Читать книгу Inheritors - Brian Penton - Страница 14

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One afternoon early in the summer of 1883 Cabell was lounging across the counter of Liam O'Connor's ironmongery store in Pyke's Crossing talking over the prospects of the season with the proprietor, whom he had watched grow from a tow-headed, pippin-faced child, crawling about the dirt floor of a lonely shepherd's hut across the Downs, into the prosperous burgess of a thriving town, no more than a single, tumbledown grog shanty at a river crossing when first he entered it thirty years before. Fencing-wire and rum had made its fortune and the fortunes of the two hundred and eighty O'Connors, wives and offspring, second and third generation, who owned every stick and stone and barrel along its one dusty street.

True, there was a foreigner in the place, a wizened and infuriated Scotchman named David Kyle, who had entrenched himself behind the fly-blown window of a druggist's shop, at the promptings of some suicidal impulse, to flaunt a yard of yellow ribbon on every 12 July and declare, wherever there was an O'Connor within earshot, that he would never rest content till he had eaten a beefsteak off the Pope. To save him from the consequences of these demented challenges the physical strength of many combined O'Connors was often called for. "We wouldn't have nothing happen to the boy," said Danny, head of the tribe and owner of its chief asset, the Travellers' Rest, "for isn't he bound to marry an O'Connor one day and quit larkin' about. There ain't no one else to marry." To which the Scotchman retorted by singing "Boyne Water" in a noteless voice of quavering fury.

It was this voice, shrieking through the suffocating stasis of noon, which now roused Liam O'Connor from behind the counter and made him exclaim, "That's the damn Scotchman. He's been pickin' on them Irish again." He grabbed an axe-handle from the counter and hurried out of doors where fifty other round and freckled faces were blinking up and down the street, empty except for the horses tethered outside the Rest, and the Scotchman approaching on feet winged with dust plumes. People shouted after him. A man began to pursue him, and one or two women, with their aprons thrown over their heads against the sun. As he drew nearer his wild yodellings took form. "Gold!" he was shouting. "Gold!"

Liam ran into the street with his axe-handle raised. "Stop or I'll brain ye, madman."

The Scotchman hesitated and his strength drained out. He collapsed panting into Liam's arms and goggled over Liam's shoulder at Cabell, still shouting "Gold! Gold!" in his punctured falsetto.

A crowd gathered.

"Ye've been drinking then, have ye," Liam said, "or what is it?"

The Scotchman tottered on to his feet. "Gold," he panted. "I've seen it. The telegram--the sergeant sent it--to the Government in Brisbane. That furrin mon come in the morn--he's wi' the sergeant noo--all the blinds down--he discovered it. Gold! Rich gold! Maggie O'Connor's father, the postmaster--he showed me the telegram--they're leavin' for Cabell Valley immediate--in secret--the Government doesna want a rush made of it. . . ."

The gabble of voices broke out again.

"Where?" Cabell demanded.

"In yer ain country," Kyle said. "In Cabell Valley."

"Impossible!" Cabell said, and outraged by the mere thought that he could have laboured all his years away with a mine of gold undiscovered at his feet, he added, "It's a damn lie. I had a man fossicking all over the valley. Peters his name was. You remember Peters, Liam. He was a friend of your mother. He dug holes all over the place and never discovered anything worth twopence."

"It's maybe just some blind of yours for leavin' the town and givin' Maggie O'Connor the slip after all," Liam said, raising his axe-handle. "I've a mind to have the sergeant, me brother-in-law, lock you up for safety."

But at this moment there was a rattle of hoofs at the end of the street and four horsemen galloped by--the sergeant himself, two troopers, and a man with a flowing white beard leading a packhorse between them.

The crowd gaped, then scattered shouting to their wives and families gathered in doorways, "Gold! They're discovered another Gympie."

Five minutes later the window of Kyle's shop was stripped of its goods. Ten minutes later his dilapidated buggy jolted out of the yard and disappeared north in dust. Half an hour later ten horsemen left the Travellers' Rest in the same direction. By this time a Dooley who was married to an O'Connor had had it from a Fagan, who was his third cousin and clerk in the bank, that a man named Larsen had that morning deposited five hundred and sixty-nine pounds' worth of gold-dust at the bank. At sunset a wagon drew away from Liam O'Connor's store loaded with picks and shovels, kegs of nails, tents, axes, and a ton of odd tools. At nightfall only Father Joseph O'Connor and the many Mesdames O'Connor, Fagan, Dooley, Farrel, O'Brien and O'Niell remained in the town. The coach for Brisbane, which Cabell had come to join, stood unharnessed in the yard of the Rest, from the parlour of which emerged the shrill chaotic flow of women's voices, birdlike in their strange resemblance to reasonable speech.

Cabell loitered in the bar till it was dark, then called for a meal and ate it in the corner of the big room, bleak with unaccustomed emptiness and the reek of stale booze. Twelve-year-old Teresa O'Connor, deputy for her absent father, set the white enamel, two-gallon pot of tea before him.

"Ain't you goin' to the gold rush, Mr Cabell?" she asked.

He gave her a malignant stare. "What gold? There isn't any, you fool."

She snatched her hand from the pot. "I mean the gold they discovered at Cabell Valley."

"There isn't any gold I tell you," and when he had wiped the smudged outline of her face from the blackboard of doorway with a fierce sweep of his hand he repeated it to himself, "Duffer rush to catch fools," denying with anxious obstinacy that all the bitterness and disappointment and tragedy of those years might have been spared him if he'd only struck a pick in the right place.

He was a young man when he went to the valley, nearly forty years ago. Why hadn't he discovered the gold then if there was any? Was there an inch of its ground he had not explored with bright eyes always urgently seeking the key to unlock the door of his exile. "I'd've been on to it like a shot." And yet--what was more eminently in the order of things as he had found them than that this wealth, which could have bought him out of exile, should fall into the hands of a pack of wasters who would use it to enrich blackguard publicans.

He jumped up and shouted for Teresa. "Get my horse. I'll ride across the Downs and catch the train."

But at the end of the street, where the bush began like a tidal wave frozen into a wall of menacing green as it curled to crash down and obliterate the town, he pulled his horse back on its haunches and turned in the saddle. Beyond the sporadic chirruping of insects and the gusty rustle of the dry pepper-trees the houses lay in hysterical darkness. Over the place hung the rabid air of a gambling-table . . .

The twitter of women's voices paused as he galloped past the Rest again, splashed through the ford, and clattered away north into the hushed night.

"He changed his mind then," Liam's wife said.

"He said there wasn't no gold," Teresa said.

"Nor there won't be none for nobody else now," her aunt said.

Forty miles out he came on David Kyle defending his possessions across the body of his dead horse from a cavalcade of pressingly helpful O'Connors. His ginger side-levers bristled in the dawn like the attenuated pale flames of righteousness. "I'll no be beholden to ye apostate rabble," he shrieked.

Cabell got twenty miles more out of his horse before it knocked up. Then he had to walk ten miles to borrow another. The infection had spread fifteen miles on each side of the road. Even the grog shanties were emptying. Trees were flat behind the haze of dust: two hundred horsemen were ahead of him. He passed a crowd of pigtailed Chinese, one with a crate of fowls on his head. With sad fatalistic faces they trotted on as though entranced by an approaching doom. Here and there he overtook prospectors, loaded with pick and shovel and rusty tin dish, lured from their fossicking by the rumour of a find. They went forward without haste, disillusioned but helpless automata of hope.

He snatched a mug of tea with one of them at the roadside.

"If ta's gold there we'll all be in time for a pickin'," the man told him. "If ta's nowt what's the use abustin' your guts?"

But to Cabell it seemed that half the population of the state was ahead of him and that they would have time to raze a mountain of gold and melt and sell it before he could get on the spot.

"Bless ye, this isn't the rush," the miner said. "Wait till ta laads on Gympie and every other payin' goldfield up and down ta country gets wind of it. We'll see somethin' then. Nothin' like a whisper that some'un's found somethin' that looks somethin' like gold to get those softies away from a good livin'."