Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated) (761 page)
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Authors: SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
There was one other building which might have come under the category of what an inhabitant of the Sluice would have described as a “public edifice” with a comprehensive wave of his pipe which conjured up images of an endless vista of colonnades and minarets. This was the Baptist chapel, a modest little shingle-roofed erection on the bend of the river about a mile above the settlement. It was from this that the town looked at its best, when the harsh outlines and crude colours were somewhat softened by distance. On that particular morning the stream looked pretty as it meandered down the valley; pretty, too, was the long rising upland behind, with its luxuriant green covering; and prettiest of all was Miss Carrie Sinclair, as she laid down the basket of ferns which she was carrying, and stopped upon the summit of the rising ground.
Something seemed to be amiss with that young lady. There was a look of anxiety upon her face which contrasted strangely with her usual appearance of piquant insouciance. Some recent annoyance had left its traces upon her. Perhaps it was to walk it off that she had rambled down the valley; certain it is that she inhaled the fresh breezes of the woodlands as if their resinous fragrance bore with them some antidote for human sorrow.
She stood for some time gazing at the view before her. She could see her father’s house, like a white dot upon the hillside, though strangely enough it was a blue reek of smoke upon the opposite slope which seemed to attract the greater part of her attention. She lingered there, watching it with a wistful look in her hazel eyes. Then the loneliness of her situation seemed to strike her, and she felt one of those spasmodic fits of unreasoning terror to which the bravest women are subject. Tales of natives and of bushrangers, their daring and their cruelty, flashed across her. She glanced at the great mysterious stretch of silent bushland beside her, and stooped to pick up her basket with the intention of hurrying along the road in the direction of the gulches. She started round, and hardly suppressed a scream as a long red-flannelled arm shot out from behind her and withdrew the basket from her very grasp.
The figure which met her eye would to some have seemed little calculated to allay her fears. The high boots, the rough shirt, and the broad girdle with its weapons of death were, however, too familiar to Miss Carrie to be objects of terror; and when above them all she saw a pair of tender blue eyes looking down upon her, and a half-abashed smile lurking under a thick yellow moustache, she knew that for the remainder of that walk ranger and black would be equally powerless to harm her.
“0 Mr. Durton,” she said, “how you did startle me!”
“I’m sorry, miss,” said Abe, in great trepidation at having caused his idol one moment’s uneasiness. “You see,” he continued, with simple cunning, “the weather bein’ fine and my partner gone prospectin’, I thought I’d walk up to Hagley’s Hill and round back by the bend, and there I sees you accidental-like and promiscuous a-standin’ on a hillock.” This astounding falsehood was reeled off by the miner with great fluency, and an artificial sincerity which at once stamped it as a fabrication. Bones had concocted and rehearsed it while tracking the little footsteps in the clay, and looked upon it as the very depth of human guile. Miss Carrie did not venture upon a remark, but there was a gleam of amusement in her eyes which puzzled her lover.
Abe was in good spirits this morning. It may have been the sunshine, or it may have been the rapid rise of shares in the Conemara, which lightened his heart. I am inclined to think, however, that it was referable to neither of these causes. Simple as he was, the scene which he had witnessed the night before could only lead to one conclusion. He pictured himself walking as wildly down the valley under similar circumstances, and his heart was touched with pity for his rival. He felt very certain that the ill-omened face of Mr. Thomas Ferguson of Rochdale Ferry would never more be seen within the walls of Azalea Villa. Then why did she refuse him? He was handsome, he was fairly rich. Could it — ? no, it couldn’t; of course it couldn’t; how could it! The idea was ridiculous — so very ridiculous that it had fermented in the young man’s brain all night, and that he could do nothing but ponder over it in the morning, and cherish it in his perturbed bosom.
They passed down the red pathway together, and along by the river’s bank. Abe had relapsed into his normal condition of taciturnity. He had made one gallant effort to hold forth upon the subject of ferns, stimulated by the basket which he held in his hand, but the theme was not a thrilling one, and after a spasmodic flicker he had abandoned the attempt. While coming along he had been full of racy anecdotes and humorous observations. He had rehearsed innumerable remarks which were to be poured into Miss Sinclair’s appreciative ear. But now his brain seemed of a sudden to have become a vacuum, and utterly devoid of any idea save an insane and overpowering impulse to comment upon the heat of the sun. No astronomer who ever reckoned a parallax was so entirely absorbed in the condition of the celestial bodies as honest Bones while he trudged along by the slow-flowing Australian river.
Suddenly his conversation with his partner came back into his mind. What was it Boss had said upon the subject? “Tell her how they live at the mines.” He revolved it in his brain. It seemed a curious thing to talk about; but Boss had said it, and Boss was always right. He would take the plunge; so with a premonitory hem he blurted out,
“They live mostly on bacon and beans in the valley.”
He could not see what effect this communication had upon his companion. He was too tall to be able to peer under the little straw bonnet. She did not answer. He would try again.
“Mutton on Sundays,” he said.
Even this failed to arouse any enthusiasm. In fact she seemed to be laughing. Boss was evidently wrong. The young man was in despair. The sight of a ruined hut beside the pathway conjured up a fresh idea. He grasped at it as a drowning man to a straw.
“Cockney Jack built that,” he remarked. “Lived there till he died.”
“What did he die of?” asked his companion.
“Three star brandy,” said Abe decisively. “I used to come over of a night when he was bad and sit with him. Poor chap! he had a wife and two children in Putney. He’d rave, and call me Polly, by the hour. He was cleaned out, hadn’t a red cent; but the boys collected rough gold enough to see him through. He’s buried there in that shaft; that was his claim, so we just dropped him down it an’ filled it up. Put down his pick too, an’ a spade an’ a bucket, so’s he’d feel kinder perky and at home.”
Miss Carrie seemed more interested now.
“Do they often die like that?” she asked.
“Well, brandy kills many; but there’s more gets dropped — shot, you know.”
“I don’t mean that. Do many men die alone and miserable down there, with no one to care for them?” and she pointed to the cluster of houses beneath them. “Is there any one dying now? It is awful to think of.”
“There’s none as I knows on likely to throw up their hand.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use so much slang, Mr. Durton,” said Carrie, looking up at him reprovingly out of her voilet eyes. It was strange what an air of proprietorship this young lady was gradually assuming towards her gigantic companion. “You know it isn’t polite. You should get a dictionary and learn the proper words.”
“Ah, that’s it,” said Bones apologetically. “It’s gettin’ your hand on the proper one. When you’ve not got a steam drill, you’ve got to put up with a pick.”
“Yes, but it’s easy if you really try. You could say that a man was `dying,’ or ‘moribund,’ if you like.”
“That’s it,” said the miner enthusiastically. “‘Moribund!’ That’s a word. Why, you could lay over Boss Morgan in the matter of words. ‘Moribund!’ There’s some sound about that.”
Carrie laughed.
“It’s not the sound you must think of, but whether it will express your meaning. Seriously, Mr. Durton, if any one should be ill in the camp you must let me know. I can nurse, and I might be of use. You will, won’t you?”
Abe readily acquiesced, and relapsed into silence as he pondered over the possibility of inoculating himself with some long and tedious disease. There was a mad dog reported from Buckhurst. Perhaps something might be done with that.
“And now I must say good-morning,” said Carrie, as they came to the spot where a crooked pathway branched off from the track and wound up to Azalea Villa. “Thank you ever so much for escorting me.”
In vain Abe pleaded for the additional hundred yards, and adduced the overwhelming weight of the diminutive basket as a cogent reason. The young lady was inexorable. She had taken him too far out of his way already. She was ashamed of herself; she wouldn’t hear of it.
So poor Bones departed in a mixture of many opposite feelings. He had interested her. She had spoken kindly to him. But then she had sent him away before there was any necessity; she couldn’t care much about him if she would do that. I think he might have felt a little more cheerful, however, had he seen Miss Carrie Sinclair as she watched his retiring figure from the garden-gate with a loving look upon her saucy face, and a mischievous smile at his bent head and desponding appearance.
The Colonial Bar was the favourite haunt of the inhabitants of Harvey’s Sluice in their hours of relaxation. There had been a fierce competition between it and the rival establishment termed the Grocery, which, in spite of its innocent appellation, aspired also to dispense spirituous refreshments. The importation of chairs into the latter had led to the appearance of a settee in the former. Spittoons appeared in the Grocery against a picture in the Bar, and, as the frequenters expressed it, the honours were even. When, however, the Grocery led a window-curtain, and its opponent returned a snuggery and a mirror, the game was declared to be in favour of the latter, and Harvey’s Sluice showed its sense of the spirit of the proprietor by withdrawing their custom from his opponent.
Though every man was at liberty to swagger into the Bar itself, and bask in the shimmer of its many coloured bottles, there was a general feeling that the snuggery, or special apartment, should be reserved for the use of the more prominent citizens. It was in this room that committees met, that opulent companies were conceived and born, and that inquests were generally held. The latter, I regret to state, was, in
On this particular evening there was an assemblage of notabilities in the snuggery, though no such pathological ceremony had called them together. Many changes had occurred of late which merited discussion; and it was in this chamber, gorgeous in all the effete luxury of the mirror and settee, that Harvey’s Sluice was wont to exchange ideas. The recent cleaning of the population was still causing some ferment in men’s minds. Then there was Miss Sinclair and her movements to be commented on, and the paying lead in the Conemara, and the recent rumours of bushrangers. It was no wonder that the leading men in the township had come together in the Colonial Bar.
The rangers were the present subject of discussion. For some few days rumours of their presence had been flying about, and an uneasy feeling had pervaded the colony. Physical fear was a thing little known in Harvey’s Sluice. The miners would have turned out to hunt down the desperadoes with as much zest as if they had been so many kangaroos. It was the presence of a large quantity of gold in the town which caused anxiety. It was felt that the fruits of their labour must be secured at any cost. Messages had been sent over to Buckhurst for as many troopers as could be spared, and in the mean time the main street of the Sluice was paraded at night by volunteer sentinels.
A fresh impetus had been given to the panic by the report brought in to-day by Jim Struggles. Jim was of an ambitious and aspiring turn of mind, and after gazing in silent disgust at his last week’s clean up, he had metaphorically shaken the clay of Harvey’s Sluice from his feet, and had started off into the woods with the intention of prospecting round until he could hit upon some likely piece of ground for himself. Jim’s story was that he was sitting upon a fallen trunk eating his midday damper and rusty bacon, when his trained ear had caught the clink of horses’ hoofs. He had hardly time to take the precaution of rolling off the tree and crouching down behind it, before a troop of men came riding down through the bush, and passed within a stone-throw of him.
“There was Bill Smeaton and Murphy Duff,” said Struggles, naming two notorious ruffians; “and there was three more that I couldn’t rightly see. And they took the trail to the right, and looked like business all over, with their guns in their hands.”
Jim was submitted to a searching cross-examination that evening; but nothing could shake his testimony or throw a further light upon what he had seen. He told the story several times and at long intervals; and though there might be a pleasing variety in the minor incidents, the main facts were always identically the same. The matter began to look serious.