Читать книгу Inheritors - Brian Penton - Страница 18

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The store was locked up. Cash, as usual of late, was over the road at Joe O'Connor's Golden Sunrise, a rickety shack with a tattered calico sign now rain-smudged. The patrons were not making so much noise today, and as he backed the wagon up to the door and took the tarpaulin off, Cabell could hear Cash roaring out one of his yarns.

"I only had fever once," he was saying, "when I was gully-raking with a mate in the mountains at the back of Richmond, down south. We had a mob of horses planted. Then me and my mate went down with fever together. I couldn't hardly move an eyelid and the only living thing in fifteen miles was our dog. We kept him starved and chained up in the hut to make him savage. And wasn't he, by Christ! Turn your back and he'd be up on it like grease lightning. I must've been out to it about eight days. I lost count. Used to stagger up and get a drink and tear my duds out of the mongrel's teeth and fall down and lie there dreaming he was eating me. And by God when I came to and looked round damned if he hadn't. Not me, but my mate. He'd slung his hook and the dog had chewed his right leg clean off."

Their interest was lethargic. He gave them up and lurched to the door to look at the rain, like a great rat slowly eating the town away. Up the street a wagon, with a dead bullock beside it, was bogged to the axletrees and abandoned. Outside Kyle's Aberdeen Emporium a youth was auctioning picks and shovels. "'Ere ladies and gents, we 'ave a bran' new pick, shovel, and cradle--never turned an ounce of gold. Carried all the way from Pyke's Crossing on this 'ere bloke's back, ladies and gents. A pick and shovel to start a market garden with and supply the Chows with greens, ladies and gentlemen. 'Ere's your chance." A week ago a pick and shovel would have brought twenty-five shillings the set. Now no one would bid even five.

Cash scowled at the wreckage of the town. The scene, no longer pregnant of that sensational action in which his spirit found its only assurance of being, made him restless. "Dead as meat," he muttered, and staggered through the mud to the shelter of the Goldbuying Agency, where he found Cabell, to whom all action, all toil and sweat and violence, had long ago become slightly unreal, dreamlike, against the conviction of the fantasies they served, hard at work unloading his dray. "Here," Cash said, "it's a caution to snakes in this dump. I'm clearing out. Give me my dough and we'll call it quits."

"Clearing out?" Cabell's jaw went down. Why, Cash was his lucky token. Hadn't he prospered more than ever before in his life with this man at his side? Besides, Cash's clearing out must mean that the gold was nearly done. "But there's a ton of gold here yet," he protested. "Larsen told me. He says the top's hardly been scraped off."

"To hell with the gold. I've got enough. I want a change of scenery."

"I'll give you a cheque to-morrow," Cabell hedged. He hoped Cash might be sober and reasonable by then. For, all other considerations apart, the business would suffer if it lost Cash, a man knowing in the ways and means of goldfields--how to spot dosed gold, how to coax a miner with a tight fist on his bag of dust, whom to back with credit, whom to watch.

"See you do," Cash said, then laughed and slapped Cabell's shoulder. "Old Rusty Guts, eh? Well, I reckon you're not a bad bastard, Cabell. I've seen plenty worse and better thought of."

And there, strangely enough, was not the least of the reasons which made Cabell regret losing Cash. He liked nobody and nobody liked him. When he walked into a bar men stopped talking and looked round at him. He knew they called him skinflint and Rusty Guts, and that there was a new generation in the land who had never known the old days and therefore could never, never understand. That young prig James for example. Dressed up like a sore finger and going round the house with his nose in the air. He'd been hearing things from a parcel of nincompoops at school, and now he was beginning to look down his nose at his father. From the loneliness of his shame and bad conscience Cabell took refuge in the robust amorality of Cash, who had seen so much life and concluded that he was not a "bad bastard" after all. Not that he felt any affection for Cash. That pottery face and derisive eye invited no tributes of gentle regard and Cabell was many, many stressful years past feeling them, past feeling for anything except the kindly phantoms of his brain; but he did feel a sort of gratitude to a man who thought less badly of him than others.

Next day Cash was dead drunk on the floor of the Sunrise. That was better for Cabell's purposes than having him sober. He remained drunk for three weeks, and by that time the first stage in the history of Black Mountain was past. Discouragement, as rabid as hope, had emptied Larsen's Bakehouse. Even many of the regular miners, who knew that there was gold in the place, had departed--a strange legion tied, like Cabell, to no steadfast star and therefore with no use whatever for gold when they found it. A kind of rakish joy in seeking moved their arduous lives, but the treasure itself they fled from at the first excuse as though they were afraid that it would seduce them to quiet days. About fifty of them were fossicking around the hills and another fifty were waiting in the pubs for the flood to go down. Apart from these only Cabell, Larsen, Ike the hawker, Joe O'Connor, sole remaining representative of his clan, John Flagg the warden, a couple of troopers, some storekeepers, a horde of Chinamen, and Kyle--fixed to the spot not by any faith in its potentialities now but, more obstinately, by the efforts of O'Connors to lure him back to the Crossing--were left under the sagging roofs of the mushroom town. The rain had cleared and the river was still several feet deep over the claims, though it had fallen enough for the old hands to come back from their fossicking and start to potter about the debris when the second phase of the story opened.

That was on a sunny day in April 1884, when Sambo and Monaghan were riding across a spur of Black Mountain in search of the fifty prime stores which had broken out of Cabell's slaughter-yard the night the rains began. They had pulled up in a fern gully, cooled by waterfalls, to rest and light their pipes.

"They bin coming down here for a drink," Sambo said, examining some cattle tracks in the rocky ground. Then he bent and picked up a piece of stone, about as big as his head, which had broken recently from a weatherworn and moss-grown outcrop. "Cripes!" he said, letting the reins slither off his arm. "Stone the crows! Whatya make of that, Mon?"

Monaghan took the stone and examined it, and instinctively held it away from Sambo, reaching over to point at a delicate line of reddish-yellow, veining its crystals like a chain of lightning. "I seed one of these here gold specimens down Larsen's," Sambo said. "If that ain't one . . . Here, give it here, I found it."

"What're you going to do with it?"

"Sell it. Whatya think? Boss'll give you a fiver for that." He gathered his reins and prepared to mount.

"Wait a bit," Monaghan said. "There might be more."

So they tied the horses up and spent the afternoon chipping lumps off the outcrop. Some had gold in them but not much that they could see. The shadow of Black Mountain, intruding on their rapt research, made Sambo look up and say, "Four o'clock! Cripes! Them stores. Boss'll be sore."

"To hell with the boss 'n' his stores," Monaghan said, then looked at Sambo slyly. "Unless you want to go and look for them. I ain't working for him no more."

"You ain't . . ." Sambo gaped at a changed Monaghan. The sagging lines of his sun-blackened face had tightened as a rope tightens in the dew. His lack-lustre eyes, like the neglected knobs of a door long closed on disused vacancy, were shining and alert, concealing a cunning idea. But at last it had dawned on Sambo too. "Gawd stiffen the crows. Why, we could start a goldmine of our own!"

"We could," Monaghan admitted grudgingly. "Suppose we did both discover it."

Sambo was in the saddle. "We oughta be gettin' back soon's we find them stores. Tell the boss . . ."

"Tell him! What for?"

"We don't know nothing about goldmines. He'll put us wise."

"Here, wait a bit. You're barmy. Look, we'll take this," Monaghan picked up the first piece of rock Sambo had found, "and we'll cover all the rest over in case any of those prospector blokes come bummin' around, and we'll go and tell the warden and no one else, see? Or by Jeez, Sambo, they'll grab it offen us like a dinger grabs the lights offen a bogged cow."

Sambo glanced round and licked a leathery tongue over his lips. "Cripes, Mon, but the boss'll be dead sore."