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

people turn wearily from the glow in the east at dawn; but the days go on, for months, one after the other, hot, breathless, of dazzling radiance, or wrapped in the red haze of a dust storm.

Ridge folk take the heat as primitive people do most acts of God, as a matter of course, with stiff-lipped hardihood, which makes complaint the manifestation of a poor spirit. They meet their difficulties with a native humour which gives zest to flagging energies. Their houses, with roofs whitened to throw off the heat, the dumps of crumbling white clay, and the iron roofs of the billiard parlour, the hotel, and Watty Frost’s new house at the end of the town, shimmer in the intense light. At a little distance they seem all quivering and dancing together.

Men like Michael, the Crosses, George Woods, Watty, and women like Maggie Grant and Martha M’Cready, who had been on the Ridge a long time, become inured to the heat. At least, they say that they “do not mind it.” No one hears a growl out of them, even when water is scarce and flies and mosquitoes a plague. Their good spirits and grit keep the community going through a trying summer. But even they raise their faces to heaven when an unexpected shower comes, or autumn rains fall a little earlier than usual.

In the early days, before stations were fenced, Bill M’Gaffy, a Warria shepherd, grazing flocks on the plains, declared he had seen a star fall on the Ridge. When he went into the station he showed the scraps of marl and dark metallic stone he had picked up near where the star had fallen, to James Henty, who had taken up Warria Station. The Ridge lay within its boundary. James Henty had turned them over curiously, and surmised that some meteoric stone had fallen on the Ridge. The place had always been called Fallen Star Ridge after that; but opal was not found there, and it did not begin to be known as the black opal field until several years later.

In the first days of the rush to the Ridge, men of restless, reckless temperament had foregathered at the Old Town. There had been wild nights at the shanty. But the wilder spirits soon drifted away to Pigeon Creek and the sapphire mines, and the sober and more serious of the miners had settled to life on the new fields.

The first gathering of huts on the clay pan below the Ridge was known as the Old Town; but it had been flooded so often, that, after people had been washed out of their homes, and had been forced to take to the Ridge for safety two or three times, it was decided to move the site of the township to the brow of the Ridge, above the range of the flood waters and near the new rush, where the most important mines on the field promised to be.

A year or two ago, a score or so of bark and bag huts were ranged on either side of the wide, unmade road space overgrown with herbage, and a smithy, a weatherboard hotel with roof of corrugated iron, a billiard parlour, and a couple of stores, comprised the New Town. A wild cherry tree, gnarled and ancient, which had been left in the middle of the road near the hotel, bore the news of the district and public notices, nailed to it on sheets of paper. A little below the hotel, on the same side, Chassy Robb’s store served as post-office, and the nearest approach to a medicine shop in the township. Opposite was the Afghan’s emporium. And behind the stores and the miners’ huts, everywhere, were the dumps thrown up from mines and old rushes.

There was no police station nearer than fifty miles, and although telegraph now links the New Town with Budda, the railway town, communication with it for a long time was only by coach once or twice a week; and even now all the fetching and carrying is done by a four or six horse-coach and bullock-wagons. The community to all intents and purposes governs itself according to popular custom and popular opinion, the seat of government being Newton’s big, earthen-floored bar, or the brushwood shelters near the mines in which the men sit at midday to eat their lunches and noodle⁠—, go over, snip, and examine⁠—the opal they have taken out of the mines during the morning.

They hold their blocks of land by miner’s right, and their houses are their own. They formally recognise that they are citizens of the Commonwealth and of the State of New South Wales, by voting at elections and by accepting the Federal postal service. Some few of them, as well as Newton and the storekeepers, pay income tax as compensation for those privileges; but beyond that the Ridge lives its own life, and the enactments of external authority are respected or disregarded as best pleases it.

A sober, easygoing crowd, the Ridge miners do not trouble themselves much about law. They have little need of it. They live in accord with certain fundamental instincts, on terms of good fellowship with each other.

“To go back on a mate,” is recognised as the major crime of the Ridge code.

Sometimes, during a rush, the wilder spirits who roam from one mining camp to another in the back-country, drift back, and “hit things up” on the Ridge, as the men say. But they soon drift away again. Sometimes, if one of them strikes a good patch of opal and outstays his kind, as often as not he sinks into the Ridge life, absorbs Ridge ways and ideas, and is accepted into the fellowship of men of the Ridge. There is no formality about the acceptance. It just happens naturally, that if a man identifies himself with the Ridge principle of mateship, and will stand by it as it will stand by him, he is recognised by Ridge men as one of