The Gold Seekers (38 page)

They sounded happy—almost, Morgan thought cynically, as happy as he himself felt … and with good reason, for his luck had changed since his arrival, ten months earlier, in the state of Victoria. He leaned back, drawing with conscious pleasure on his pipe, the thin blue cloud of tobacco smoke effectively warding off the assault of the flies and other stinging insects that plagued the campsite.

There were other men, hundreds of them, and a veritable forest of tents and ramshackle shelters in the valley a quarter of a mile away, their cooking fires lighting the gathering darkness like so many fireflies. And they would be quarreling among themselves, Morgan knew, grumbling incessantly about the price of food and the exorbitant charges made by the government for the monthly licenses they were compelled to take out before they were allowed to begin their search for gold. Most bitterly, though, they would be complaining of the brutality of the Victoria police, trading stories of armed raids and arbitrary arrests, of beatings and heavy fines, and cursing the man who ordered these things— the local police inspector, whom they had nicknamed Basher Brownlow.

Brownlow—Lieutenant Leonard Arthur Brownlow, to give him the name and rank he claimed were his—was not, Morgan reflected, a man he either liked or trusted, but he was undoubtedly one with whom it was expedient to keep on good terms. He was a tyrant, and he was corrupt, and it was unlikely that he had ever held commissioned rank in the British Army. Unlike himself, Len Brownlow made no effort to appear to be of gentle birth; his accent was uneducated, his language coarse, and his manners were uncouth. But he ruled his police troopers with a rod of iron, and they—many of them recruited from the Van Diemen’s Land convict establishments—respected and obeyed him without question, their high-handed treatment of the gold diggers more a reflection of their superior’s attitude than a manifestation of their own.

Morgan’s thin lips curved into a satisfied smile. Soon after staking his claim in the Ballarat field, he had come up against Lieutenant Brownlow, and they had struck a mutually advantageous bargain for which, he was forced to concede, he was now more than glad. The diggers were an unruly lot, particularly in the region of Ballarat, where the worst of them seemed to have congregated. There were Irishmen, Americans, English, Italians, and native-born, and an even higher proportion of ex-convicts than were serving in the police, and—inevitably, with so volatile a mixture of races—there was unrest, coupled with hardship and heavy drinking, often culminating in riots and pitched battles.

He had been in a position where he had been able to give Brownlow warning of impending trouble, and the police inspector had shown his gratitude in more ways than one.

He had had only to ask, Morgan recalled, and his gold had been sent to Melbourne under police escort; troublemakers of whom he had complained had been promptly arrested and taken off to jail; and when one of his horses had contracted some equine ailment and died, Brownlow had replaced it from the government pound, gratis and without question.

“Captain Humphrey!” Young Angus Broome’s voice broke into his thoughts, and Jasper Morgan reluctantly tapped out his pipe and stood up.

“Yes, what is it?”

“Meal’s ready, sir,” Angus told him, jerking his head in the direction of the campfire. “Lamb chops.” He grinned. “Bundilly lamb. Don’t let it spoil.”

“I won’t,” Morgan assured him, pleasantly conscious of hunger. He had been uncommonly fortunate in his choice of companions this time, he was aware. Angus and Lachlan were of a very different stamp from the two dour Mormon farm boys and the Australian seamen with whom he had been in partnership in California.

They were young, scarcely more than boys, it was true, but they were well educated and articulate, as well as hard and diligent workers, putting to shame the hired men he had initially employed to sink his mine shaft. Their father, William Broome, was a wealthy sheep farmer, whose station, Bundilly, was only fifty miles away, on the Murray River … and he saw to it that they did not starve.

At the outset, the elder Broome had been adamant in his determination not to allow his sons to succumb to the all-prevailing gold fever and go prospecting, but … Morgan smiled to himself as he hunkered down beside the glowing ashes of the fire and accepted a brimming plate from seventeen-year-old Lachlan. He had used his persuasive charm to some effect, and the boys’ eager pleading had done the rest. They had been entrusted to his care, and their father’s visits —ostensibly to ensure that they were supplied with fresh provisions—had become less frequent. Latterly, because the wet season had caused flooding over his vast acreage and he was short of labor, William Broome had not come in person but had sent their supplies by carrier, and the two boys had claimed proudly that this was a tacit admission that he considered them adult and able to take care of themselves.

As, in fact, they were—too adult, and rapidly becoming more than able to take care of themselves. Enjoying his meal, Morgan studied them covertly, conscious of a faint but growing anxiety. He was loath to part with them, yet he knew parting was inevitable, once they started to gain knowledge and ask questions. It had been easy at first to pull the wool over their eyes; they knew nothing of gold mining and, obedient and trusting, did as he bade them, toiling with pick and shovel to sink their mine shafts twenty, forty, even seventy or eighty feet through the layers of earth, red sand, and quartz, till the bluish clay marl was reached and a gold-bearing vein —if one existed—was revealed.

I

He had left the boys to load the marl into sacks and barrows, cart it down to the creek, and wash tons of it through the cradle rocker, to take as reward for their labor a few ounces of glittering dust, while he himself, whenever he could contrive to be alone, sought for and found the mine’s real treasure, in the form of lumps, chiseled skillfully from the gold-impregnated rock. In the shaft’s darkness, and in their ignorance, his partners remained unaware of the finds he made, and he kept them well hidden.

And so, Jasper Morgan reflected with regret, it might well have continued, with the profits from their enterprise paying for their living expenses and affording each of them a wage. But as luck would have it, young Angus had inadvertently made the strike of a lifetime when, wielding his pick a trifle carelessly, he had brought part of the wall of the mine shaft crashing about his ears. After the rubble had been cleared and the lad, shaken but not seriously hurt, had been extricated, the gold was there: seven of the largest and purest nuggets any of them had ever seen, worn smooth by the water in which, hundreds of years before, they had lain, unnoticed and deemed without value by the primitive people who had then inhabited this land. The smallest had weighed thirty-five pounds; the largest, ninety-eight.

The find—worth at least twenty thousand pounds—had gone to Melbourne, escorted by Brownlow’s mounted policemen, and, on Morgan’s instructions, had been lodged, in his sole name, at the government Treasury Office. He held the official receipt for it, of course, but … Leaning forward to pour himself tea from the blackened billycan on the fire’s embers, Morgan smothered an exasperated sigh. Added to his own secret plundering of the shafts they had sunk on their claim, it was a small fortune waiting to be paid over. Enough to keep him in comparative luxury for the rest of his days, provided he was able to keep it for himself. Divided into three, it would not suffice, and the young Broomes were now constantly talking of making the split, to enable them to return to their father’s station and take up their lives as sheep farmers once again.

The tea was scalding hot, and Morgan swore softly as it burned his lips. Once again, he thought resentfully, he was

facing the situation he had faced at Windy Gully, back in California. But this time the same solution to the problem could not be contemplated, for a variety of reasons—the boys’ wealthy and influential father, for one, plus the fact that here at Ballarat all the diggers lived cheek by jowl—an estimated ten thousand miners in this area alone.

He leaned back, sipping his tea more cautiously while listening to the boys’ cheerful chatter, and his dark brows knitted in a frown. They were accustomed to his moods and did not question or seek to break his silence, but as he took in the gist of their present conversation, his irritation grew. Damned young fools, he thought contemptuously. Better educated and infinitely superior to the Mormon pair—what were their names? Murphy—Daniel and Luke Murphy, but … the Broomes were no more ambitious than the Murphy brothers had been.

“We could stick together, Lachie,” he heard Angus say. “Our two shares would be ample to buy—what? Ten thousand acres between us, and Pa would let us have the stock, enough to start us off, anyway. He’d lend us a couple of merino rams, I’m sure he would.”

“Yes, of course he would,” Lachlan agreed. “Because we wouldn’t have to quit Bundilly. We could buy out old Abel Knight’s holding—he’d let it go if we made him a fair offer— and then we could squat, like Pa did. And we could still work for him when he needed us.”

“I’d want to do that,” Angus said forcefully. “After all, Pa let us go, didn’t he? He let us come here, even though half the men went off to the diggings, leaving him short. We owe Pa, Lachie. I reckon we’re agreed on that point.”

“Yes, we’re agreed.” Sensing Lachlan’s eyes on him, Jasper Morgan closed his own, feigning weariness, but Angus, undeterred by the subterfuge, leaned across to grasp his booted leg, snaking it gently.

“Captain Humphrey, sir,” he said politely. “My brother and I—we’re grateful for all you’ve done for us, all you’ve taught us. But we’ve talked it over for quite a while now, sir, and we both reckon we’ve been away long enough.”

“Do you?” Morgan challenged, an edge to his voice. “You’re making a mistake, you know. One should never quit when one’s on a winning streak, and we are, boy! We could double or even treble what we’ve got.”

“We figured we have all we need, sir,” Angus argued with characteristic obstinacy. He waved a hand in the direction of the forest of tents below them. “We’ve been lucky so far. There are men here who’ve worked harder and longer than we have, with nothing to show for it. Some poor devils can’t raise the price of their licenses—you know that, sir, and you know what the police do to them if they can’t. Besides”—he glanced at his brother—“we’re afraid that before much longer there will be trouble, like there was in Bendigo, and frankly, Lachie and I want no part of that. Pa wouldn’t like it if we were mixed up in any sort of confrontation with the police. He’s a magistrate, sir. It would go against him, you

see.

Jasper Morgan took out his tobacco pouch and his pipe. He took his time filling and lighting it, but both boys continued to wait, eyeing him expectantly, and finally he was compelled to attempt to refute Angus’s argument. He did so with easy fluency, denying any possibility of trouble, for all he was acutely aware that it was there, simmering beneath the surface. The Governor of Victoria, Charles Latrobe— torn, it was said, between the rights of the farmers and landowners and the ever-increasing influx of gold seekers, who demanded the right to search wherever they pleased— had recently increased the license fee from thirty shillings to three pounds a month, and as Angus had said, a great many of the Ballarat diggers were unable to raise such a sum. The gold commissioner at Forest Creek had been besieged in his tent when he had posted the new decree, and throughout the goldfields there were rumbles of discontent, culminating in a proposal, put forward by a number of the Ballarat miners, to form some kind of union for the protection of their rights, which had been so brutally denied at Bendigo, Beechworth, and Castlemaine.

Indeed, he himself had been approached by two of the men involved and invited to join, Morgan recalled, and he had given serious consideration to the suggestion. Nevertheless … He smiled in friendly fashion from Angus Broome to his brother and reiterated his firm belief that they

would be risking little if they delayed their return home for a few more weeks.

Angus, however, to his annoyance, remained adamant.

“We’ve made up our minds, Captain Humphrey,” he asserted. “There’s no point in your trying to persuade us otherwise. We’d leave you the claim, sir, with no strings attached—that goes without saying. But—”

“But what, lad?” Morgan broke in, vainly trying not to show his irritation. “What do you want me to do?”

“Come back to Melbourne with us, sir,” Angus returned uncompromisingly, “cash in the gold, and pay us our share. That’s all we’re asking.”

The prospect of going back to Melbourne held singularly little appeal for Jasper Morgan. The invasion of thousands of men, women, and even children, compelled to halt there on their way to the goldfields, had brought chaos in its wake. The flimsy wooden houses, built by the first settlers, were insufficient to accommodate even half the newcomers, and conditions in the tented camp that had sprung up were unsanitary and unhealthy. There was no street lighting, robberies were commonplace, and the roads, after rain, were a sea of mud, in which wheeled vehicles quickly became bogged down. People on foot had no choice but to wade through the morass, often knee-deep in the glutinous mud. He had been fortunate in that he had managed to sell his brig Banshee to a speculator, after disposing very profitably of his cargo, and, Morgan reminded himself, the vessel was now tied up alongside the jetty at Liardet’s Beach, serving as a lodging house for those better-off new arrivals who could afford the present owner’s sky-high charges.

He forced himself to adopt a quiet, placatory tone, drawing deeply on his pipe and meeting young Angus Broome’s challenging gaze with a hint of a smile. “Well, if you’re sure that is what you both want, Angus,” he conceded, “then I’m willing. But give it another week or ten days, will you? I’ve some matters to attend to here before I can leave.”

Having won his point, Angus readily acceded to the brief delay. A week, even two weeks, might not be enough, Morgan knew—but there was always Brownlow. The police inspector might, if offered a bribe, be willing to detain one or both of the young Broomes on some trumped-up charge, at least long enough for him to go to the Treasury Office ahead of them. And Brownlow need not be told why… .