ridge, and the milk shop was an evergreen bone of contention between him and his wife. The only peace he ever got was when Mrs. Watty went away to Sydney for a holiday, or he went with her, because she would rarely go away without him. She could not be happy without Watty, people said. She had no one to growl to and let off her irritation about things in general at, if he were not there. Watty grew fat, and was always whistling cheerily, nevertheless. Mrs. Watty cooked like an archangel, he said; and, to give her her due, the men admitted that although she had never pretended to approve of the life they led, Mrs. Watty had been a good wife to Watty.

But everybody, even Mrs. Watty, was as pleased as if a little fortune had come to them, when, towards the end of their first week, Michael and his company came on a patch of good stone. Michael struck it, following the lead he had been working for some time, and, although not wonderful in colour or quality, the opal cut out