Читать книгу Inheritors - Brian Penton - Страница 15

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The gold was in one of the gullies among the foot-hills of Black Mountain, a stone's throw from the hole in which Peters, after prospecting for six years with undiminishable faith, had died and rotted to a tiny white skeleton. A creek, shrunk to a shallow gutter in this dry season, twisted through the undergrowth of ferns and vine. Where the rush had halted it swelled into a wide lagoon scaled with lotus flowers. Big staghorns hung from the trees and the maidenhair grew with a lush magnificence to the men's waists. There was a musky trace of ibises on the stagnant air, heavy with the scent of rotting gum-leaves and the intense, evanescent flowers of the tropics. Here no cool breeze ever penetrated through the intricate overlapping of hills, from the midst of which Black Mountain thrust a sugar-loaf head gashed bloodily and covered with cancerous outcrops of black and red rock. On a ridge of this mountain, four hundred feet above the gully, Cabell had shot down a tribe of blacks in the early days. Since then not more than half a dozen white men had come up the steep and stony seven miles from the road, stockmen looking for lost horses or cattle gone wild in the scrub. Cabell's Reach was forty miles away and Narrow Gut, the Jardine homestead and the nearest settlement, nearly ten.

Cabell arrived at eleven o'clock on the second morning after he left Pyke's Crossing, but already the first excitement of the rush was over. Larsen had washed out three pans of dirt to satisfy the sergeant that the field was payable and had marked the twenty-one claims that were to be his reward. Then, red-eyed from sleeplessness, he sat on the edge of the shaft and watched a hundred and fifty of the men who had gathered around him on the road, with bland, impetuous trust, scampering for claims near to his, cursing, quarrelling, hurling themselves into the treacherous undergrowth, numbed by fear of losing their share. Around them the gully preserved its aloof, immemorial silence, in which the ferns and palms had slept their graceful dancer's sleep long, long before there were men to be tricked into mad activity by the illusion of owning rare things. But already, as a forewarning of a new order, the sound of axes, the scent of trampled grass and flowers and earth laid bare, fretted the edges of its tranquillity.

All this was over before Cabell arrived and found the vanguard of the rush, still panting, bleeding, dazed, like somnambulists roughly awakened from an almost fatal misadventure, seated on their claims or standing hostile guard over the sticks driven into the ground to mark their boundaries. He hurried on and came out in the little clearing which Larsen had made when prospecting and secretly working his find in the previous two months. There the sergeant, a trooper beside him, was sitting on a pile of saddles and listening to a dispute between two men. The sweat, drying from his cheeks, had left the dust in leprous patches. It had soaked through his boots, his cap, and the shoulders of his tunic. His hands, holding his unlighted pipe, lay heavily on his fat legs as he listened to the wrangling of the men with the diffused stare of a horse asleep on its feet.

Near by in the shade fifteen or twenty other people waited for the sergeant to decide where they were to scramble for the privilege of erecting their grog shanties and stores. Six O'Connors, representing almost every branch of trade and commerce, whose supplies were slowly approaching by pack-horse and wagon, sat their horses apart from the rest in a clannish solidarity of freckled faces cast to the same grave mould.

But others were already doing brisk business. Ike, the Syrian hawker, an itinerant of boundary-riders' and shepherds' huts in the valley, who had fallen in with the rush on his way to Narrow Gut, was busily spreading a slab of tobacco, a bottle, two sticky glasses, and a billy of water on a rock in the shade of a cabbage-tree palm, and soon the men were crowding around to pay two shillings for a nobbler of his vile, anonymous liquor and threepence for a fill of their pipes.

Now that the first excitement was over the hunger and weariness of the long, foodless scamper were savage. Quart-pots bubbled over the fires, the improvident many were going round trying to beg, borrow, or steal the makings of a damper, a trooper was boiling a mess of rice and raisins for the official breakfast. Only one man had brought a rifle. He sold the loan of it to others and they went off looking for birds to shoot. Two or three were chopping down a cabbage-tree palm for its succulent heart, but most who had nothing to eat tightened their belts, dragged their saddles on to their claims, and lay down to sleep out the hours till the first packhorse came. "Perhaps to-night," the O'Connors said.

Cabell pulled into the shade and looked around, wondering what to do now that he had got himself here at such an expense of horseflesh. Vaguely he had expected to see the men carting the gold away in great lumps under his nose, but all the gold in sight was the few unimpressive grains of it in Larsen's dish, which lay neglected beside the heap of police saddles, arousing a splutter of tired curses from the sergeant's cook every time he stumbled over it on his way to the fire. The owner of it was kneading a damper on the back of his shovel with gluttonous concentration, the discoverer, one might have thought, of some infinitely precious particle of sustenance in a world famished for food, not for gold.

Cabell became aware of his own hunger then, catching a whiff of bacon frying and tea on the boil. They belonged to a man in bowyanged moleskins and cabbage-tree hat, who sat on his heels quietly smoking a corncob pipe in the shade, swagman by the looks of him. He caught Cabell's eye on the billy as he hooked it off the fire, took a second look at him, and said, "How about a mug, mate? Thirsty?"

Cabell climbed down and tethered his horse to the tree behind which the swaggie was hiding these preparations for a good breakfast.

He poured Cabell a pannikin and took the billy for himself.

"Ain't you Cabell from up the valley?" he asked.

Cabell nodded.

"Thought I spotted you. What d'you think of it, eh?" He jerked his thumb towards the clearing. "You been here twenty, thirty years . . ."

"Nearer forty," Cabell corrected sourly.

"All right, forty. And the dirt's been here a couple of million and it all has to be settled before 11 a.m. on 15 November 1883, or whatever the day is."

"Twelve o'clock will be a bit too late for somebody."

"Don't you believe it. I saw them washing off this morning. There's a lot of gold around here. But I doubt if there's much in this gully. Just shallow stuff, poor man's stuff."

"You've got a claim?"

"Not on your life. No, sir. I got no claim. And don't want none." He buried his face in the billy and swallowed long draughts of scalding tea.

"What're you here for then?"

The swaggie laughed. He had an engaging laugh, deep from the pit of his thick chest, which was burnt, like his face, the colour of mahogany. "God knows that," he said, wiping his mouth on the palm of his hand and reaching for the bacon, "because it takes a man a long time to learn nothing, I suppose, even when he started learning it like I did at the age of twelve in a tough house like the Sacramento."

"You were in California?"

"Yessir, I was. In the blessed year of forty-nine. That's why you'll hear them call me Yankee Jack. Yankee Jack Cash--that's my monniker, but I was born in Surry Hills, Sydney, forty-six years ago." He lifted a rasher out of the boiling fat, dropped it into his open mouth, then chewed it slowly with his mind on something else, as though it was cold meat he was eating. "Yes, Lucky Yankee Jack," he said. "Yet I been on every field from the Ovens to the Towers and never raised more than enough gold to buy me a blind to forget it. No, gold ain't my lucky stone."

Cabell, waiting for his own tea to cool, paid a polite and drowsy inattention. The two miners were still wrangling with the peevish and reiterative monotony of the tired. The sergeant no longer listened. He was settling business with the tradesmen, who had marked out their sites somewhere back in the scrub, and trying to finish his arrangements for the rush to come and get a few hours' rest. Many of the men, spuriously exhilarated by food, were beginning to sink shafts in their claims. They were new hands at the game. Those who had been at a rush before either busied themselves cutting bark for a gunyah or slept, or sat waiting for someone to start work in the claim next door to see whether it was worth digging up their own.

The heat flowed in glutinous waves from the high wall of the gully. Flakes of light crystallized turned to butterflies in the shade. Parrots, brilliant, episodic, fluttered among the trees and made a sound like silver bells carelessly disturbed. Dragonflies played with their own images on the still lagoon, where lotus flowers, crushed from the surface by miners dipping for a drink, burned through the yet clear water as though behind glass. For this last moment in its long history the gully, henceforth to be known as Larsen's Bakehouse, slept in Edenic serenity; and the men slept in Edenic serenity, too, upon dreams of wealth.

Cabell, worn out now that he had rested a moment, gave in to the tug of the earth's inertia and flopped his back against the tree. "What were you lucky at then?" he asked, now for the first time taking a good look at his host, garrulous and alike unaffected by the stirring events around him and the over-powering heat of noon.

Behind his black beard, as solid with tight, close curls as a lump of carved jet, his big mouth was constantly twitching with vivacious amiability, like an energetic little animal eating its way through a hard rock. It was the only feature which moved in that face, cut to an attractive monkey-ugliness, or rather moulded out of brick-clay and baked hard. His eyes were wide and hard and looked straight out, impervious to the glare. But they were really not like eyes at all, they stared so hard and fixedly, more like two thin sheets of coloured mica behind which his eyes were hidden. Yet there was nothing cunning or secretive about him. On the contrary, the flat squat face was without depth or guile, unless in its up-turned corners his mouth secreted a faint irony.

At a first glance a commonplace character of the bush, which exposed itself in gestures of a simple and innocent frankness. But Cabell had had time to take a second glance over the rim of his pannikin, and was puzzled to fix this man in any simple and innocent class of bush life. His voice was crisp and vigorous, not the voice of a bushman drawling on and on over meandering tracks of thought that petered out, sooner or later, in the vast, unchartered wilderness of day-dream. He had not the soft hands of a shearer, the dandyism of a stockman or horse-breaker, the swagman's air of a broken-spirited straggler from a defeated army for ever doggedly retreating across the waste. His boots were out at the toes and mended with fencing-wire, but he wore a heavy gold ring on the little finger of his left hand and a gold bracken-leaf tie-pin jauntily in the silk handkerchief around his neck. His hair was brushed into an arrogant scythe of curl over the right eye and his beard was neatly trimmed.

Cabell repeated the question, sharper with interest. "What do they call you lucky for then?"

Cash swallowed the last piece of bacon, wiped the pan around with a piece of damper, swallowed that, and took out his pipe. "Lucky not to be stretched on a hundred-and-thirty-foot Oregon flagpole erected in the name of liberty and justice," he said.

Cabell started. "Oh?"