Читать книгу Inheritors - Brian Penton - Страница 19

Table of Contents

Cabell was angry, but with a wordless, helpless anger when, called from the Reach by an urgent message from Cash, he arrived on the new field, which had depopulated Larsen's Bakehouse as completely as the Bakehouse had depopulated Pyke's Crossing, and found Monaghan, in top-hat, monocle, and new elastic-sided boots, entertaining a select company of advisers to champagne in his tent. The top-hat was once an accessory of David Kyle's "Chreestian burials," and Monaghan had been overcome to discover that it could be his for the mere trouble of signing an IOU. He was sitting in an arm-chair acquired on the same terms from the postmaster, and his tent was stuffed with odds and ends of apparel, furniture, and toilet articles wherewith he fulfilled a lifetime's yearning for commodities hitherto as remote, in the fables of newspaper advertisement, as the Grand Cham's treasure.

When Cabell walked into the tent he was waving an empty bottle and declaiming his plans to a humble audience of shopkeepers: "And none of your lousy twist for me no more. Nothing but the best Manilas, see? Then I'll get married and have a bloke come in and shave me every day and . . . and . . ."

He blinked at Cabell and bobbed his head like a dog that expects to be kicked, glanced round his possessions, so like the jumble of an opulent dream, felt the dreamlike softness of the upholstery under his buttocks, and half rose. But the realistic smell of dust, in the haze of which Cabell looked bodiless and without danger, the rattle of shovels, the shouts, the crash of trees reassured him. His nostrils closed and he pushed his chinless face out defiantly. "Nor I won't eat no more of your maggoty burgoo neither!"

Cabell turned stiffly away and met the eyes of Sambo, modestly drunk behind a heap of bottles. He swung his long equine face from side to side looking for a way of escape, then his jaw dropped and his mouth opened as if habit had taught him that the best way to take the bit was quietly. "Them stores, boss," he said. "They musta got through the Pass. I'll track 'em down to-morrow first thing."

"So you're a miner now, eh, Sambo?"

"Something like that, boss. I ain't rightly got the hang . . ."

"Huh. What d'you think you're going to do with it?"

Sambo fingered the new handkerchief round his neck, looked at a pair of new boots on his feet, a new hat on the heap of bottles, considered cases of bottles unopened, and scratched his head for an inkling of wants unsatisfied. "I might buy a racehoss."

"A racehorse! Jesus!"

Sambo twisted his handkerchief like a garrot round his neck. "I dunno then. Was you thinking of something, boss?"

Cash steered Cabell into the open air, noisy with the new rush. Here were only hard-bitten miners yet, and they were going to work with deadly expertness to strip the ridge of its trees and ferns. Already Joe O'Connor and Ike the hawker, had grog shanties in full blast, and deformed hovels of bark and wattles marked the future main street of Waterfall Town--Monaghan Street as it was to be called.

"Steady now," Cash said, shaking Cabell roughly. "Take a pull or you'll cruel our pitch."

Cabell took a handkerchief out and wiped his face. "Sambo! Think of it! I remember when he'd never seen a two-story house, and now . . . He's going to buy a racehorse!" He stared vacantly at the tent. "Yes, yes, that's the way it is."

"Stop moaning a second and listen," Cash said and shook a preoccupied attention out of Cabell. "There's a big rush coming, understand? Bigger than Larsen's. Big money. The day before yesterday Sambo found a nugget with nearly five hundred quids' worth of gold in it. When the telegraph sends that round Australia they'll come in thousands. So you better take your finger out."

But Cabell was looking round Sambo and Monaghan's claim, a prospector's claim of twelve men's ground running nearly two hundred yards up the side of Black Mountain. "And all to enrich the first blasted crook that comes along and spins them a yarn!"

"Well?" Cash grinned. "Why shouldn't we be the first . . . ?"

As he had foretold, the news of Sambo's find brought a new and bigger rush to the valley: miners who had resisted the first rush, station hands, clerks from the city, their women and children, their tykes and camp-followers, swept on by a snowball story of nuggets lying about on the ground as big as a man's fist, as big as a man's head--as big as hope and imagination. Coming, they met the despondent and footsore fugitives from the Bakehouse. "Go back--it's a duffer," these told them. "The poor sods there are living on grass." And some did turn back, but most came on, and before the winter had settled six thousand people were living at the foot of Black Mountain, which rose from its gullies like an old barnacled octopus asleep on fabulous treasure.

Almost from the start Waterfall was a more solid town than Larsen's. The masses of iron-stained stone cropping from the ridge--most abundant in the Lost Stores Prospect but scattered over nearly the whole mountain-side--which looked to the old miners like quartz containing plenty of low-grade gold, promised the place a long life. Companies were forming and machinery was on the way to extract this thin peppering of wealth, but in the meantime life seethed about the almost daily finds of nuggets and free gold lying in pockets on the spurs of the hills and their gullies. For half a mile along the erratic creek, dammed hastily with logs and stones but nevertheless evaporating, seeping slowly away, men and women and children were hard at work sinking and panning off. Every one had an assay to talk about, a glittering specimen with which to tempt credit from storekeepers and effort from their own weary bodies. From the first streak of dawn till the quick night came down they slaved with pick and shovel and pan, then sat up till the early hours of the morning hammering the stone to dust in their mortars, for there were no stampers on the field yet. Their shadows crouching on the hessian walls of the humpies or fierily across a doorway, the incessant crunch, crunch, crunch of their thousands of hands slowly turning the skeleton of the earth to powder, made the dark gully seem like some strange Nibelung underworld.

The road wound precipitously three miles from the valley, the last half-mile out of Waterfall a perilous razorback which broke the legs of bullocks and the hearts and whip-handles of their drivers. The wreckage of many wagons was strewn about and many dead bullocks, bloated and hived with blowflies. Precisely at four o'clock every afternoon, as the mercifully early shadow of Black Mountain was spreading across the blistered town, Cobb and Co.'s coach toiled up that boulder-strewn rampart, past the Chinese market gardens--a mirage of incredible green against the barren hills--through China-town--set in pariah isolation but breathing a pleasant perfume of samshoo and joss-sticks on the dust-clogged nostrils of the poor devils in the coach--past the hessian and bark and packing-case houses of the outer suburbs, furnished, many of them, with piano and sewing-machine, glazed with windows of piled bottles--turned the summit into Monaghan Street and completed the last two hundred yards of its two-hundred-mile dash from Pyke's Crossing with a bravura gallop past David Kyle's Aberdeen Emporium and Mortuary, past the Ningpo Butchery, Peter O'Connor's Shamrock Hotel, Liam O'Connor's Hardware Store, Joe O'Connor's Golden Sunrise, Jake O'Connor's Auction Mart, the Bank, the Police Station and Lock-up, the Cabell Valley Goldbuying Agency and General Store, Aloysius O'Connor's Produce Exchange, Ike the hawker's Queen Victoria Tavern, Shaftoe's Billiard Parlour and Gymnasium, McFarlane's Butcher Shop, the Grand Opera House--with a poster of a waxworks outside--the Stock Exchange, and the Post Office to draw up, in an all-obscuring cloud of dust, like a pack of red devils that had been chasing it for nearly two days and had at last caught and swallowed it, in front of the Grand Central Hotel of Danny O'Connor.

Grey with grime and weariness the travellers climbed stiffly out and staggered into this the town's choicest resort--a rambling iron building with a long, low roof, which collected the thirsty heat of the day and held it, an adjunct to a bar trade which roared on till early morning, like an oven. How Danny found room for this unending flow of visitors, new hopefuls, travellers from far lands, investors, salesmen for mining machinery, shady company promoters, newspaper correspondents, or the merely curious, was one of the town's major mysteries.

Danny winked. "Now haven't ye never heard tell of the Yankee plan by which you put the first mob to sleep then stand them up in the corner. They don't take up so much room that way. Then you put the next mob off and stand them up till ye've got 'em all stowed away as snug as sardines."

The visitors arrived at the climax of a day of whispers, rumours, finds. From the stout slab walls of the Stock Exchange across the street emerged the roar of the late afternoon trade, the fierce, angry, frantic, outraged, waspish, despairing wails of brokers selling "Hit or Miss," "Southern Cross," "Kyle's No Liability," obliterating even the clatter of pots, the steady noise of guzzle, badinage, quarrel, and conversation in the Grand Central bar, and the moiling struggle about the window of the post office next door where the mailbags from the coach were just being opened.

Perhaps, while they waited for the coachman to finish his phlegm-cutter and unload their baggage from the boot, they would see a gentleman in an unexpected top-hat and a still more unexpected carriage and pair, passing up the street with a florid and amiable looking lady at his side. Driving from the back seat with the box vacant he looked like a drunken coachman taking the cook for a drive--generally pleased with himself but slightly oppressed by anxiety about time, for he kept drawing a tremendous gold watch from his pocket and studying it with puzzled concentration.

"That's Monaghan, the man that found the first nugget," Danny would tell them. "Now owns a quarter-share in the Lost Stores. And that's German Lizzie, his wife, that was one of my best barmaids. And that's a coach he paid a hundred quid for to Miss Ludmilla, from over Ningpo, who had it from her father, the Colonel. And the day Monaghan and Lizzie was married in it the boys put golden shoes on his horses and chained him and his missus together with a golden chain."

They certainly would see Cash, bustling out of the Exchange when the day's business closed and the crowd transferred itself across the street to moisten its rasped throats at the Grand Central. And as he passed, slapping Danny's back or stopping to hitch his trousers and look at the new arrivals if there were any ladies among them, Danny would whisper behind his hand, "Now there's a feller! Owns a quarter-share in the Lost Stores with Cabell from over the Reach. And there's another feller." And he would nod over that two or three times with one eye closed. "As me old mother used to say, 'A man that's got as much as that one on his brain-pan,' says she, 'and don't never touch liquor will be hollerin' for a blanket to keep him warm in hell.'"