Rolf Boldrewood - Nevermore

'The best thing you can do, then,' said his new friend, 'is to walk out there and stay in our tent to-night. To-morrow you can get back and show your party the way. It's no good staying where you are.'

'Done with you,' said Lance. 'Jack, you can go back and tell your wife,' and away they went. After walking three or four miles, a kind of open ravine, which in Australia is called a gully, presented itself. The tents were thinner and the miners not quite so busy. 'That's our tent,' said Hastings, 'and there's my mate sitting on a log outside, smoking and wondering what's become of me. Hulloa! Bob, did you think I was lost or in chokee? This is Mr. Trevanion; he's stood my friend or else I should have spent the night on the chain, so we must lay him on to a show, if there's one in the gully.'

'It's a nice way to treat a Christian, chaining of him up like a dorg, ain't it, sir?' said the miner slowly. 'It'll raise trouble some day, I'll go bail. Proud to see you, sir. There's plenty of tea in the billy, it'll soon warm up. Luckily I baked last night and there's a goodish lump of corned silver-side of beef. You'll be ready for dinner, both on ye, I reckon.'

'This child is,' said Hastings, and 'Mr. Trevanion has had a goodish walk, which ought to sharpen his appetite. That's right, Bob.'

As he spoke, his companion, who, if slow of speech, was evidently a man of action, placed some tin plates on a small table in the tent, knives and forks, with a large loaf, half a round of cold corned beef, and a bottle of pickles. This done, he poured out two pint pannikins of tea, and sitting a little way off outside, filled his pipe and lit it afresh.

'Mind them Irishmen that took up number six claim above Jackson's?' inquired he.

'Think I do,' mumbled Hastings, whose mouth, like some people's hearts, was too full for utterance. 'Think I do; what about them?'

'What about 'em?' returned Bob. 'Why, they've jacked up and cut it. Said they wanted summut more certain. A dashed good show, I call it.'

'There's a chance for you, Trevanion,' said Hastings. 'Go and peg it out the moment you've finished this humble meal. You've got twenty-four hours to be at work in it. But the sooner you make a start the better. I shouldn't like to see you lose it. Bob will go with you.'

Lance made very good time over the corned beef, which he couldn't be induced to leave for a while. But he and Bob made a formal pegging out half an hour afterwards, thus taking legal possession of two men's ground.

The very next morning saw the party duly installed. Mrs. Polwarth and Tottie had arrived, the tent was pitched, a fireplace made, the windlass fitted with a new rope, and Lance and Jack working away as if they had been mining all their lives.

For nearly a fortnight the two men toiled and delved, one winding up and the other picking and shovelling away at the various strata which intervened between them and the precious ore they hoped to discover.

'We shan't get no gold here, I don't believe,' quoth Jack, mournfully, one day. 'I've heard of a grand diggings only fifty miles off. I'm warned they're a-pickin' of it up in handfuls.'

'It wants ten days to the end of the month,' replied Lance. 'I like to stick to things when I've begun. Suppose we make up our minds to keep at it till then. It isn't fair to Hastings to run away without a good trial.'

'All right, Mr. Lance, we'll give it till the thirty-first. If we don't hit it then, I'm off to Forest Creek for good. Until then we'll see who can work the hardest.'

As far as manual labour was concerned there had now come to be perfect equality between the man of birth and the son of toil. Stalwart and symmetrical always, the frame of Lance Trevanion had now acquired from daily labour and simple food the muscle and elasticity of an athlete in full training. Hour after hour could he swing the pick and lift the shovel weighted with clay and gravel, or wind up the heavy raw hide bucket, fully loaded, without the slightest sense of fatigue, with hardly a quickening of the breath. The healthful, yet abundant, food always procurable at a prosperous digging, amply sufficed for all their needs; the sound and dreamless sleep restored strength and tissue, and sent them forth ready, even eager for the morning's toil.

As Lance walked among the tents, or strolled up the busy lighted street on Saturday night, resplendent in clean flannels or a half-worn shooting-jacket of fashionable cut, many an admirer of form, even in that lanista of magnificent athletes, the flower of the adventurous manhood of many a clime, stopped to make favourable comment on the handsome young Englishman who had come to the gully with 'Callao' Hastings.

Just one day before the last one of the month, when the partners were already inquiring the distance of the first stage to Forest Creek, Lance broke into a stratum of decomposed rock mingled with quartz gravel. This was from a foot to eighteen inches in depth, and extended across the shaft. They did not know – ignorant as they were of the humblest mining lore – what had happened till they consulted their guide, philosopher, and friend, Hastings.

'Why, you've bottomed,' he made answer, with a look of profound wisdom, 'I'll go down and have a look at the "wash."'

They lowered him down. Ten minutes after he sent up the bucket, half-full; then, after the rope was lowered, came up himself. 'Get a tin dish and carry it down to the creek till I wash the "prospect,"' quoth he.

He filled the dish with the 'wash-dirt,' as he called it, dipped it again and again in the yellow waters of the creek, sending out the clay-stained water with a circular twist of his wrist, in a way incomprehensible to Lance and Jack. Lastly, when bit by bit all the clay and gravel had disappeared, leaving but a narrow ring of black and gray sand around the bottom of the dish, he spoke again —

'Look there,' he said meaningly.

They looked, and saw dull red and yellow streaks on the upper edge of close-lying grains, with an occasional pea-like pebble of the same colour.

'Is that – is that – ?' asked Lance in a husky voice.

'Gold!' shouted Hastings, 'yes, that's what it is. I call it an ounce to the dish, with eighteen inches of wash-dirt for the whole width of the claim; your fortune's made. It's a golden hole, nothing less, and one of the richest on the field.'

So it was… Day after day the partners cradled the precious gravel; day after day they returned to their tent with a tin pannikin or camp kettle containing enough of the precious metal to cause the most pleasurable excitement in the owners, and to occasion exaggerated reports of their wealth and the inexhaustible richness of the claim to pervade the field.

'You'll have to look out now,' said Hastings, impressively, one day. 'You've got a most dangerous and unenviable reputation. You've supposed to have gold untold in your tent. Do you know what that means here?'

'But we take our gold to the Commissioner every day,' said Lance, 'and we see it sealed up and labelled and put in a safe before we leave.'

'That's all very well, and the most sensible thing you could do, but nothing will persuade some of those fellows, with which the gully is getting too full to please me, that you don't keep gold or cash in your tent.'

'Well, what of that?'

'What of that among some of the greatest scoundrels unhung? Fellows that for a ten-pound note would chop Mrs. Polwarth up for sausages and fry Tottie with bread sauce, after knocking both of you on the head? You don't know what a real bad digging crowd is, and when you do it may be too late.'

Now the reign of Plutus had set in, as far as Lance and his companion were concerned. A few short weeks and how had their prospects changed. What was now their position? – shovelling in gold at the rate of five hundred pounds a week per man. It seemed like a dream, a fairy tale to Lance. A year or so at most of this kind of work and he would be able to return to England in the triumphant position of a man who had seen the world, who had been, as the phrase runs, the architect of his own fortune, who had boldly accepted the alternative rather than own himself in the wrong, and who now had carried out what he had vowed to do in spite of the incredulity of disapproving friends.