Hammond Innes - Solomons Seal

‘Two birds in the hand,’ Cooper said. ‘Better than I’d have expected on the figures.’ He advised acceptance. The policy of the company was to buy privately, never at auction, and with the present state of the market he thought the best we could hope for at auction would be something around the present offers, and it might well be lower.

I said I would have to cable Rowlinson, but he had already done that and handed me the reply. It was terse, and addressed to me personally: Decide for yourself it’s what you’re there for — Rowlinson.

Auction or private treaty, it made little difference to the agents’ commission, so I accepted Cooper’s advice as being impartial and left for Munnobungle the next day. I felt McIver had a right to some say in the choice of purchasers, and both he and his wife seemed quite touched that I should have thought of consulting them. I had expected them to prefer the local station owner, but as soon as they knew who it was, they opted for the company, one of whose directors had already visited Munnobungle and had indicated that if the company’s offer was accepted, the McIvers could stay on.

I phoned Cooper in Brisbane, told him to close with the company, and with that settled, I was free to take a trip north to Cooktown to locate Minya Lewis. I wanted to find out what had happened to his father, if he really was the Merlyn Dai Lewis who had shipped as stoker aboard the Holland Trader in July 1911. Also, I had a feeling I might discover the reason Hans had been so determined to get his hands on anything connected with those Solomons Seal ship labels. It was almost as though they were some damning piece of evidence that had to be acquired at any cost.

Cooktown from the air was a straggle of neatly laid-out clapboard buildings facing on to the muddy estuary of the Endeavour River and its mangrove swamps. The memorial to Cook was clearly visible as we came in over Grassy Hill, and there were wallabies bounding through the long grass at the edge of the airfield where we landed. We were met by a minibus, and as soon as I mentioned the name Lewis the driver said, ‘You want the Old Timers’ Hotel. They’ll get Dog Weary Lewis for you.’

We passed the gold rush cemetery, and shortly afterwards he dropped me off at an old wooden hotel building. The big bar room that occupied most of the ground floor was almost empty, only a few old men propping up one end of the counter and the barman talking to them. Silence fell as I dumped my things and enquired for Lewis. ‘Old bastard’s usually here by now,’ the barman said, coming over to me. ‘Want to buy him a beer and hear his story, do you?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Okay, mate.’ He looked across at the little huddle of habitués. ‘Go fetch him, Les.’ He came and joined me, leaning hairy arms on the counter, the pale dome of his head with its few hairs carefully slicked down outlined against one of the gold rush murals that decorated the walls. He had a beer with me while we waited, and when I asked him where the Dog Weary mine was, he said it was on the edge of the Simpson, way over beyond the Georgina. ‘Helluva long way from here, and what’s so bloody silly, he can’t get it into his thick woolly head that it was worked out years ago, before he was even born, I reck’n.’

He wouldn’t tell me anything about Black Holland, only that Lewis had killed him because of an argument over the mine. ‘Ain’t fair to spoil his racket for him. That’s how he pays for his drinks, telling Pommies and others like you about the Dog Weary and how he killed a man over it. Except for one time when he got some sort of a legacy, or maybe he stole something. Anyways, he was flush with money for the better part of six months.’ I asked how long ago that would be, and when he said about three years, I knew it must have been the cash from the sale of the Solomons Seal cover.

Frosted glass windows, and mirrors advertising plug tobacco I had never heard of, gave the place an Edwardian appearance. ‘Custom-built for the gold miners,’ the barman said over his shoulder as he dealt out beers to the old men at the far end. ‘All red plush. You wouldn’t believe it, looking at the town now, but there were sixty-five saloons and a score of eating houses then, that’s what they say. And the cemetery full of kids dead within months of being born. You have a gander at the gravestones. There’s men there that were brought in by ship at the turn of the century dying of blackwater fever.’

We were on to our second beer when Lewis finally arrived. God knows what age he was, his hands gnarled and trembling, his shoulders stooped, the muscles of his neck standing out like cords, wiry hair turned grey. He was small and tough-looking, his face so creased and wrinkled it looked like the face of a mummy dried and preserved in the hot Queensland sun. ‘Heard you’re gonna buy me a beer.’ His voice was deep and husky, barely intelligible. ‘Then I tell you about Dog Weary mine.’ He wore a dark serge suit that hung loosely on his thin frame, and the bulging eyes that stared at me greedily were blue like sapphires in a bloodshot yellow setting.

I bought him a beer, and straight away he began talking. It was a long, rambling tale about his father being left to die in the desert by his partner. In essence, it was what I had already read in that letter.

‘What was your father’s name?’ I asked.

‘Him Lewis.’

‘I want his Christian names.’ The blue eyes stared uncomprehendingly. ‘Was his name Merlyn Dai Lewis?’

He nodded, the black wizened face without expression.

‘And the partner, what was his name?’

‘Him take water, gun, everything. Come back after, dig gold.’

‘Who? Who was his partner?’

‘Holland.’

‘The man you killed?’

He looked puzzled. ‘Him Black Holland. This man his father. Red Holland.’ And he went on to tell me how his father had been rescued by some aborigines on walkabout, how he had travelled with them back across all the deserts of Australia. He had married an aborigine girl and had worked in the gold fields around Kalgoorlie. ‘Me born in the desert, and sometime we live in Ora Banda.’ Then they had come east, to Cooktown, where he had been brought up, and his father had gone off to find the man who had left him to die in the desert and get his share of the gold.

‘What happened then?’ I asked.

‘Him never come back.’ And he added, ‘Mama spik me. She very sad papa no come back, she very poor, so me go look white fellow. But white fellow him dead, too.’ There was something I couldn’t follow then, about being shot and put in a hospital. The name Black Holland was mentioned. And then suddenly with a sweeping gesture of his hand: ‘Sometime me hear him working Queensland, find him and he laugh at me. Him very drunk, say many things — say Dog Weary bilong him. So me kill him, an’ now Dog Weary bilong me. Savvy?’

The barman laughed, coming towards us and leaning his elbows on the counter again. ‘Same old story, is it? Can’t get that bloody mine out of his head. Talks of going there, but never has. Lazy bastard.’ He looked across at Lewis, smiling and tapping his forehead. ‘Yu longlong. That’s Pidgin for crazy. Reck’n it was the war.’ And without my asking he got another can of beer out of the fridge.

‘You mean he was wounded in the war?’ I asked him.

‘That’s right. Something I reck’n he didn’t bargain for since he was in the Pioneer Corps. Got sent to Bougainville, an’ the Black Dogs put a bullet through his neck. Got it through there, din’t you, mate?’ And he pointed a dirty finger at the old man’s neck. ‘Well, never mind. Drink that.’ And he put the can down in front of him.

Lewis filled his glass and drank half of it in a single swallow. Then, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, he began telling me how he had found Black Holland working on a sugar plantation near the coast. His voice was already a little slurred, and it was difficult to follow, but I thought what he was saying was that this was the man who had shot him during the war. There was an argument over his father and who owned the Dog Weary mine, and Black Holland had suddenly drawn a knife. Then, quite clearly, he said there had been a fight, and in the struggle he had seized the knife and ripped the man’s belly open with it.