‘He may not have killed Chapman at all.’
‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘You made a mistake. You should have ridden straight out and not come near me. That way I’d have been safe, at least. Now I’m in as much danger as you. You owe it to me to take me with you.’
‘What would your father say?’
‘Never you worry about him.’ She sprang out of bed, white limbs flashing. ‘You clear out while I dress. Don’t go far,’ she warned him, pushing him out of the room. ‘I won’t be five minutes.’
As he waited, Matthew wondered what on earth he had done. He didn’t love her. If he took her away, he’d be responsible for her and he needed that like he needed Cusack after him with a gun.
Inside the forge the furnace was roaring, flames leaping white and blue as Honeyman worked on a mass of glowing metal.
Without looking up Honeyman raised his voice above the sound of the flames. ‘Off to the goldfields, then?’
‘Thought I’d give it a try.’
‘Taking Janice with you?’
‘You don’ mind?’
Honeyman doused the hot metal in a thunder of steam. ‘Don’ make no odds what I mind,’ he said. He wiped his arm across his forehead. ‘Her life, after all.’
A lot of fathers would have shot Matthew for even suggesting such a thing but Honeyman was not a normal father.
The door from the house opened and Janice came out wearing a long travelling coat over a plain navy blue dress and carrying a canvas saddle-bag in her hand.
Matthew said, ‘I want a word with you. Outside.’
Her face went white.
They went and stood in the sunshine.
‘You’re a nice girl, really nice. You’re the best friend I’ve got. I can’t leave you behind but I don’t love you. You understand that?’
She closed her eyes. ‘Thank God!’
He stared at her, nonplussed. ‘Eh?’
She gave him a brilliant smile. ‘All the time I was packing I was afraid by the time I got out here you’d be gone. When you said we had to talk I thought you’d changed your mind.’ Tears were running down her face. ‘I know you don’t love me. That’s all right. I love you enough for two. And maybe,’ voice choking, ‘maybe in time you’ll come to love me, too.’
Her emotion embarrassed him. ‘Let’s get on,’ he said. ‘Before Cusack finds us.’
‘Shouldn’t we buy some things?’ she asked. ‘A tent, something to dig with?’
Matthew wasn’t keen about leaving clues for Cusack to find. ‘We can do that when we get there.’
‘It’s bound to be much more expensive than here. Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘There are lots of goldfields. He won’t know which one we’ve gone to.’
He didn’t like her to think he might be afraid of Cusack. ‘I’m not worried about that.’
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘But we need food, too.’
They bought a tent, a canvas bed, rope, a pick and short-handled shovel, a washing dish and a bucket, some sausage and bread. It almost cleaned him out of money. He didn’t want to show the gold in Amherst.
‘We’ll soon make lots more,’ Janice said. ‘We’re going to be lucky. I know it.’
They didn’t start out lucky. Five miles short of the diggings Lupin, Janice’s grey filly, cast a shoe.
‘Fine pair we are,’ Matthew grumbled. ‘Your dad a blacksmith and so was mine and now look at us.’ The sun had developed a steep westerly slant. ‘Have to find somewhere to camp overnight. We won’t make it to Mount Alexander before dark.’
A mile further on they came to a patch of open ground on the bank of a shallow creek. Matthew pitched the tent near the water while Janice collected wood for a fire.
As it got dark they sat by the fire, chewing slices of sausage and looking at the light reflecting in waves of flickering gold from the motionless leaves of the gum trees. Every so often Jack’s jaws snapped noisily on the scraps of sausage Matthew threw him.
‘Bet you’re sorry you came,’ he said to Janice, grinning.
She tossed her head. ‘Bet you’re sorry you brought me.’
‘I’d have been in Mount Alexander by now if I hadn’t.’
‘You wouldn’t have had any food though.’
‘I’d have bought food when I got there.’
‘You wouldn’t have had me for company.’
He looked at her, very close. ‘Company?’
‘That sort of thing.’
‘Hmm.’
His hand found her breast gently fondling. She closed her eyes, leaning her head against him. Heat licked her. She sighed deep in her throat.
Jack barked suddenly, excitedly, and a rough voice said, ‘Evenin’, mates. Room for a few more, eh?’
There were five of them, hard-looking men, with two pack horses piled high with gear. Four of them were Australians from Melbourne. The fifth was an American. He was perhaps a year older than Matthew with pale topaz eyes in a square, bronzed face and sun-bleached, almost white hair. He looked as tough as teak and his hands had seen a lot of action in their time. His name was Hamish Fairchild. He and Matthew sat together by the fire and talked, or Hamish did.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘I was at California and that sure was a rough place. Men died like flies there and not too many of old age, let me tell you. Made a few dollars, not much, learned one helluva lot about how to survive in a mining camp—and that is useful knowledge to have, believe me—then heard about gold being found here in Australia so decided to come and see if I’d have any better luck than I’d had back home.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘Way things have started it sure don’t look like it. The boat was supposed to put into Melbourne but the captain received new orders or maybe just plumb changed his mind, I dunno, and headed straight for Adelaide. And me out of money, too. So I thought, kid, you wanna try your luck on the goldfields you’d better do something about this. So I set out to walk.’
‘Walk? From Adelaide?’
‘Four weeks on the road,’ he said and laughed.
This is the sort of partner I should have, Matthew thought. Out of the corner of his eye he looked at Hamish’s companions—a rough-looking bunch. ‘You with these blokes?’
Hamish shook his head. ‘Met ’em on the road is all. They mean nothing to me.’
There were so few women in the colony Janice knew she was a curiosity. While Matthew and the American talked, the rest of the strangers gathered around her, all eyes and rough jokes. Hands, too, if she gave them half a chance. Even if she didn’t.
‘Girl like you at Mount Alexander, you’ll be rich before you know it,’ the oldest of the group told her as he squeezed her knee.
She lifted his hand off. ‘Don’t.’
‘You join up with the four of us, we’d make a good team,’ he said. ‘Even you and me alone would be good. What about it?’
The hand was back on her knee.
‘I doubt my friend would think much of that.’
The man sneered. He had a good face for sneering: about thirty years old, pitted nose, no chin to speak of, two days’ growth of whiskers on a long and leathery-looking jaw. ‘He don’t care what happens to you. You was my girl, I wouldn’t let no stranger touch you.’
The man was right. Janice felt indignant with Matthew for yakking to the American where he should have been paying attention to her. Once again she pushed the hand away but it came back at once. It made her wonder why she bothered. One of the man’s mates sniggered.
‘Playin’ ’ard to get, are you?’ he said. He put his hand on her breast. She went rigid, turning her head away. He stank like a cesspit and his breath was worse. To her mortification she was close to tears.
‘Leave me alone!’
The man laughed, tightened his grip, then screeched like a frightened piglet as Matthew’s massive paw seized him. The other miners sat with mouths open, too stunned to move as Matthew yanked the man away from her as easily as he would a baby. He was in midair when Matthew hit him a terri
ble blow and Janice saw the shape of his face change as Matthew’s fist crashed into it.
‘Great shooting, sir.’ The American’s voice had a laugh in it. ‘You’ve no objection, I’ll take one myself.’
‘Feel free,’ Matthew said, turning on the second man.
Hamish Fairchild sized up his man and sank his fist up to the wrist in his belly. As his head came forward he chopped the exposed neck once with the edge of his hand. The man dropped. The second man had also retired from the fray. Matthew sucked his knuckles.
‘One left.’
It was the oldest man, the one who had started the business. He looked a lot tougher and meaner than his mates. He was on his feet backing away to give himself space, teeth bared, pistol in his hand. Jack snarled, leaping frantically in and out, trying to grab an ankle.
‘Don’ you bastards come near me!’
‘That, sir,’ Hamish said sadly, ‘is downright foolishness.’
The kick came so fast that Janice never saw it. The toe of the American’s boot caught the man on the wrist. The pistol flew over his head and disappeared into the darkness.
The man yelped. Before he could move Hamish was on him. One punch to the gut, another to the head and it was over.
‘And then there was none,’ Hamish said. ‘I apologise, sir. I undertook to deal with one of the rascals. This one was pure greed.’
‘No worries,’ Matthew assured him, breathing heavily.
In contrast, Hamish Fairchild could have just returned from a pleasant stroll. ‘As I mentioned, California was a very good training ground.’
Matthew eyed him. ‘If you know as much about finding gold as you do about dealing with rascals, I reckon we might do worse than team up together.’
‘My very thoughts, sir,’ Hamish said. He turned and smiled at Janice. ‘And with you, too, ma’am. Of course.’
The trail wound like a writhing snake through the green hills. Now there wrere other people on the road: men in groups, lone individuals, youths barely out of childhood, men with grey hair and bent backs. There were lean men, skin weathered by years of sun. There were soft red-faced men whose comfortable bellies were clearly feeling the strain even before they reached the diggings. White men and a few black men. All of them pressing onwards in ever-thickening crowds, dogged faces and eyes surly with suspicion as they made their way as quickly as they could towards the gold that for most of them had become their sole reason for existence. There were hardly any women.
The majority walked although some, like themselves, were mounted. Occasionally a coach forced its way through the throng which parted reluctantly, no one wanting others to get to the field before themselves.
‘Miserable-looking bunch,’ Matthew commented out of the side of his mouth.
‘Gold sickness,’ Hamish told him. ‘Everyone wants to get there first because they know the first-comers usually get most of the pie. You fall and break your leg, they’d walk all over you rather than give you a hand.’
At ten o’clock in the morning they came to the top of the last rise.
Hamish gave a shrill, yipping cry, pulled his hat off his head and waved it in the air. ‘Look at that, friends. There it is at last.’
They reined in their horses and looked at the valley spread out before them.
It was certainly impressive. The brown scar of the diggings extended to the foothills of the distant range. A few gum trees remained, forlorn branches hanging above the scurrying figures of the diggers, but for the most part the valley had been stripped of vegetation. Tents were packed side by side across the plain and along the banks of the various creeks that radiated from it. Mounds of excavated clay stood high above the workings. Grimy figures carried buckets, hauled ropes, turned the capstans of crude windlasses. Heads emerged from holes opened up seemingly at random in the ground. Dozens of tracks wound through the sun-browned grass. Over all lay the blue smoke of fires.
‘Must be ten thousand people down there,’ Matthew groaned.
Hamish shaded his eyes. ‘They even got the creeks covered. Still, we’re here now. Let’s go down and see what’s what. Maybe we’re in for a pleasant surprise.’
The three of them rode into the valley. The din and activity were prodigious. They passed groups of furiously working people, none of whom paid them the slightest attention. The air was full of smoke and the stench of sewage. It was like a foretaste of hell.
‘Now what?’ Matthew asked.
It was a rhetorical question and Hamish did not answer as they rode deeper into the valley.
Every few yards the ground was marked by the pegs of claims. Most but not all were being worked. Hamish dismounted by one or two of the unworked sites and frowned over samples of soil and rock that he ran through his hands. It seemed that he never found what he was looking for; after each examination he remounted without comment and they rode on.
Janice spoke for the first time since their arrival. ‘There’s a smithy over there. I’m going to ask him how much he’ll charge to fit Lupin up with a new shoe.’
The price the smith quoted made Matthew gasp but Hamish showed no surprise.
‘Always the same. First thing happens, prices go through the roof.’
Janice, it seemed, was not prepared to accept the smith’s price. ‘That’s an awful lot to charge an old friend,’ she said.
The smith, grey beard fanned across his brawny chest, looked at her again. ‘Do I know you, lady?’
‘Janice Honeyman.’
‘Janice Honeyman …’ His jaw dropped and he seized her hands in excitement. ‘So it is! I would never have recognised you, girlie!’ Holding her at arm’s length, he looked her up and down, beaming. ‘How long’s it been, eh?’
‘Three years? Four?’ She turned to Matthew. ‘Pete Saul worked a few months with my dad maybe four years ago. We’re old friends.’ Coquettishly, she reached up and stroked the side of his face. ‘You don’t look a day older than when I saw you last.’
‘Can’t say the same for you,’ he chuckled, eyeing her appreciatively.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I’m a big girl now.’ She nudged him with her elbow. ‘Big enough to know when an old friend is trying to rip me off.’
‘Now, Janice girl,’ Pete’s face reddened, ‘that was before I knew it was you.’
‘So now you know you’ll give me a special price, won’t you, Pete?’
‘Prices on the goldfields are sky high,’ Pete told Janice. ‘I pay a fortune for horseshoes, you know.’
‘What a pity,’ she said sympathetically. ‘I’d hoped to give you the business but if you can’t come down …’
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Let me work something out here.’ He scratched with a stump of pencil on a dirty card. ‘Reckon I can give you a discount of maybe twenty per cent,’ he said hopefully. ‘It’ll cost me money but I’ll do it for old times’ sake. Seeing it’s you, Janice.’
‘Make it thirty, you’ve got a deal.’
Pete sighed and threw his scrap of paper over his shoulder. ‘What the hell,’ he said, ‘I always was a sucker for a pretty face.’
Janice looked at Matthew and Hamish. ‘Why don’t you boys go for a walk?’ she suggested. ‘Come back in twenty minutes, I should be ready by then.’
As the two men walked away Hamish said, ‘The way that little lady goes about things, I reckon she’ll be worth her weight to us.’
‘In gold,’ Matthew agreed. ‘In gold.’
They walked through the diggings, receiving suspicious glances from all sides but no one tried to interfere with them. When the twenty minutes was up they returned to Pete Saul’s forge to find Lupin shod and Janice waiting.
‘Drop in next time you’re passing,’ the old smith called after her as they rode away. ‘Let me know how you’re doing.’
Janice turned in the saddle, smiling and blowing kisses until Pete Saul was out of sight.
‘Made a conquest there,’ Matthew said with a grin.
‘I pumped him for everything he
could tell me.’ She looked about her and lowered her voice. ‘He says there are two claims fifty yards from his forge that we should look at. Two brothers claimed them and paid the licence but the next day, before they’d even started work, their father was killed up Bathurst way and they had to go and sort out his affairs. That was three weeks ago. The licences are due the day after tomorrow and he doesn’t think they’ll be back.’
‘Bit tough on the blokes who made the claims,’ Matthew said dubiously.
‘Don’t waste sympathy on them. Pete said they cut up some bloke so bad he nearly died. And they were only here a couple of days.’
‘These claims,’ Hamish said, ‘must be other folks got their eyes on them.’
‘Several, Pete says, but he thinks if we go to the gold commissioner we might be able to jump the queue.’
They found the commissioner’s tent and went inside. The clerk, a pasty youth with a sweaty forehead, spots and greased-down hair, looked them over, his moist eyes lingering warmly on Janice. Unfortunately his ardour proved insufficient to deflect him from his job.
‘Thirty shillings a month,’ he said. ‘Each.’
It was a breath-taking sum.
‘What do we get for that?’ Hamish asked.
‘You pick the place you want, I come and put in the pegs. Each claim’s eight foot square. After that it’s up to you.’
Janice smiled brilliantly into the clerk’s eyes. ‘There are two unworked claims near Pete Saul’s smithy. I hear those boys aren’t coming back. I’d like first chance at them.’
The clerk shook his head. ‘The licences aren’t due for renewal yet.’
‘What I thought was, if the present licencees don’t come back—’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘But if—’
‘I’m sorry. It is completely out of—’
‘I thought we could perhaps pay for the licences now and if the present licencees don’t come back, in two days’ time you could issue the new licences to us.’
Silence.
‘There would be no question of a refund,’ the clerk said.
‘We understand that. We would not expect you to go to any trouble for us,’ she said carefully, ‘without being properly recompensed for doing so. Even if we got the licences.’
The Burning Land Page 22
