Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated) (760 page)

Abe bent tenderly over his prostrate companion. He could see that he was very white, and breathing with difficulty.

“Cheer up, old Boss,” he murmured. “Hullo! my stars!”

The last two exclamations were shot out of the honest miner’s bosom as if they were impelled by some irresistible force, and he took a couple of steps backward in sheer amazement. There at the other side of the fallen man, and half shrouded in the darkness, stood what appeared to Abe’s simple soul to be the most beautiful vision that ever had appeared upon earth. To eyes accustomed to rest upon nothing more captivating than the ruddy faces and rough beards of the miners in the Sluice, it seemed that that fair delicate countenance must belong to a wanderer from some better world. Abe gazed at it with a wondering reverence, oblivious for the moment even of his injured friend upon the ground.

“0 papa,” said the apparition, in great distress, “he is hurt, the gentleman is hurt,” and with a quick feminine gesture of sympathy, she bent her lithe figure over Boss Morgan’s prostrate figure.

“Why, it’s Abe Durton and his partner,” said the driver of the buggy, coming forward and disclosing the grizzled features of Mr. Joshua Sinclair, the assayer to the mines. “I don’t know how to thank you, boys. The infernal brute got the bit between his teeth, and I should have had to have thrown Carrie out and chanced it in another minute. That’s right,” he continued as Morgan staggered to his feet. “Not much hurt, I hope.”

“I can get up to the hut now,” said the young man, steadying himself upon his partner’s shoulder. “How are you going to get Miss Sinclair home?”

“Oh, we can walk,” said the young lady, shaking off the effects of her fright with all the elasticity of youth.

“We can drive and take the road round the bank so as to avoid the ford,” said her father. “The horse seems cowed enough now; you need not be afraid of it, Carrie. I hope we shall see you at the house, both of you. Neither of us can easily forget this night’s work.”

Miss Carrie said nothing, but she managed to shoot a little demure glance of gratitude from under her long lashes, to have won which honest Abe felt that he would have cheerfully undertaken to stop a runaway locomotive.

There was a cheery shout of “Good-night,” a crack of the whip, and the buggy rattled away in the darkness.

“You told me the men were rough and nasty, pa,” said Miss Carrie Sinclair, after a long silence, when the two dark shadows had died away in the distance, and the carriage was speeding along by the turbulent stream. “I don’t think so. I think they were very nice.” And Carrie was unusually quiet for the remainder of her journey, and seemed more reconciled to the hardship of leaving her dear friend Amelia in the far-off boarding school at Melbourne.

That did not prevent her from writing a full, true, and particular account of their little adventure to the same young lady upon that very night.

“They stopped the horse, darling, and one poor fellow was hurt. And 0, Amy, if you had seen the other one in a red shirt, with a pistol at his waist! I couldn’t help thinking of you, dear. He was just your idea. You remember, a yellow moustache and great blue eyes. And how he did stare at poor me! You never see such men in Burke-street, Amy;” and so on, for four pages of pretty feminine gossip.

In the mean time poor Boss, badly shaken, had been helped up the hill by his partner and regained the shelter of the shanty. Abe doctored him out of the rude pharmacopoeia of the camp, and bandaged up his strained arm. Both were men of few words, and neither made any allusion to what had taken place. It was noticed, however, by Blinky that his master failed to pay his usual nightly orisons before the shrine of Susan Banks. Whether this sagacious fowl drew any deductions from this, and from the fact that Bones sat long and earnestly smoking by the smouldering fire, I know not. Suffice it that as the candle died away and the miner rose from his chair, his feathered friend flew down upon his shoulder, and was only prevented from giving vent to a sympathetic hoot by Abe’s warning finger, and its own strong inherent sense of propriety.

A casual visitor dropping into the straggling township of Harvey’s Sluice shortly after Miss Carrie Sinclair’s arrival would have noticed a considerable alteration in the manners and customs of its inhabitants. Whether it was the refining influence of a woman’s presence, or whether it sprang from an emulation excited by the brilliant appearance of Abe Durton, it is hard to say — probably from a blending of the two. Certain it is that that young man had suddenly developed an affection for cleanliness and a regard for the conventionalities of civilisation, which aroused the astonishment and ridicule of his companions. That Boss Morgan should pay attention to his personal appearance had long been set down as a curious and inexplicable phenomenon, depending upon early education; but that loose-limbed easy-going Bones should flaunt about in a clean shirt was regarded by every grimy denizen of the Sluice as a direct and premeditated insult. In self-defence, therefore, there was a general cleaning up after working hours, and such a run upon the grocery establishment, that soap went up to an unprecedented figure, and a fresh consignment had to be ordered from McFarlane’s store in Buckhurst.

“Is this here a free minin’ camp, or is it a darned Sunday-school?” had been the indignant query of Long McCoy, a prominent member of the reactionary party, who had failed to advance with the times, having been absent during the period of regeneration. But his remonstrance met with but little sympathy; and at the end of a couple of days a general turbidity of the creek announced his surrender, which was confirmed by his appearance in the Colonial Bar with a shining and bashful face, and hair which was redolent of bear’s grease.

“I felt kinder lonesome,” he remarked apologetically, “so I thought as I’d have a look what was under the clay,” and he viewed himself approvingly in the cracked mirror which graced the select room of the establishment.

Our casual visitor would have noticed a remarkable change also in the conversation of the community. Somehow, when a certain dainty little bonnet with a sweet girlish figure beneath it was seen in the distance among the disused shafts and mounds of red earth which disfigured the sides of the valley, there was a warning murmur, and a general clearing off of the cloud of blasphemy, which was, I regret to state, an habitual characteristic of the working population of Harvey’s Sluice. Such things only need a beginning; and it was noticeable that long after Miss Sinclair had vanished from sight there was a decided rise in the moral barometer of the gulches. Men found by experience that their stock of adjectives was less limited than they had been accustomed to suppose, and that the less forcible were sometimes even more adapted for conveying their meaning.

Abe had formerly been considered one of the most experienced valuators of an ore in the settlement. It had been commonly supposed that he was able to estimate the amount of gold in a fragment of quartz with remarkable exactness. This, however, was evidently a mistake, otherwise he would never have incurred the useless expense of having so many worthless specimens assayed as he now did. Mr. Joshua Sinclair found himself inundated with such a flood of fragments of mica, and lumps of rock containing decimal percentages of the precious metals, that he began to form a very low opinion of the young man’s mining capabilities. It is even asserted that Abe shuffled up to the house one morning with a hopeful smile, and, after some fumbling, produced half a brick from the bosom of his jersey, with the stereotyped remark “that he thought he’d struck it at last, and so had dropped in to ask him to cipher out an estimate.” As this anecdote rests, however, upon the unsupported evidence of Jim Struggles, the humorist of the camp, there may be some slight inaccuracy of detail.

It is certain that what with professional business in the morning and social visits at night, the tall figure of the miner was a familiar object in the little drawing room of Azalea Villa, as the new house of the assayer had been magniloquently named. He seldom ventured upon a remark in the presence of its female occupant; but would sit on the extreme edge of his chair in a state of speechless admiration while she rattled off some lively air upon the newly-imported piano. Many were the strange and unexpected places in which his feet turned up. Miss Carrie had gradually come to the conclusion that they were entirely independent of his body, and had ceased to speculate upon the manner in which she would trip over them on one side of the table while the blushing owner was apologising from the other. There was only one cloud on honest Bones’s mental horizon, and that was the periodical appearance of Black Tom Ferguson, of Rochdale Ferry. This clever young scamp had managed to ingratiate himself with old Joshua, and was a constant visitor at the villa. There were evil rumours abroad about Black Tom. He was known to be a gambler, and shrewdly suspected to be worse. Harvey’s Sluice was not censorious, and yet there was a general feeling that Ferguson was a man to be avoided. There was a reckless
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lan about his bearing, however, and a sparkle in his conversation, which had an indescribable charm, and even induced the Boss, who was particular in such matters, to cultivate his acquaintance while forming a correct estimate of his character. Miss Carrie seemed to hail his appearance as a relief, and chattered away for hours about books and music and the gaieties of Melbourne. It was on these occasions that poor simple Bones would sink into the very lowest depths of despondency, and either slink away, or sit glaring at his rival with an earnest malignancy which seemed to cause that gentleman no small amusement.

The miner made no secret to his partner of the admiration which he entertained for Miss Sinclair. If he was silent in her company, he was voluble enough when she was the subject of discourse. Loiterers upon the Buckhurst road might have heard a stentorian voice upon the hillside bellowing forth a vocabulary of female charms. He submitted his difficulties to the superior intelligence of the Boss.

“That loafer from Rochdale,” he said, “he seems to reel it off kinder nat’ral, while for the life of me I can’t say a word. Tell me, Boss, what would you say to a girl like that?”

“Why, talk about what would interest her,” said his companion. “Ah, that’s where it lies.”

“Talk about the customs of the place and the country,” said the Boss, pulling meditatively at his pipe. “Tell her stories of what you have seen in the mines, and that sort of thing.”

“Eh? You’d do that, would you?” responded his comrade more hopefully. “If that’s the hang of it I am right. I’ll go up now and tell her about Chicago Bill, an’ how he put them two bullets in the man from the bend the night of the dance.”

Boss Morgan laughed.

“That’s hardly the thing,” he said. “You’d frighten her if you told her that. Tell her something lighter, you know; something to amuse her, something funny.”

“Funny?” said the anxious lover, with less confidence in his voice. “How you and me made Mat Houlahan drunk and put him in the pulpit of the Baptist church, and he wouldn’t let the preacher in in the morning. How would that do, eh?”

“For Heaven’s sake, don’t say anything of the sort,” said his Mentor, in great consternation. “She’d never speak to either of us again. No, what I mean is that you should tell about the habits of the mines, how men live and work and die there. If she is a sensible girl that ought to interest her.”

“How they live at the mines? Pard, you are good to me. How they live? There’s a thing I can talk of as glib as Black Tom or any man. I’ll try it on her when I see her.”

“By the way,” said his partner listlessly, “just keep an eye on that man Ferguson. His hands aren’t very clean, you know and he’s not scrupulous when he is aiming for anything. You remember how Dick Williams, of English Town, was found dead in the bush. Of course it was rangers that did it. They do say, however, that Black Tom owed him a deal more money than he could ever have paid. There’s been one or two queer things about him. Keep your eye on him, Abe. Watch what he does.”

“I will,” said his companion.

And he did. He watched him that very night. Watched him stride out of the house of the assayer with anger and baffled pride on every feature of his handsome swarthy face. Watched him clear the garden paling at a bound, pass in long rapid strides down the side of the valley, gesticulating wildly with his hands, and vanish into the bushland beyond. All this Abe Durton watched, and with a thoughtful look upon his face he relit his pipe and strolled slowly backward to the hut upon the hill.

March was drawing to a close in Harvey’s Sluice, and the glare and heat of the antipodean summer had toned down into the rich mellow hues of autumn. It was never a lovely place to look upon. There was something hopelessly prosaic in the two bare rugged ridges, seamed and scarred by the hand of man, with iron arms of windlasses, and broken buckets projecting everywhere through the endless little hillocks of red earth. Down the middle ran the deeply rutted road from Buckhurst, winding along and crossing the sluggish tide of Harper’s Creek by a crumbling wooden bridge. Beyond the bridge lay the cluster of little huts with the Colonial Bar and the Grocery towering in all the dignity of whitewash among the humble dwellings around. The assayer’s verandah-lined house lay above the gulches on the side of the slope nearly opposite the dilapidated specimen of architecture of which our friend Abe was so unreasonably proud.