Denis Dent Part 13

"And you both do well!" added Moseley, catching them up. "I'm all in favour of a fetish; that's what I never had on Bendigo. But nuggets--decoy nuggets--set a nugget to catch a nugget, eh? That's a fetish and a half! I suppose they're only little bits of things? Do you mind letting me see them?"

When he did see them, he changed his tune.

"Good heavens! But these must be over a pound between them, if not getting on for three figures in the other kind of pounds; do you mean to say you had these given you? I say, I'm not sure that my affection for a fetish would hold out against one of these."

"Well, mine will," said Denis, smiling with set teeth. "I don't turn presents into money, Moseley, till the devil drives!"

"But who on earth made you such presents as these?"

"Oh, a rough diamond with a beard to his middle, and a voice like a bull, who did his best to stand on his head in a bucket of champagne."

"By Jove! I believe it must have been old Bullocky himself."

"It was. Do you know him?"

"Know him? No one was ever yet on Bendigo without knowing old Bullocky; he's c.o.c.k of the walk in Ironbark Gully, finds gold every time, by a sort of second sight, as some of these chaps find water. Why, the first time I ever saw him he was sitting picking nuggets out of a lump of earth like plums from a pudding!"

And Moseley beguiled a mile or more with tales of the great gorilla; he had, indeed, a very pa.s.sable gift of anecdote, and an easy, idle, fanciful wit which made up in rarer qualities what it lacked in brilliance and virility. He had not a foul or an unkind word in his vocabulary; and Denis had been too long at sea to undervalue either merit. Moseley was not only a gentleman, but a man of refinement and no little charm, whose companions.h.i.+p might well be prized by such another at that wild end of the earth. And yet Denis forgot to listen as one entertaining tale led light-heartedly to another, for it was only the humours of the life that Moseley seemed to have absorbed.

"But I might as well save my breath," said Moseley, with more truth than he supposed. "It's bound to be the same on Ballarat, only more of it; the one thing I can promise you is plenty of compensation if the fetish doesn't do his duty."

Denis smiled without replying. "I suppose you don't know what sort of soil it is at Ballarat?" he asked at length.

"At Ballarat?" cried Moseley, greatly amused. "Why, my dear fellow, I couldn't tell you what sort it was at Bendigo!"

"But you were digging there five months."

"Digging, exactly; not studying the soil."

"They seemed to you to find it anywhere, did they?"

"Anywhere and everywhere, my dear fellow! Are you a geologist, Dent?"

The question came after a pause.

"Not as yet," said Denis; and Doherty, who had no notion what a geologist was, glanced at him sidelong as at one who could soon be it or anything else he chose.

So the time pa.s.sed, and the miles were mounting up when Moseley, who ought to have known the way to a certain point, found that he had overshot it by as many miles again. It was a trying moment for the height and heat of the afternoon; but so savage was the mild Moseley with himself, so unusually animated with his contrition, that Denis slapped him on the back, and they turned back laughing to an inn where they had drunk beer a couple of hours before. This beer-drinking was an extravagance resented by Denis, yet not a point on which he cared to oppose the man who had contributed so freely to the common fund. Nothing could have been more wholesome for active young fellows, but their beer alone cost them eight and threepence the first day, bread three and six, billy-can two and six, tea and sugar two and six, and their beds at this inn six s.h.i.+llings. One pound two and nine-pence for the first nine miles.

Denis did not grumble, but in his heart he resented the beds almost as much as the beer; there was more to be said for them, however, especially in a country teeming with desperate characters; and the beds at least were cheap, few travelers breaking their journey so near its beginning or its end. Denis, however, sat late in the bar, listening to the conversation of all and sundry who stopped to drink, and learning much in an un.o.btrusive way: he had never in his life been quite such a Dent, so canny, so calculating, and so cool. As a first step toward the accomplishment of his great resolve, he had already overcome the romantic spirit of its inception; thus the next night, at Bacchus Marsh, he thought nothing of foregathering with an odious little man, who consulted Denis as to the best place to get a "white 'igh 'at and a diamond ring" immediately on landing in London, but who gave him much valuable information in return. And the night after that, when they were fifty miles from Melbourne, there was a landlord with gold-dust sticking to the palms of his hands, who only needed plying with his own liquor to talk by the hour. By this time Moseley was keeping them all back with a sore heel; and the nearer the diggings, the greater each day's expenses; but Denis no longer grudged the money, for he was gaining much that money could not buy.

Often they were overtaken and left behind by more das.h.i.+ng adventurers, aggressively mounted and armed, and what was more galling, once or twice by swifter pedestrians than themselves; but Moseley preferred hobbling with his companions to boarding the scarlet coach which pa.s.sed them, pitching like a s.h.i.+p on its leather springs. The partners met with no moving accident on the road. Rumours of bushrangers were never followed by their appearance. It was not the less delightful to meet the Ballarat gold-escort coming down, in its sparkling cordon of sabres and lace, for it made the braver show in those sombre wilds, and left a rea.s.suring sense of law and order in its yellow wake.

The fourth night they camped out but ten miles from the diggings, where they hoped to arrive by noon next day; but the blister on Moseley's heel broke and bled, and though either Denis or Jim carried his pack thereafter, while the other gave him an arm, the last and most exciting stage of their journey was also the slowest. The deep-cut bullock-track led them all morning by open flat and shallow gully, between low hills timbered like an English park; from noon on, as the track converged with others, the party received more than one cheery invitation to drain a pannikin of tea at wayside encampments; but even the lame man would not stop again, and the light in his eyes was as bright as any. The three drew close together as they walked. It was as though each made it a point of honour neither to lead by an inch nor to keep the others back; it was also as though all three had lost their tongues and found new eyes, for the gold-light was in them all.

"Hus.h.!.+" exclaimed Denis, stopping suddenly.

A deep though distant hum came to their ears, faintly at first, but in a steady boom as they stooped and listened without a breath between them.

"It's like the streets of London, from the docks, after a voyage,"

whispered Denis, raising a puzzled face a little.

"It's a creek," said Doherty. "I never knew they had a creek like that."

"Nor I."

And as one man they turned to Moseley, to stand upright on the spot; for so he was standing, and grinning at them both from ear to ear.

"That's not traffic, nor yet a creek," said he. "It was the same when you got near Bendigo. It's the gold in the cradles. It's the gold!"

The broad brown track rose before them, scored by a myriad wheels, backed by hard blue sky. In an instant they were racing skyward between the ruts. Jimmy had given a whoop, and Moseley his light-hearted laugh, but Denis led without a word until the deep hum had risen to a rumble.

Then he looked round, and Jimmy pa.s.sed him with a yell. Moseley was running very lame. Denis waited for him.

"Jump on my back!" said he. "I won't leave you, and I can't wait."

"You certainly can't carry me."

"We'll see."

"Then you sha'n't."

"Come on!"

And Denis was soon staggering in Doherty's steps, a lean s.h.i.+n protruding from the crook of either arm, a good ten stone upon his back. As he stumbled on, in the last hundred yards, the rumble resolved itself into the roar of ten thousand cradles rocking as one. And on the hill's crest Doherty stood waving his wideawake against the blue.

Denis reeled up to him, breathing hard, with Moseley still protesting on his back. But for the next few minutes it might have been a bronze group that crowned the hill.

Under their eyes, in a single smooth green basin of the sere and wooded ranges, were the tents and earthworks of all nations, joined for once in unnatural war upon the earth that bore them. White were the tents of that unparalleled encampment, gleaming coolly in the sun, and pitched in patches like the scent from a paper-chase; and for every tent there was a red-lipped shaft, with men like ants crawling out and in, and muddy pools here and there between the heaps, with more ants busy at their brim. Here a few cradles rocked, like great square-toed shoes; but they blackened either bank of the yellow stream that picked its way between the tents and the ant-heaps of gravel and of clay; and thence the noise, as of a giant foundry, which could be heard a mile away. The squeak of a windla.s.s was a variation at closer quarters; the deeper claims were thus distinguished; the deepest of all had windsails, too, that rose from the earth like tall ghosts, with lantern jaws and arms like fins.

"Anything like Bendigo?" whispered Doherty to the seasoned digger, who was standing between the other two.

"More compact," replied Moseley. "And not half the trees."

"This must be Black Hill Flat, this open ground on our right," said Denis. "And that should be Bakery Hill over there on the left."

His tone made the others look from the landmarks indicated to Denis himself; and he was consulting a dirty bit of cardboard.

"What have you got there?" asked Moseley, edging up to him.

"A map, a map!" cried Jimmy, who had run round to his other side.

"Where on earth did you get hold of that, Dent?"

"Aha!" chuckled Denis. "I suppose you don't remember the man I told you about at Bacchus Marsh, who wanted the white hat and the diamond ring?

He gave it to me, and I'd rather have it than the fifty pounds he said he'd give for his ring! I make that the Gravel Pits right ahead across the stream; you can see the sun on the pools of water; they say it's the wettest bit on the diggings. And you see the trim tent to the right on the green mound? That's Commissioner's Flat, where we shall go first thing on Monday morning for our licenses."

"You've been here before," said Moseley, with an amused shake of the head. "You were here last voyage--don't tell me!"

"My last voyage was to Calcutta," said Denis, laughing as they walked on; "but if you like I was here most nights on the way up, more especially the one we spent at Bacchus Marsh."