Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  He shifted his hard stare from the fire to Cabell's face and examined him coolly for several seconds. “No saying what you blokes in frockcoats will do when your pocket's been touched,” he said, and grinned derisively back at Cabell's tight mouth through the gossamer of his pipe smoke. “They took my old man up a lane once and cut his ears off. But he was a right smart cove and they never laid hands on him again till the night I'm speaking of. They were coming back from church and caught him lugging the safe out of old MacPherson's warehouse, with me holding the horse ready for him. All Vigilantes they were—hot for law and order and topping off a few Sydney Ducks for an example. But my old man had been near stretched so many times he didn't set any store by threats. 'Just you keep your glib shut,' he says, 'and we'll be home in bed in half an hour. These fancy traps ain't got the bone to kill their own chats.' They'd got us into a house by that time. 'You better confess,' they said, 'and we won't make it so hot for you.' 'Kiss me backside,' says me old man. 'We'll hang you,' they said. 'You couldn't hang wall-paper,' says the old man.

  “And sure enough they looked a damn sight whiter round the gills than he did. 'Look at 'em,' says the old man. 'They look the dead speaking spit of hangmen, now don't they?'

  “But I was listening to something else. A sound like a beetle crawling on paper. It was getting louder. I took a look behind me through the window and saw the street outside crowded with people, standing there not talking, just moving their feet impatient in the dust. 'I wish we hadn't gone near that place to-night,' I says to the old man. 'Aw, stop snivelling,' he says. 'I never been hanged yet.'

  “And things did change a bit brighter then because there was a bit of a lull and one bloke blows his nose and says, 'Well, gentlemen, if there's a reasonable doubt. . .' He was a little fat cove who kept a draper's shop and his collar had gone like a bit of wet bread round his neck. 'I, for one,' he says, 'would never agree to topping off a man unless. . .' But while they're hanging in the wind up jumps a fellow called Barrett, a real nasty looking bastard. 'What's the use beating about the bush,' he says. 'We come here to-night to hang two men, I reckon. Let's get down to business. Call the parson.'

  “'But are we sure enough?' says the fat cove.

  “'I'm sure of one thing,' says Barrett. 'If we don't we'll get laughed out of town.'

  “The little fat cove looked out the window—sounded as if there might be two or three thousand beetles there now—and blew his nose. 'Well, yes,' he says, 'perhaps for the public good. . .'

  “And then I knew our number was up. In comes the cushion-smiter and starts trying to make my old man pray, but Barrett cuts him short. 'That's enough talk. Get the praying business over. I'm going to hand these men in half an hour.'

  “'Not this youth, surely,' says the parson. 'He's so young.'

  “'Younger the better,' Barrett says. 'Like bugs.'

  “So he goes to the window and asks the crowd and the crowd yells, 'Yes, hang 'em both. Chuck 'em down here.'

  “'That's all right. You'll see 'em hang,' Barrett says. 'In half an hour at the Old Adobe. Go and put a block and tackle on the Liberty Pole.'

  “With that they cheered and marched off. It took 'em about fifteen minutes to get clear and then Barrett turns round and says, 'Are you ready, gents?' So they grab hold of us and push us downstairs and into the street. There was a wind getting up. I could smell the sea strong. 'Wish to Christ you'd stayed in Australia,' I says to the old man. 'What're you saying, you damned whelp?' says he. 'You know if I stayed in Australia I'd 'a' been hanged.'

  “All the Vigilantes were crowding round us now, holding a rope fence round us with about ten men on each side and in front, and half a dozen outriders with carbines. Barrett shoved his gun into my old man's back. 'March!' he says.

  “It must've been near two o'clock. The crowd had lit torches. You could see the glow a mile off. Suddenly the engine companies' bells start to toll. Up Sansome Street to California we went, then up Clay and Montgomery to Portsmouth Square. Then my heart come up hot in my mouth. I heard a cooee, and a mob from Sydney Valley rushed out from the side of the street and start pulling the outriders down. But we went on and after a bit the outriders come up and said they shot a man.”

  He paused to look in his pipe, knock the ashes out, and fill it again. The sun had moved the shade away from him and its flails beat down on his back and bare head now. He did not notice. Sitting there unwearyingly on his heels he seemed, against the background of his story, encased in an invisible mail of imperviousness to, more than mere discomfort, all possible vagaries of a reckless destiny.

  Cabell, man of order and property, hardened against him, instinctively recognizing the eternal soldier of fortune, race-course tout to-day, jailbird to-morrow, and strutting gentleman of brilliant means the day after, but through all of them glazed over with this impervious, because contemptuous, fortitude to change and disaster. Still, he had had too many troubles in his own life not to admire fortitude and envy it. “Well, what then?” he said.

  “One thing about that night,” Cash said, “I got finished with dying, if you know what I mean. I mean I died fifty times crossing Portsmouth Square, and after that living was like getting a second run for your money. It's just so much for nothing, so you don't worry about losing it again. That's why my old man took it so easy. He'd slept in the condemned cell twice and been pardoned. I'd begun to hang back, but he only cursed harder. The mob was all around us. They sounded like a lot of niggers singing—you know, without a tune. And then we come round the corner all of a sudden and there was the hundred-and-thirtyfoot Oregon flagpole and another mob around it with torches, holding the rope ready. We stopped then, and Barrett tried to get hold of the noose, but the cove that had it didn't want to give it up. He held it in both hands close to his chest and kept his eyes on me. So they had to crack him on the head with the butt of a gun to get it off him.

  “Barrett looked at it and tried it, with the mob waving their torches and yelling, 'Put it on, Barrett. Don't waste time. Put it on the old bloke first. Put a torch to him. Burn the dog.' And just at that moment somebody grabbed my shoulder. It was the little fat bloke, the draper. He was hanging on to my shoulder breathing hard. His face looked like a lump of lard melting. I saw he was going to be sick and gave him one shove and he staggered back and fell and they walked over him.

  “When I looked round Barrett was holding the noose up over the old man's head. I thought, 'This is the stone end,' and stopped feeling scared. The mob, and the torches, and the horses rearing and kicking hell out of the mob all got mixed up, and I felt a bit lushy and as if it was nothing to do with me anyway. Barrett had hold of the old man by the beard and was pulling the noose on. They'd made it a bit small so it took all the skin off his nose. He put his hand up and felt his nose and yelled something, and then he stumbled suddenly and went on his knees and somebody started to shout, 'Look out. He's escaping. They got him by the legs.' I looked down, and sure enough there was somebody, some Sydney Duck, had crawled up in the dark and got my old man by the boot and was trying to pull him out under the rope fence, with Barrett white as a sheet pulling the other end of the chit and my old man's head in between with his tongue hanging out and wagging like a long, red leaf—like the leaf round the end of a bunch of young bananas. It looked nearly six inches long and I expected to see his face turn inside out any minute. He was hanging on to the noose too and they were jabbing at his hands with a torch trying to make him let go, and then he let go and Barrett looked over his shoulder and yelled, 'Every lover of liberty and good order lay hands on the rope,' and about fifty of them grabbed hold of the loose end and my old man went up the pole like a rocket, hung with his legs in the light for a moment while they got another grip, then disappeared into the dark.”

  His pipe had gone out again. He stowed it under his bowyang, and drank a few mouthfuls of lukewarm tea from the billy. The afternoon was settling in now with a stir of birds rousing from the midday heat and the rasp of insects, like the audi
ble brazen clang of the sunlight striking down on the rocky walls of the gully.

  There was a commotion in the bushes and Ike, the hawker, appeared, leading a miserable pantomime horse with a cloud of flies round its head like a nimbus.

  “Sold out, Ike?” Cash asked.

  “Ah, Yankee, I sell too chip.” He began to whine in a thick, slightly rancid voice. “Zat's my trouble.”

  “That's all our trouble,” Cash said. “Still, if good rum was cheaper than kerosene and lampblack I bet you'd still use kerosene and lampblack. You're just made that way.”

  The Syrian bobbed his head over a pair of intent, viperous eyes and grinned, “Yis, Yankee.”

  “Where're you sneaking off to now? Just stole something?”

  “No, Yankee. I jist go bringa bifsteks.” He waved down the gully.

  “Plenty more come. Plenty hungry. I bringa bifsteks to-morrow.”

  “Public benefactor,” Cash said.

  “Yis, Yankee.” The Syrian flashed his vindictive glance between them and went on.

  “There's a shrewd-head,” Cash said. “You wouldn't catch him swinging a pick after gold that mightn't be there. They reckon he owns a street of houses in Brisbane.” He leant forward and touched Cabell's knee. “You weren't thinking of navvying in this sweat-house, were you?”

  “I'm not here for the scenery,” Cabell said.

  “I always heard you were a shrewd-head too.” Cash laughed. “But perhaps you don't know goldfields like I do.” He nodded past the tree. “Look at those poor plugs digging. How much gold d'you think they've got? Nothing. And not likely to. No, Cabell. I could lay you—both of us, that is—on to a better thing than that.”

  Cabell jerked his head round with the exaggerated turn necessary to focus his one eye. The hard confidence in the eyes of the other repelled and alarmed him, but attracted him too.

  “My face mightn't appeal,” Cash said, “but my name ought to. Then there's my luck.”

  “Yes,” Cabell said, hedging, “but you didn't finish your yarn.”

  “Neither I did.” He swung back on his heels again. “But there's not much more. While everybody was looking up at the pole, jerking about like a rod with a big fish on it, someone reached over and cracked me on the head with a torch and laid me out. I felt a lot of feet around me kicking and then I didn't know where I was till I come to running down Clay Street for the lick of my life. The bells were still tolling. I just kept on running towards the smell of the sea. . .”

  Cabell grunted. “You were damned lucky.”

  “A lot are lucky,” Cash said, “otherwise a lot more would go up the pole.”

  “Eh? Lucky? Yes, yes, you're right there.”

  “So with my luck and YOUR luck we ought to get along,” Cash said. “Is it a deal?”

  Chapter Four: Partners

  The partnership began with an innocent transaction in beef, mutton, flour, tea, molasses, and tobacco.

  “To-morrow,” Cash said, “nobody will be thinking about gold except to spend whatever they've got of it or expect to get on tucker. By breakfast they'll be ready to sell their grandmother to a Chow for a handful of bird-seed.”

  So, with the aid of Cash, Cabell sold meat at eightpence a pound, flour for two shillings a pint, and tea by the spoonful before Tim O'Connor could bring a load of steer beef from Narrow Gut and the packhorses arrived at sunset next day. He rode home with two pounds' weight of gold in his boot and his confidence in Cash was much deeper. Cash inspired confidence. The miners liked him. After a bit, when the gold began to flow, the Cabell Valley Goldbuying Agency and General Store opened its doors on Larsen Street with Cash as the amiable and hard-fisted manager. The place was always full with a roaring crowd—men for the most part in cord trousers, red shirts, and long California hats, the regular miners from Gympie, the Palmer, and Charters Towers, from Ballarat and Bendigo, even from New Zealand—wild spenders and simple fellows, simple as children, craving bright gewgaws, eyeglasses, and drinks in silver-topped bottles.

  “True scales and rum pretty well all rum, that's what fetches 'em,” Cash told Cabell.

  “That fellow Kyle doesn't trouble himself much about whether his scales are true or not,” Cabell grumbled. “I bet he makes a couple of pennyweights on every ounce.”

  “One night they'll kick Kyle down Larsen Street into the lagoon,” Cash said. “Then you'll admit it was a lucky day you met me.”

  “What d'you mean?”

  Cash only laughed. Cabell's rampagings didn't worry him. “Patience, man. Who's raking it in as fast as you?” He ran his fingers through a pile of gold-dust which he was weighing and packing into little chamoisleather bags for Cabell to take in the night coach to the bank at Pyke's Crossing. “Ten bob on every ounce you buy, 200 per cent on everything you sell.”

  “Yes, yes.” Cabell walked to the door and looked out. The ferns, palms, and maidenhair were gone. The trees were gone, cut down for firewood or timber or bark. Everything green was gone, and the earth lay bare and mauled, wasting in an arid miasma of dust. There was a kind of gratuitous evil in the hasty ugliness of the scene—the holes, abandoned and half-filled with water by a shower of rain, the muddy piles of sludge at the edge of the ochreous lagoon, the clumsy miamias of bark and calico sprawling across the slopes of the gully, more like kennels than human habitations, the sardine tins and broken bottles at their doors, and the stench they breathed of human sweat and human garbage—as though the place had been mutilated, not by men strong and brave and steady in a decent cause, but by terrified ravishers, clutching and demented. The beastly mark of this fear was on everything and everybody, on the miners digging in the earth, afraid that they would not find gold, afraid that the gold they found would peter out; on the faces of men hearing about a new find up the gully, afraid to leave what they had, afraid of missing something good. It was as though a jocular and infantile god of Chance had been given this square mile of earth and the two thousand men on it to play with. Under his paw there could be no certainty, peace, or contentment.

  The fear had bitten fatally deep into Cabell's susceptible heart. Here was a store of riches momently dwindling, slipping through his fingers—such wealth as he had never imagined within his reach. So easily to be come by, so easily to be lost. Henceforth he would be inescapably chained to this adventitious stone, plagued by the thought that under the slow grass of his pastures gold might lie waiting to enrich someone else, lacerated by regrets and a sense of colossal injustice. “Patience! Damn it all, Cash, I've been walking round this stuff for the best part of my life, drudging a few miserly quid off the backs of sheep when I might have been. . .” A vision of fields ploughed into straight furrows rising peacefully to the skyline of an English evening confronted him out of the broken earth.

  “Might've been!” Cash said. “What's the use thinking of might've beens.”

  “I might've been a different kind of man, that's what I mean. A lot of things wouldn't have happened.” He gestured towards the miners scurrying up and down the gully. “I feel as if they've robbed me of everything I wanted—confound them.”

  Cash stroked his beard. A dribble of smoke seeped through it like a rich, blue liquor he was wringing from the hair. “Trouble with you, Cabell, is you're. . .” A word eluded him and he continued to stare at Cabell's back and ponder. “Blokes say you're hard as nails—think of nothing but money. But it might be better if you did think of money just as money, I mean. But you don't. It's not just money in your brain.”

  “No, no, it's not the money.”

  “You put me in mind of a bloke,” Cash hitched his chair around. “He was pretty tough too—had that reputation. Men were civil to him where men aren't usually civil, but behind his back they reckoned he was mean. Mean and inhuman. No more feeling than jerked beef's got juice. A blackbirder out of the Mary River—that was his line. Chuck a cargo of coons in chains overboard as soon as spit in the sea. And all the time that bloke was in love with a shielagh about half his age down in Sydn
ey. He hadn't even spoken to her and she didn't know he existed. Saw her in a theatre one night and fell in love. Only once, mind you, and he used to go and stand outside her house for hours in the hopes of seeing her again. He was a bank clerk on thirty bob a week, and she was Sir Somebody Something's daughter. So he chucked his job and went north to make enough money to marry her. Reckoned he had eight years. He had a crazy old ketch you nearly went through the deck of when you walked about, leaked like a sieve. I don't know how he bought it, probably robbed the bank for a start. Anyway he made money—hand over fist. I went one trip with him. Nobody else would. And he told me about the tart in Sydney. Tears come in his eyes. This bloke they called Bill the Body-Snatcher. Imagine that. The day before I saw him go and shoot up a chief who wouldn't trade any boys, and here he was blubbering about her 'beautiful raven locks,' or something of the sort.”

  Cabell turned away impatiently. He was getting used to Cash pulling his leg.

  “No, but wait a bit,” Cash said. “He went back to Sydney. Sold his boat and bought a new pair of flash duds and washed the smell of coons off his hands. And what'd he find? Of course the shielagh had married. She had a right to, but he didn't think so. He got into the house and beat up her husband and called her every kind of bitch under the sun. He would've done her in too, had hold of her by the throat when they came in and rescued her. She didn't know who he was from Adam and nobody knew what he meant by saying that she was responsible for him killing and enslaving decent coons, so they put him in a rathouse. But he wasn't mad. He wasn't sorry for what he'd done to her either, only wished he'd done worse. You couldn't get it into his head. He was. . . ah yes, infatuated. That's it, infatuated. That's what you put me in mind of—an infatuated bloke.” He nudged Cabell gently. “It's not that tart over your place, is it?”