Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  When Cabell walked into the tent he was waving an empty bottle and declaiming his plans to a humble audience of shopkeepers: “And none of your lousy twist for me no more. Nothing but the best Manilas, see? Then I'll get married and have a bloke come in and shave me every day and. . . and. . .”

  He blinked at Cabell and bobbed his head like a dog that expects to be kicked, glanced round his possessions, so like the jumble of an opulent dream, felt the dreamlike softness of the upholstery under his buttocks, and half rose. But the realistic smell of dust, in the haze of which Cabell looked bodiless and without danger, the rattle of shovels, the shouts, the crash of trees reassured him. His nostrils closed and he pushed his chinless face out defiantly. “Nor I won't eat no more of your maggoty burgoo neither!”

  Cabell turned stiffly away and met the eyes of Sambo, modestly drunk behind a heap of bottles. He swung his long equine face from side to side looking for a way of escape, then his jaw dropped and his mouth opened as if habit had taught him that the best way to take the bit was quietly. “Them stores, boss,” he said. “They musta got through the Pass. I'll track 'em down to-morrow first thing.”

  “So you're a miner now, eh, Sambo?”

  “Something like that, boss. I ain't rightly got the hang. . .”

  “Huh. What d'you think you're going to do with it?”

  Sambo fingered the new handkerchief round his neck, looked at a pair of new boots on his feet, a new hat on the heap of bottles, considered cases of bottles unopened, and scratched his head for an inkling of wants unsatisfied. “I might buy a racehoss.”

  “A racehorse! Jesus!”

  Sambo twisted his handkerchief like a garrot round his neck. “I dunno then. Was you thinking of something, boss?”

  Cash steered Cabell into the open air, noisy with the new rush. Here were only hard-bitten miners yet, and they were going to work with deadly expertness to strip the ridge of its trees and ferns. Already Joe O'Connor and Ike the hawker, had grog shanties in full blast, and deformed hovels of bark and wattles marked the future main street of Waterfall Town—Monaghan Street as it was to be called.

  “Steady now,” Cash said, shaking Cabell roughly. “Take a pull or you'll cruel our pitch.”

  Cabell took a handkerchief out and wiped his face. “Sambo! Think of it! I remember when he'd never seen a two-story house, and now. . . He's going to buy a racehorse!” He stared vacantly at the tent. “Yes, yes, that's the way it is.”

  “Stop moaning a second and listen,” Cash said and shook a preoccupied attention out of Cabell. “There's a big rush coming, understand? Bigger than Larsen's. Big money. The day before yesterday Sambo found a nugget with nearly five hundred quids' worth of gold in it. When the telegraph sends that round Australia they'll come in thousands. So you better take your finger out.”

  But Cabell was looking round Sambo and Monaghan's claim, a prospector's claim of twelve men's ground running nearly two hundred yards up the side of Black Mountain. “And all to enrich the first blasted crook that comes along and spins them a yarn!”

  “Well?” Cash grinned. “Why shouldn't we be the first. . .?”

  As he had foretold, the news of Sambo's find brought a new and bigger rush to the valley: miners who had resisted the first rush, station hands, clerks from the city, their women and children, their tykes and campfollowers, swept on by a snowball story of nuggets lying about on the ground as big as a man's fist, as big as a man's head—as big as hope and imagination. Coming, they met the despondent and footsore fugitives from the Bakehouse. “Go back—it's a duffer,” these told them. “The poor sods there are living on grass.” And some did turn back, but most came on, and before the winter had settled six thousand people were living at the foot of Black Mountain, which rose from its gullies like an old barnacled octopus asleep on fabulous treasure.

  Almost from the start Waterfall was a more solid town than Larsen's. The masses of iron-stained stone cropping from the ridge—most abundant in the Lost Stores Prospect but scattered over nearly the whole mountain-side—which looked to the old miners like quartz containing plenty of low-grade gold, promised the place a long life. Companies were forming and machinery was on the way to extract this thin peppering of wealth, but in the meantime life seethed about the almost daily finds of nuggets and free gold lying in pockets on the spurs of the hills and their gullies. For half a mile along the erratic creek, dammed hastily with logs and stones but nevertheless evaporating, seeping slowly away, men and women and children were hard at work sinking and panning off. Every one had an assay to talk about, a glittering specimen with which to tempt credit from storekeepers and effort from their own weary bodies. From the first streak of dawn till the quick night came down they slaved with pick and shovel and pan, then sat up till the early hours of the morning hammering the stone to dust in their mortars, for there were no stampers on the field yet. Their shadows crouching on the hessian walls of the humpies or fierily across a doorway, the incessant crunch, crunch, crunch of their thousands of hands slowly turning the skeleton of the earth to powder, made the dark gully seem like some strange Nibelung underworld.

  The road wound precipitously three miles from the valley, the last halfmile out of Waterfall a perilous razorback which broke the legs of bullocks and the hearts and whip-handles of their drivers. The wreckage of many wagons was strewn about and many dead bullocks, bloated and hived with blowflies. Precisely at four o'clock every afternoon, as the mercifully early shadow of Black Mountain was spreading across the blistered town, Cobb and Co.'s coach toiled up that boulderstrewn rampart, past the Chinese market gardens—a mirage of incredible green against the barren hills—through China-town—set in pariah isolation but breathing a pleasant perfume of SAMSHOO and joss-sticks on the dustclogged nostrils of the poor devils in the coach—past the hessian and bark and packing-case houses of the outer suburbs, furnished, many of them, with piano and sewing-machine, glazed with windows of piled bottles—turned the summit into Monaghan Street and completed the last two hundred yards of its two-hundred-mile dash from Pyke's Crossing with a bravura gallop past David Kyle's Aberdeen Emporium and Mortuary, past the Ningpo Butchery, Peter O'Connor's Shamrock Hotel, Liam O'Connor's Hardware Store, Joe O'Connor's Golden Sunrise, Jake O'Connor's Auction Mart, the Bank, the Police Station and Lock-up, the Cabell Valley Goldbuying Agency and General Store, Aloysius O'Connor's Produce Exchange, Ike the hawker's Queen Victoria Tavern, Shaftoe's Billiard Parlour and Gymnasium, McFarlane's Butcher Shop, the Grand Opera House—with a poster of a waxworks outside—the Stock Exchange, and the Post Office to draw up, in an all-obscuring cloud of dust, like a pack of red devils that had been chasing it for nearly two days and had at last caught and swallowed it, in front of the Grand Central Hotel of Danny O'Connor.

  Grey with grime and weariness the travellers climbed stiffly out and staggered into this the town's choicest resort—a rambling iron building with a long, low roof, which collected the thirsty heat of the day and held it, an adjunct to a bar trade which roared on till early morning, like an oven. How Danny found room for this unending flow of visitors, new hopefuls, travellers from far lands, investors, salesmen for mining machinery, shady company promoters, newspaper correspondents, or the merely curious, was one of the town's major mysteries.

  Danny winked. “Now haven't ye never heard tell of the Yankee plan by which you put the first mob to sleep then stand them up in the corner. They don't take up so much room that way. Then you put the next mob off and stand them up till ye've got 'em all stowed away as snug as sardines.”

  The visitors arrived at the climax of a day of whispers, rumours, finds. From the stout slab walls of the Stock Exchange across the street emerged the roar of the late afternoon trade, the fierce, angry, frantic, outraged, waspish, despairing wails of brokers selling “Hit or Miss,” “Southern Cross,” “Kyle's No Liability,” obliterating even the clatter of pots, the steady noise of guzzle, badinage, quarrel, and conversation in the Grand Central bar, and the moiling struggle
about the window of the post office next door where the mailbags from the coach were just being opened.

  Perhaps, while they waited for the coachman to finish his phlegmcutter and unload their baggage from the boot, they would see a gentleman in an unexpected top-hat and a still more unexpected carriage and pair, passing up the street with a florid and amiable looking lady at his side. Driving from the back seat with the box vacant he looked like a drunken coachman taking the cook for a drive—generally pleased with himself but slightly oppressed by anxiety about time, for he kept drawing a tremendous gold watch from his pocket and studying it with puzzled concentration.

  “That's Monaghan, the man that found the first nugget,” Danny would tell them. “Now owns a quarter-share in the Lost Stores. And that's German Lizzie, his wife, that was one of my best barmaids. And that's a coach he paid a hundred quid for to Miss Ludmilla, from over Ningpo, who had it from her father, the Colonel. And the day Monaghan and Lizzie was married in it the boys put golden shoes on his horses and chained him and his missus together with a golden chain.”

  They certainly would see Cash, bustling out of the Exchange when the day's business closed and the crowd transferred itself across the street to moisten its rasped throats at the Grand Central. And as he passed, slapping Danny's back or stopping to hitch his trousers and look at the new arrivals if there were any ladies among them, Danny would whisper behind his hand, “Now there's a feller! Owns a quarter-share in the Lost Stores with Cabell from over the Reach. And there's another feller.” And he would nod over that two or three times with one eye closed. “As me old mother used to say, 'A man that's got as much as that one on his brain-pan,' says she, 'and don't never touch liquor will be hollerin' for a blanket to keep him warm in hell.'”

  Chapter Seven: Chisellers

  He felt no bad conscience when he set about chiselling Sambo and Monaghan out of their claim, anyway. It was almost a crusade of righteousness. But before he had gone far he found himself up against a spirit as dogged as his own, righteous too, but in a way Monaghan was more likely to understand.

  “Ha'e no truck wi' the cut-throats,” Kyle told him, “or sure as your name's Monaghan they'll strip ye of every brass farthin' bit. Why, isna tha mon Cabell known for a dirty, horse-stealin', wife-beatin', goddam rascal from one end the country to the ither? Ask Dugald McFarlane. Didna Cabell no steal mares from his old mon and try for to drive him off his verra hearthstane by legal chicanery? And wasna it no clearly revealed in the courts of law at the time that he was mixed in with Black Jem the bushranger? Och noo mon, ye'd save ye'self a lot of heartburning by gi'in' ower yer purse to the blackguard wi'out more ado if ye've got it in mind to let him back ye in the claim.”

  That was the first stage of the fight. Who was to put up the money for working the big Lost Stores claim? Wages had to be paid, powder and fuse and food bought, and finally expensive machinery.

  “Noo, I'm no a bloodsucker,” Kyle said. “I'll gi'e ye two thousand pounds for one half-share in the claim.” Considering Sambo and Monaghan athwart his thin, red nose he stroked his ginger dundrearies. Renowned whiskers these, said to be worth a couple of thousand a year to Kyle. When he was buying gold he fingered the fine dust and hummed and hawed about the quality and the risk of its being dosed—and stroked his well-oiled side-whiskers. They said he washed a couple of pennyweights of gold out of those pale, aspiring flambeaux after every customer. “Mind ye, it's no so certain there's a muckle gold in yer claim,” he told Monaghan. “Ye havena no jewellery shop here like is in the Hit or Miss or the Black Crow. A prudent mon wudna look for more than an ounce to the ton from that red stane.”

  Cabell and Cash had Sambo in a corner. “Let Monaghan let that Scotch bastard in and you're as good as done for,” Cash told him. “See what he did to those poor ginks he backed up the gully—backed them right out and put his own name over the mine.”

  Torn between loyalty to Cabell and loyalty to his mate, Sambo could only keep repeating, “I dunno, boss. Gawd, boss, I dunno.” Their haggling ended in the Lost Stores Goldmining Company Ltd posting its name at the Stock Exchange. It had a nominal capital of ten thousand pounds in ten thousand one-pound shares, a quarter held by Monaghan, a quarter by Sambo, a quarter by Kyle, and a quarter by Cabell and Cash. With four thousand pounds to spend the company put a dozen men to work, sinking shafts, timbering, building log stages for the windlasses, and piling up heaps of mullock, carefully stockaded against thieves, in readiness for the stampers, which were on their way. Cabell fretted to see the gold hidden from his eye in these heaps of stone. He was always crawling about in the stockades, fingering bits of stone, chipping them.

  Cash laughed. “Looking for something?”

  “It might be a duffer after all, Cash. I don't see a trace of gold.”

  “Because you're looking in the wrong place,” Cash said, pointing up the street to the Stock Exchange. “That's where our gold is.”

  In those early days of Black Mountain, when there was still much free gold to be found, the real centre of the field was the Exchange. Shares rushed up and down between sixpence and two pounds or more. The look on a miner's face, a wink, a whisper was enough. At nine o'clock in the morning the news that the exploratory drive in Hit or Miss had opened a likely-looking piece of dirt sent Hit or Miss to twenty shillings in a few minutes, but when at four o'clock in the afternoon there was no sign of gold in the buckets coming up the shaft Hit or Miss began to fall, and after the Exchange closed the selling went on in the street and in the bar of the Grand Central till Hit or Miss were hardly worth buying for shaving-paper.

  Cash was a hard gambler, an unwearying collector and distributor of tips and clues at Danny O'Connor's bar. This it was which held him to Waterfall, the swift, daily dramas of the Exchange, not the prospect of wealth to be acquired by a long and laborious development of the Lost Stores property. But Cabell held back from a dangerous game. There was not much of the adventurer in Cabell. His dreams were not of money but of a great mine which would swallow all the other mines and belong to him. He saw its batteries, windlasses, sluices, chimneys, shafts, windmills, engine-rooms covering the hillside, and himself the man of power, owning a mountain of gold, with bankers, politicians, capitalists, promoters, and “all that mob in Brisbane” kotowing abjectly. And, of course, Harriet marrying the kind of man such wealth would entitle her to. Yes, dear little Harriet: it was all for her.

  “No gambling for me,” he said. “Look at Larsen. He came from the Bakehouse with eight thousand quid and now he's a wages man for Miss Ludmilla.”

  “Pooh, this is no gamble,” Cash said. “It's a drummond. Look, tomorrow we'll sell a thousand Stores.”

  “We'll do no such thing. Kyle will buy them.”

  “Not him. Not at the price they are. He's got too many irons in the fire.”

  “But I want to buy shares, not sell them.”

  “All right. We'll buy some later.” He took out a pencil and paper. “Look. We sell a thousand. Say at eighteen bob. Then I oil up the mob at Danny's and we'll slam in another thousand and they'll come down with a bump.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what? Buy them back of course. Say they go down to ten bob. It might shake Monaghan out of a few if the market started to jump a bit. Or even old Kyle. He'd gamble on the sunrise.”

  They sold a thousand. Stores was not sensational stock, but it was known to have a lot of low-grade ore scattered through the claim and a fair dividend in the mullock heaps, and its machinery was due any day. They were good for anybody who didn't mind waiting. Eighteen and sixpence a share they brought.

  In Danny's Cash received the news that somebody had just unloaded a thousand Stores. “Must be Kyle,” he said and frowned.

  Next day he sold a thousand and let everybody know he was doing so. The price came down to seventeen and six. “What's the use sitting on your rhino like an emu,” he told Danny. “Between ourselves, strictly, they just got word the stampers won't be here before Christmas.�
� “There now,” Danny said, “and you told me they'd be crushin' next month and here's me hanging on to five hundred of them things I give Monaghan a pound each for.”

  “Well, we've got fifteen hundred more to unload before the news gets round.”

  In the afternoon Stores slumped to twelve and six, sellers. Cash and Cabell bought back fifteen hundred and the market rose to sixteen shillings. They picked up the other five hundred in dribs and drabs within a week at an average of eighteen to nineteen.

  “There you are,” Cash said, handing back the scrip. “Two-fifty quid for damn all.”

  Cabell was relieved to have his shares again. “Never more,” he said. “Never's a big word,” Cash said. “Wait.”

  A week later the Lost Stores announced that it had laid open a rich vein of gold giving seven ounces to the ton in the drive from No. 1 to No. 2 shaft. Stores leapt to fifty shillings, no sellers.

  Cabell stood all day at the head of the shaft watching bucket after bucket of yellow-veined stone come up.

  Cash drew him aside. “It won't last, so you needn't kid yourself. Let us get rid of a thousand while the selling's good.”

  They sold a thousand. Kyle sold a thousand and Monaghan sold a thousand. Next day the buckets brought up less and less gold and at last the same old red stone. Kyle persuaded Monaghan to sell another thousand, and himself sold a thousand short at thirty shillings. At twentyfive shillings Monaghan wanted to buy back, but Kyle told him to hold on till they reached a pound, and himself bought back Monaghan's thousand for a cover and at twenty-two shillings the thousand he had sold at fifty, thus finishing with a profit of sixteen hundred pounds and his own block intact. There were now two thousand five hundred shares on the market. Cabell and Cash held fifteen hundred, Kyle and Sambo their original quota, and Monaghan, who was four thousand pounds in pocket, most of which he owed to Kyle for money advanced and goods purchased, none. But at twenty shillings he got back five hundred, and as the market was weak decided to wait and see about the rest. Cash and Cabell were about three thousand pounds up, having speculated energetically all the way down the scale from fifty shillings. Cabell wanted to square up now, but Cash persuaded him to wait and see too.