The Gold Seekers (31 page)

“He was badly hurt, wasn’t he, Mama?” the young voice questioned. “Eddie said he dislocated his shoulder but Dickon put it to rights, and they thought that was all the injury he had suffered. But it must have been worse than they supposed.”

“He has suffered a concussion,” the older voice answered practically. “But I’m sure he will get over it, after a few days’ rest and quiet. There—” Luke felt a blessed coolness pervading his scalp, holding the throbbing at bay, and he let himself sink down into the yielding comfort of his pillows, content to lie there with his eyes closed, lulled by the whispering voices and strangely at peace.

“Let us hope he is not like our last visitor, Mama,” the girl’s voice declared. “He seemed such a charming gentleman, so—so worldly and so widely traveled. And an officer, who had served in the Household Cavalry! And yet Dickon is sure that he was the one who killed dear old Winyara … and for no reason. Winyara would have done him no harm.”

“People are afraid of the aborigines—those who do not know them, that’s to say. The men who have come here from California tend to suppose they are like the red Indians, ready to attack them without provocation, and they react accordingly. And”—the mother’s voice took on a sharper note—“Dickon took a strong dislike to Major Lewis, you know, Elizabeth.”

“Dickon is usually right, Mama. Because he cannot hear or speak, he has other ways of judging people—ways the blackfellows taught him. I’d trust his judgment anywhere.” There was a pause, and then the girl’s voice added quietly, “Dickon likes this young man. I could tell by the way he carried him in after he had fallen from his horse. He took so much care not to hurt him.”

She was talking about him, Luke realized, and felt heartened by her words. But … the earlier part of her conversation with her mother ought, he was reasonably certain, to have had some significance for him; only he could not call to mind what the significance was. They had spoken of a major, who had served in the British Household Cavalry—a major named Lewis—but the name meant nothing to him. It seemed strange that Dickon should suspect Major Lewis of killing an aborigine and that—what was the girl’s name? Elizabeth, that was it—Elizabeth’s mother should pour scorn on the idea. He puzzled over it and then dismissed it.

The voices ceased, there was a faint click of a door closing, and Luke drifted back to sleep, his mind again blank and untroubled.

The girl’s voice wakened him. He opened his eyes and saw that she had placed a lighted oil lamp on the table by his bedside and that she was carrying a steaming bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other.

“Mama thought that you must be hungry, so I’ve brought you some broth. Do you feel well enough to take it, Mr.

Murphy?”

The contents of the bowl smelled very appetizing, and Luke tried to sit up, surprised and more than a little embarrassed when the effort proved beyond him, and the girl had to set down her bowl and come to his aid.

“I—I’m sorry,” he stammered awkwardly. “I seem to be as weak as a kitten.”

“That is not to be wondered at,” she assured him, picking up the bowl and seating herself on the edge of the bed. “You were rather badly hurt, you know, and Mama says that you have a concussion. I’m Elizabeth Tempest, by the way. And you’re Luke Murphy, my brother says.”

“I guess so, Miss Elizabeth.” She was a beautiful girl, Luke saw, studying her by the light of the lamp. Tall and slim, with wide-set blue eyes and a mass of corn-colored hair, braided very neatly about her head. Her dress was simple—blue, echoing the color of her eyes, with a starched white collar and matching cuffs, worn with a white pinafore over it, presumably because she had been at work in the kitchen. He took the bowl from her, holding out his hand for the spoon. “I can feed myself,” he asserted, anxious to regain some measure of masculine independence.

“Are you sure you can? Mama said I should feed you if you couldn’t manage it yourself. She thought you might still be experiencing vertigo.”

Luke shook his head and was deeply chagrined to find that the vertigo persisted, the ceiling of the room suddenly seeming to be rising and falling and the end of his bed describing odd gyrations for which he could not account. But he clung obstinately to the spoon and, by the exercise of stern willpower, managed to drink a few sips of the cooling broth. Elizabeth Tempest watched him gravely. “You really should let me help you. Your hands are shaking badly, you know, and you’ll spill it if you’re not careful. Besides, I’m really quite good at it—I feed the calves and any sick animals on the farm.” Her lips twitched, as if she were trying to suppress a smile, and suddenly Luke found himself laughing at the absurd comparison.

“All right, then.” He yielded up the bowl, still laughing. “Pretend I’m a sick calf.”

She joined in his laughter and was setting about the task of feeding him when her mother came in.

“You must be feeling much better, Mr. Murphy,” she said approvingly, “to be able to laugh like that. I’m so glad. For a while we were quite worried about you. Could you manage to take some more broth, do you think? Or tea and cake, perhaps?”

“Nothing more, thank you, ma’am.”

“You slept for a long time,” Mrs. Tempest told him. “Almost twenty-four hours. You were on your way to Bathurst, were you not, when you stopped to help Edmund and Dickon?”

To Bathurst, Luke thought—had he been on his way to Bathurst, and if he had, for what purpose was he going there? He could not remember; the past was a blank. “I— yes, I guess so,” he managed. “I must have been.”

Mrs. Tempest eyed him uncertainly and then, with a warning glance at her daughter, said sympathetically, “Do not worry if your memory has failed you. Concussion has that effect sometimes. It all will come back to you in a little while, I’m quite sure.”

But nothing came back to him, not even his name, although, since the Tempests addressed him as Luke or Mr. Murphy, he supposed that must be his name, and he answered to it readily enough. Within another twenty-four hours his physical ills had greatly subsided, and realizing that his hosts were short of labor, he offered his assistance, which was gratefully accepted. The Pengallon holding was extensive and well stocked, with several thousand merino and crossbred sheep, as well as the beef herd, and there were hundreds of acres of arable land, now starting to show signs of neglect.

Apart from Tempest himself—who worked as hard as any of them—only Edmund and Dickon and an aborigine called

Billy Joe were left to cope with the stock and the day-to-day chores, and Luke’s help was welcomed. To his own surprise he found that he possessed some skills: he was able to milk the house cows, could handle a plow with inbred competence, and required no instruction in either the blacksmith’s art or that of the sawyers and carpenters, who had abandoned their employment to join in the search for gold.

In normal times, Pengallon must have been as self-contained as a small village, he realized. It was well supplied with cottage homes for the laborers and their families; there were stables, paddocks for the stud mares and the foals that were bred there, granaries and sheep pens, a large shearing shed, and a beautiful garden containing fruit trees, vines, and close to an acre devoted to vegetable cultivation. A small, fenced-in lawn, surrounded by shade trees, grew a variety of flowers and sweet-smelling flowering shrubs native to the area, and Mrs. Tempest, whose province this was, had had a pretty wooden summerhouse built there, where guests were entertained and visiting children happily

played.

Not all the women had left with their men; five or six, with young families, had remained, and Elizabeth, Luke discovered by chance, regularly took a class for Bible studies and the basics of education, which most of the children attended in the now-empty granary.

He spent as much of his time as he could in her company. It was not much, for he toiled on the land from dawn to dusk, but he came increasingly to savor the brief interludes when they were able to be together; walking by the river just before dusk, or sitting by her side at mealtimes and later, when the whole family gathered in the pleasantly furnished living room; listening to her pretty, tuneful voice as she sang to her mother’s accompaniment on an old but lovingly preserved upright piano. Such moments, and the fact that the Tempests had accepted him almost as one of their own, brought him a warm glow of happiness, which, he began fervently to hope, might continue into the foreseeable future.

He no longer worried about his lost memory or asked himself why it was that he had been on his way to Bathurst when he had encountered the stampeding beef herd, for it seemed no longer to matter. Edmund had tried, once or twice, to jog his memory by talking of the goldfields on the Turon, whence he had supposedly come, but Luke knew that he had little interest in gold-seeking now.

The diggers who had camped on the Pengallon stretch of the river had moved on, with their tents and their tools, seeking more promising sites on the Louisa, the Meroo, and the Pyramil, and the sluice the Tempests had worked had, of necessity, to be neglected, if the valuable merino flocks were to be kept alive until the drought broke. Luke took only a passing interest in it, recognizing simply that it was of sound and skillful construction, for which, Edmund told him, they had Major Lewis to thank. Dickon had scowled darkly at the mention of that name and walked away, his face like thunder.

“He will have it that Lewis murdered an old aborigine shepherd we had here—a fine old fellow called Winyara, whom we all loved,” Edmund explained. “But there wasn’t a shred of proof, except some bloodstains on a Colt revolver that Dickon unearthed from God knows where. It could just as easily have belonged to one of the diggers as to the major, and in any event, what possible reason could he have had for killing the old man? He was a British Army officer; he fought in the Carlist War in Spain—he would be unlikely to panic at the sight of a frail old blackfellow, even if Winyara had crept up on him in the dark. And besides, Lewis stayed with us for a couple of nights, which, I’m sure, he would never have done if he had battered the poor old fellow to death with a Colt six-gun.”

“A Colt six-gun?” Luke echoed, mildly puzzled because he had a sudden vision of a bolstered Colt revolver coming, or so it seemed to him, from nowhere.

“Yes, that’s right,” Edmund confirmed indifferently. “It’s an American handgun, which fires six shots from a revolving chamber.” He grinned good-naturedly. “You’re an American, or so you told us when we first picked you up. You must have seen dozens of them.”

And most probably he had, Luke told himself; men would have carried such weapons in the California diggings for

protection … and worn them in holsters, no doubt, as western cowhands wore them, ready to hand.

“Ask Dickon to show you the one he found,” Edmund suggested. “Who knows? It might trigger that lost memory of yours!”

Luke nodded, but, he asked himself, what would it profit him if he did recover his memory? Life at Pengallon was simple and uncomplicated, and even if the work was hard, Rick Tempest was an appreciative and generous employer, and Edmund and Dickon were his friends now, as well as his workmates. And there was the sweet young Elizabeth, with whom, if the truth were known, he was already more than a little in love. It would be a wrench to leave them, and had they not all insisted that they did not want him to go? True, he was penniless—his gold-seeking in both California and on the Turon appeared to have shown no return—but he could earn a living as a farmhand here or anywhere else. He could support a wife, and if Elizabeth should look upon him with favor and her father give his consent, then the last thing he wanted to do was resume his journey to Bathurst. Or— “Can you take water out to the broodmares in the far paddock?” Edmund asked, breaking into his thoughts. “It would appear that we have visitors.” He pointed to a small procession approaching the homestead from the direction of Bathurst, and Luke was able to make out a curricle, drawn by a pair of bay horses, with two mounted men trotting, in leisurely fashion, behind it. “Visitors?” he questioned.

“Yes, indeed,” Edmund confirmed, sounding suddenly elated. “And if my eyesight isn’t failing me, they are most welcome visitors, Luke my boy. The Broomes from Sydney Town—Captain Justin Broome, his daughter Jenny, and, I think, his son John. Yes, I’m sure that’s who they are.”

He was off at a gallop, waving his hat excitedly in the air and shouting an enthusiastic welcome. Luke stared after him and then, mindful of his duties, went to water the broodmares.

Over dinner that evening, he was introduced to the new arrivals, who, it was evident, were friends of long standing, on intimate terms with all the Tempests. Their exchange of went on throughout the meal, and Luke listened with a polite pretense of interest, although little of what they said had any meaning for him. But he studied them as he ate, watching each in turn and liking what he saw, for all they were strangers and their concerns outside his ken.

Justin Broome was a retired naval post captain, of some distinction, he judged—probably a contemporary of Rick Tempest’s, or even a onetime shipmate in his youth, for it was apparent from their conversation that they knew each other well and had memories in common going back many years. His son, whom the Tempests addressed as Johnny, was a tall, bearded fellow and a newspaperman, recently returned from an assignment for his paper in the new Victoria goldfields.

The daughter, Jenny, was a few years older than Elizabeth, a charming, vivacious young woman, with bright auburn hair and a most engaging smile, in whom, it became increasingly clear as the meal progressed, Edmund Tempest had a keen and proprietary interest.

Evidently there was another son—a naval officer, like his father—who had arrived in Sydney comparatively recently, in command of Her Majesty’s ship Galah, and who was referred to as Red.

Jenny spoke of him with affection and, it seemed to the listening Luke, with a measure of pity when she mentioned that he had been relieved of his command.

“For God’s sake, why?” Rick Tempest demanded. “I heard that Commodore Skinner was throwing his weight about over some quite incredible threat of a Russian attack on Port Jackson by the Tsar’s Pacific Fleet. They were supposed to be mounting the attack from Valparaiso or something equally absurd. Did Red point out the absurdity of the notion or what?”