Denis Dent

Chapter 16

The pair had passed the place where they had waved farewell to Moseley, and were in sound but not quite in sight of all that one of them had never expected to see or to hear again, when a voice hailed them in the rear, and they found that a buggy and pair had crept upon them while they talked. Doherty was filled with apprehension. He had not been so happy for two months. But Denis was much interested in the driver of the buggy, who drove alone, and who looked as though he might have been got up in Bedford Row, what with his black silk stock, his high hat still shining through its layer of yellow dust, and his spectacled face clean-shaven to the lips.

"May I ask if you are Ballarat diggers," said he, "or new arrivals like myself?"

"We are diggers," replied Denis, "and Ballarat's just over that hill."

"So I should suppose," observed the gentleman from afar, and proceeded to weigh the couple with a calculating eye. "Been at it long?" he added as one who did not find them altogether wanting.

"A couple of months."

"H'mph! Not so long as I should have liked, but there's just a chance that you can help me, as I am sure you will, sir," nodding at Denis, who nodded back, "if you can. Perhaps the lad will be so kind as to hold my horse. Thanky. Not that it's mine at all," the incongruous gentleman went on, as he flung down the reins and addressed himself to the contents of a small black bag. "I couldn't afford twenty-four hours in Melbourne waiting for the coach, so I had to hire, with all sorts of arrangements for changing horses on the way. But my coachman was in liquor before midnight, and when I left him, appropriately enough at Bacchus Marsh, early this morning, I wasn't going to trust myself to another. If you have a tongue in your head, sir, you can find your own way from Lincoln's Inn to John o' Groats. Ah, now I have it!" and he produced a photograph, of the carte-de-visite size then alone in vogue, and shook it playfully at Denis before putting it into his outstretched hand. "There, sir!" he wound up. "If you happen to know that face, just say so; and if you do not know it, have the goodness not to pretend you do. The answer to the question is Yes or No."

Denis looked upon the full-length presentment of a very tall gentleman, in a frock-coat, a white waistcoat, and an attitude as stiff as the heart of early Victorian photographer could desire. An elbow rested on the pedestal of a draped pillar, and the thumb of that hand in the watch-pocket; but the handsome face looked contemptuously conscious of its own self-consciousness, only it was the very gentlest contempt, and Denis recognized the expression before the face. Strip off his muddy rags, re-apparel him thus, shave his chin and nick his beard into flowing whiskers, and there was their friend the deep-sinker, hardly a day younger than when Denis had last seen him on his claim in Rotten Gully.

"The answer is Yes," he said, returning the likeness.

"You are sure of that?"

"Quite."

"You don't want the lad to confirm your view?"

"As you like; but he has only seen him once, and I have twice. It's the deep-sinker, Jimmy," added Denis over his shoulder.

The shaven gentleman pulled a wry face.

"May I ask if that's the only name you know him by?"

"I have never heard his name; but that's what he is, and the most scientific one I've come across."

The wry face went into a dry smile.

"And do you know where to find him?"

"Well, I know his claim."

"Would you very much mind getting up beside me and directing me how to drive there?"

"I should be delighted to have the lift."

"Thanky. There'll be room for your young friend behind. This is one of those happy coincidences which almost give one back one's childish belief in luck!"

The diggings were in the state of suspended animation which was their normal condition from twelve to three. The latest pilgrim blinked about him through his spectacles, more interested than impressed with what he saw. Denis took the reins, turned off the road at once, found a ford in the northern bend of the Yarrowee, and drove straight into an outpost of windsails and windlasses hidden away behind the hill. In another minute the buggy drew up beside the deep-sinker's solid little hut, in whose shade his soured assistant sat asleep, with his eyebrows up and the corners of his mouth turned down, even in his dreams.

"Where's your master?" demanded the visitor, causing Denis and Doherty to exchange glances; but the other merely opened a long-suffering eye, pointed indoors, and had closed it again before the gentleman descended.

At his request, the partners remained in the buggy, where they spent an interval of a few minutes in covetous admiration of the neat hut with its bark roof, the iron windlass, the stack of timber slabs for lining the shaft, and the suggestively solid opening of the shaft itself. They agreed to look down, if not to descend, with the deep-sinker's permission, before departure. Meanwhile his quiet voice was not to be heard outside, but the visitor's was, and eventually the pair emerged.

"But I'm just going to touch bottom," the tall digger expostulated. "After weeks and months I'm all but on it, and now you want to carry me off!"

The visitor whispered some smiling argument, which elicited a shrug of familiar and restrained contempt.

"It isn't the money," said the tall man. "It's the fun of the thing, don't you know."

The visitor took out his watch as though they could just catch a train.

"I've arranged for fresh horses all along the road," said he. "These have only done ten miles, and they can do the same ten back again. I hope I made it plain about the first ship. It may sail the day after to-morrow."

The digger sighed inevitable acquiescence. He looked rather sadly, yet with some quiet amusement, at his rude little home, at the good windlass on its staging stamped against the sky. His assistant had meanwhile risen from his slumbers, and was standing respectfully at hand.

"Charles," said the digger, "I've got to go home. Are you coming with me, or will you stay out here and make your fortune out of the hole? I'll make you a present of it if you will."

But the look of splendid disgust had vanished as if by magic from the assistant's face. "I'll go home with you, sir!" he said emphatically, and then looked from one gentleman to the other, as though he might have committed a solecism. He was forthwith ordered into the hut to put his master's things together, with a grim smile on the master's part, who proceeded at last to notice Denis, or at any rate to record such notice with his fraction of a nod.

"So it's to you I owe my prompt discovery," said he. "'Pon my word I'm not as grateful to you as I ought to be! Doing any better on Black Hill Flat?"

"I've left it," said Denis, rather shortly.

"Where are you now?"

"Nowhere. We have sold up and are going to start again. Your friend has given us a lift, for which we're much obliged, but I think the horses would stand all right without us."

"Would you like to take over this claim and hole?"

"I have no money," said Denis. Behind him Doherty had given a gasp, followed by something like a sob of disappointment. But the deep-sinker wore the broadest smile they had ever seen upon his languid countenance.

"My dear good fellow, I don't want money for it!" cried he. "I want a worthy inheritor with energy and ideas, somebody a cut above the stupid average, and by Jove you're my very man! Come on: if you don't the whole thing will be jumped by the nearest ruffian. I don't say there's much in the hole; but it's a good, sound hole as far as it goes, and it can't have to go much further. We've worked through the light clays and through the sand, and we're well in the red; when you get through that you can start washing, and I wish you the luck you deserve. Thank me? What for? If you don't come in some one else will. I am only too glad to leave the little place in such good hands. It was pretty carefully chosen, and if it isn't plumb over the gutter it ought to be."

So the reconstructed firm of Dent and Doherty became possessed of one of the deepest holes and best-appointed claims on the celebrated Eureka Lead, and all within a few minutes; for it took the man Charles no longer to collect such chattels as were worth his master's while to take away with him. Thus, ere the diggings were astir again for the afternoon, the new owners were alone in their unforeseen glory, and one of them at least was still capering and singing in his joy. But over Denis a cloud had already fallen; and there was a blacker cloud on Jimmy when he grasped the cause.

"It's Moseley," said Denis. "This is horribly unfair on him."

"Unfair! How?"

"Suppose we should have as good luck here as we had bad luck on the flat!"

"Well? Didn't he want to be out of it? Wasn't he longing to go home?"

"I don't like it," persisted Denis. "I played a trick on him, but I never thought it would turn out like this. I thought we should spend months doing what we've after all had done for us." He raised his brooding eyes from the ground, and there was the buggy still in view, labouring in and out among the tents. "Jimmy, you stay on the claim!" he cried, and dashed after it on the spur of the moment.

"What's happened?" asked the late sinker, pleasantly. "We haven't forgotten anything, have we?"

"No, but I have," panted Denis, "and if you can help me I'll be as grateful again to you. There's a chum of ours who left us only this morning. He was sick of it; but he little knew the luck that was in store for us. His name's Moseley, and he was going home in the first ship, which will be your ship, but you will probably overtake him on the road to-night."

"What's he like?" asked the spectacled gentleman, who no longer drove; and when Denis told him he was sure he had met Moseley in the forenoon, and felt confident of recognizing him again.

"Then will you tell him exactly what has happened to us, and that he shall come in on the old shares if only he'll come back? Say we changed our mind about Bendigo; and say we must be two men and a boy, and we'd far rather he was the other man than some stranger, especially if there's a fortune in it. Tell him there probably is; and if you will tell it him all from his friend, Denis Dent, gentlemen, I can't say how grateful I shall be to you!"

Denis had an odd reward for his trouble and this outburst. The tall digger shook hands with him for the first and last time.

But the climax of the business was to come long before Moseley's answer. Denis had not been five minutes absent, yet on his return to the new claim it was surrounded by a fringe of diggers embellished by a posse of mounted men in spruce uniform.

"What on earth is it?" cried Denis, rushing up in alarm.

"The old story," answered a digger. "Joe! Joe! Joe!"

"Traps," added another; but Denis had not been on the diggings two months without learning the meaning of both words. Either was the diggers' danger signal, and signified a raid by the police in search of their licenses; in fact, that very sport whose praises Lieutenant Rackham had sung in the ear of his old crony Captain Devenish.

And it was Rackham who led the present field; dismounted, he had run his man to earth in the bark-roofed hut; and his man was no more of a man than the unfortunate Doherty, who was clinging tooth and nail to the door-post, while Rackham himself, a full-blooded n***o in his rage, tugged like a terrier at his ankles.

"Stick to it, little 'un!" cried one in good-humoured encouragement. "If you don't, the claim'll be jumped afore your mate gets back."

"Hold your row," growled another with an oath. "It's a fine deep hole, and I have a jolly good mind to jump it myself."

Denis burst through them at that moment.

"What's the matter?" he demanded of Rackham; but he had the sense not to lay a hand on the fellow's uniform, and the black devil let go one of Doherty's ankles.

"He's not got his license, and he's going to the Logs," says Rackham, showing his white teeth in the sun. "Who are you?"

"His mate," said Denis. "Do you mind letting go his other leg?"

"And where's your license?" added Rackham, turning on him as he complied.

Denis was feeling in his breast pocket with a smile; before quitting the flat Jimmy had proposed to destroy his Ballarat license as of no further use, but Denis knowing better had got it from him on some pretext.

"Here is my license and his, too," said he, and handed both to Rackham, who now stood livid and trembling with mortification, under a derisive cross-fire of "Joe! Joe! Joe!" from all sides of the claim. "If you will examine them," added Denis, with the politeness he could afford, "you will find that they both have about a week to run; and after this you may trust us to take out the new ones in very good time."