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

Pony-Fence rather liked it. He was for working a little longer, but to oblige his mate he agreed to sink again. Soon after they had started, Paul began to appear at the dump when the morning was half through, or not at all. Or, as often as not, when he did decide to sling a pick, or dig a bit, he groaned so about the pains in his back or his head that as often as not Pony-Fence told him to go home and get the missus to give him something for it.

The mildest man on the fields, Pony-Fence Inglewood did not discover for some time what the boys said was correct. There was nothing the matter with Rum-Enough but a dislike of shifting mullock if he could get anyone to shift it for him. When he did discover he was doing the work of the firm, Pony-Fence and Paul had it out with each other, and parted company. Pony-Fence took a new mate, Bully Bryant, a youngster from Budda, who was anxious to put any amount of elbow grease into his search for a fortune, and Paul drifted. He had several mates afterwards, newcomers to the fields, who wanted someone to work with them, but they were all of the same opinion about him.

“Tell Rum-Enough there’s a bit of colour about, and he’ll work like a chow,” they said; “but if y’ don’t see anything for a day or two, he goes as flat as the day before yesterday.”

If he had been working, and happened on a knobby, or a bit of black potch with a light or two in it, Paul was like a child, crazy with happiness. He could talk of nothing else. He thought of nothing else. He slung his pick and shovelled dirt as long as you would let him, with a devouring impatience, in a frenzy of eagerness. The smallest piece of stone with no more than sun-flash was sufficient to put him in a state of frantic excitement.

Strangers to the Ridge sometimes wanted to know whether Rouminof had ever had a touch of the sun. But Ridge folk knew he was not mad. He had the opal fever all right, they said, but he was not mad.

When Jun Johnson blew along at the end of one summer and could not get anyone to work with him, he took Paul on. The two chummed up and started to sink a hole together, and the men made bets as to the chance of their ever getting ten or a dozen feet below ground; but before long they were astounded to see the old saw of setting a thief to catch a thief working true in this instance. If anybody was loafing on the new claim, it was not Rouminof. He did every bit of his share of the first day’s hard pick work and shovelling. If anybody was slacking, it was Jun rather than Paul. Jun kept his mate’s nose to the grindstone, and worked more successfully with him than anyone else had ever done. He knew it, too, and was proud of his achievement. Joking over it at Newton’s in the evening, he would say:

“Great mate I’ve got now! Work? Never saw a chow work like him! Work his fingers to the bone, he would, if I’d let him. It’s a great life, a gouger’s, if only you’ve got the right sort of mate!”

Ordinarily, of course, mates shared their finds. There was no question of what partners would get out of the luck of one or the other. But Jun⁠—he had his own little way of doing business, everybody knew. He had been on the Ridge before. He and his mate did not have any sensational luck, but they had saved up two or three packets of opal and taken them down to Sydney to sell. Old Bill Olsen was his mate then, and, although Bill had said nothing of the business, the men guessed there had been something shady about it. Jun had his own story of what happened. He said the old chap had “got on his ear” in Sydney, and that “a couple of spielers had rooked him of his stones.” But Bill no longer noticed Jun if they passed each other on the same track on the Ridge, and Jun pretended to be sore about it.

“It’s dirt,” he said, “the old boy treating me as if I had anything to do with his bad luck losin’ those stones!”

“Why don’t you speak to him about it?” somebody asked.

“Oh, we had it out in Sydney,” Jun replied, “and it’s no good raking the whole thing up again. Begones is bygones⁠—that’s my motto. But if any man wants to have a grudge against me, well, let him. It’s a free country. That’s all I’ve got to say. Besides, the poor old cuss isn’t all there, perhaps.”

“Don’t you fret,” Michael had said, “he’s all right. He’s got as much there as you or me, or any of us for that matter.”

“Oh well, you know, Michael,” Jun declared. He was not going to quarrel with Michael Brady. “What you say goes, anyhow!”

That was how Jun established himself anywhere. He had an easy, plausible, good-natured way. All the men laughed and drank with him and gave him grudging admiration, notwithstanding the threads and shreds of resentments and distrusts which old stories of his dealings, even with mates, had put in their minds. None of those stories had been proved against him, his friends said, Charley Heathfield among them. That was a fact. But there were too many of them to be good for any man’s soul, Ridge men, who took Jun with a grain of salt, thought⁠—Michael Brady, George Woods, Archie Cross, and Watty Frost among them; but Charley Heathfield, Michael’s mate, had struck up a friendship with Jun since his return to the Ridge.

George Woods and the Crosses said it was a case of birds of a feather, but they did not say that to