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

buy⁠—hang round the pub all day, and yet had stuff to sell,” Watty murmured.

The men smoked silently for a few minutes.

“How much did they get, again?” Bully Bryant asked.

“Couple of months,” George said.

“Police protect criminals⁠—everybody knows that,” Snowshoes said.

Sitting on the dump just beyond the shade the shelter cast, he had been listening to what the men were saying, the sun full blaze on him, his blue eyes glittering in the shadow of his old felt hat. All eyes turned to him. The men always listened attentively when Snowshoes had anything to say.

“If there’s a policeman about, and a man starts ratting and is caught, he gets a couple of months. Well, what does he care? But if there’s a chance of the miners getting hold of him and some rough handling⁠ ⁠… he thinks twice before he rats⁠ ⁠… knowing a broken arm or a pain in his head’ll come of it.”

“That’s true,” George said. “I vote we get this bunch ourselves.”

“Right!” The Crosses and Bully agreed with him. Watty did not like the idea of the men taking the law into their own hands. He was all for law and order. His fat, comfortable soul disliked the idea of violence.

“Seems to me,” he said, “it ’d be a good thing to set a trap⁠—catch the rats⁠—then we’d know where we were.”

Michael nodded. “I’m with Watty,” he said.

“Then we could hand ’em over to the police,” Watty said.

Michael smiled. “Well, after the last batch getting two months, and the lot of us wasting near on two months gettin’ ’em jailed, I reck’n it’s easier to deal with ’em here⁠—But we’ve got to be sure. They’ve got to be caught red-handed, as the sayin’ is. It don’t do to make mistakes when we’re dealin’ out our own justice.”

“That’s right, Michael,” the men agreed.

“Well, I reck’n we’d ought to have in the police,” Watty remarked obstinately.

“The police!” Snowshoes stood up as if he had no further patience with the controversy. “It’s like letting hornets build in your house to keep down flies⁠—to call in the police. The hornets get worse than the flies.”

He turned on his heel and walked away. His tall, white figure, straighter than any man’s on the Ridge, moved silently, his feet, wrapped in their moccasins of grass and sacking, making no sound on the shingly earth.

Men whose claims had not been nibbled arranged to watch among themselves, to notice exactly where they put their spiders when they left the mines in the afternoon, and to set traps for the rats.

Some of them had their suspicions as to whom the rats might be, because the field was an old one, and there were not many strangers about. But when it was known next day that Jun Johnson and his wife had “done a moonlight flit,” it was generally agreed that these suspicions were confirmed. Maud had made two or three trips to Sydney to sell opal within the last year, and from what they heard, men of the Ridge had come to believe she sold more opal than Jun had won, or than she herself had bought from the gougers. Jun’s and Maud’s flight was taken not only as a confession of guilt, but also as an indication that the men’s resolution to deal with rats themselves had been effective in scaring them away.

When the storm the ratting had caused died down, life on the Ridge went its even course again. Several men threw up their claims on the hill after working without a trace of potch or colour for months, and went to find jobs on the stations or in the towns nearby.

The only thing of any importance that happened during those dreary summer months was Bully Bryant’s marriage to Ella Flail, and, although it took everybody by surprise that little Ella was grown-up enough to be married, the wedding was celebrated in true Ridge fashion, with a dance and no end of hearty kindliness to the young couple.

“Roy O’Mara’s got good colour down by the crooked coolebah, Michael,” Potch said one evening, a few days after the wedding, when he and Michael had finished their tea. He spoke slowly, and as if he had thought over what he was going to say.

“Yes?” Michael replied.

“How about tryin’ our luck there?” Potch ventured.

Michael took the suggestion meditatively. Potch and he had been working together for several years with very little luck. They had won only a few pieces of opal good enough to put into a parcel for an opal-buyer when he came to Fallen Star. But Michael was loth to give up the old shaft, not only because he believed in it, but because of the work he and his mates had put into it, and because when they did strike opal there, the mine would be easily worked. But this was the first time Potch had made a suggestion of the sort, and Michael felt bound to consider it.

“There’s a bit of a rush on, Snowshoes told me,” Potch said. “Crosses have pegged, and I saw Bill Olsen measurin’ out a claim.”

Michael’s reluctance to move was evident.

“I feel sure we’ll strike it in the old shaft, sooner or later,” he murmured.

“Might be sooner by the coolebah,” Potch said.

Michael’s eyes lifted to his, the gleam of a smile in them.

“Very well, we’ll pull pegs,” he said.

While stars were still in the high sky and the chill breath of dawn in the air, men were busy measuring and pegging claims on the hillside round about the old coolebah. Half a dozen blocks were marked one hundred feet square before the stars began to fade.

All the morning men with pegs, picks, and shovels came straggling up the track from the township and from other workings scattered along the Ridge. The sound of picks on the hard ground and the cutting down of scrub broke the limpid stillness.

Paul came out of his hut as Potch passed it on his way to the coolebah. Immediately he recognised the significance of the heavy pick