This Golden Land (44 page)

     But she knew that calling him Mr. O'Brien had more to do with keeping a barrier between herself and this man to whom she was becoming frighteningly attracted. And because she suspected Jamie O'Brien felt the same way toward her—the way she would feel his eyes on her, the self-assured smile he would send her across a glowing campfire—she feared he might make an overture that she would not be able to resist.

     Hannah pushed strands of hair from her face as she squinted in the late afternoon sunlight to watch the bucket go down into the narrow mine shaft that was wide enough for one man with a bit of elbow room. The wind in this desert blew relentlessly, night and day, hot and cold, north to south, east to west. Hannah was forever holding onto her skirts and taming her hair. She had lost her bonnet long ago, to watch it carried away on the wind.

     But she was exhilarated. When the bandage came off Jamie's shin to reveal a clean wound, she had known that the iodine prevented infections in serious wounds such as compound fractures. What other miracles might the preparation perform? When Mike Maxberry had offered to escort her back to Adelaide, Hannah had thought of what she could do with the money, if opals were indeed as precious as Jamie O'Brien said—she could move out of the Australia Hotel and into a place of her own from which she could study and experiment, and widen her scope of learning. And help so many more people. She had thought: Neal is crossing the Nullarbor with Sir Reginald, Alice is touring the colonies with Sam Glass, and Liza Guinness thinks I am with Neal. No one would miss her, and so Hannah had said she would like to stay and hunt for opals.

     After Jamie had bought his mysterious treasure map, he had discreetly chatted up experienced gold and gem hunters, called fossickers, to learn about opals, and based on what an old fossicker had told him, he knew they would have to sink holes and "gouge" for opals. So he and Maxberry had picked up equipment and supplies all over Adelaide, never too much from one place so as not to rouse suspicion and cause a "run." Jamie and his men had worked night and day in the spot Stinky Sam found, until the whole area became so pocked with holes, each with its own miner gouging away,
that Nan had laughed and said, "
Kooba peedi
," which in her tongue meant "white men in holes." Jamie had taken his knife and etched onto one of the boulders,
Coober Pedy.

     At first, their finds had not been spectacular—small pieces of pale blue stone, and not exactly the "millions" a drunken Sam had reported—but Jamie and his men dreamed of great chunks of fiery gems such as they had heard of in legend, and so they had settled down to serious mining, creating a home of this bustling little settlement 500 miles north of Adelaide and consisting of six tents, a horse corral, a twig and brush shed for working the opals, and an outhouse made of planks from one of the wagons and constructed by Blackie White, who had declared, "Dig the dunny deep the first time and you won't have to keep moving it." Although water had to be rationed, Hannah was able to hang out laundry. It hadn't been washed, but the wind and sunlight and sand seemed to whip the clothes clean.

     And it wasn't all hardship and labor. Charlie Olde and Stinky Sam were so good with pistols that there was meat at almost every meal, and what those two former stockmen didn't catch, Nan got with her digging stick. The three carrot-topped brothers Roddy, Cyrus and Elmo, bricklayers with whom Jamie had linked up in Botany Bay, and whom Hannah couldn't tell apart, provided evening musical entertainment—Roddy on the banjo, Cyrus with a fiddle, and Elmo whistling through his missing front teeth.

     And there was always Jamie with his amazing store of Outback tales.

     While everyone watched and waited as Jamie worked the windlass with Blackie White, and they waited for Church to dig himself out—and Hannah tried not to stare at Jamie's sweaty back and sinewy arms—a cooking aroma drifted their way. Nan was at one of the fires, roasting a fat goanna she had trapped and killed, cooking it in the skin Aboriginal-style. Hannah didn't know Nan's story. No one did. Judging by the scars pitting her dark face, Nan had once had a severe case of pox, a white man's disease. Jamie said that Mike Maxberry didn't talk about the native woman he kept company with, saying simply that her entire clan had been wiped out by a chicken pox epidemic, with only Nan surviving. For some reason, she had attached herself to Mike and stayed with him since.

     Nan didn't talk much, even though she knew English. But one thing
Hannah had heard the Aboriginal woman say was that this area of the Out-back was called Plains of Fire by the Aborigines. A wilderness that, in the summer, was hotter than blazes where "not even blackfellah goes."

     This was the source of what had been troubling Hannah on this sunny spring afternoon in September as she had noodled on mullocks for over-looked opals: her growing fear that these men were so gripped with opal fever that they would not abandon these fields when the time came. And that time, blazing summer, was coming soon.

     Suddenly a muffled roar was heard underground.

     The men exchanged fearful glances.

     "Church!" Jamie called down. "You still there?"

     They listened, but all they heard was the whistling wind.

     "I'm going down," Jamie said.

     "And lose you, too?" Maxberry shouted. "Boyo, it's suicide going down there. Ralph is buried!"

     Jamie climbed over the side and, using the handholds and footholds gouged into the stone wall of the shaft, slipped his right foot into the bucket, gripped the rope and said, "Lower me."

     Roddy the carrot-topped bricklayer took over for Jamie and cranked the handles with Blackie White. They waited in anxious silence as the winch creaked Jamie O'Brien down into the abyss, his dark-blond head swallowed by darkness. They heard a thud at the bottom, and then the hurried clearing of rocks and stones, heavy breathing and the occasional, "Hang on, Church, I'm coming."

     Hannah bit her lip. Only last week Jamie had wondered out loud if the men were sinking shafts too close together, possibly creating a dangerous situation by destabilizing this patch of desert. As sounds drifted up from the bottom of the hole, but no sound coming from Ralph Gilchrist, Hannah looked toward the distant horizon, across the hundreds of miles of flat windswept desolation, and thought: No one knows where we are.

     Finally: "Got him!" And as Roddy and Blackie strained at the windlass, hoisting Ralph up the shaft, hands reached out, ready to grab him.

     Ralph was covered in blood from a head wound. Hannah was immediately at his side as the men laid their friend on the ground. He was fully
awake, Hannah could see, and in a great deal of pain. The cave-in had pelted him with rocks and stones that had cut him all over.

     The men joked with Ralph to lift his spirits. And Ralph, himself grinning, roared, "Quit yer laughing, you lot. This ain't as funny as it looks!"

     But when Hannah saw Ralph Gilchrist grimace, revealing his teeth, she received a shock. "Merciful Heaven," she whispered.

     She stood and, suddenly shaken, said, "Will you please carry him to his tent? I shall look after him there."

     Jamie climbed up and out of the mine shaft, to the cheers of his friends, but Hannah was too stunned to congratulate him on a brave deed.

     The opal hunters didn't know it, but they suddenly had a very serious and deadly situation on their hands.

W
HEN
H
ANNAH FINISHED SEEING TO
R
ALPH GILCHRIST'S
wounds, none of which were life threatening, she came out of the tent to find that night had fallen and the men were gathered around the main campfire. Stinky Sam was digging biscuits out of the embers while Nan was skinning the goanna and dropping juicy chunks of lizard meat onto the men's tin plates. Hannah watched them pass around a canvas water bag, drinking freely.

     She was worried about their dwindling water supply. Scant winter rains had come through, keeping the barrels full, and Nan was adept at digging in dry creek beds and sucking up brackish water through a reed. But a rainless summer was coming. While there was enough water now for men and horses, soon it would be all gone. Hannah had held back some of the precious water as an eye wash, because of the constant threat of a conjunctivitis called "sandy blight," but even that would not last long.

     And now they had an even bigger worry. She glanced back into the tent
where Ralph Gilchrist lay moaning. He hadn't long to live, and it had nothing to do with the cave-in.

     Hannah lifted her face to the cold wind. The air felt different this evening, strange. Was rain coming? But no clouds covered the bright, frosty stars.

     She looked at Jamie O'Brien at the campfire, noting that he had changed into a fresh shirt, one that he had hung on a line to let the wind and sand blast it clean. Over it, the familiar black leather vest with silver buttons. And while he had to forgo shaving because of water restrictions, Jamie kept his dark blond beard clipped short and his hair trimmed at the collar.

     As she looked at the other men's faces illuminated in the fire's glow, while they ate and laughed and talked, Hannah thought what a close-knit fraternity it was. It was the mateship peculiar to the Outback, she knew, where danger was so rife that many times the only thing between a man and certain death was the friend riding at his side.

     So the problem of convincing these men to abandon the opal fields, that it was a matter of life or death, lay with Mr. O'Brien. Hannah knew that if she could convince
him
to leave, the others would follow.

     As Jamie told a story, he kept his eyes on Hannah, standing outside the tent Ralph Gilchrist shared with Tabby and Bluey Brown. She had a worried look on her face. Was Church all right? Hannah was a sight, Jamie thought with a rush of sexual yearning. Her gown had seen better days, and wisps of hair hung loose about her face. But she was still every inch the lady.

     Hannah Conroy occupied Jamie's thoughts night and day. He dreamed about her. As he toiled away in his mine, chipping at the sandstone, he wondered what it would be like to hold her, to kiss her. After years of chasing skirts and enjoying amorous conquests, Jamie thought himself immune to love. Had not even come close.

     Until now.

     Now he knew where the songs and poems came from, about love and romance and eternal faithfulness. He had thought they were just fanciful notions and words composed by lovesick young men. Jamie wished now that he himself had the gift for poetry and lyric, because simply thinking, "I love this woman," sounded inadequate and far from his true feelings.

     "You always tell the story wrong, Jamie," Charlie Olde teased. "The
dog that sat on the tucker box. The way I heard it, the word wasn't
sat."

     As the others laughed, Jamie growled, "Watch your language," and suddenly seeing Hannah standing there, Charlie blushed fiercely and apologized to her. But Hannah wasn't offended. Jamie O'Brien's tales fascinated her.

     As colorful as he was, however, Hannah realized that Jamie didn't know much beyond Australia or his own experience. He'd been around and seen a lot, but when she made mention, perhaps, of Keats or Byron, he didn't know what she was talking about. He knew nothing of history or science, and his knowledge of geography, outside of Australia, was scant. "Never been to England. I hear it rains a lot." Jamie O'Brien's smarts lay in his foxy quick-thinking brain, craftily tricking other men, and staying one step ahead of the law.

     She could not help comparing him to Neal, which she knew was not fair, but there it was all the same. Neal, who was book-smart and educated, a gentleman with a thirst for knowledge, for solving mysteries, a man of honesty and integrity and with whom she had once thought she was going to die.

     How was it possible to be attracted to two men at once, and men so different from each other? Perhaps it
was
possible, if the emotions themselves were different, too. Her love for Neal ran deep and sure, and made her toss and turn in restless dreams. Her feelings for Jamie were less sure, less definable, and more immediate. He felt forbidden to her, and therefore exciting. Not love, perhaps, but desire. Definitely desire.

     Hannah always looked forward to evenings at the campfire—in the company of men who were shy and polite with her, who watched their language and called her Miss Conroy—beneath a vast starry sky, listening to Jamie O'Brien's stories. She thought what beautiful ballads they would make, and she imagined Alice singing them on a stage to a spellbound audience. Jamie spun colorful tales of drovers and sheepmen, soldiers and outlaws, of immoral women and saintly wives, of explorers and adventures, swagmen and bushrangers, natives who went walkabout, and men who drank and gambled and gave up their lives to pursue elusive dreams. Jamie told of Aborigines named Pingjim and Joe, and mountains called Karra Karra and Wellington, of towns with ancient names and names that were new,
like Gundagai and Victoria. And he boasted about his own swindles, taking money from gullible men, selling land that didn't exist, making off with the horses and wagons of Her Majesty's troops, all told in a wry tone with a cheeky grin.