Chapter LII…

Chapter LII

THE old attachment was revived. Robinson had always a great regard for George, and after nursing and bringing him through a dangerous illness this feeling doubled. And as for George, the man who had brought him a letter from Susan one hundred and sixty miles became such a benefactor in his eyes that he thought nothing good enough for him.

In a very few days George was about again and on his pony, and he and Robinson and Carlo went a shepherding. One or two bullocks had gone to Jericho while George lay ill, and the poor fellow's heart was sore when he looked at his diminished substance and lost time. Robinson threw himself heart and soul into the business, and was of great service to George; but after a bit he found it a dull life.

George saw this, and said to him: “You would do better in a town. I should be sorry to lose you, but if you take my advice you will turn your back on unlucky George, and try the paint-brush in Bathurst.”

For Robinson had told him all about it--and painted his front door. “Can't afford to part from Honesty,” was the firm reply.

George breathed again. Robinson was a great comfort to the weak, solitary, and now desponding man. One day for a change they had a thirty-mile walk, to see a farmer that had some beasts to sell a great bargain; he was going to boil them down if he could not find a customer. They found them all just sold. “Just my luck,” said George.

They came home another way. Returning home, George was silent and depressed.

Robinson was silent, but appeared to be swelling with some grand idea. Every now and then he shot ahead under its influence. When they got home and were seated at supper, he suddenly put this question to George, “Did you ever hear of any gold being found in these parts?”

“No! never!”

“What, not in any part of the country?”

“No! never!”

“Well, that is odd!”

“I am afraid it is a very bad country for that.”

“Ay to make it in, but not to find it in.”

“What do you mean?”

“George,” said the other, lowering his voice mysteriously, “in our walk to-day we passed places that brought my heart into my mouth; for if this was only California those places would be pockets of gold.”

“But you see it is not California, but Australia, where all the world knows there is nothing of what your mind is running on.”

“Don't say 'knows,' say 'thinks.' Has it ever been searched for gold?”

“I'll be bound it has; or, if not, with so many eyes constantly looking on every foot of soil a speck or two would have come to light.”

“One would think so; but it is astonishing how blind folks are, till they are taught how to look, and where to look. 'Tis the mind that sees things, George, not the eye.”

“Ah!” said George with a sigh, “this chat puts me in mind of 'The Grove.' Do you mind how you used to pester everybody to go out to California?”

“Yes! and I wish we were there now.”

“And all your talk used to be gold--gold--gold.”

“As well say it as think it.”

“That is true. Well, we shall be very busy all day to-morrow, but in the afternoon dig for gold an hour or two--then you will be satisfied.”

“But it is no use digging here; it was full five-and-twenty miles from here the likely-looking place.”

“Then why didn't you stop me at the place?”

“Why?” replied Robinson, sourly, “because his reverence did so snub me whenever I got upon that favorite topic, that I really had got out of the habit. I was ashamed to say, 'George, let us stop on the road and try for gold with our finger-nails.' I knew I should only get laughed at.”

“Well,” said George sarcastically, “since the gold mine is twenty-five miles off, and our work is round about the door, suppose we pen sheep to-morrow--and dig for gold when there is nothing better to be done.”

Robinson sighed. Unbucolical to the last degree was the spirit in which our Bohemian tended the flocks next morning.

His thoughts were deeper than the soil. And every evening up came the old topic. Oh! how sick George got of it. At last one night he said: “My lad, I should like to tell you a story--but I suppose I shall make a bungle of it; shan't cut the furrow clean I am doubtful.”

“Never mind; try!”

“Well, then. Once upon a time there was an old chap that had heard or read about treasures being found in odd places, a pot full of guineas or something; and it took root in his heart till nothing would serve him but he must find a pot of guineas, too; he used to poke about all the old ruins, grubbing away, and would have taken up the floor of the church, but the churchwardens would not have it. One morning he comes down and says to his wife, 'It is all right, old woman, I've found the treasure.'

“'No! have you, though?' says she.

“'Yes!' says he; 'leastways, it is as good as found; it is only waiting till I've had my breakfast, and then I'll go out and fetch it in.'

“'La, John, but how did you find it?'

“'It was revealed to me in a dream,' says he, as grave as a judge.

“'And where is it?' asks the old woman.

“'Under a tree in our own orchard--no farther,' says he.

“'Oh, John! how long you are at breakfast to-day!' Up they both got and into the orchard. 'Now, which tree is it under?'

“John, he scratches his head, 'Blest if I know.'

“'Why, you old ninny,' says the mistress, 'didn't you take the trouble to notice?'

“'That I did,' said he; 'I saw plain enough which tree it was in my dream, but now they muddle it all, there are so many of 'em.'

“'Drat your stupid old head,' says she, 'why didn't you put a nick on the right one at the time?'”

Robinson burst out laughing. George chuckled. “Oh!” said he, “there were a pair of them for wisdom, you may take your oath of that. 'Well,' says he, 'I must dig till I find the right one.' The wife she loses heart at this; for there was eighty apple-trees, and a score of cherry-trees. 'Mind you don't cut the roots,' says she, and she heaves a sigh. John he gives them bad language, root and branch. 'What signifies cut or no cut; the old faggots--they don't bear me a bushel of fruit the whole lot. They used to bear two sacks apiece in father's time. Drat 'em.'

“'Well, John,' says the old woman, smoothing him down; 'father used to give them a deal of attention.'--' 'Tain't that! 'tain't that!' says he quick and spiteful-like; 'they have got old like ourselves, and good for fire-wood.' Out pickax and spade and digs three foot deep round one, and finding nothing but mould goes at another, makes a little mound all round him, too--no guinea-pot. Well, the village let him dig three or four quiet enough; but after that curiosity was awakened, and while John was digging, and that was all day, there was mostly seven or eight watching through the fence and passing jests. After a bit a fashion came up of flinging a stone or two at John; then John he brought out his gun loaded with dust-shot along with his pick and spade, and the first stone came he fired sharp in that direction and then loaded again. So they took that hint, and John dug on in peace--till about the fourth Sunday--and then the parson had a slap at him in church. 'Folks were not to heap up to themselves treasures on earth,' was all his discourse.”

“Well, but,” said Robinson, “this one was only heaping up mould.”

“So it seemed when he had dug the five-score holes, for no pot of gold didn't come to light. Then the neighbors called the orchard 'Jacobs' Folly;' his name was Jacobs--John Jacobs. 'Now then, wife,' says he, 'suppose you and I look out for another village to live in, for their gibes are more than I can bear.' Old woman begins to cry. 'Been here so long--brought me home here, John--when we were first married, John--and I was a comely lass, and you the smartest young man I ever saw, to my fancy any way; couldn't sleep or eat my victuals in any house but this.'

“'Oh! couldn't ye? Well, then, we must stay; perhaps it will blow over.'--'Like everything else, John; but, dear John, do ye fill in those holes; the young folk come far and wide on Sundays to see them.'

“'Wife, I haven't the heart,' says he. 'You see, when I was digging for the treasure I was always a-going to find, it kept my heart up; but take out shovel and fill them in--I'd as lieve dine off white of egg on a Sunday.' So for six blessed months the heaps were out in the heat and frost till the end of February, and then when the weather broke the old man takes heart and fills them in, and the village soon forgot 'Jacobs' Folly' because it was out of sight. Comes April, and out burst the trees. 'Wife,' says he, 'our bloom is richer than I have known it this many a year, it is richer than our neighbors'.' Bloom dies, and then out come about a million little green things quite hard.”

“Ay! ay!” said Robinson; “I see.”

“Michaelmas-day the old trees were staggering and the branches down to the ground with the crop; thirty shillings on every tree one with another; and so on for the next year, and the next; sometimes more, sometimes less, according to the year. Trees were old and wanted a change. His letting in the air to them, and turning the subsoil up to the frost and sun, had renewed their youth. So by that he learned that tillage is the way to get treasure from the earth. Men are ungrateful at times, but the soil is never ungrateful, it always makes a return for the pains we give it.”

“Well, George,” said Robinson, “thank you for your story; it is a very good one, and after it I'll never dig for gold in a garden. But now suppose a bare rock or an old river's bed, or a mass of shingles or pipe-clay, would you dig or manure them for crops?”

“Why, of course not.”

“Well, those are the sort of places in which nature has planted a yellower crop and a richer crop than tillage ever produced. And I believe there are plums of gold not thirty miles from here in such spots waiting only to be dug out.”

“Well, Tom, I have wasted a parable, that is all. Good-night; I hope to sleep and be ready for a good day's work to-morrow. You shall dream of digging up gold here--if you like.”

“I'll never speak of it again,” said Robinson doggedly.

If you want to make a man a bad companion, interdict altogether the topic that happens to interest him. Robinson ceased to vent his chimera. So it swelled and swelled in his heart, and he became silent, absorbed, absent and out of spirits. “Ah!” thought George, “poor fellow, he is very dull. He won't stay beside me much longer.”

This conviction was so strong that he hesitated to close with an advantageous offer that came to him from his friend, Mr. Winchester. That gentleman had taken a lease of a fine run some thirty miles from George. He had written George that he was to go and look at it, and if he liked it better than his own he was to take it. Mr. Winchester could make no considerable use of either for some time to come.

George hesitated. He felt himself so weak-handed with only Robinson, who might leave him, and a shepherd lad he had just hired. However his hands were unexpectedly strengthened.

One day as the two friends were washing a sheep an armed savage suddenly stood before them. Robinson dropped the sheep and stood on his defense, but George cried out, “No! no! it is Jacky! Why, Jacky, where on earth have you been?” And he came warmly toward him. Jacky fled to a small eminence and made warlike preparations. “You stop you a good while and I speak. Who you?”

“Who am I? stupid. Why, who should I be but George Fielding?”

“I see you one George Fielding, but I not know you dis George Fielding. George die. I see him die. You alive. You please you call dog Carlo! Carlo wise dog.”

“Well, I never! Hie, Carlo! Carlo!”

Up came Carlo full pelt. George patted him, and Carlo wagged his tail and pranced about in the shape of a reaping-hook. Jacky came instantly down, showed his ivories, and admitted his friend's existence on the word of the dog. “Jacky a good deal glad because you not dead now. When black fellow die he never live any more. Black fellow stupid fellow. I tink I like white fellow a good deal bigger than black fellow. Now I stay with you a good while.”

George's hands thus strengthened he wrote and told Mr. Winchester he would go to the new ground, which, as far as he could remember, was very good, and would inspect it, and probably make the exchange with thanks. It was arranged that in two days' time the three friends should go together, inspect the new ground and build a temporary hut there.

Meantime Robinson and Jacky make great friends. Robinson showed him one or two sleight-of-hand tricks that stamped him at once a superior being in Jacky's eyes, and Jacky showed Robinson a thing or two He threw his boomerang and made it travel a couple of hundred yards, and return and hover over his head like a bird and settle at his feet; but he was shy of throwing his spear. “Keep spear for when um angry, not throw him straight now.

“Don't you believe that, Tom,” said George. “Fact is the little varmint can't hit anything with 'em. Now look at that piece of bark leaning against that tree. You don't hit it. Come, try, Jacky.” Jacky yawned and threw a spear carelessly. It went close by but did not hit it.

“Didn't I tell you so?” said George. “I'd stand before him and his spears all day with nothing but a cricket-stump in my hand, and never be hit, and never brag, neither.” Jacky showed his ivories. “When I down at Sydney white man put up a little wood and a bit of white money for Jacky. Then Jacky throw straight a good deal.”

“Now hark to that! black skin or white skin 'tis all the same; we can't do our best till we are paid for it. Don't you encourage him, Tom, I won't have it.”

The two started early one fine morning for the new ground, distant full thirty miles. At first starting Robinson was in high glee; his nature delighted in change; but George was sad and silent. Three times he had changed his ground and always for the better. But to what end. These starts in early morning for fresh places used once to make him buoyant, but not now. All that was over. He persisted doggedly, and did his best like a man, but in his secret heart not one grain of hope was left. Indeed it was but the other day he had written to Susan and told her it was not possible he could make a thousand pounds. The difficulties were too many, and then his losses had been too great. And he told her he felt it was scarcely fair to keep her to her promise. “You would waste all your youth, Susan, dear, waiting for me.” And he told her how he loved her and never should love another; but left her free.

To add to his troubles he was scarcely well of the fever when he caught a touch of rheumatism; and the stalwart young fellow limped along by Robinson's side, and instead of his distancing Jacky as he used in better days, Jacky rattled on ahead and having got on the trail of an opossum announced his intention of hunting it down and then following the human trail. “Me catch you before the sun go, and bring opossum--then we eat a good deal.” And off glided Jacky after his opossum.

The pair plodded and limped on in gloomy silence, for at a part of the road where they emerged from green meadows on rocks and broken ground Robinson's tongue had suddenly ceased.

They plodded on, one sad and stiff, the other thoughtful. Any one meeting the pair would have pitied them. Ill-success was stamped on them. Their features were so good, their fortunes so unkind. Their clothes were sadly worn, their beards neglected, their looks thoughtful and sad. The convert to honesty stole more than one look at the noble figure that limped beside him and the handsome face in which gentle, uncomplaining sorrow seemed to be a tenant for life; and to the credit of our nature be it said that his eyes filled and his heart yearned. “Oh, Honesty!” said he, “you are ill-paid here. I have been well paid for my little bit of you, but here is a life of honesty and a life of ill-luck and bitter disappointment. Poor George! poor, dear George! Leave you? never while I have hands to work and a brain to devise!”

They now began slowly to mount a gentle slope that ended in a long black snakelike hill. “When we get to that hill we shall see my new pasture,” said George. “New or old, I doubt 'twill be all the same.”

And he sighed and relapsed into silence. Meantime Jacky had killed his opossum and was now following their trail at an easy trot.

Leaving the two sad ones with worn clothes and heavy hearts plodding slowly and stiffly up the long rough slope, our story runs on before and gains the rocky platform they are making for and looks both ways--back toward the sad ones and forward over a grand, long, sweeping valley. This pasture is rich in proportion as it recedes from this huge backbone of rock that comes from the stony mountains and pierces and divides the meadows as a cape the sea. In the foreground the grass suffers from its stern neighbor, is cut up here and there by the channels of defunct torrents, and dotted with fragments of rock, some of which seem to have pierced the bosom of the soil from below, others have been detached at different epochs from the parent rock and rolled into the valley. But these wounds are only discovered on inspection; at a general glance from the rocky road into the dale the prospect is large, rich and laughing; fairer pastures are to be found in that favored land, but this sparkles at you like an emerald roughly set, and where the backbone of rock gives a sudden twist bursts out all at once broad smiling in your face--a land flowing with milk and every bush a thousand nosegays. At the angle above-mentioned, which commanded a double view, a man was standing watching some object or objects not visible to his three companions; they were working some yards lower down by the side of a rivulet that brawled and bounded down the hill. Every now and then an inquiry was shouted up to that individual, who was evidently a sort of scout or sentinel. At last one of the men in the ravine came up and bade the scout go down.

“I'll soon tell you whether we shall have to knock off work.” And he turned the corner and disappeared.

He shaded both his eyes with his hands, for the sun was glaring. About a mile off he saw two men coming slowly up by a zig-zag path toward the very point where he stood. Presently the men stopped and examined the prospect, each in his own way. The taller one took a wide survey of the low ground, and calling his companion to him appeared to point out to him some beauty or peculiarity of the region. Our scout stepped back and called down to his companions, “Shepherds!”

He then strolled back to his post with no particular anxiety. Arrived there his uneasiness seemed to revive. The shorter of the two strangers had lagged behind his comrade, and the watcher observed, that he was carrying on a close and earnest inspection of the ground in detail.

He peered into the hollows and loitered in every ravine. This gave singular offense to the keen eye that was now upon him. Presently he was seen to stop and call his taller companion to him, and point with great earnestness first to something at their feet, then to the backbone of rocks; and it so happened by mere accident that his finger took nearly the direction of the very spot where the observer of all his movements stood. The man started back out of sight and called in a low voice to his comrades,

“Come here.”

They came straggling up with troubled and lowering faces. “Lie down and watch them,” said the leader. The men stooped and crawled forward to some stunted bushes, behind which they lay down and watched in silence the unconscious pair who were now about two furlongs distant. The shorter of the two still loitered behind his companion, and inspected the ground with particular interest. The leader of the band, who went by the name of Black Will, muttered a curse upon his inquisitiveness. The others assented all but one, a huge fellow whom the others addressed as Jem. “Nonsense,” said Jem, “dozens pass this way and are none the wiser.”

“Ay,” replied Black Will, “with their noses in the air. But that is a notice-taking fellow. Look at him with his eyes forever on the rocks, or in the gullies, or--there if he is not picking up a stone and breaking it!”

“Ha! ha!” laughed Jem incredulously, “how many thousand have picked up stones and broke them and all, and never known what we know.”

“He has been in the same oven as we,” retorted the other.

Here one of the others put in his word. “That is not likely, captain; but if it is so there are no two ways. A secret is no secret if all the world is to know it.”

“You remember our oath, Jem,” said the leader sternly.

“Why should I forget it more than another?” replied the other angrily.

“Have you all your knives?” asked the captain gloomily. The men nodded assent.

“Cross them with me as we did when we took our oath first.”

The men stretched out each a brawny arm, and a long sharp knife, so that all the points came together in a focus; and this action suited well with their fierce and animal features, their long neglected beards, their matted hair and their gleaming eyes. It looked the prologue to some deed of blood. This done, at another word from their ruffianly leader they turned away from the angle in the rock and plunged hastily down the ravine; but they had scarcely taken thirty steps when they suddenly disappeared.

In the neighborhood of the small stream I have mentioned was a cavern of irregular shape that served these men for a habitation and place of concealment. Nature had not done all. The stone was soft, and the natural cavity had been enlarged and made a comfortable retreat enough for the hardy men whose home it was. A few feet from the mouth of the cave on one side grew a stout bush that added to the shelter and the concealment, and on the other the men themselves had placed two or three huge stones, which, from the attitude the rogues had given them, appeared, like many others, to have rolled thither years ago from the rock above.

In this retreat the whole band were now silently couched, two of them in the mouth of the cave, Black Will and another lying flat on their stomachs watching the angle of the road for the two men who must pass that way, and listening for every sound. Black Will was carefully and quietly sharpening his knife on one of the stones and casting back every now and then a meaning glance to his companions. The pertinacity with which he held to his idea began to tell on them, and they sat in an attitude of sullen and terrible suspicion. But Jem wore a look of contemptuous incredulity. However small a society may be, if it is a human one jealousy shall creep in. Jem grudged Black Will his captaincy. Jem was intellectually a bit of a brute. He was a stronger man than Will, and therefore thought it hard that merely because Will was a keener spirit, Will should be over him. Half an hour passed thus, and the two travelers did not make their appearance.

“Not even coming this way at all,” said Jem.

“Hush!” replied Will sternly, “hold your tongue. They must come this way, and they can't be far off. Jem, you can crawl out and see where they are, if you are clever enough to keep that great body out of sight.”

Jem resented this doubt cast upon his adroitness, and crawled out among the bushes. He had scarcely got twenty yards when he halted and made a signal that the men were in sight. Soon afterward he came back with less precaution. “They are sitting eating their dinner close by, just on the sunny side of the rock--shepherds, as I told you--got a dog. Go yourself if you don't believe me.”

The leader went to the spot, and soon after returned and said quietly, “Pals, I dare say he is right. Lie still till they have had their dinner; they are going farther, no doubt.”

Soon after this he gave a hasty signal of silence, for George and Robinson at that moment came round the corner of the rock and stood on the road not fifty yards above them. Here they paused as the valley burst on their view, and George pointed out its qualities to his comrade. “It is not first-rate, Tom, but there is good grass in patches, and plenty of water.”

Robinson, instead of replying or giving his mind to the prospect said to George, “Why, where is he?”

“Who?”

“The man that I saw standing at this corner a while ago. He came round this way I'll be sworn.”

“He is gone away, I suppose. I never saw any one, for my part.”

“I did, though. Gone away? How could he go away? The road is in sight for miles, and not a creature on it. He is vanished.”

“I don't see him anyway, Tom.”

“Of course you don't, he is vanished into the bowels of the earth. I don't like gentlemen that vanish into the bowels of the earth.”

“How suspicious you are! Bushrangers again, I suppose. They are always running in your mind--them and gold.”

“You know the country, George. Here, take my stick.” And he handed George a long stick with a heavy iron ferule. “If a man is safe here he owes it to himself, not to his neighbor.”

“Then why do you give me your weapon?” said George with a smile.

“I haven't,” was the reply. “I carry my sting out of sight, like a humble bee.” And Mr. Robinson winked mysteriously, and the process seemed to relieve his mind and soothe his suspicions. He then fell to inspecting the rocks; and when George pointed out to him the broad and distant pasture he said, in an absent way, “Yes;” and turning round George found him with his eyes glued to the ground at his feet, and his mind in a deep reverie. George was vexed, and said somewhat warmly, “Why, Tom, the place is worth looking at now we are come to it, surely.”

Robinson made no direct reply. “George,” said he thoughtfully, “how far have you got toward your thousand pounds?”

“Oh, Tom! don't ask me, don't remind me! How can I ever make it? No market within a thousand miles of any place in this confounded country! Forced to boil down sheep into tallow and sell them for the price of a wild duck! I have left my Susan, and I have lost her. Oh, why did you remind me?”

“So much for the farming lay. Don't you be down-hearted, there's better cards in the pack than the five of spades; and the farther I go and the more I see of this country the surer I am. There is a good day coming for you and me. Listen, George. When I shut my eyes for a moment now where I stand, and then open them--I'm in California.”

“Dreaming?”

“No, wide awake--wider than you are now. George, look at these hills; you could not tell them from the golden range of California.. But that is not all; when you look into them you find they are made of the same stuff, too--granite, mica and quartz. Now don't you be cross.”

“No! no! why should I? Show me,” said George, trying out of kindheartedness to take an interest in this subject, which had so often wearied him.

“Well, here are two of them. That great dark bit out there is mica, and all this that runs in a vein like is quartz. Quartz and mica are the natural home of gold; and some gold is to be found at home still, but the main of it has been washed out and scattered like seed all over the neighboring clays. You see, George, the world is a thousand times older than most folks think, and water has been working upon gold thousands and thousands of years before ever a man stood upon the earth, ay or a dog either, Carlo, for as wise as you look squatting out there thinking of nothing and pretending to be thinking of everything.”

“Well, drop gold,” said George, “and tell me what this is,” and he handed Robinson a small fossil.

Robinson eyed it with wonder and interest. “Where on earth did you find this?”

“Hard by; what is it?”

“Plenty of these in California. What is it? Why, I'll tell you; it is a pale old Joey.”

“You don't say so; looks like a shell.”

“Sit down a moment, George, and let us look at it. He bids me drop gold--and then goes and shows me a proof of gold that never deceived us out there.”

“You are mad. How can this be a sign of gold? I tell you it is a shell.”

“And I tell you that where these things are found among mica, quartz and granite, there gold is to be found if men have the wit, the patience and the skill to look for it. I can't tell you why; the laws of gold puzzle deeper heads than mine, but so it is. I seem to smell gold all round me here.” And Robinson flushed all over, so powerfully did the great idea of gold seated here on his native throne grapple and agitate his mind.

“Tom,” said the other doggedly, “if there is as much gold on the ground of New South Wales as will make me a wedding-ring--I am a Dutchman;” and he got up calmly and jerked the pale old Joey a tremendous way into the valley.

This action put Robinson's blood up. “George,” cried he, springing up like fire and bringing his foot down sharp upon the rocky floor, “IF I DON'T STAND UPON GOLD--I'M D----D!”

And a wild but true inspiration seemed to be upon the man; a stranger could hardly have helped believing him, but George had heard a good deal of this, though the mania had never gone quite so far. He said quickly, “Come, let us go down into the pasture.”

“Not I,” replied Robinson. “Come, George, prejudice is for babies, experience for men. Here is an unknown country with all the signs of gold thicker than ever. I have got a calabash--stay and try for gold in this gully; it looks to me just like the mouth of a purse.”

“Not I.”

“I will, then.”

“Why not? I don't think you will find anything in it, but anyway you will have a better chance when I am not by to spoil you. Luck is all against me. If I want rain, comes drought; if I want sun, look for a deluge, if there is money to be made by a thing I'm out of it; to be lost, I'm in it; if I loved a vixen she'd drop into my arms like a medlar; I love an angel and that is why I shall never have her, never. From a game of marbles to the game of life I never had a grain of luck like other people. Leave me, Tom, and try if you can find gold; you will have a chance, my poor fellow, if unlucky George is not aside you.”

“Leave you, George! not if I know it.”

“You are to blame if you don't. Turn your back on me as I did on you in England.”

“Never! I'd rather not find gold than part with honesty. There, I'm coming--let us go--quick--come, let us leave here.” And the two men left the road and turned their faces and their steps across the ravine.

During all this dialogue the men in the cave had strained both eyes and ears to comprehend the speakers. The distance was too great for them to catch all the words, but this much was clear from the first, that one of the men wished to stay on the spot for some purpose, and the other to go on; but presently, as the speakers warmed, a word traveled down the breeze that made the four ruffians start and turn red with surprise, and the next moment darken with anger and apprehension. The word came again and again; they all heard it--its open vowel gave it a sonorous ring; it seemed to fly farther than any other word the speaker uttered, or perhaps when he came to it he spoke it louder than smaller words, or the hearers' ears were watching for it.

The men interchanged terrible looks, and then they grasped their knives and watched their leader's eye for some deadly signal. Again and again the word “g-o-l-d” came like an Aeolian note into the secret cave, and each time eye sought eye and read the unlucky speaker's death-warrant there. But when George prevailed and the two men started for the valley, the men in the cave cast uncertain looks on one another, and he we have called Jem drew a long breath and said brutally, yet with something of satisfaction, “You have saved your bacon this time.” The voices now drew near and the men crouched close, for George and Robinson passed within fifteen yards of them. They were talking now about matters connected with George's business, for Robinson made a violent effort and dropped his favorite theme to oblige his comrade. They passed near the cave, and presently their backs were turned to it.

“Good-by, my lads,” whispered Jem. “And curse you for making us lose a good half hour,” muttered another of the gang. The words were scarce out of his mouth before a sudden rustle was heard and there was Carlo. He had pulled up in mid career and stood transfixed with astonishment, literally pointing the gang; it was but for a moment--he did not like the looks of the men at all; he gave a sharp bark that made George and Robinson turn quickly round, and then he went on hunting.

“A kangaroo!” shouted Robinson, “it must have got up near that bush; come and look--if it is we will hunt it down.”

George turned back with him, but on reflection he said, “No! Tom, we have a long road to go, let us keep on, if you please;” and they once more turned their backs to the cave, whistled Carlo, and stepped briskly out toward the valley. A few yards before them was the brook I have already noticed--it was about three yards broad at this spot. However, Robinson, who was determined not to make George lose any more time, took the lead and giving himself the benefit of a run, cleared it like a buck. But as he was in the air his eye caught some object on this side the brook, and making a little circle on the other side, he came back with ludicrous precipitancy, and jumping short, landed with one foot on shore and one in the stream. George burst out laughing.

“Do you see this?” cried Robinson.

“Yes; somebody has been digging a hole here,” said George very coolly.

“Come higher up,” cried Robinson, all in a flutter--“do you see this?”

“Yes; it is another hole.”

“'It is. Do you see this wet, too?”

“I see there has been some water spilled by the brook side.”

“What kind of work has been done here? have they been digging potatoes, farmer?”

“Don't be foolish, Tom.”

“Is it any kind of work you know? Here is another trench dug.”

“No! it is nothing in my way, that is the truth.”

“But it is work the signs of which I know as well as you know a plowed field from a turnpike-road.”

“Why, what is it then?”

“It is gold washing.”

“You don't say so, Tom.”

“This is gold washing as beginners practice it in California and Mexico and Peru, and wherever gold-dust is found. They have been working with a pan, they haven't got such a thing as a cradle in this country. Come lower down; this was yesterday's work, let us find to-day's.”

The two men now ran down the stream busy as dogs hunting an otter. A little lower down they found both banks of the stream pitted with holes about two feet deep and the sides drenched with water from it.

“Well, if it is so, you need not look so pale; why, dear me, how pale you are, Tom!”

“You would be pale,” gasped Tom, “if you could see what a day this is for you and me, ay! and for all the world, old England especially. George, in a month there will be five thousand men working round this little spot. Ay! come,” cried he, shouting wildly at the top of his voice, “there is plenty for all. GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! I have found it. I, Tom Robinson, I've found it, and I grudge it to no man. I, a thief that was, make a present of it to its rightful owner, and that is all the world. Here GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!”

Though George hardly understood his companion's words, he was carried away by the torrent of his enthusiasm, and even as Robinson spoke his cheeks in turn flushed and his eyes flashed, and he grasped his friend's hands warmly, and cried, “GOLD! GOLD! blessings on it if it takes me to Susan; GOLD! GOLD!”

The poor fellows' triumph and friendly exultation lasted but a moment; the words were scarce out of Robinson's mouth when to his surprise George started from him, turned very pale, but at the same time lifted his iron-shod stick high in the air and clinched his teeth with desperate resolution. Four men with shaggy beards and wild faces and murderous eyes were literally upon them, each with a long glittering knife raised in the air.

At that fearful moment George learned the value of a friend that had seen adventure and crime; rapid and fierce and unexpected as the attack was, Robinson was not caught off his guard. His hand went like lightning into his bosom, and the assailants, in the very act of striking, were met in the face by the long glistening barrels of a rifle revolver, while the cool, wicked eye behind it showed them nothing was to be hoped in that quarter from flurry, or haste, or indecision.

The two men nearest the revolver started back, the other two neither recoiled nor advanced, but merely hung fire. George made a movement to throw himself upon them; but Robinson seized him fiercely by the arm--he said steadily but sternly, “Keep cool, young man--no running among their knives while they are four. Strike across me and I shall guard you till we have thinned.”

“Will you?” said Black Will, “here, pals!” The four assailants came together like a fan for a moment and took a whisper from their leader. They then spread out like a fan and began to encircle their antagonists, so as to attack on both sides at once.

“Back to the water, George,” cried Robinson quickly, “to the broad part here.” Robinson calculated that the stream would protect his rear, and that safe he was content to wait and profit by the slightest error of his numerous assailants; this, however, was to a certain degree a miscalculation, for the huge ruffian we have called Jem sprang boldly across the stream higher up and prepared to attack the men behind, the moment they should be engaged with his comrades. The others no sooner saw him in position than they rushed desperately upon George and Robinson in the form of a crescent, and as they came on Jem came flying knife in hand to plunge it into Robinson's back. As the front assailants neared them, true to his promise, Robinson fired across George, and the outside man received a bullet in his shoulder-blade, and turning round like a top fell upon his knees. Unluckily George wasted a blow at this man which sung idly over him, he dropping his head and losing his knife and his powers at the very moment. By this means Robinson, the moment he had fired his pistol, had no less than three assailants; one of these George struck behind the neck so furiously with a back-handed stroke of his iron-shod stick that he fell senseless at Robinson's feet. The other, met in front by the revolver, recoiled, but kept Robinson at bay while Jem sprang on him from the rear. This attack was the most dangerous of all; in fact, neither Robinson nor George had time to defend themselves against him even if they had seen him, which they did not. Now as Jem was in the very act of making his spring from the other side of the brook, a spear glanced like a streak of light past the principal combatants and pierced Jem through and through the fleshy part of the thigh, and there stood Jacky at forty yards' distance, with the hand still raised from which the spear had flown, and his emu-like eye glittering with the light of battle.

Jem, instead of bounding clear over the stream, fell heavily into the middle of it and lay writhing and floundering at George's mercy, who turning in alarm at the sound stood over him with his long deadly staff whirling and swinging round his head in the air, while Robinson placed one foot firmly on the stunned man's right arm and threatened the leader Black Will with his pistol, and at the same moment with a wild and piercing yell Jacky came down in leaps like a kangaroo, his tomahawk flourished over his head, his features entirely changed, and the thirst of blood written upon every inch of him. Black Will was preparing to run away and leave his wounded companions, but at sight of the fleet savage he stood still and roared out for mercy. “Quarter! quarter!” cried Black Will.

“Down on your knees!” cried Robinson in a terrible voice.

The man fell on his knees, and in that posture Jacky would certainly have knocked out his brains but that Robinson pointed the pistol at his head and forbade him; and Carlo, who had arrived hastily at the sound of battle, in great excitement but not with clear ideas, seeing Jacky, whom he always looked on as a wild animal, opposed in some way to Robinson, seized him directly by the leg from behind and held him howling in a vise. “Hold your cursed noise, all of you,” roared Robinson. “D'ye ask quarter?”

“Quarter!” cried Black Will.

“Quarter!” gurgled Jem.

“Quarter!” echoed more faintly the wounded man. The other was insensible.

“Then throw me your knives.”

The men hesitated.

“Throw me them this instant, or--”

They threw down their knives.

“George, take them and tie them up in your wipe.” George took the knives and tied them up.

“Now pull that big brute out of the water or he'll drown himself.” George and Jacky pulled Jem out of the water with the spear sticking in him; the water was discolored with his blood.

“Pull the spear out of him!” George pulled and Jem roared with pain, but the spear-head would not come back through the wound; then Jacky came up and broke the light shaft off close to the skin, and grasping the head drew the remainder through the wound forward, and grinned with a sense of superior wisdom.

By this time the man whom George had felled sat up on his beam ends winking and blinking and confused, like a great owl at sunrise.

Then Robinson, who had never lost his presence of mind, and had now recovered his sang-froid, made all four captives sit around together on the ground in one little lot, “While I show you the error of your ways,” said he. “I could forgive a rascal but I hate a fool. You thought to keep such a secret as this all to yourselves--you dunces--the very birds in the air would carry it; it never was kept secret in any land and never will. And you would spill blood sooner than your betters should know it--ye ninny-cumpoops! What the worse are you for our knowing it? If a thousand knew it to-day would that lower the price of gold a penny an ounce? No! All the harm they could do you would be this, that some of them would show you where it lies thickest, and then you'd profit by it. You had better tie that leg of yours up; you have lost blood enough I should say by the look of you; haven't you got a wipe? here, take mine--you deserve it, don't you? No man's luck hurts his neighbor at this work; how clever you were, you have just pitched on the unlikeliest place in the whole gulley, and you wanted to kill the man that would have taught you which are the likelier ones. I shall find ten times as much gold before the sun sets as you will find in a week by the side of that stream; why, it hasn't been running above a thousand years or two, I should say, by the look of it; you have got plenty to learn, you bloody-minded greenhorns! Now I'll tell you what it is,” continued Robinson, getting angry about it, “since you are for keeping dark what little you know, I'll keep you dark; and in ten minutes my pal here and the very nigger shall know more about gold-finding than you know, so be off, for I'm going to work. Come, march!”

“Where are we to go, mate?” said the leader sullenly.

“Do you see that ridge about three miles west? well, if we catch you on this side of it we will hang you like wild cats. On the other side of it do what you like, and try all you know; but this gully belongs to us now; you wanted to take something from us that did not belong to you--our blood--so now we take something from you that didn't belong to us a minute or two ago. Come, mizzle, and no more words, or--” and he pointed the tail of his discourse with his revolver.

The men rose, and with sullen, rueful, downcast looks moved off in the direction of the boundary; but one remained behind, the man was Jem.

“Well!”

“Captain, I wish you would let me join in with you!”

“What for?”

“Well, captain, you've lent me your wipe, and I think a deal of it, for it's what I did not deserve; but that is not all. You are the best man, and I like to be under the best man if I must be under anybody.”

Robinson hesitated a moment. “Come here,” said he. The man came and fronted him. “Look me in the face! now give me your hand--quick, no thinking about how.” The man gave him his hand readily. Robinson looked into his eyes. “What is your name?”

“Jem.”

“Jem, we take you on trial.”

Jem's late companions, who perfectly comprehended what was passing, turned and hooted the deserter; Jem, whose ideas of repartee were primitive, turned and hooted them in reply.

While the men were retreating Robinson walked thoughtfully with his hands behind him, backward and forward, like a great admiral on his quarter deck--enemy to leeward. Every eye was upon him and watched him in respectful, inquiring silence. “Knowledge is power;” this was the man now, the rest children.

“What tools have you?”

“There is a spade and trowel in that bush, captain.”

“Fetch them, George. Hadn't you a pan?”

“No, captain; we used a calabash. He will find it lower down.”

George, after a little search, found all these objects, and brought them back. “Now,” cried Robinson, “these greenhorns have been washing in a stream that runs now, but perhaps in the days of Noah was not a river at all; but you look at the old bed of a stream down out there. That was a much stronger stream than this in its day, and it ran for more than a hundred thousand years before it dried up.”

“How can you tell that?” said George, resuming some of his incredulity.

“Look at those monstrous stones in it here, there and everywhere. It has been a powerful stream to carry such masses with it as that, and it has been running many thousand years, for see how deep it has eaten into its rocky sides here and there. That was a river, my lads, and washed gold down for hundreds of thousands of years before ever Adam stood on the earth.”

The men gave a hurrah, and George and Jacky prepared to run and find the treasure. “Stop,” cried Robinson, “you are not at the gold yet. Can you tell in what parts of the channel it lies thick and where there isn't enough to pay the labor of washing it? Well, I can--look at that bend where the round pebbles are collected so; there was a strong eddy there. Well, under the ridge of that eddy is ten times as much gold lying as in the level parts. Stop a bit again. Do you know how deep or how shallow it lies--do you think you can find it by the eye? Do you know what clays it sinks through, as if they were a sieve, and what stops it like an iron door? Your quickest way is to take Captain Robinson's time--and that is now.”

He snatched the spade, and giving full vent to the ardor he had so long suppressed with difficulty, plunged down a little declivity that led to the ancient stream, and drove his spade into its shingle, the debris of centuries of centuries. George sprang after him, his eyes gleaming with hope and agitation; the black followed in wonder and excitement, and the wounded Jem limped last, and, unable through weakness to work, seated himself with glowing eyes upon that ancient river's bank.

“Away with all this gravel and shingle--these are all newcomers--the real bed of the stream is below all this, and we must go down to that.”

Trowel and spade and tomahawk went furiously to work, and soon cleared away the gravel from a surface of three or four feet.

Beneath this they found a bed of gray clay.

“Let us wash that, captain,” said Jem eagerly.

“No! Jem,” was the reply; “that is the way novices waste their time. This gray clay is porous, too porous to hold gold--we must go deeper.”

Tomahawk, spade and trowel went furiously to work again.

“Give me the spade,” said George, and he dug and shoveled out with herculean strength and amazing ardor; his rheumatism was gone and nerves came back from that very hour. “Here is a white clay.”

“Let me see it. Pipe-clay! go no deeper, George; if you were to dig a hundred feet you would not find an ounce of gold below that.”

George rested on his spade. “What are we to do, then? try somewhere else?”

“Not till we have tried here first.”

“But you say there is nothing below this pipe-clay.”

“No more there is.”

“Well, then.”

“But I don't say there is nothing above it!!!”

“Well, but there is nothing much above it except the gray, without 'tis this small streak of brownish clay; but that is not an inch thick.”

“George! in that inch lies all the gold we are likely to find; if it is not there we have only to go elsewhere. Now while I get water you stick your spade in and cut the brown clay away from the white it lies on. Don't leave a spot of the brown sticking to the white--the lower part of the brown clay is the likeliest.”

A shower having fallen the day before, Robinson found water in a hole not far distant. He filled his calabash and returned; meantime George and Jacky had got together nearly a barrowful of the brown or rather chocolate-colored clay, mixed slightly with the upper and lower strata, the gray and white.

“I want yon calabash and George's as well.” Robinson filled George's calabash two-thirds full of the stuff, and pouring some water upon it, said good-naturedly to Jem, “There--you may do the first washing, if you like.”

“Thank you, captain,” said Jem, who proceeded instantly to stir and dissolve the clay and pour it carefully away as it dissolved. Jacky was sent for more water, and this, when used as described, had left the clay reduced to about one-sixth of its original bulk.

“Now, captain,” cried Jem in great excitement.

“No, it's not now, captain, yet,” said Robinson; “is that the way you do pan-washing?”

He then took the calabash from Jem, and gave him Jacky's calabash two-thirds full of clay to treat like the other, and this being done he emptied the dry remains of one calabash into the other, and gave Jem a third lot to treat likewise. This done, you will observe he had in one calabash the results of three first washings. But now he trusted Jem no longer. He took the calabash and said, “You look faint, you are not fit to work; besides you have not got the right twist of the hand yet, my lad. Pour for me, George.” Robinson stirred and began to dissolve the three remainders, and every now and then with an artful turn of the hand he sent a portion of the muddy liquid out of the vessel. At the end of this washing there remained scarce more than a good handful of clay at the bottom. More water was poured on this. “Now,” said Robinson, “we shall know this time, and if you see but one spot of yellow among it, we are all gentlemen and men of fortune.”

He dissolved the clay, and twisted and turned the vessel with great dexterity, and presently the whole of the clay was liquefied.

“Now,” said Robinson, “all your eyes upon it, and if I spill anything I ought to keep--you tell me.” He said this conceitedly but with evident agitation. He was now pouring away the dirty water with the utmost care, so that anything, however small, that might be heavier than clay should remain behind. Presently he paused and drew a long breath. He feared to decide so great a question. It was but for a moment; he began again to pour the dirty water away very slowly and carefully. Every eye was diving into the vessel. There was a dead silence!

Robinson poured with great care. There was now little more than a wine-glassful left.

DEAD SILENCE!

Suddenly a tremendous cry broke from all these silent figures at the same instant. A cry! it was a yell. I don't know what to compare it to. But imagine that a score of wolves had hunted a horse for two centuries up and down, round and round, sometimes losing a yard, sometimes gaining one on him, and at last, after a thousand disappointments and fierce alternations of hope and despair, the horse had suddenly stumbled and the wild gluttons had pounced on him at last. Such a fierce yell of triumph burst from four human bosoms now.

“Hurrah! we are the greatest men above ground. If a hundred emperors and kings died to-day, their places could be filled to-morrow; but the world could not do without us and our find. We are gentlemen--we are noblemen--we are whatever we like to be. Hurrah!” cried Robinson.

“Hurrah!” cried George, “I see my Susan's eyes in you, you beauty.”

“Hurrah!” whined Jem feebly, “let me see how much there is,” and clutching the calabash he fainted at that moment from loss of blood and fell forward insensible, his face in the vessel that held the gold, and his hands grasping it so tight that great force had to be used to separate them.

They lifted Jem and set him up again, and sprinkled water in his face. The man's thick lip was cut by the side of the vessel, and more than one drop of blood had trickled down its sides and mingled with the gold-dust.

No comment was made on this at the time. They were so busy.

“There, he's coming to, and we've no time to waste in nursing the sick. Work!” and they sprang up on to the work again.

It was not what you have seen pass for work in Europe, it was men working themselves for once as they make horses work forever. Work? It was battle; it was humanity fighting and struggling with Nature for her prime treasure--(so esteemed). How they dug and scraped, and fought tooth, and spade, and nail, and trowel, and tomahawk for gold! Their shirts were wet through with sweat, yet they felt no fatigue. Their trousers were sheets of clay, yet they suffered no sense of dirt. The wounded man recovered a portion of his strength, and, thirsting for gold, brought feeble hands but indomitable ardor to the great cause. They dug, they scraped, they bowed their backs, and wrought with fury and inspiration unparalleled; and when the sun began to decline behind the hills these four human mutes felt injured. They lifted their eyes a moment from the ground, and cast a fretful look at the great, tranquil luminary.

“Are you really going to set this afternoon the same as usual, when we need your services so?”

Would you know why that wolfish yell of triumph? Would you see what sight so electrified those gloating eyes and panting bosoms? Would you realize that discovery, which in six months peopled that barren spot with thousands of men from all the civilized tribes upon earth, and in a few years must and will make despised Australia a queen among the nations--nations who must and will come with the best thing they have, wealth, talent, cunning, song, pencil, pen, tongue, arm, and lay them all at her feet for this one thing?

Would you behold this great discovery the same in appearance and magnitude as it met the eyes of the first discoverers, picked with a knife from the bottom of a calabash, separated at last by human art and gravity's great law from the meaner dust it had lurked in for a million years--Then turn your eyes hither, for here it is:

[Knife handle drawing]

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Chapter LIII

MR. MEADOWS dispatched his work in Shropshire twice as fast as he had calculated, and returned home with two forces battling inside him--love and prudence. The battle was decided for him.

William Fielding's honest but awkward interference had raised in Susan Merton a desire to separate her sentiments from his by showing Mr. Meadows a marked respect. She heard of his arrival and instantly sent her father to welcome him home. Old Merton embraced the commission, for he happened to need Meadows's advice and assistance. The speculations into which he had been led by Mr. Clinton, after some fluctuations, wore a gloomy look, “which could only be temporary,” said that gentleman. Still a great loss would be incurred by selling out of them at a period of depression, and Mr. Clinton advised him to borrow a thousand pounds and hold on till things brightened.

Mr. Meadows smiled grimly as the fly came and buzzed all this in his web: “Dear! dear! what a pity my money is locked up! Go to Lawyer Crawley. Use my name. He won't refuse my friend, for I could do him an ill turn if I chose.”

“I will. You are a true friend. You will look in and see us, of course, market-day?”

“Why not?”

Meadows did not resume his visits at Grassmere without some twinges of conscience and a prudent resolve not to anchor his happiness upon Susan Merton. “That man might come here any day with his thousand pounds and take her from me,” said he. “He seems by his letters to be doing well, and they say any fool can make money in the colonies. Well, if he comes home respectable and well to do--I'll go out. If I am not to have the only woman I ever loved or cared for, let thousands and thousands of miles of sea lie between me and that pair.” But still he wheeled about the flame.

Ere long matters took a very different turn. The tone of George's letters began to change. His repeated losses of bullocks and sheep were all recorded in his letters to Susan, and these letters were all read with eager anxiety by Meadows a day before they reached Grassmere.

The respectable man did not commit this action without some iron passing through his own soul--Nemo repente turpissimus. The first letter he opened it was like picking a lock. He writhed and blushed, and his uncertain fingers fumbled with another's property as if it had been red-hot. The next cost him some shame, too, but the next less, and soon these little spasms of conscience began to be lost in the pleasure the letters gave him. “It is clear he will never make a thousand pounds out there, and if he doesn't the old farmer won't give him Susan. Won't? He shan't! He shall be too deep in my debt to venture on it even if he was minded.” Meadows exulted over the letters; and as he exulted they stabbed him, for by the side of the records of his ill fortune the exile never failed to pour out his love and confidence in his Susan and to acknowledge the receipt of some dear letter from her, which Meadows could see by George's must have assured him of undiminished or even increased affection.

Thus did sin lead to sin. By breaking a seal which was not his and reading letters which were not his, Meadows filled himself with the warmest hopes of possessing Susan one day, and got to hate George for the stabs the young man innocently gave him. At last he actually looked on George as a sort of dog in the manger, who could not make Susan happy, yet would come between her heart and one who could. All weapons seemed lawful against such a mere pest as this--a dog in the manger.

Meadows started with nothing better nor worse than a commonplace conscience. A vicious habit is an iron that soon sears that sort of article. When he had opened and read about four letters, his moral nature turned stone-blind of one eye. And now he was happier (on the surface) than he had been ever since he fell in love with Susan.

Sure now that one day or another she must be his, he waited patiently, enjoyed her society twice a week, got everybody into his power, and bided his time. And one frightful thing in all this was that his love for Susan was not only a strong but in itself a good love. I mean it was a love founded on esteem; it was a passionate love, and yet a profound and tender affection. It was the love which, under different circumstances, has often weaned men, ay, and women, too, from a frivolous, selfish, and sometimes from a vicious life. This love Meadows thought and hoped would hallow the unlawful means by which he must crown it. In fact, he was mixing vice and virtue. The snow was to whiten the pitch, not the pitch blacken the snow. Thousands had tried this before him and will try it after him. Oh, that I could persuade them to mix fire and gunpowder instead! Men would bless me for this when all else I have written has been long, long forgotten.

He felt good all over when he sat with Susan and thought how his means would enable that angel to satisfy her charitable nature, and win the prayers of the poor as well as the admiration of the wealthy. “If ever a woman was cherished she shall be! If ever a woman was happy she shall be!” And as for him, if he had done wrong to win her, he would more than compensate it afterward. In short, he had been for more than twenty years selling, buying, swapping, driving every conceivable earthly bargain--so now he was proposing one to Heaven.

At last came a letter in which George told Susan of the fatal murrain among his sheep, of his fever that had followed immediately, of the further losses while he lay ill, and concluded by saying that he had no right to tie her to his misfortunes, and that he felt it would be more manly to set her free.

When he read this, Meadows' exultation broke all bounds. “Ah ha!” cried he, “is it come to that at last? Well, he is a fine fellow after all, and looks at it the sensible way, and if I can do him a good turn in business I always will.”

The next day he called at Grassmere. Susan met him all smiles and was more cheerful than usual. The watchful man was delighted. “Come, she does not take it to heart.” He did not guess that Susan had cried for hours and hours over the letter, and then had sat quietly down and written a letter and begged George to come home and not add separation to their other misfortunes; and that it was this decision, and having acted upon it, that had made her cheerful. Meadows argued in his own favor, and now made sure to win. The next week he called three times at Grassmere instead of twice, and asked himself how much longer he must wait before he should speak out. Prudence said, “A little more patience;” and so he still hid in his bosom the flame that burned him the deeper for this unnatural smothering. But he drank deep, silent draughts of love, and reveled in the bright future of his passion. It was no longer hope, it was certainty. Susan liked him; her eye brightened at his coming; her father was in his power. There was nothing between them but the distant shadow of a rival; sooner or later she must be his. So passed three calm, delicious weeks away.

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Chapter LIV

MEADOWS sat one day in his study receiving Crawley's report.

“Old Mr. Merton came yesterday. I made difficulties as instructed. Is to come to-morrow.”

“He shall have the eight hundred.”

“That makes two thousand four hundred; why, his whole stock won't cover it.”

“No!”

“Don't understand it, it is too deep for me. What is the old gentleman doing?”

“Hunting Will-o'-the-wisp. Throwing it away in speculations that are colored bright for him by a man that wants to ruin him.”

“Aha!” cackled Crawley.

“And do him no harm.”

“Augh! How far is it to the bottom of the sea, sir, if you please? I'm sure you know? Mr. Levi and you.”

“Crawley,” said Meadows, suddenly turning the conversation, “the world calls me close-fisted, have you found me so?”

“Liberal as running water, sir. I sometimes say how long will this last before such a great man breaks Peter Crawley and flings him away and takes another?” and Crawley sighed.

“Then your game is to make yourself necessary to me.”

“I wish I could,” said Peter, with mock candor. “Sir,” he crept on, “if the most ardent zeal, if punctuality, secrecy, and unscrupulous fidelity--”

“Hold your gammon! Are we writing a book together! Answer me this in English. How far dare you go along with me?”

“As far as your purse extends: only--”

“Only what? Only your thermometer is going down already, I suppose.”

“No, sir; but what I mean is, I shouldn't like to do anything too bad.”

“What d'ye mean by too bad?”

“Punishable by law.”

“It is not your conscience you fear, then?” asked the other gloomily.

“Oh, dear, no, sir, only the law.”

“I envy you. There is but one crime punishable by law, and that I shall never counsel you to.”

“Only one--too deep, sir, too deep. Which is that?”

“The crime of getting found out.”

“What a great man! how far would I go with you? To the end of the earth. I have but one regret, sir.”

“And what is that?”

“That I am not thought worthy of your confidence. That after so many years I am still only a too--I mean an honored instrument, and not a humble friend.”

“Crawley,” said Meadows, solemnly, “let well alone. Don't ask my confidence, for I am often tempted to give it you, and that would be all one as if I put the blade of a razor in your naked hand.”

“I don't care, sir! You are up to some game as deep as a coal-pit; and I go on working and working all in the dark. I'd give anything to be in your confidence.”

“Anything is nothing; put it in figures,” sneered Meadows, incredulously.

“I'll give twenty per cent off all you give me if you will let me see the bottom.”

“The bottom?”

“The reason, sir--the motive!--the why!--the wherefore--the what it is all to end in. The bottom!”

“Why not say you would like to read John Meadows' heart?”

“Don't be angry, sir; it is presumption, but I can't help it. Deduct twenty per cent for so great a honor.”

“Why, the fool is in earnest.”

“He is; we have all got our little vanity, and like to be thought worthy of confidence.”

“Humph!”

“And then I can't sleep for puzzling. Why should you stop every letter that comes here from Australia. Oh, bless me, how neglectful I am; here is a letter from there, just come. To think of me bringing it, and then forgetting.”

“Give it me, directly.”

“There it is. And then, why on earth are we ruining old Mr. Merton without benefiting you? and you seem so friendly with him; and indeed, you say he is not to be harmed--only ruined; it makes my head ache. Why, what is the matter, Mr. Meadows, sir? What is wrong? No ill news, I hope. I wish I'd never brought the letter.”

“That will do, Crawley,” said Meadows, faintly, “you may go.”

Crawley rose with a puzzled air.

“Come here to-morrow evening at nine o'clock, and you shall have your wish. All the worse for you,” added he, moodily. “All the worse for me. Now go, without one word.”

Crawley retired dumfounded. He saw the iron man had received some strange, unexpected and terrible blow; but for a moment awe suppressed curiosity, and he went off on tiptoe, saying almost in a whisper, “To-morrow night at nine, sir.”

Meadows spread George's letter on the table and leaned on his two hands over it.

The letter was written some weeks after the last desponding one. It was full of modest, but warm and buoyant exultation. Heaven had been very good to Susan and him. Robinson had discovered gold; gold in such abundance and quality as beat even California. The thousand pounds, so late despaired of, was now a certainty. Six months' work, with average good fortune, would do it. Robinson said five thousand apiece was the least they ought to bring home; but how could he (George) wait so long as that would take! “And, Susan, dear, if anything could make this wonderful luck sweeter, it is to think that I owe it to you and to your goodness. It was you that gave Tom the letter, and bade me be kind to him, and keep him by me for his good; he has repaid me by making us two man and wife, please God. See what a web life is! Tom and I often talk of this. But Tom says it is Parson Eden I have to thank for it, and the lessons he learned in the prison; but I tell him if he goes so far back as that, he should go farther, and thank Farmer Meadows, for he it was that sent Tom to the prison, where he was converted, and became as honest a fellow as any in the world, and a friend to your George as true as steel.”

The letter concluded as it began, with thanks to Heaven, and bidding Susan expect his happy return in six months after this letter. In short, the letter was one “Hurrah!” tempered with simple piety and love.

Meadows turned cold as death in reading it. At the part where Farmer Meadows was referred to as the first link in the golden chain, he dashed it to the ground and raised his foot to trample on it, but forbore lest he should dirty a thing that must go to Susan.

Then he walked the room in great agitation.

“Too late, George Fielding,” he cried aloud--“too late; I can't shift my heart like a weathercock to suit the changes in your luck. You have been feeding me with hopes till I can't live without them. I never longed for a thing yet but what I got it, and I'll have this though I trample a hundred George Fieldings dead on my way to it. Now let me think.”

He pondered deeply, his great brows knitted and lowered. For full half an hour invention and resource poured scheme after scheme through that teeming brain, and prudence and knowledge of the world sat in severe and cool judgment on each in turn, and dismissed the visionary ones. At last the deep brow began to relax, and the eye to kindle; and when he rose to ring the bell his face was a sign-post with Eureka written on it in Nature's vivid handwriting. In that hour he had hatched a plot worthy of Machiavel---a plot complex yet clear. A servant-girl answered the bell.

“Tell David to saddle Rachel directly.”

And in five minutes Mr. Meadows, with a shirt, a razor, a comb, and a map of Australia, was galloping by cross lanes to the nearest railway station. There he telegraphed Mr. Clinton to meet him at Peel's Coffee-House at two o'clock. The message flashed up to town like lightning. The man followed it slowly like the wind.

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Chapter LV

MEADOWS found Mr. Clinton at Peel's. “Mr. Clinton, I want a man of intelligence to be at my service for twenty-four hours. I give you the first offer.”

Mr. Clinton replied that really he had so many irons in the fire that twenty-four hours--

Meadows put a fifty-pound note on the table.

“Will all your irons iron you out fifty pounds as flat as that?”

“Why, hem?”

“No, nor five. Come, sir, sharp is the word. Can you be my servant for twenty-four hours for fifty pounds? yes or no!”

“Why, this is dramatic--yes!”

“It is half-past two. Between this and four o'clock I must buy a few hundred acres in Australia, a fair bargain.”

“Humph! Well, that can be done. I know an old fellow that has land in every part of the globe.”

“Take me to him.”

In ten minutes they were in one of those dingy, narrow alleys in the city of London, that look the abode of decent poverty, and they could afford to buy Grosvenor Square for their stables; and Mr. Clinton introduced his friend to a blear-eyed merchant in a large room papered with maps; the windows were incrusted; mustard and cress might have been grown from them. Beauty in clean linen collar and wristbands would have shown here with intolerable luster; but the blear-eyed merchant did not come out bright by contrast; he had taken the local color. You could see him and that was all. He was like a partridge in a furrow. A snuff-colored man; coat rusty all but the collar, and that greasy; poor as its color was, his linen had thought it worth emulating; blackish nails, cotton wipe, little bald place on head, but didn't shine for the same reason the windows didn't. Mr. Clinton approached this “dhirrrty money,” this rusty coin, in the spirit of flunkyish.

“Sir,” said he, in a low reverential tone, “this party is disposed to purchase a few hundred acres in the colonies.”

Mr. Rich looked up from his desk and pointed with a sweep of his pen to the walls.

“There are the maps; the red crosses are my land. They are numbered. Refer to the margin of map, and you will find the acres and the latitude and longitude calculated to a fraction. When you have settled in what part of the world you buy, come to me again; time is gold.”

And the blear-eyed merchant wrote and sealed and filed and took no notice of his customers. They found red crosses in several of the United States, in Canada, in Borneo, in nearly all the colonies, and as luck would have it they found one small cross within thirty miles of Bathurst, and the margin described it as five hundred acres. Mr. Meadows stepped toward the desk.

“I have found a small property near Bathurst.”

“Bathurst? where is that?”

“In Australia.”

“Suit?”

“If the price suits. What is the price, sir?”

“The books must tell us that.”

Mr. Rich stretched out his arm and seized a ledger, and gave it Meadows.

“I have but one price for land, and that is five per cent profit on my outlay. Book will tell you what it stands me in, you can add five per cent to that, and take the land away or leave it.”

With this curt explanation, Mr. Rich resumed his work.

“It seems you gave five shillings an acre, sir,” said Mr. Clinton. “Five times five hundred shillings, one hundred and twenty-five pounds. Interest at five per cent, six pounds five.”

“When did I buy it?” asked Mr. Rich.

“Oh, when did you buy it, sir?”

Mr. Rich snatched the book a little pettishly, and gave it to Meadows.

“You make the calculation,” said he; “the figures are all there. Come to me when you have made it.”

The land had been bought twenty-seven years and some months ago. Mr. Meadows made the calculation in a turn of the hand and announced it. Rich rang a hand bell. Another snuffy figure with a stoop and a bald head and a pen came through a curtain.

“Jones, verify that calculation.”

“Penny, halfpenny, twopence, penny, halfpenny, twopence. Mum, mum! Halfpenny wrong, sir.”

“There is a halfpenny wrong!” cried Mr. Rich to Meadows, with a most injured air.

“There is, sir,” said Meadows, “but it is on the right side for you. I thought I would make it even money against myself.”

“There are only two ways, wrong and right,” was the reply. “Jones, make it right. There, that is the price for the next half hour; after business hours to-day add a day's interest; and, Jones--if he does not buy, write your calculation into the book with date--save time, next customer comes for it.”

“You need not trouble, Mr. Jones,” said Meadows. “I take the land. Here is two hundred and fifty pounds--that is rather more than half the purchase-money.

“Jones--count.”

“When can I have the deeds?”

“Ten, to-morrow.”

“Receipt for two hundred and fifty pounds,” said Meadows, falling into the other's key.

“Jones, write receipt--two five naught.”

“Write me an agreement to sell,” proposed Meadows.

“No, you write it; I'll sign it. Jones, enter transaction in the books. Have you anything to do, young gentleman?” addressing Clinton.

“No, sir.”

“Then draw this pen through the two crosses on the map and margin. Good morning, gentlemen.”

And the money-making machine rose and dismissed them, as he had received them, with a short, sharp business conge'.

Ye fair, who turn a shop head over heels, maul sixty yards of ribbon and buy six, which being sent home insatiable becomes your desire to change it for other six which you had fairly, closely, and with all the powers of your mind compared with it during the seventy minutes the purchase occupied, let me respectfully inform you that the above business took just eight minutes, and that “when it was done, 'twas done.” (Shakespeare.)

“You have given too much, my friend,” said Mr. Clinton.

“Come to my inn,” was all the reply. “This is the easy part, the game is behind.”

After dinner. “Now,” said Meadows, “business. Do you know any respectable firm disposed toward speculation in mines?”

“Plenty.”

“Any that are looking toward gold?”

“Why, no. Gold is a metal that ranks very low in speculation. Stop! yes, I know one tip-top house that has gone a little way in it, but they have burned their fingers, so they will go no farther.”

“You are wrong; they will be eager to go on--first to recover the loss on that article of account, and next to show their enemies, and in particular such of them as are their friends, that they didn't blunder. You will go to them to-morrow and ask if they can allow you a commission for bringing them an Australian settler on whose land gold has been found.”

“Now, my good sir,” began Mr. Clinton, a little superciliously, “that is not the way to gain the ear of such a firm as that. The better way will be for you to show me your whole design and leave me to devise the best means for carrying it into effect.”

Up to this moment Meadows had treated Mr. Clinton with a marked deference, as from yeoman to gentleman. The latter, therefore, was not a little surprised when the other turned sharp on him thus:

“This won't do; we must understand one another. You think you are the man of talent and I am the clodhopper. Think so to-morrow night; but for the next twenty-four hours you must keep that notion out of your head or you will bitch my schemes and lose your fifty pounds. Look here, sir. You began life with ten thousand pounds; you have been all your life trying all you know to double it--and where is it? The pounds are pence and the pence on the road to farthings. I started with a whip and a smock-frock, and this,” touching his head, “and I have fifty thousand pounds in government securities. Which is the able man of these two--the bankrupt that talks like an angel and loses the game, or the wise man that quietly wins it and pockets what all the earth are grappling with him for? So much for that. And now which is master, the one who pays or the one who is paid? I am not a liberal man, sir; I am a man that looks at every penny. I don't give fifty pounds. I sell it. That fifty pounds is the price of your vanity for twenty-four hours. I take a day's loan of it. You are paid fifty pounds per diem to see that there is more brains in my little finger than in all your carcass. See it for twenty-four hours or I won't fork out, or don't see it but obey me as if you did see it. You shan't utter a syllable or move an inch that I have not set down for you. Is this too hard? then accept ten pounds for to-day's work, and let us part before you bungle your master's game as you have done your own.”

Mr. Clinton was red with mortified vanity, but forty pounds! He threw himself back in his chair.

“This is amusing,” said he. “Well, sir, I will act as if you were Solomon and I nobody. Of course under these circumstances no responsibility rests with me.”

“You are wasting my time with your silly prattle,” said Meadows, very sternly. “Man alive! you never made fifty pounds cash since you were calved. It comes to your hand to-day, and even then you must chatter and jaw instead of saying yes and closing your fingers on it like a vise.”

“Yes!” shouted Clinton; “there.”

“Take that quire,” said Meadows, sharply. “Now I'll dictate the very words you are to say; learn them off by heart and don't add a syllable or subtract one or--no fifty pounds.”

Meadows being a general by nature (not Horse-Guards) gave Clinton instructions down to the minutest matters of detail, and he whose life had been spent in proving he would succeed--and failing--began to suspect the man who had always succeeded might perhaps have had something to do with his success.

Next morning, well primed by Meadows, Mr. Clinton presented himself to Messrs. Brathwaite & Stevens and requested a private audience. He inquired whether they were disposed to allow him a commission if he would introduce them to an Australian settler on whose land gold had been discovered.

The two members of the firm looked at one another. After a pause one of them said:

“Commission really must depend on how such a thing turned out. They had little confidence in such statements, but would see the settler and put some questions to him.”

Clinton went out and introduced Meadows. This happened just as Meadows had told him it would. Outside the door Mr. Meadows suddenly put on a rustic carriage and so came in and imitated natural shyness with great skill; he had to be twice asked to sit down.

The firm cross-examined him. He told them gold had been discovered within a stone's throw of his land, thirty miles from Bathurst; that his friends out there had said go home to England and they will give you a heavy price for your land now; that he did hope to get a heavy price, and so be able to live at home--didn't want to go out there again; that the land was worth money--for there was no more to be sold in that part; government land all round and they wouldn't sell, for he had tried them (his sharp eye had seen this fact marked on Mr. Rich's map).

“Well,” said the senior partner, “we have information that gold has been discovered in that district; the report came here two days ago by the Anne Amelia. But the account is not distinct as yet. We do not hear on whose land it is found if at all. I presume you have not seen gold found.”

“Could I afford to leave my business out there and come home--on a speculation?”

The eyes of the firm began to glitter.

“Have you got any gold to show us?”

“Nothing to speak of, sir; only what they chucked me for giving them a good dinner. But they are shoveling it about like grains of wheat, I assure you.”

The firm became impatient.

“Show us what they gave you as the price of a dinner?”

Meadows dug into a deep pocket, and chased into a corner, and caught, and produced a little nugget of quartz and gold worth about four pounds, also another of somewhat less value.

“They don't look handsome, gents,” said he, “but you may see the stuff glitter here and there; and here is some of the dust. I had to buy this; gave them fifty shillings an ounce for it. I wish I had bought a hundred-weight, for they tell me it is worth three pound ten here.”

“May we inspect these specimens?”

“Why not, sir? I'll trust it with you. I wouldn't with everybody, though.”

The partners retired with the gold, tested it with muriatic acid, weighed it, and after a short, excited interview one of them brought it back and asked with great nonchalance the price of the land.

Meadows hung his head.

“Twenty thousand pounds.”

“Twenty thousand pounds!” and the partner laughed in his face.

“I don't wonder you are surprised, sir. I wonder at myself asking so much. Why, before this, if you had offered me five thousand, I would have jumped into your arms, as the saying is; but they all say I ought to have twenty thousand, and they have talked to me till they make me greedy.”

The partner retired and consulted, and the firm ended by offering ten thousand.

“I am right down ashamed to say no,” was the answer, “but I suppose I must not take it.”

The firm undertook to prove it was a magnificent offer. Meadows offered no resistance, he thought so too; but he must not take it, everybody told him it was worth more. At last, when his hand was on the door, they offered him twelve thousand five hundred.

He begged to consider it.

No! they were peremptory. If he was off, they were off.

He looked this way and that way with a frightened air.

“What shall I do, sir?” said he, helplessly, to Clinton, and nudged him secretly.

“Take it, and think yourself very lucky,” said that gentleman, exchanging a glance with the firm.

“Well, then, if you say so, I will. You shall have it, gentlemen, five hundred acres in two lots--400 and 100.”

Clinton, acting on his secret instructions, now sought a private interview with the firm.

“I am to have a commission, gentlemen?”

“Yes! fifty pounds; but, really, we can hardly afford it.”

“Well, then, as you give me an interest in it, I say--pin him.”

“Why?”

“Don't you see he is one of those soft fellows who listen to everybody. If he goes away, and they laugh at him for not getting more for it, I really could hardly answer for his ever coming back here.”

The firm came in cheerfully.

“Well, Mr. ---- Mr.”

“Not Mr., sir. Crawley--plain John Crawley.”

“We will terminate this affair with you. We will have a contract of sale drawn up and make you an advance. When can you give us the title deeds?”

“In a couple of hours, if the lawyer is at home.”

“By the by, you will not object to draw upon us at three months for one half of the money?”

“No, sir. I should say by the look of you you were as good as the bank.”

“The other half by check in two hours.” The parties signed the contract respectively.

Then Meadows and Clinton went off to the Five-per-Center, completed with him, got the title deeds, brought them, received check and accepted draft. Clinton, by Meadows' advice, went in and dunned for his commission then and there, and got it, and the confederates went off and took a hasty dinner together. After dinner they settled.

“As you showed me how to get this commission out of them, it belongs to you,” said Clinton, sorrowfully.

“It does, sir. Give it to me. I return it to you, sir; do me the favor to accept it.”

“You are very generous, Mr. Meadows.”

“And here is the other fifty you have earned.”

“Thank you, my good sir. Are you satisfied with the day's work?”

“Amply, sir. Your skill and ingenuity brought us through triumphant,” said Meadows, resuming the deferential, since he risked nothing by it now.

“Well, I think I managed it pretty well. By the by, that gold you showed them, was it really gold?”

“Certainly.”

“Oh! because I thought--”

“No, sir, you did not. A man of your ability knows I would not risk ten thousand pounds for want of a purchase I could not lose ten shillings by ----. Ore is not a fancy article.”

“Oh! ah! yes, very true; no, of course not. One question more. Where did the gold come from?”

“California.”

“But, I mean, how did you get it?”

“I bought it out of a shop window those two knowing ones pass twice every day of their lives.”

“Ha! ha! ha!”

“You pass it oftener than that, sir. Excuse me, sir; I must catch the train. But one word before I go. My name must never be mentioned in this business.”

“Very well; it never shall transpire, upon my honor.”

Meadows felt pretty safe. As he put on his greatcoat he thought to himself: “When the story is blown and laughed over, this man's vanity will keep my name out of it. He won't miss a chance of telling the world how clever he is. My game is to pass for honest, not for clever, no, thank you.”

“Good-by, sir,” was his last word. “It is you for hoodwinking them.”

“Ha! ha! ha! Good-by, farmer.” (In a patronizing tone.)

Soon after this, Meadows was in a corner of a railway-carriage, twelve thousand four hundred and fifty pounds in his pocket, and the second part of his great complex scheme boiling and bubbling in his massive head. There he sat silent as the grave, his hat drawn over his powerful brows that were knitted all the journey by one who never knitted them in vain.

He reached home at eight and sat down to his desk and wrote for more than half an hour. Then he sealed up the paper, and when Crawley came he found him walking up and down the room. At a silent gesture Crawley took a chair and sat quivering with curiosity. Meadows walked in deep thought.

“You demanded my confidence. It is a dangerous secret, for once you know it you must serve me with red-hot zeal, or be my enemy and be crushed out of life like a blind-worm, or an adder, Peter Crawley.”

“I know that, dear sir,” assented Peter, ruefully.

“First, how far have you guessed?”

“I guess Mr. Levi is somehow against us.”

“He is,” replied Meadows, carelessly.

“Then that is a bad job. He will beat us. He is as cunning as a fox.”

Meadows looked up contemptuously; but as he could not afford to let such a sneak as Crawley think him anything short of invincible, he said coolly, “He is, and I have measured cunning with a fox.”

“You have? That must have been a tight match.”

“A fox used to take my chickens one hard winter; an old fox cautious and sly as the Jew you rate so high. The men sat up with guns for him--no; a keeper set traps in a triangle for him--no. He had the eye of a hawk, the ear of a hare, and his own nose. He would have the chickens, and he would not get himself into trouble. The women complained to me of the fox. I turned a ferret loose into the rabbit-hutch, and in half a minute there was as nice a young rabbit dead as ever you saw.”

“Lookee there now,” cried Crawley.

“I choked the ferret off, but never touched the rabbit. I took the rabbit with a pair of tongs; the others had handled their baits and pug crept round 'em and nosed the trick. I poured twenty drops of croton oil into the little hole ferret had made in bunny's head, and I dropped him in the grass near pug's track. Next morning rabbit had been drawn about twenty yards and the hole in his head was three times as big. Pug went the nearest way to blood; went in at ferret's hole. I knew he would.”

“Yes, sir! yes! yes! yes! and there lay the fox.”

“No signs of him. Then I said: 'Go to the nearest water. Croton oil makes 'em dry.' They went along the brook--and on the very bank there lay an old dog-fox blown up like bladder, as big as a wolf and as dead as a herring. Now for the Jew. Look at that;” and he threw him a paper.

“Why, this is the judgment on which I arrested Will Fielding, and here is the acceptance.”

“Levi bought them to take the man out of my power. He left them with old Cohen. I have got them again, you see, and got young Fielding in my power spite of his foxy friend.”

“Capital, sir, capital!” cried the admiring Crawley. He then looked at the reconquered documents. “Ah!” said he, spitefully, “how I wish I could alter one of these names, only one!”

“What d'ye mean?”

“I mean that I'd give fifty pound (if I had it) if it was but that brute George Fielding that was in our power instead of this fool William.”

Meadows opened his eyes: “Why?”

“Because he put an affront upon me,” was the somewhat sulky reply.

“What was that?”

“Oh, no matter, sir!”

“But it is matter. Tell me. I am that man's enemy.”

“Then I am in luck. You are just the enemy I wish him.”

“What was the affront?”

“He called me a pettifogger.”

“Oh, is that all?”

“No. He discharged me from visiting his premises.”

“That was not very polite.”

“And threatened to horsewhip me next time I came there.”

“Oh, is that where the shoe pinches?”

“No, it is not!” cried Crawley, almost in a shriek; “but he altered his mind, and did horsewhip me then and there. Curse him!”

Meadows smiled grimly. He saw his advantage. “Crawley,” said he, quickly, “he shall rue the day he lifted his hand over you. You want to see to the bottom of me.”

“Oh, Mr. Meadows, that is too far for the naked eye to see,” was the despondent reply.

“Not when it suits my book. I am going to keep my promise and show you my heart.”

“Ah!”

“Listen and hear the secret of my life. Are you listening?”

“What do you think, sir?” was the tremulous answer.

“I--love--Miss--Merton;” and for once his eyes sank before Crawley's.

“Sir! you--love--a--woman?”

“Not as libertines love, nor as boys flirt and pass on. Heaven have mercy on me, I love her with all my heart and soul and brain! I love her with more force than such as you can hate!”

“The deuce you do!”

“I love the sweetheart--of the man--who lashed you--like a dog.”

Crawley winced and rubbed his hands.

“And your fortune is made if you help me to win her.”

Crawley rubbed his hands.

“Old Merton has promised the woman I love to this George Fielding if he comes back with a thousand pounds.”

“Don't you be frightened, sir; that he will never do.”

“Will he not? Read this letter.”

“Ah! the letter that put you out so. Let me see--Mum! mum! Found gold. Pheugh! Pheugh! Pheeeugh!!”

“Crawley, most men reading that letter would have given in then and there, and not fought against such luck as this. I only said to myself, 'Then it will cost me ten thousand pounds to win the day.' Well, between yesterday eleven forenoon and this hour I made the ten thousand pounds.”

He told him briefly how.

“Beautiful, sir! What, did you make the ten thousand out of your own rival's letter?”

“Yes, I taxed the enemy for the expenses of the war.”

“Oh, Mr. Meadows, what a fool, what a villain I was to think Mr. Levi was as great a man as you! I must have been under a hallucination.”

“Crawley, the day that John and Susan Meadows walk out of church man and wife I put a thousand pounds into your hand and set you up in any business you like; in any honest business, for from that day our underhand dealings must end. The husband of that angel must never grind the poor or wrong a living creature. If Heaven consents to my being happy in this way, the least I can do is to walk straight and straightforward the rest of my days, and I will, s'help me God.”

“That is fair. I knew you were a great man, but I had no idea you were such a good one.”

“Crawley,” said the other, with a sudden gloomy misgiving, “I am trying to cheat the devil. I fear no man can do that;” and he hung his head.

“No ordinary man, sir,” replied the parasite, “but your skill has no bounds. Your plan, sir, at once, that I may co-operate and not thwart your great skill through ignorance.”

“My plan has two hands; one must work here, the other a great many miles from here. If I could but cut myself in two, all would be well; but I can't; I must be one hand, you the other. I work thus: Post-office here is under my thumb. I stop all letters from him to her. Presently comes a letter from Australia telling among pork, grains, etc., how George Fielding has made his fortune and married a girl out there.”

“But who is to write the letter?”

“Can't you guess?”

“Haven't an idea. She won't believe it.”

“Not at first, perhaps, but when she gets no more letters from him she will.”

“So she will. So then you will run him down to her.”

“Not such a fool, she would hate me. I shall never mention his name. I make one of my tools hang jail over old Merton. Susan thinks George married. I strike upon her pique and her father's distress. I ask him for his daughter. Offer to pay my father-in-law's debts and start him afresh.”

“Beautiful! Beautiful!”

“Susan likes me already. I tell her all I suffered silent while she was on with George. I press her to be mine. She will say no perhaps three or four times, but the fifth she will say yes!”

“She will; you are a great man.”

“And she will be happy.”

“Can't see it.”

“A man that marries a virtuous woman and loves her is no man at all if he can't make her love him; they can't resist our stronger wills except by flight or by leaning upon another man. I'll be back directly.”

Mr. Meadows returned with a bottle of wine and two glasses. Crawley was surprised. This was a beverage he had never seen his friend drink or offer him. Another thing puzzled him. When Mr. Meadows came back with the wine he had not so much color as usual in his face--not near so much.

“Crawley,” said Meadows, in a low voice, “suppose, while I am working, this George Fielding were to come home with money in both pockets?”

“He would kick it all down in a moment.”

“I am glad you see that. Then you see one hand is not enough; another must be working far away.”

“Yes, but I don't see--”

“You will see. Drink a glass of wine with me, my good friend; your health.”

“Same to you, sir.”

“Is it to your mind?”

“Elixir! This is the stuff that sharpens a chap's wit and puts courage in his heart.”

“I brought it for that. You and I have no chicken's play on hand. Another glass.”

“Success to your scheme, sir.”

“Crawley, George Fielding must not come back this year with one thousand pounds.”

“No, he must not--thank you, sir, your health. Mustn't, he shan't; but how on earth can you prevent him?”

“That paper will prevent him; it is a paper of instructions. My very brains lie in that paper--put it in your pocket.”

“In my pocket, sir? Highly honored--shall be executed to the letter. What, wine!”

“And this is a check-book.”

“No! is it though?”

“You will draw on me for one hundred pounds per month.”

“No! shall I, though? Sir, you are a king!”

“Of which you will account for fifty pounds only.”

“Liberal, sir; as I said before, liberal as running water.”

“You are going a journey.”

“Am I? well! Don't you turn pale for that--I'll come back to you--nothing but death shall part us. Have a drop of this, sir; it will put blood into your cheek, and fire into your heart. That is right. Where am I going, sir?”

“What, don't you know?”

“No! nor I don't care, so long as it is in your service I go.”

“Still it is a long journey.”

“Oh, is it? Your health then, and my happy return.”

“You are not afraid of the sea or the wind?”

“I am afraid of nothing but your wrath, and--and--the law. The sea be hanged, and the wind be blowed! When I see your talent and energy, and hold your checkbook in my hand and your instructions in my pocket, I feel to play at football with the world. When shall I start?”

“To-morrow morning.”

“To-night, if you like. Where am I to go to?”

“To AUSTRALIA!”

That single word suspended the glass going to Crawley's lips, and the chuckle coming from them. A dead silence on both sides followed it. And now two colorless faces looked into one another's eyes across the table.

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Chapter LVI

THREE days the gold-finders worked alone upon the pre-Adamite river's bed. At evening on the third day they looked up and saw a figure perched watching them with a pipe in its mouth. It disappeared in silence. Next day there were men on their knees beside them, digging, scraping, washing and worshipping gold. Soon they were the center of a group--soon after of a humming mob. As if the birds had really carried the secret north, south, east and west, men swarmed and buzzed and settled like locusts on the gold-bearing tract. They came in panting, gleaming, dusty and travel-stained and flung off their fatigue at sight, and, running up, dived into the gullies and plied spade and pickax with clinched teeth and throbbing hearts. They seamed the face of Nature for miles; turned the streams to get at their beds; pounded and crushed the solid rock to squeeze out the subtle stain of gold it held in its veins; hacked through the crops as through any other idle impediment; pecked and hewed and fought and wrestled with Nature for the treasure that lay so near yet in so tight a grip.

We take off our clothes to sleep and put them on to play at work, but these put on their clothes to sleep in, and tore them off at peep of day, and labor was red-hot till night came and cooled it; and in this fight lives fell as quickly as in actual war, and by the same enemy--Disease. Small wonder, when hundreds and hundreds wrought the livelong day one half in icy water, the other half dripping with sweat.

Men rotted like sheep, and died at the feet of that Gold whom they stormed here in his fortress; and some alas met a worse fate. For that befell which the world has seen in every age and land where gold has come to light upon a soil; men wrestling fiercely with Nature jostled each other; cupidity inflamed hate to madness, and human blood flowed like water over that yellow dirt. And now from this one burning spot gold fever struck inward to the heart of the land; burned its veins and maddened its brain. The workman sold his tools, bought a spade and a pickax, and fled to the gold; the lawyer flung down his parchment and off to the gold; the penny-a-liner his brass pen and off to a greater wonder than he had ever fabricated; the schoolmaster to whom little boys were puzzling out

Quid non mortalia pectora cogis Auri sacra fames--

made the meaning perfectly clear; he dropped ferrule and book and ran with the national hunt for gold. Shops were closed for want of buyers and sellers; the grass crept up between the paving-stones in great thoroughfares; outward-bound ships lay deserted and helpless in the roads; the wilderness was peopled and the cities desolate; commerce was paralyzed, industry contracted. The wise and good trembled for the destiny of the people, the government trembled for itself--idle fear. That which shook this colony for a moment settled it as firm as a granite mountain and made it great with a rapidity that would have astounded the puny ages cant appeals to as the days of wonders.

The sacra fames was not Australian, but human; and so at the first whisper of gold the old nations poured the wealth they valued--their food and clothes and silk and coin--and the prime treasure they valued not, their men--into that favored land.

Then did great Labor, insulted and cheated so many years in narrow, overcrowded corners of the huge unpeopled globe, lift his bare arm and cry, “Who bids for this?” and a dozen gloved hands jumped and clutched at the prize. And in bargains where a man went on one side and money on the other, the money had to say, “Thank you,” over it instead of the man.

But still, though the average value of labor was now full as high in the cities as in the mine, men flowed to the desert and the gold, tempted by the enormous prizes there, that lay close to all and came to fortune's favorites.

Hence a new wonder, a great moral phenomenon the world had never seen before on such a wide scale. At a period of unparalleled civilization and refinement, society, with its artificial habits and its jealous class distinctions on its back, took a sudden unprepared leap from the heights it had been centuries constructing--into a gold mine; it emerged, its delicate fabric crushed out of all recognizable shape, its petty prides annihilated, and even its just distinctions turned topsy-turvey. For mind is really more honorable than muscle, yet when these two met in a gold mine it fared ill with mind. Classical and mathematical scholars joined their forces with navvies to dig gold; and nearly always the scholars were found after a while cooking, shoe cleaning, and doing generally menial offices for the navvies.

Those who had no learning, but had good birth, genteel manners and kid gloves and feeble loins, sunk lower and became the dregs of gold-digging society ere a week's digging had passed over their backs. Not that all wit yielded to muscle. Low cunning often held its own; hundreds of lazy leeches settled on labor's bare arm and bled it. Such as could minister to the diggers' physical needs, appetites, vices, had no need to dig; they made the diggers work for them, and took toll of the precious dust as it fell into their hands.

One brute that could not spell chicory to save himself from the gallows cleared two thousand pounds a month by selling it and hot water at a pinch a cup. Thus ran his announcement, “Cofy allus rady.”

Meantime Trigonometry was frying steaks and on Sunday blacking boots.

After a while lucky diggers returned to the towns clogged with gold, and lusting and panting for pleasure.

They hired carriages and sweethearts, and paraded the streets all day, crying, “We be the hairy-stocracy, now!!”

The shopkeepers bowed down and did them homage.

Even here Nature had her say. The sexes came out--the men sat in the carriages in their dirty fustian and their checkered shirts and no jacket; their inamoritas beside them glittered in silk and satin. And some fiend told these poor women it was genteel to be short-sighted; so they all bought gold spy-glasses, and spied without intermission.

Then the old colonial aristocracy, who had been born in broadcloth and silk, and unlike the new had not been transported, but only their papas and mammas, were driven to despair; but at last they hit upon a remedy. They would be distinguished by hook or by crook, and the only way left now was always to go on foot. So they walked the pavement--wet or dry, nothing could induce them to enter the door of a carriage. Item: they gave up being shortsighted; the few who for reasons distinct from fashion could not resign the habit concealed it, as if it was a defect instead of a beauty.

This struggle of classes in the towns, with its hundred and one incidents, was an excellent theme for satire of the highest class. How has it escaped? is it that even Satire, low and easy art, is not so low and easy as Detraction? But these are the outskirts of a great theme. The theme itself belonged, not to little satire, but to great epic.

In the sudden return of a society far more complex, artificial and conventional than Pericles ever dreamed of, to elements more primitive than Homer had to deal with; in this, with its novelty, and nature, and strange contrasts,

In the old barbaric force and native color of the passions, as they burst out undisguised around the gold,

In the hundred and one personal combats and trials of cunning,

In a desert peopled, and cities thinned by the magic of cupidity,

In a huge army collected in ten thousand tents, not as heretofore by one man's constraining will, but each human unit spurred into the crowd by his own heart,

In “the siege of Gold,” defended stoutly by Rock and Disease,

In the world-wide effect of the discovery, the peopling of the earth at last according to Heaven's long-published and resisted design,

Fate offered poetry a theme broad and high, yet piquant, and various as the dolphin and the rainbow.

I cannot sing this song, because I am neither Lamartine, nor Hugo, nor Walter Scott. I cannot hum this song, because the severe conditions of my story forbid me even to make the adventurous attempt. I am here to tell, not the great tale of gold, but the little story of how Susan Merton was affected thereby. Yet it shall never be said that my pen passed close to a great man or a great thing without a word of homage and sympathy to set against the sneers of groveling criticasters, the blindness of self-singing poetasters, and the national itch for detraction of all great things and men that live, and deification of dead dwarfs.

God has been bountiful to the human race in this age. Most bountiful to Poets; most bountiful to all of us who have a spark of nobleness in ourselves, and so can see and revere at sight the truly grand and noble (any snob can do this after it has been settled two hundred years by other minds that he is to do it). He has given us warlike heroes more than we can count--far less honor as they deserve; and valor as full of variety as courage in the Iliad is monotonous--except when it takes to its heels.

He has given us one hero, a better man than Hector or Achilles. For Hector ran away from a single man; this hero was never known to run away at all. Achilles was a better egotist than soldier; wounded in his personal vanity, he revenged himself, not on the man who had wronged him--Prudence forbade--but on the army, and on his country. This antique hero sulked; my hero, deprived of the highest command, retained a higher still--the command that places the great of heart above all petty personal feeling. He was a soldier, and could not look from his tent on battle and not plunge into it. What true soldier ever could? He was not a Greek but a Frenchman--and could not love himself better than his country. Above all, he was not Achilles, but Canrobert.

He has given us to see Nineveh disinterred by an English hero.

He has given us to see the northwest passage forced, and winter bearded on his everlasting throne, by another. (Is it the hero's fault if self and snowdrop-singing poetasters cannot see this feat with the eyes of Camoens?)

He has given us to see Titans enslaved by man; Steam harnessed to our carriages and ships; Galvanism tamed into an alphabet--a Gamut, and its metal harp-strings stretched across the earth malgre' mountains and the sea, and so men's minds defying the twin monsters Time and Space; and now, gold revealed in the East and West at once, and so mankind now first in earnest peopling the enormous globe. Yet old women and children of the pen say, this is a bad, a small, a lifeless, an unpoetic age--and they are not mistaken. For they lie.

As only tooth-stoppers, retailers of conventional phrases, links in the great cuckoo-chain, universal pill-venders, Satan, and ancient booksellers' ancient nameless hacks can lie, they lie.

It is they who are small-eyed. Now, as heretofore, weaklings cannot rise high enough to take a bird's-eye view of their own age, and calculate its dimensions.

The age, smaller than epochs to come, is a giant compared with the past, and full of mighty materials for any great pen in prose or verse.

My little friends aged nineteen and downward--fourscore and upward--who have been lending your ears to the stale little cant of every age, as chanted in this one by Buffo-Bombastes and other foaming-at-the-pen old women of both sexes--take by way of antidote to all that poisonous, soul-withering drivel, ten honest words.

I say before heaven and earth that the man who could grasp the facts of this day and do an immortal writer's duty by them, i.e., so paint them as a later age will be content to engrave them, would be the greatest writer ever lived. Such is the force, weight and number of the grand topics that lie this day on the world's face. I say that he who has eyes to see may now see greater and far more poetic things than human eyes have seen since our Lord and his Apostles and his miracles left the earth.

It is very hard to write a good book or a good play, or to invent a good picture, and having invented paint it. But it always was hard, except to those--to whom it was impossible. Bunglers will not mend matters by blackening the great canvases they can't paint on, nor the impotent become males by detraction.

“Justice!”

When we write a story or sing a poem of the great nineteenth century, there is but one fear--not that our theme will be beneath us, but we miles below it; that we shall lack the comprehensive vision a man must have from heaven to catch the historical, the poetic, the lasting features of the Titan events that stride so swiftly past IN THIS GIGANTIC AGE.

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Chapter LVII

THE life of George Fielding and Thomas Robinson for months could be composed in a few words: tremendous work from sunrise to sundown, and on Sunday welcome rest, a quiet pipe, and a book.

At night they slept in a good tent, with Carlo at their feet and a little bag between them; this bag never left their sight; it went out to their work and in to sleep.

It is dinner-time; George and Tom are snatching a mouthful, and a few words over it.

“How much do you think we are, Tom?”

“Hush! don't speak so loud, for Heaven's sake;” he added in a whisper, “not a penny under seven hundred pounds' worth.”

George sighed.

“It is slower work than I thought; but it is my fault, I am so unlucky.”

“Unlucky! and we have not been eight months at it.”

“But one party near us cleared four thousand pounds at a haul; one thousand pounds apiece--ah!”

“And hundreds have only just been able to keep themselves. Come, you must not grumble, we are high above the average.”

George persisted.

“The reason we don't get on is we try for nothing better than dust. You know what you told me, that the gold was never created in dust, but in masses, like all metals; the dust is only a trifle that has been washed off the bulk. Then you said we ought to track the gold-dust coarser and coarser till we traced the metal to its home in the great rocks.”

“Ay! ay! I believe I used to talk so; but I am wiser now. Look here, George, no doubt the gold was all in block when the world started, but how many million years ago was that? This is my notion, George; at the beginning of the world the gold was all solid, at the end it is all to be dust; now which are we nearer, the end or the beginning?”

“Not knowing, can't say, Tom.”

“Then I can, for his reverence told me. We are fifty times nearer the end than the beginning, follows there is fifty times as much gold-dust in nature as solid gold.”

“What a head you ha' got, Tom! but I can't take it up so. Seems to me this dust is like the grain that is shed from a ripe crop before it comes to the sickle. Now if we could trace--”

“How can you trace syrup to the lump when the lump is all turned to syrup?”

George held his peace--shut up, but not convinced.

“Hallo! you two lucky ones,” cried a voice distant about thirty yards. “Will you buy our hole, it is breaking our heart here.”

Robinson went up and found a large hole excavated to a great depth; it was yielding literally nothing, and this determined that paradoxical personage to buy it if it was cheap. “What there is must be somewhere all in a lump.”

He offered ten pounds for it, which was eagerly snapped at.

“Well done, Gardiner,” said one of the band. “We would have taken ten shillings for it,” explained he to Robinson.

Robinson paid the money, and let himself down into the hole with his spade. He drove his spade into the clay, and the bottom of it just reached the rock; he looked up. “I would have gone just one foot deeper before I gave in,” said he; he called George. “Come, George, we can know our fate in ten minutes.”

They shoveled the clay away down to about one inch above the rock, and there in the white clay they found a little bit of gold as big as a pin's head.

“We have done it this time,” cried Robinson, “shave a little more off, not too deep, and save the clay.” This time a score of little nuggets came to view sticking in the clay; no need for washing, they picked them out with their knives.

The news soon spread, and a multitude buzzed round the hole and looked down on the men picking out peas and beans of pure gold with their knives.

Presently a voice cried, “Shame, give the men back their hole!”

“Gammon,” cried others, “they paid for a chance, and it turned out well; a bargain is a bargain.” Gardiner and his mates looked sorrowfully down. Robinson saw their faces and came out of the hole a moment. He took Gardiner aside and whispered, “Jump into our hole like lightning, it is worth four pound a day.”

“God bless you!” said Gardiner. He ran and jumped into the hole just as another man was going to take possession. By digger's law no party is allowed to occupy two holes.

All that afternoon there was a mob looking down at George and Robinson picking out peas and beans of gold, and envy's satanic fire burned many a heart. These two were picking up at least a hundred pounds an hour.

Now it happened late in the afternoon that a man of shabby figure, evidently not a digger, observing that there was always more or less crowd in one place, shambled up and looked down with the rest; as he looked down, George happened to look up; the newcomer drew back hastily. After that his proceedings were singular; he remained in the crowd more than two hours, not stationary, but winding in and out. He listened to everything that was said, especially if it was muttered and not spoken out; and he peered into every face, and peering into every face it befell that at last his eye lighted on one that seemed to fascinate him; it belonged to a fellow with a great bull neck, and hair and beard flowing all into one--a man more like the black-maned lion of North Africa than anything else. But it was not his appearance that fascinated the serpentine one, it was the look he cast down upon those two lucky diggers; a scowl of tremendous hatred--hatred unto death. Instinct told the serpent there must be more in this than extempore envy. He waited and watched, and, when the black-maned one moved away, he followed him about everywhere till at last he got him alone.

Then he sidled up, and in a cringing way said:

“What luck some men have, don't they?”

The man answered by a fierce grunt.

The serpent was half afraid of him, but he went on.

“There will be a good lump of gold in their tent to-night.”

The other seemed struck with these words.

“They have been lucky a long time,” explained the other, “and now this added--”

“Well, what about it?”

“Nothing! only I wish somebody else had it instead.”

“Why?”

“That is a secret for the present. I only tell you because I think somehow they are no friends of yours either.”

“Perhaps not! what then.”

“Then we might perhaps do business together; it will strike you singular, but I have a friend who would give money to any one that would take a little from those two.”

“Say that again.”

“Would give money to any one that would take it from those two.”

“And you won't ask for any share of the swag?”

“Me? I have nothing to do with it.”

“Gammon! well, your friend! will he?”

“Not a farthing!”

“And what will he give, suppose I have a friend that will do the trick?”

“According to the risk!”

The man gave a whistle. A fellow with forehead villainously low came from behind some tents.

“What is it, Will?” asked the newcomer.

“A plant.”

“This one in it?”

“Yes! This is too public, come to Bevan's store.”

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Chapter LVIII

“GEORGE, I want you to go to Bathurst.”

“What for?”

“To buy some things.”

“What things?”

“First of all, a revolver; there were fellows about our tent last night, creeping and prowling.”

“I never heard them.”

“No more you would an earthquake--but I heard them, and got up and pointed my revolver at them; so then they cut--all the better for them. We must mind our eye, George; a good many tents are robbed every week, and we are known to have a good swag.”

“Well, I must start this moment if I am to be back.”

“And take a pound of dust and buy things that we can sell here to a profit.”

George came back at night looking rather sheep-faced.

“Tom,” said he, “I am afraid I have done wrong. You see there was a confounded auction, and what with the hammer, and the folk bidding, and his palaver, I could not help it.”

“But what is it you have bought?”

“A bit o' land, Tom.”

Robinson groaned; but, recovering himself, he said gayly:

“Well, have you brought it with you?”

“No, it is not so small as all that; as nice a bit of grass as ever you saw, Tom, and just outside the town of Bathurat; only I didn't ought to have spent your money as well as my own.”

“Stuff and nonsense--I accept the investment. Let me load your new revolver. Now look at my day's work. I wouldn't take a hundred pound for these little fellows.”

George gloated over the little nuggets, for he saw Susan's eyes in them. To-night she seemed so near. The little bag was placed between them, the day's spoils added to it, and the tired friends were soon asleep.

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Chapter LIX

“HELP! help! murder! help! murder!” Such were the cries that invaded the sleepers' ears in the middle of the night, to which horrible sounds was added the furious barking of Carlo.

The men seized their revolvers and rushed out of the tent. At about sixty yards distant they saw a man on the ground struggling under two fellows, and still crying, though more faintly, “murder” and “help.”

“They are killing him!” cried George; and Robinson and he cocked their revolvers and ran furiously toward the men. But these did not wait the attack. They started up and off like the wind, followed by two shots from Robinson that whistled unpleasantly near them.

“Have they hurt you, my poor fellow?” said Robinson.

The man only groaned for answer.

Robinson turned his face up in the moonlight, and recognized a man to whom he had never spoken, but whom his watchful eye had noticed more than once in the mine--it was, in fact, the peddler Walker.

“Stop, George, I have seen this face in bad company. Oh! back to our tent for your life, and kill any man you see near it!”

They ran back. They saw two dark figures melting into the night on the other side the tent. They darted in--they felt for the bag. Gone! They felt convulsively all round the tent. Gone! With trembling hands Robinson struck a light. Gone--the work of months in a moment---the hope of a life snatched out of a lover's very hand, and held out a mile off again!

The poor fellows rushed wildly out into the night. They saw nothing but the wretched decoy vanishing behind the nearest tents. They came into the tent again. They sat down and bowed to the blow in silence, and looked at one another, and their lips quivered, and they feared to speak lest they should break into unmanly rage or sorrow. So they sat like stone till daybreak.

And when the first streak of twilight came in, George said in a firm whisper:

“Take my hand, Tom, before we go to work.”

So the two friends sat hand in hand a minute or two; and that hard grip of two workingmen's hands, though it was not gently eloquent like beauty's soft, expressive palm, did yet say many things good for the heart in this bitter hour.

It said: “A great calamity has fallen; but we do not blame each other, as some turn to directly and do. It is not your fault, George. It is not your fault, Tom.”

It said: “We were lucky together; now we are unlucky together--all the more friends. We wrought together; now we have been wronged together--all the more friends.” With this the sun rose, and for the first time they crept to their work instead of springing to it.

They still found gold in it, but not quite so abundant or so large. They had raised the cream of it for the thieves. Moreover, a rush had been made to the hole, claims measured off actually touching them; so they could not follow the gold-bearing strata horizontally--it belonged to their neighbors. They worked in silence, they ate their meal in silence. But as they rose to work again, Robinson said, very gravely, even solemnly:

“George, now I know what an honest man feels when he is robbed of the fruits of his work and his self-denial and his sobriety. If I had known it fifteen years ago, I should never have been a--what I have been.”

For two months the friends worked stoutly with leaden hearts, but did little more than pay their expenses. The bag lay between them light as a feather. One morning Tom said to George:

“George, this won't do. I am going prospecting. Moore will lend me his horse for a day.”

That day George worked alone. Robinson rode all over the country with a tin pan at his back, and tested all the places that seemed likely to his experienced eye. At night he returned to their tent. George was just lying down.

“No sleep to-night, George,” said he, instinctively lowering his voice to a whisper; “I have found surface gold ten miles to the southward.”

“Well, we will go to it to-morrow.”

“What, by daylight, watched as we are? We, the two lucky ones,” said Robinson bitterly. “No. Wait till the coast is clear--then strike tent and away.”

At midnight they stole out of the camp. By peep of day they were in a little dell with a brook running at the bottom of it.

“Now, George, listen to me. Here is ten thousand pounds if we could keep this gully and the creek a fortnight to ourselves.”

“Oh, Tom! and we will. Nobody will find us here, it is like a box.”

Robinson smiled sadly. The men drove their spades in close to the little hole which Robinson had made prospecting yesterday, and the very first cradleful yielded an ounce of gold-dust extremely small and pure. They found it diffused with wonderful regularity within a few inches of the surface. Here for the first time George saw gold-dust so plentiful as to be visible. When a spadeful of the clay was turned up it glittered all over. When they tore up the grass, which was green as an emerald, specks of bright gold came up clinging to the roots. They fell like spaded tigers on the prey.

“What are you doing, George?”

“Going to light a fire for dinner. We must eat, I suppose, though I do grudge the time.”

“We must eat, but not hot.”

“Why not?”

“Because, if you light a fire, the smoke will be seen miles off, and half the diggings will be down upon us. I have brought three days' cold meat---here it is.”

“Will this be enough?” asked George, simply, his mouth full.

“Yes, it will be enough,” replied the other, bitterly. “Do you hear that bird, George? They call him a leather-head. What is he singing?”

George laughed. “Seems to me he is saying, 'Off we go!' 'Off we go!' 'Off we go!'”

“That is it. And look now, off he is gone; and, what is more, he has gone to tell all the world he saw two men pick up gold like beans.”

“Work!” cried George.

That night the little bag felt twice as heavy as last night, and Susan seemed nearer than for many a day. These two worked for their lives. They counted each minute, and George was a Goliath; the soil flew round him like the dust about a wmnnowing-machine. He was working for Susan. Robinson wasted two seconds admiring him.

“Well,” said he, “gold puts us all on our mettle, but you beat all I ever saw. You are a man.”

It was the morning of the third day, and the friends were filling the little bag fast; and at breakfast George quizzed Robinson's late fears.

“The leather-head didn't tell anybody, for here we are all alone.”

Robinson laughed.

“But we should not have been, if I had let you light a fire. However, I really begin to hope now they will let us alone till we have cleared out the gully. Hallo!”

“What is the matter?”

“Look there, George.”

“What is it? Smoke rising--down the valley?”

“We are done! Didn't I tell you?”

“Don't say so, Tom. Why, it is only smoke, and five miles off.”

“What signifies what it is or where it is? It is on the road to us.”

“I hope better.”

“What is the use of hoping nonsense? Was it there yesterday? Well, then.”

“Don't you be faint-hearted,” said George. “We are not caught yet. I wonder whether Susan would say it was a sin to try and mislead them?”

“A sin! I wish I knew how, I'd soon see. That was a good notion. This place is five hundred pound a day to us. We must keep it to-day by hook or by crook. Come with me, quick. Bring your tools and the bag.”

George followed Robinson in utter ignorance of his design; that worthy made his way as fast as he could toward the smoke. When they got within a mile of it the valley widened and the smoke was seen rising from the side of the stream. Concealing themselves, they saw two men beating the ground on each side like pointers. Robinson drew back. “They are hunting up the stream,” said he, “it is there we must put the stopper on them.”

They made eastward for the stream which they had left.

“Come,” said Robinson, “here is a spot that looks likely to a novice; dig and cut it up all you can.”

George was mystified but obeyed, and soon the place looked as if men had been at work on it some time. Then Robinson took out a handful of gold-dust and coolly scattered it over a large heap of mould.

“What are you at? Are you mad, Tom? Why, there goes five pounds. What a sin!”

“Did you never hear of the man that flung away a sprat to catch a whale? Now turn back to our hole. Stop, leave your pickax, then they will think we are coming back to work.”

In little more than half an hour they were in their little gully working like mad. They ate their dinner working. At five o'clock George pointed out to Robinson no less than seven distinct columns of smoke rising about a mile apart all down the valley.

“Ay!” said Robinson, “those six smokes are hunting the smoke that is hunting us! but we have screwed another day out.”

Just as the sun was setting, a man came into the gully with a pickax on his shoulder.

“Ah! how d'ye do?” said Robinson, in a mock friendly accent. “We have been expecting you. Thank you for bringing us our pickax.”

The man gave a sort of rueful laugh and came and delivered the pick and coolly watched the cradle.

“Why don't you ask what you want to know?” said Robinson.

The man sneered. “Is that the way to get the truth from a digger?” said he.

“It is from me, and the only one.”

“Oh! then what are you doing, mate?”

“About ten ounces of gold per hour.”

The man's mouth and eyes both opened. “Come, my lad,” said Robinson, good-naturedly, “of course I am not glad you have found us, but since you are come, call your pals, light fires, and work all night. To-morrow it will be too late.”

The man whistled. He was soon joined by two more and afterward by others. The whole party was eight. A hurried conference took place, and presently the captain, whose name was Ede, came up to Robinson with a small barrel of beer and begged him and his pal to drink as much as they liked. They were very glad of the draught and thanked the men warmly.

The newcomers took Robinson's advice, lighted large fires, divided their company, and groped for gold. Every now and then came a shout of joy, and, in the light of the fires, the wild figures showed red as blood against the black wall of night, and their excited eyes glowed like carbuncles as they clawed the sparkling dust. George and Robinson, fatigued already by a long day, broke down about three in the morning. They reeled into their tent, dug a hole, put in their gold bag, stamped it down, tumbled dead asleep down over it, and never woke till morn.

Gn l r-r-r! gn l r-r-r!

“What is the matter, Carlo?”

Gn l r-r-r.

Hum! hum! hum! Crash! crash!

At these sounds Robinson lifted up the corner of his tent. The gully was a digging. He ran out to see where he was to work, and found the whole soil one enormous tan-yard, the pits ten feet square, and so close there was hardly room to walk to your hole without tumbling into your neighbor's. You had to balance yourself like boys going along a beam in a timber-yard. In one of these he found Ede and his gang working. Mr. Ede had acquired a black eye, ditto one of his mates.

“Good-morning, Captain Robinson,” said this personage, with a general gayety of countenance that contrasted most drolly with the mourning an expressive organ had gone into.

“Well, was I right?” asked Robinson, looking ruefully round the crowded digging.

“You were, Captain Robinson, and thank you for last night.”

“Well, you have picked up my name somehow. Now just tell me how you picked up something else. How did you suspect us in this retired spot?”

“We were working just clear of the great digging by the side of the creek, and doing no good, when your cork came down.”

“My cork?”

“Cork out of your bottle.”

“I had no bottle. Oh, yes! my pal had a bottle of small beer.”

“Ay, he must have thrown it into the creek, for a cork came down to us. Then I looked at it, and I said, 'Here is a cork from Moore's store; there is a party working up stream by this cork.'”

Robinson gave a little groan. “We are never to be at the bottom of gold digging,” said he.

“So we came up the stream and tried several places as we came, but found nothing; at last we came to your pickax and signs of work, so my lads would stay and work there, and I let them an hour or two, and then I said, 'Come now, lads, the party we are after is higher up.'”

“Now how could you pretend to know that?” inquired Robinson, with curiosity.

“Easy enough. The water came down to us thick and muddyish, so I knew you were washing up stream.”

“Confound my stupid head,” cried Robinson, “I deserve to have it cut off after all my experience.”

And he actually capered with vexation.

“The best may make a mistake,” said the other soothingly. “Well, captain, you did us a good turn last night, so here is your claim. We put your pal's pick in it--here close to us. Oh! there was a lot that made difficulties, but we over-persuaded them.”

“Indeed! How?”

“Gave them a hiding, and promised to knock out any one's brains that went into it. Oh! kindness begets kindness, even in a gold mine.”

“It does,” cried Robinson, “and the proof is--that I give you the claim. Here come this way and seem to buy it of me. All their eyes are upon us. Now split your gang, and four take my claim.”

“Well, that is good of you. But what will you do, captain? Where shall you go?” And his eyes betrayed his curiosity.

“Humph! Well, I will tell you on condition that you don't bring two thousand after me again. You should look behind you as well as before, stupid.”

These terms agreed to, Robinson let Ede know that he was going this moment back to the old digging. The other was greatly surprised. Robinson then explained that in the old digging gold lay at various depths and was inexhaustible; that this afternoon there would be a rush made from it to Robinson's Gully (so the spot where they stood was already called); that thousands of good claims would thus by diggers' law be vacated; and that he should take the best before the rush came back, which would be immediately, since Robinson's Gully would be emptied of its gold in four hours.

“So clear out your two claims,” said he. “It won't take you two hours. All the gold lies in one streak four inches deep. Then back after me; I'll give you the office. I'll mark you down a good claim.”

Mr. Ede, who was not used to this sort of thing since he fought for gold, wore a ludicrous expression of surprise and gratitude. Robinson read it and grinned superior, but the look rendered words needless, so he turned the conversation.

“How did you get your black eye?”

“Oh! didn't I tell you? Fighting with the blackguards for your claim.”

It was now Robinson's turn to be touched.

“You are a good fellow. You and I must be friends. Ah! if I could but get together about forty decent men like you, and that had got gold to lose.”

“Well,” said Ede, “why not? Here are eight that have got gold to lose, thanks to you, and your own lot--that makes ten. We could easy make up forty for any good lay; there is my hand for one. What is it?”

Robinson took Ede's hand with a haste and an energy that almost startled him, and his features darkened with an expression unusual now to his good-natured face. “To put down thieving in the camp,” said he, sternly.

“Ah!” said the other, half sadly (the desirableness of this had occurred to him before now); “but how are we to do that?” asked he, incredulously. “The camp is choke-full of them.”

Robinson looked blacker, uglier and more in earnest. So was his answer when it came.

“Make stealing death by the law.”

“The law! What law?”

“Lynch!”

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Chapter LX

ABOUT a fortnight after Robinson's return to the diggings two men were seated in a small room at Bevan's store. There was little risk of their being interrupted by any honest digger, for it was the middle of the day.

“I know that well enough,” growled the black-maned one, “everybody knows the lucky rip has got a heavier swag than ever, but we shan't get it so cheap, if we do at all.”

“Why not?”

“He is on his guard now, night and day, and what is more he has got friends in the mine that would hang me or you either up to dry, if they but caught us looking too near his tent.”

“The ruffians. Well, but if he has friends he has enemies.”

“Not so many; none that I know of but you and me. I wonder what he has done to you?”

The other waived this question and replied: “I have found two parties that hate him; two that came in last week.”

“Have you? then, if you are in earnest, make me acquainted with them, for I am weak-handed; I lost one of my pals yesterday.”

“Indeed! how?”

“They caught him at work and gave him a rap over the head with a spade. The more ---- fool he for being caught. Here is to his memory.”

“Ugh! what, is he, is he--”

“Dead as a herring.”

“Where shall we all go to? What lawless fellows these diggers are. I will bring you the men.”

For the last two months the serpentine man had wound in and out the camp, poking about for a villain of the darker sort as minutely as Diogenes did for an honest man, and dispensing liquor and watching looks and words. He found rogues galore, and envious spirits that wished the friends ill, but none of them seemed game to risk their lives against two men, one of whom said openly he would kill any stranger he caught in his tent, and whom some fifty stout fellows called Captain Robinson, and were ready to take up his quarrel like fire. But at last he fell in with two old lags, who had a deadly grudge against the captain, and a sovereign contempt for him into the bargain. By the aid of liquor he wormed out their story. This was the marrow of it: The captain had been their pal, and, while they were all three cracking a crib, had with unexampled treachery betrayed them, and got them laid by the heels for nearly a year; in fact, if they had not broken prison they would not have been here now. In short, in less than half an hour he returned with our old acquaintances, brutus and mephistopheles.

These two came half reluctant, suspicious and reserved. But at sight of Black Will they were reassured, villain was so stamped on him. With instantaneous sympathy and an instinct of confidence the three compared notes, and showed how each had been aggrieved by the common enemy. Next they held a council of war, the grand object of which was to hit upon some plan of robbing the friends of their new swag.

It was a difficult and very dangerous job. Plans were proposed and rejected, and nothing agreed upon but this, that the men should be carefully watched for days to find out where they kept their gold at night and where by day, and an attempt timed and regulated accordingly. Moreover, the same afternoon a special gang of six was formed, including Walker, which pitiful fox was greatly patronized by the black-maned lion. At sight of him, brutus, who knew him not indeed by name but by a literary transaction, was “for laying on,” but his patron interposed, and, having inquired and heard the offense, bellowed with laughter, and condemned the ex-peddler to a fine of half a crown in grog. This softened brutus, and a harmonious debauch succeeded. Like the old Egyptians they debated first sober and then drunk, and to stagger my general notion that the ancients were unwise, candor compels me to own, it was while stammering, maudling, stinking and in every sense drunk that mephistopheles driveled out a scheme so cunning and so new as threw everybody and everything into the shade. It was carried by hiccoughation.

To work this scheme mephistopheles required a beautiful large new tent; the serpentine man bought it. Money to feed the gang; serpent advanced it.

Robinson's tent was about thirty yards from his claim, which its one opening faced. So he and George worked with an eye ever upon their tent. At night two men of Robinson's party patrolled armed to the teeth; they relieved guard every two hours. Captain Robinson's orders to these men, if they saw anybody doing anything suspicious after dark, were these:

First fire, Then inquire.

This general order was matter of publicity for a quarter of a mile round Robinson's tent, and added to his popularity and our rascals' perplexities.

These orders had surely the double merit of conciseness and melody; well, for all that, they were disgustingly offensive to one true friend of the captain, viz., to George Fielding.

“What is all the gold in the world compared with a man's life?” said he, indignantly.

“An ounce of it is worth half a dozen such lives as some here,” was the cool reply.

“I have heard you talk very different. I mind when you could make excuses even for thieves that were never taught any better, poor unfortunate souls.”

“Did I?” said the captain, a little taken aback. “Well, perhaps I did; it was natural, hem, under the circumstances. No! not for such thieves as these, that haven't got any honor at all.”

“Honor, eh?”

“Yes! honor. Look here, suppose in my unconverted days I had broke into a jeweler's shop (that comes nearest to a mine) with four or five pals, do you think I should have held it lawful to rob my pals of any part of the swag just because we happened to be robbing a silversmith? Certainly not; I assure you, George, the punishment of such a nasty, sneaking, dishonorable act would be death in every gang, and cheap, too. Well, we have broken into Nature's shop here, and we are to rifle her, and not turn to like unnatural monsters, and rob our ten thousand pals.”

“Thieving is thieving, in my view,” was the prejudiced reply.

“And hanging is hanging--as all thieves shall find if caught convenient.”

“You make my flesh creep, Tom. I liked you better when you were not so great a man, more humble like; have you forgotten when you had to make excuses for yourself; then you had Susan on your side and brought me round, for I was bitter against theft; but never so bad as you are now.”

“Oh, never mind what I said in those days; why, you must be well aware I did not know what I was talking about. I had been a rogue and a fool, and I talked like both. But now I am a man of property, and my eyes are open and my conscience revolts against theft, and the gallows is the finest institution going, and next to that comes a jolly good prison. I wish there was one in this mine as big as Pentonville, then property--”

Here the dialogue was closed by the demand the pick made upon the man of property's breath. But it rankled, and on laying down the pick he burst out: “Well, to think of an honest man like you having a word to say for thieving. Why, it is a despicable trait in a gold mine. I'll go farther, I'll prove it is the sin of sins all round the world. Stolen money never thrives--goes for drink and nonsense. Now you pick and I'll wash. Theft corrupts the man that is robbed as well as the thief; drives him to despair and drink and ruin temporal and eternal. No country could stand half an hour without law!! The very honest would turn thieves if not protected, and there would be a go. Besides, this great crime is like a trunk railway, other little crimes run into it and out of it; lies buzz about it like these Australian flies--drat you! Drunkenness precedes and follows it, and perjury rushes to its defense.”

“Well, Tom, you are a beautiful speaker.”

“I haven't done yet. What wonder it degrades a man when a dog loses his dignity under it. Behold the dog who has stolen; look at Carlo yesterday when he demeaned himself to prig Jem's dinner (the sly brute won't look at ours). How mean he cut with his tail under his belly, instead of turning out to meet folk all jolly and waggle-um-tail-um as on other occasions--Hallo, you, sir! what are you doing so near our tent?” and up jumped the man of property and ran cocking a revolver to a party who was kneeling close to the friends' tent.

The man looked up coolly; he was on his knees.

“We are newly arrived and just going to pitch, and a digger told us we must not come within thirty yards of the captain's tent, so we are measuring the distance.”

“Well, measure it--and keep it.”

Robinson stayed by his tent till the man, whose face was strange to him, had measured and marked the ground. Soon after the tent in question was pitched, and it looked so large and new that the man of property's suspicions were lulled.

“It is all right,” said he, “tent is worth twenty pounds at the lowest farthing.”

While Black Will and his gang were scheming to get the friends' gold, Robinson, though conscious only of his general danger, grew more and more nervous as the bag grew heavier, and strengthened his defenses every day.

This very day one was added to the cause of order in a very characteristic way. I must first observe that Mr. McLaughlan had become George's bailiff, that is, on discovery of the gold he had agreed to incorporate George's flocks, to use his ground and to account to him, sharing the profits, and George running the risks. George had, however, encumbered the property with Abner as herdsman. That worthy had come whining to him lame of one leg from a blow on the head, which he convinced George Jacky had given him with his battle-ax.

“I'm spoiled for life and by your savage. I have lost my place; do something for me.”

Good-hearted George did as related, and moreover promised to give Jacky a hiding if ever he caught him again. George's aversion to bloodshed is matter of history; it was also his creed that a good hiding did nobody any harm.

Now it was sheep-shearing time and McLaughlan was short of hands; he came into the mine to see whether out of so many thousands he could not find four or five who would shear instead of digging.

When he put the question to George, George shook his head doubtfully. “However,” said he, “look out for some unlucky ones, that is your best chance, leastways your only one.”

So McLaughlan went cannily about listening here and there to the men who were now at their dinners, and he found Ede's gang grumbling and growling with their mouths full; in short, enjoying at the same time a good dinner and an Englishman's grace.

“This will do,” thought the Scot, misled like continental nations by that little trait of ours; he opened the ball.

“I'm saying--my lads--will ye gie ower this weary warrk a wee whilee and sheer a wheen sheep to me?”

The men looked in his face, then at one another, and the proposal struck them as singularly droll. They burst out laughing in his face.

McLaughlan (keeping his temper thoroughly, but not without a severe struggle). “Oh, fine I ken I'll ha'e to pay a maist deevelich price for your highnesses--aweel, I'se pay--aw thing has its price; jaast name your wage for shearing five hunder sheep.”

The men whispered together. The Scot congratulated himself on his success; it would be a question of price, after all.

“We will do it for--the wool.”

“Th' 'oo?--oo ay! but hoo muckle o' th' 'oo? for ye ken--”

“How muckle? why, all.”

“A' the 'oo! ye blackguard, ye're no blate.”

“Keep your temper, farmer, it is not worth our while to shear sheep for less than that.”

“De'il go wi' ye then!” and he moved off in great dudgeon.

“Stop,” cried the captain, “you and I are acquainted--you lived out Wellington way--me and another wandered to your hut one day and you gave us our supper.”

“Ay, lad, I mind o' ye the noo!”

“The jolliest supper ever I had--a haggis you called it.”

“Ay, did I, my fine lad. I cookit it till ye myssel. Ye meicht help me for ane.”

“I will,” said Captain Ede; and a conference took place in a whisper between him and his men.

“It is a' reicht the noo!” thought McLaughlan.

“We have an offer to make you,” said Ede, respectfully.

“Let us hear't.”

“Our party is large; we want a cook for it, and we offer you the place in return for past kindness.”

“Me a cuik, y' impudent vagabond!” cried the Caledonian, red as a turkey-cock; and, if a look could have crushed a party of eight, their hole had been their grave.

McLaughlan took seven ireful steps--wide ones--then his hot anger assumed a cold, sardonic form, he returned, and with blighting satire speered this question by way of gratifying an ironical curiosity.

“An' whaat would ye ha'e the cheek t'offer a McLanghlan to cuik till ye, you that kens sae fine the price o' wark?”

“Thirty shillings.”

“Thretty shilling the week for a McLaughlan!”

“The week,” cried Ede, “nonsense--thirty shillings a day of course. We sell work for gold, sir, and we give gold for it; look here!” and he suddenly bared a sturdy brown arm, and, smacking it, cried, “That is dirt where you come from, but it is gold here.”

“Ye're a fine lad,” said the Scot, smoothly, “and ye've a boeny aerm,” added he, looking down at it. “I'se no deny that. I'm thinking--I'll just come--and cuik till ye a wee--for auld lang syne--thretty schelln the day--an' ye'll buy the flesh o' me. I'll sell it a hantle cheaper than thir warldly-minded fleshers.”

Bref, he came to be shorn, and remained to fleece.

He went and told George what he had done.

“Hech! hech!” whined he, “thir's a maist awfu' come doon for the McLaughlans---but wha wadna' stuip to lift gowd?”

He left his head man, a countryman of his own, in charge of the flocks, and tarried in the mine. He gave great satisfaction, except that he used to make his masters wait for dinner while he pronounced a thundering long benediction; but his cookery compensated the delay.

Robinson enrolled him in his police and it was the fashion openly to quiz, and secretly respect him.

Robinson also made friends with the women, in particular with one Mary McDogherty, wife of a very unsuccessful digger. Many a pound of potatoes Pat and she had from the captain, and this getting wind secured the good will of the Irish boys.

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Chapter LXI

GEORGE was very homesick.

“Haven't we got a thousand pounds apiece yet?”

“Hush! no! not quite; but too much to bawl about.”

“And we never shall till you take my advice, and trace the gold to its home in the high rocks. Here we are plodding for dust, and one good nugget would make us.”

“Well! well!” said Robinson, “the moment the dry weather goes you shall show me the home of the gold.” Poor George and his nuggets!

“That is a bargain,” said George, “and now I have something more to say. Why keep so much gold in our tent? It makes me fret. I am for selling some of it to Mr. Levi.

“What, at three pounds the ounce? not if I know it.”

“Then why not leave it with him to keep?”

“Because it is safer in its little hole in our tent. What do the diggers care for Mr. Levi? You and I respect him, but I am the man they swear by. No, George, Tom Weasel isn't caught napping twice in the same year. Don't you see I've been working this four months past to make my tent safe? and I've done it. It is watched for me night and day, and if our swag was in the Bank of England it wouldn't be safer than it is. Put that in your pipe. Well, Carlo, what is the news in your part?”

Carlo came running up to George, and licked his face, which just rose above the hole.

“What is it, Carlo?” asked George, in some astonishment.

“Ha! ha!” laughed the other. “Here is the very dog come out to encourage his faint-hearted master.”

“No!” said George, “it can't be that--he means something--be quiet, Carlo, licking me to pieces--but what it is Heaven only knows; don't you encourage him; he has no business out of the tent--go back, Carlo--go into kennel, sir;” and off slunk Carlo back into the tent, of which he was the day sentinel.

“Tom,” remarked George, thoughtfully, “I believe Carlo wanted to show me something; he is a wonderful wise dog.”

“Nonsense,” cried Robinson, sharply, “he heard you at the old lay, grumbling, and came to say cheer up, old fellow.”

While Robinson was thus quizzing George, a tremendous noise was suddenly heard in their tent. A scuffle--a fierce, muffled snarl--and a human yell; with a cry, almost as loud, the men bounded out of their hole, and, the blood running like melting ice down their backs with apprehension, burst into the tent; then they came upon a sight that almost drew the eyes out of their heads.

In the center of the tent, not six inches from their buried treasure, was the head of a man emerging from the bowels of the earth, and cursing and yelling, for Carlo had seized his head by the nape of the neck, and bitten it so deep that the blood literally squirted, and was stamping and going back snarling and pulling and hauling in fierce jerks to extract it from the earth, while the burly-headed ruffian it belonged to, cramped by his situation, and pounced on unawares by the fiery teeth, was striving and battling to get down into the earth again. Spite of his disadvantage, such were his strength and despair that he now swung the dog backward and forward. But the men burst in. George seized him by the hair of his head, Tom by the shoulder, and with Carlo's help, wrenched him on to the floor of the tent, where he was flung on his back with Tom's revolver at his temple, and Carlo flew round and round barking furiously, and now and then coming flying at him; on which occasions he was always warded off by George's strong arm, and passed devious, his teeth clicking together like machinery, the snap and the rush being all one design that must succeed or fail together. Captain Robinson put his lips to his whistle, and the tent was full of his friends in a moment.

“Get me a bullock rope.”

“Ay!”

“And drive a stout pole into the ground.”

“Ay!”

In less than five minutes brutus was tied up to a post in the sun, with a placard on his breast on which was written in enormous letters--

THIEF

(and underneath in smaller letters--)

Caught trying to shake Captain Robinson's tent. First offense. N B--To be hanged next time.

Then a crier was sent through the mine to invite inspection of brutus's features, and ere sunset thousands looked into his face, and when he tried to lower it pulled it savagely up.

“I shall know you again, my lad,” was the common remark, “and, if I catch you too near my tent, rope or revolver, one of the two.”

Captain Robinson's men did not waste five minutes with brutus. They tied him to the stake, and dashed into their holes to make up lost time, but Robinson and George remained quiet in their tent.

“George,” said Tom, in a low, contrite, humble voice, “let us return thanks to Heaven, for vain is man's skill.”

And they did.

“George,” said Tom, rising from his knees, “the conceit is taken out of me for about the twentieth time; I felt so strong and I was nobody. The danger came in a way I never dreamed, and when it had come we were saved by a friend I never valued. Give a paw, Carlo.”

Carlo gave a paw.

“He has been a good friend to us this day,” said George. “I see it all now; he must have heard the earth move and did not understand it so he came for me, and, when you would not let me go, he went back, and says he, 'I dare to say it is a rabbit burrowing up.' So he waited still as death, watching, and nailed six feet of vermin instead of bunny.”

Here they both fell to caressing Carlo, who jumped and barked and finished with a pretended onslaught on the captain as he was kneeling, looking at their so late imperiled gold, and knocked him over and slobbered his face when he was down. Opinions varied, but the impression was he knew he had been a clever dog. This same evening, Jem made a collar for him on which was written “Policeman C.”

The fine new tent was entered and found deserted, nothing there but an enormous mound of earth that came out of the subterranean, which Robinson got a light and inspected all the way to its debouchure in his own tent. As he returned, holding up his light and peering about, he noticed something glitter at the top of the arch; he held the light close to it and saw a speck or two of gold sparkling here and there. He took out his knife and scraped the roof in places, and brought to light in detached pieces a layer of gold-dust about the substance of a sheet of blotting-paper and full three yards wide; it crossed the subterranean at right angles, dipping apparently about an inch in two yards. The conduct of brutus and co. had been typical. They had been so bent on theft, that they were blind to the pocketfuls of honest, safe, easy gold they rubbed their very eyes and their thick skulls against on their subterraneous path to danger and crime.

Two courses occurred to Robinson; one was to try and monopolize this vein of gold, the other to take his share of it and make the rest add to his popularity and influence in the mine. He chose the latter, for the bumptiousness was chilled in him. This second attack on his tent made him tremble.

“I am a marked man,” said he. “Well, if I have enemies, the more need to get friends all round me.”

I must here observe that many men failed altogether at the gold diggings and returned in rags and tatters to the towns; many others found a little, enough to live like a gentleman anywhere else, but too little for bare existence in a place where an egg cost a shilling, a cabbage a shilling, and baking two pounds of beef one shilling and sixpence, and a pair of mining boots eight pounds, and a frying-pan thirty shillings, and so on.

Besides, the hundreds that fell by diarrhea, their hands clutching in vain the gold that could not follow them, many a poor fellow died of a broken heart and hardships suffered in vain, and some, long unlucky but persevering, suddenly surprised by a rich find of gold, fell by the shock of good fortune, went raving mad, dazzled by the gold, and perished miserably. For here all was on a great heroic scale, starvation, wealth, industry, crime, retribution, madness and disease.

Now the good-natured captain had his eye upon four unlucky men at this identical moment.

No. 1, Mr. Miles, his old master, who, having run through his means, had come to the diggings. He had joined a gang of five; they made only about three pounds a week each, and had expelled him, alleging that his work was not quite up to their mark. He was left without a mate and earned a precarious livelihood without complaining, for he was game; but Robinson's quick eye and ear saw his clothes were shabby and that he had given up his ha! ha! ha!

No. 2, Jem, whose mate had run away and robbed him, and he was left solus with his tools.

No. 3, Mr. Stevens, an accomplished scholar, and, above all, linguist, broad in the forehead but narrow in the chest, who had been successively rejected by five gangs and was now at a discount. He picked up a few shillings by interpreting, but it was a suspicious circumstance that he often came two miles from his end of the camp to see Robinson just at dinner-time. Then a look used to pass between those two good-hearted creatures, and Mr. Stevens was served first and Carlo docked till evening. Titles prevailed but little in the mine. They generally addressed the males of our species thus:

“Hi! man!”

The females thus:

“Hi! woman!”

The Spartans! but these two made an exception in favor of this reduced scholar. They called him “Sir,” and felt abashed his black coat should be so rusty; and they gave him the gristly bits, for he was not working, but always served him first.

No. 4, Unlucky Jack, a digger. This man really seemed to be unlucky. Gangs would find the stuff on four sides of him, and he none; his last party had dissolved, owing they said to his ill-luck, and he was forlorn. These four Robinson convened, with the help of Mary McDogherty, who went for Stevens; and made them a little speech, telling them he had seen all their four ill-lucks, and was going to end that with one blow. He then, taking the direction of brutus's gold-vein, marked them out a claim full forty yards off, and himself one close to them; organized them, and set them working in high spirits, tremulous expectation, and a fervor of gratitude to him, and kindly feeling toward their unlucky comrades.

“You won't find anything for six feet,” said the captain. “Meantime, all of you turn to and tell the rest how you were the unluckiest man in the whole mine--till you fell in with me--he! he!”

And the captain chuckled. His elastic vanity was fast recovering from brutus, and his spirits rising.

Toward evening he collected his whole faction, got on the top of two cradles, made a speech, thanked them for their good-will, and told them he had now an opportunity of making them a return. He had discovered a vein of gold which he could have kept all to himself, but it was more just and more generous to share it with his partisans.

“Now, pass through this little mine one at a time,” said he, “and look at the roof, where I have stuck the two lighted candles, and then pass on quick to make room for others.”

The men dived one after another, examined the roof, and, rushing wildly out at the other end in great excitement, ran and marked out claims on both sides of the subterranean.

But, with all their greediness and eagerness, they left ten feet square untouched on each side the subterranean.

“What is this left for?”

“That is left for the clever fellow that found the gold after a thief had missed it,” cried one.

“And for the generous fellow that parted his find,” roared another, from a distance.

Robinson seemed to reflect.

“No! I won't spoil the meat by cutting myself the fat--no! I am a digger, but not only a digger, I aspire to the honor of being a captain of diggers; my claim lies out there.”

“Hurrah; three cheers for Captain Robinson!”

“Will you do me a favor in return?”

“Hurrah! won't we?”

“I am going to petition the governor to send us out police to guard our tents.”

“Hurrah!”

“And even beaks, if necessary” (doubtful murmurs). “And, above all, soldiers to take our gold safe down to Sydney.”

“Hurrah!”

“Where we can sell it at three fifteen the ounce.”

“Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!”

“Instead of giving it away here for three pounds, and then being robbed. If you will all sign, Mr. Stevens and I will draw up the petition; no country can stand without law!”

“Hurrah for Captain Robinson, the diggers' friend.”

And the wild fellows jumped out of the holes, and four seized the diggers' friend, and they chaired him in their rough way, and they put Carlo into a cradle, and raised him high, and chaired him; and both man and dog were right glad to get safe out of the precarious honor.

The proceedings ended by brutus being loosed and set between two long lines of men with lumps of clay, and pelted and knocked down, and knocked up again, and driven, bruised, battered and bleeding, out of that part of the camp. He found his way to a little dirty tent not much bigger than a badger's hole, crawled in, and sank down in a fainting state, and lay on his back stiff and fevered, and smarting soul and body many days.

And while Robinson was exulting in his skill, his good fortune, his popularity, his swelling bag, and the constabulary force he was collecting and heading, this tortured ruffian, driven to utter desperation by the exposure of his features to all the camp with “Thief” blazing on him, lay groaning stiff and sore--but lived for revenge.

“Let him keep his gold--I don't care for his gold now. I'll have his blood!”

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Chapter LXII

“I WONDER at you giving away the claim that lay close to the gold; it is all very well to be generous, but you forget--Susan.”

“Don't you be silly, George. The vein dips, and those that cut down on it where it is horizontalish will get a little; we, that nick it nearly verticalish, will get three times as much out of a ten-foot square claim.”

“Well! you are a sharp fellow, to be sure; but, if it is so, why on earth did you make a favor to them of giving them the milk and taking the cream?”

“Policy, George! policy!”

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LXIII. SUNDAY

“TOM, I invite you to a walk.”

“Ay! ay! I'd give twenty pounds for one; but the swag?”

“Leave it this one day with Mr. Levi; he has got two young men always armed in his tent, and a little peevish dog, and gutta-percha pipes running into all the Jews' tents that are at his back like chicks after the old hen.”

“Oh, he is a deep one.”

“And he has got mouth-pieces to them, and so he could bring thirty men upon a thief in less than half a minute.”

“Well, then, George! a walk is a great temptation, this beautiful day.”

In short, by eight o'clock the gold was deposited, and the three friends, for Policeman C must count for one, stepped lustily out in the morning air.

It was the month of January; a blazing hot day was beginning to glow through the freshness of morning; the sky was one cope of pure blue, and the southern air crept slowly up, its wings clogged with fragrance, and just tuned the trembling leaves--no more.

“Is not this pleasant, Tom--isn't it sweet?”

“I believe you, George! and what a shame to run down such a country as this. There they come home, and tell you the flowers have no smell, but they keep dark about the trees and bushes being haystacks of flowers. Snuff the air as we go, it is a thousand English gardens in one. Look at all those tea-scrubs each with a thousand blossoms on it as sweet as honey, and the golden wattles on the other side, and all smelling like seven o'clock; after which flowers be hanged!”

“Ay, lad! it is very refreshing; and it is Sunday, and we have got away from the wicked for an hour or two; but in England there would be a little white church out yonder, and a spire like an angel's forefinger pointing from the grass to heaven, and the lads in their clean smock-frocks like snow, and the wenches in their white stockings and new shawls, and the old women in their scarlet cloaks and black bonnets, all going one road, and a tinkle-tinkle from the belfry, that would turn all these other sounds and colors and sweet smells holy, as well as fair, on the Sabbath morn. Ah! England. Ah!”

“You will see her again--no need to sigh.”

“Oh, I was not thinking of her in particular just then.”

“Of who?”

“Of Susan!”

“Prejudice be hanged, this is a lovely land.”

“So 'tis, Tom, so 'tis. But I'll tell you what puts me out a little bit; nothing is what it sets up for here. If you see a ripe pear and go to eat it,--it is a lump of hard wood. Next comes a thing the very sight of which turns your stomach--and that is delicious, a loquot, for instance. There now, look at that magpie! well, it is Australia--so that magpie is a crow and not a magpie at all. Everything pretends to be some old friend or other of mine, and turns out a stranger. Here is nothing but surprises and deceptions. The flowers make a point of not smelling, and the bushes that nobody expects to smell, or wants to smell, they smell lovely.

“What does it matter where the smell comes from, so that you get it?”

“Why, Tom,” replied George, opening his eyes, “it makes all the difference. I like to smell a flower--flower is not complete without smell--but I don't care if I never smell a bush till I die. Then the birds they laugh and talk like Christians; they make me split my sides, God bless their little hearts; but they won't chirrup. Oh, dear, no, bless you, they leave the Christians to chirrup--they hold conversations and giggle and laugh and play a thing like a fiddle--it is Australia! where everything is inside-out and topsy-turvy. The animals have four legs, so they jump on two. Ten-foot square of rock lets for a pound a month; ten acres of grass for a shilling a year. Roasted at Christmas, shiver o' cold on midsummer-day. The lakes are grass, and the rivers turn their backs on the sea and run into the heart of the land; and the men would stand on their heads, but I have taken a thought, and I've found out why they don't.”

“Why?”

“Because if they did their heads would point the same way a man's head points in England.”

Robinson laughed, and told George he admired the country for these very traits. “Novelty for me against the world. Who'd come twelve thousand miles to see nothing we couldn't see at home? Hang the same old story always; where are we going, George?”

“Oh, not much farther, only about twelve miles from the camp?”

“Where to?”

“To a farmer I know. I am going to show you a lark, Tom,” said George. His eyes beamed benevolence on his comrade.

Robinson stopped dead short. “George,” said he, “no! don't let us. I would rather stay at home and read my book. You can go into temptation and come out pure; I can't. I am one of those that, if I go into a puddle up to my shoe, I must splash up to my middle.”

“What has that to do with it?”

“Your proposing to me to go in for a lark on the Sabbath day.

“Why, Tom, am I the man to tempt you to do evil?” asked George, hurt.

“Why, no! but, for all that, you proposed a lark.”

“Ay, but an innocent one, one more likely to lift your heart on high than to give you ill thoughts.”

“Well, this is a riddle;” and Robinson was intensely puzzled.

“Carlo,” cried George, suddenly, “come here. I will not have you hunting and tormenting those kangaroo rats to-day. Let us all be at peace, if you please. Come to heel.”

The friends strode briskly on, and a little after eleven o'clock they came upon a small squatter's house and premises. “Here we are,” cried George, and his eyes glittered with innocent delight.

The house was thatched and whitewashed, and English was written on it and on every foot of ground round it. A furzebush had been planted by the door. Vertical oak palings were the fence, with a five-barred gate in the middle of them. From the little plantation all the magnificent trees and shrubs of Australia had been excluded with amazing resolution and consistency, and oak and ash reigned safe from overtowering rivals. They passed to the back of the house, and there George's countenance fell a little, for on the oval grass-plot and gravel walk he found from thirty to forty rough fellows, most of them diggers.

“Ah, well,” said he, on reflection, “we could not expect to have it all to ourselves, and indeed it would be a sin to wish it, you know. Now, Tom, come this way; here it is, here it is--there.” Tom looked up, and in a gigantic cage was a light brown bird.

He was utterly confounded. “What, is it this we came twelve miles to see?”

“Ay! and twice twelve wouldn't have been much to me.”

“Well, but what is the lark you talked of?”

“This is it.”

“This? This is a bird.”

“Well, and isn't a lark a bird?”

“Oh, ay! I see! ha! ha! ha! ha!”

Robinson's merriment was interrupted by a harsh remonstrance from several of the diggers, who were all from the other end of the camp.

“Hold your ---- cackle,” cried one, “he is going to sing;” and the whole party had their eyes turned with expectation toward the bird.

Like most singers, he kept them waiting a bit. But at last, just at noon, when the mistress of the house had warranted him to sing, the little feathered exile began as it were to tune his pipes. The savage men gathered round the cage that moment, and amid a dead stillness the bird uttered some very uncertain chirps, but after a while he seemed to revive his memories, and call his ancient cadences back him to one by one, and string them sotto voce.

And then the same sun that had warmed his little heart at home came glowing down on him here, and he gave music back for it more and more, till at last--amid breathless silence and glistening eyes of the rough diggers hanging on his voice--out burst in that distant land his English song.

It swelled his little throat and gushed from him with thrilling force and plenty, and every time he checked his song to think of its theme, the green meadows, the quiet stealing streams, the clover he first soared from, and the spring he sang so well, a loud sigh from many a rough bosom, many a wild and wicked heart, told how tight the listeners had held their breath to hear him; and when he swelled with song again, and poured with all his soul the green meadows, the quiet brooks, the honey clover and the English spring, the rugged mouths opened and so stayed, and the shaggy lips trembled, and more than one drop trickled from fierce unbridled hearts down bronzed and rugged cheeks.

Dulce dornurn!

And these shaggy men, full of oaths and strife and cupidity, had once been white-headed boys, and had strolled about the English fields with little sisters and little brothers, and seen the lark rise, and heard him sing this very song. The little playmates lay in the churchyard, and they were full of oaths and drink and lusts and remorses--but no note was changed in this immortal song. And so for a moment or two years of vice rolled away like a dark cloud from the memory, and the past shone out in the song-shine. They came back, bright as the immortal notes that lighted them, those faded pictures and those fleeted days; the cottage, the old mother's tears when he left her without one grain of sorrow; the village-church and its simple chimes; the clover-field hard by in which he lay and gamboled, while the lark praised God overhead; the chubby playmates that never grew to be wicked, the sweet hours of youth--and innocence--and home.

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Chapter LXIV

“WHAT will you take for him, mistress? I will give you five pounds for him.”

“No! no! I won't take five pounds for my bird!”

“Of course she won't,” cried another, “she wouldn't be such a flat. Here, missus,” cried he, “I'll give you that for him;” and he extended a brown hand with at least thirty new sovereigns glittering in it.

The woman trembled; she and her husband were just emerging from poverty after a hard fight. “Oh!” she cried, “it is a shame to tempt a poor woman with so much gold. We had six brought over, and all died on the way but this one!” and she threw her white apron over her head, not to see the glittering bribe.

“---- you, put the blunt up and don't tempt the woman,” was the cry. Another added: “Why, you fool, it wouldn't live a week if you had it,” and they all abused the merchant. But the woman turned to him kindly and said:

“You come to me every Sunday, and he shall sing to you. You will get more pleasure from him so,” said she, sweetly, “than if he was always by you.”

“So I will, old girl,” replied the rough, in a friendly tone.

George stayed till the lark gave up singing altogether, and then he said: “Now I am off. I don't want to hear bad language after that; let us take the lark's chirp home to bed with us;” and they made off; and true it was the pure strains dwelt upon their spirits, and refreshed and purified these sojourners in a godless place. Meeting these two figures on Sunday afternoon, armed each with a double-barreled gun and a revolver, you would never have guessed what gentle thoughts possessed them wholly. They talked less than they did coming, but they felt so quiet and happy.

“The pretty bird,” purred George (seeing him by the ear), “I feel after him--there--as if I had just come out o' church.”

“So do I, George, and I think his song must be a psalm, if we knew all.”

“That it is, for Heaven taught it him. We must try and keep all this in our hearts when we get among the broken bottles, and foul language, and gold,” says George. “How sweet it all smells, sweeter than before.”

“That is because it is afternoon.”

“Yes! or along of the music; that tune was a breath from home that makes everything please me. Now this is the first Sunday that has looked, and smelled, and sounded Sunday.”

“George, it is hard to believe the world is wicked. Everything seems good, and gentle, and at peace with heaven and earth.”

A jet of smoke issued from the bush, followed by the report of a gun, and Carlo, who had taken advantage of George's revery to slip on ahead, gave a sharp howl, and spun round upon all fours.

“The scoundrels!” shrieked Robinson. And in a moment his gun was at his shoulder, and he fired both barrels slap into the spot whence the smoke had issued.

Both the men dashed up and sprang into the bush revolver in hand, but ere they could reach it the dastard had run for it; and the scrub was so thick pursuit was hopeless. The men returned full of anxiety for Carlo.

The dog met them, his tail between his legs, but at sight of George he wagged his tail, and came to him and licked George's hand, and walked on with them, licking George's hand every now and then.

“Look, Tom, he is as sensible as a Christian. He knows the shot was meant for him, though they didn't hit him.”

By this time the men had got out of the wood, and pursued their road, but not with tranquil hearts. Sunday ended with the noise of that coward's gun. They walked on hastily, guns ready, fingers on trigger--at war. Suddenly Robinson looked back, and stopped and drew George's attention to Carlo. He was standing with all his four legs wide apart, like a statue.

George called him; he came directly, and was for licking George's hand, but George pulled him about and examined him all over.

“I wish they may not have hurt him after all, the butchers; they have, too. See here, Tom, here is one streak of blood on his belly, nothing to hurt, though, I do hope. Never mind, Carlo,” cried George, “it is only a single shot by what I can see, 'tisn't like when Will put the whole charge into you, rabbit-shooting, is it, Carlo? No, says he; we don't care for this, do we, Carlo?” cried George, rather boisterously.

“Make him go into that pool, there,” said Robinson; “then he won't have fever.”

“I will; here--cess! cess!” He threw a stone into the pool of water that lay a little off the road, and Carlo went in after it without hesitation, though not with his usual alacrity. After an unsuccessful attempt to recover the stone he swam out lower down, and came back to the men and wagged his tail slowly, and walked behind George.

They went on.

“Tom,” said George, after a pause, “I don't like it.”

“Don't like what?”

“He never so much as shook himself.”

“What of that? He did shake himself, I should say.”

“Not as should be. Who ever saw a dog come out of the water and not shake himself? Carlo, hie, Carlo!” and George threw a stone along the ground, after which Carlo trotted; but his limbs seemed to work stiffly; the stone spun round a sharp corner in the road, the dog followed it.

“He will do now,” said Robinson.

They walked briskly on. On turning the corner they found Carlo sitting up and shivering, with the stone between his paws.

“We must not let him sit,” said Tom; “keep his blood warm. I don't think we ought to have sent him into the water.”

“I don't know,” muttered George, gloomily. “Carlo,” cried he, cheerfully, “don't you be down-hearted; there is nothing so bad as faint-heartedness for man or beast. Come, up and away ye go, and shake it off like a man.”

Carlo got up and wagged his tail in answer, but he evidently was in no mood for running; he followed languidly behind.

“Let us get home,” said Robinson; “there is an old pal of mine that is clever about dogs, he will cut the shot out if there is one in him, and give him some physic.”

The men strode on, and each, to hide his own uneasiness, chatted about other matters; but all of a sudden Robinson cried out, “Why, where is the dog?” They looked back, and there was Carlo some sixty yards in the rear, but he was not sitting this time, he was lying on his belly.

“Oh! this is a bad job,” cried George. The men ran up in real alarm; Carlo wagged his tail as soon as they came near him, but he did not get up.

“Carlo,” cried George, despairingly, “you wouldn't do it, you couldn't think to do it. Oh, my dear Carlo, it is only making up your mind to live; keep up your heart, old fellow; don't go to leave us alone among these villains. My poor, dear, darling dog! Oh, no! he won't live, he can't live; see how dull his poor, dear eye is getting. Oh, Carlo! Carlo!”

At the sound of his master's voice in such distress, Carlo whimpered, and then he began to stretch his limbs out. At the sight of this Robinson cried hastily:

“Rub him, George; we did wrong to send him into the water.”

George rubbed him all over. After rubbing him a while, he said:

“Tom, I seem to feel him turning to dead under my hand.”

George's hand in rubbing Carlo came round to the dog's shoulder, then Carlo turned his head and for the third time began to lick George's hand. George let him lick his hand and gave up rubbing him, for where was the use? Carlo never left off licking his hand, but feebly, very feebly, more and more feebly.

Presently, even while he was licking his hand, the poor thing's teeth closed slowly on his loving tongue, and then he could lick the beloved hand no more. Breath fluttered about his body a little while longer; but in truth he had ceased to live when he could no longer kiss his master's hand.

And so the poor single-hearted soul was gone.

George took it up tenderly in his arms. Robinson made an effort to console him. “Don't speak to me, if you please,” said George, gently but quickly. He carried it home silently, and laid it silently down in a corner of the tent.

Robinson made a fire and put some steaks on, and made George slice some potatoes to keep him from looking always at what so little while since was Carlo. Then they sat down silently and gloomily to dinner, it was long past their usual hour and they were workingmen. Until we die we dine, come what may. The first part of the meal passed in deep silence. Then Robinson said sadly:

“We will go home, George. I fall into your wishes now. Gold can't pay for what we go through in this hellish place.”

“Not it,” replied George, quietly.

“We are surrounded by enemies.”

“Seems so,” was the reply, in a very languid tone.

“Labor by day and danger by night.”

“Ay,” but in a most indifferent tone.

“And no Sabbath for us two.”

“No!”

“I'll do my best for you, and when we have five hundred pounds more you shall go home to Susan.”

“Thank you. He was a good friend to us that lies there under my coat; he used to lie over it, and then who dare touch it?”

“No! but don't give way to that, George--do eat a bit, it will do you good.”

“I will, Tom, I will. Thank you kindly. Ah! now I see why he came to me and kept licking my hand so the moment he got the hurt. He had more sense than we had; he knew he and I were to part that hour. And I tormented his last minutes sending him into the water and after stones, when the poor thing wanted to be bidding me good-by all the while. Oh, dear! oh, dear!” and George pushed his scarce-tasted dinner from him, and left the tent hurriedly, his eyes thick with tears.

Thus ended this human day so happily begun; and thus the poor dog paid the price of fidelity this Sunday afternoon.

Siste viator iter--and part with poor Carlo--for whom there are now no more little passing troubles--no more little simple joys. His duty is performed, his race is run. Peace be to him, and to all simple and devoted hearts. Ah me! how rare they are among men!

“What are you doing, Tom, if you please?”

“Laying down a gut line to trip them up when they get into our tent.”

“When--who?”

“Those that shot Carlo.”

“They won't venture near me.

“Won't they? What was the dog shot for? They will come--and come to their death; to-night, I hope. Let them come! you will hear me cry 'Carlo' in their ears as I put my revolver to their skulls and pull the trigger.”

George said nothing, but he clinched his teeth. After a pause he muttered, “We should pray against such thoughts.”

Robinson was disappointed, no attack was made; in fact, even if such a thing was meditated, the captain's friends watched his tent night and day, and made such a feat a foolhardy enterprise, full of danger from without and within.

In the course of the next week a good deal of rain fell and filled many of the claims, and caused much inaction and distress among the diggers, and Robinson guarded the tent, and wrote letters and studied Australian politics, with a view to being shortly a member of Congress in these parts. George had his wish at last and cruised about looking for the home of the gold. George recollected to have seen what he described as a river of quartz sixty feet broad, and running between two black rocks. It ran in his head that gold in masses was there locked up, for, argued he, all the nuggets of any size I have seen were more than half quartz. Robinson had given up debating the point.

George was uneasy and out of spirits at not hearing from Susan for several months, and Robinson was for indulging him in everything.

Poor George! he could not even find his river of quartz. And when he used to come home day after day empty-handed and with this confession, the other's lips used to twitch with the hard struggle not to laugh at him; and he used to see the struggle and be secretly more annoyed than if he had been laughed out at.

One afternoon Tom Robinson, internally despising the whole thing, and perfectly sure in his own mind that there was no river of quartz, but paternal and indulgent to his friend's one weakness, said to him:

“I'll tell you how to find this river of quartz, if it is anywhere except in your own head.”

“I shall be much obliged to you. How?”

“Jem has come back to camp and he tells me that Jacky is encamped with a lot more close to the gully he is working--it was on the other side the bush there-and Jacky inquired very kind after you.”

“The little viper.”

“He grinned from ear to ear, Jem tells me; and says he, 'Me come and see George a good deal soon,' says he.”

“If he does, George will tan his black hide for him.”

“What makes you hold spite so long against poor Jacky?”

“He is a little sneaking varmint.”

“He knows every part of this country, and he would show you 'the home of the gold,'” observed Robinson, restraining his merriment with great difficulty.

This cock would not fight, as vulgar wretches say. Jacky had rather mortified George by deserting him upon the first discovery of gold. “Dis a good deal stupid,” was that worthy's remark on the second day. “When I hunt tings run, and I run behind and catch dem. You hunt--it not run--yet you not catch it always. Dat a good deal stupid. Before we hunt gold you do many tings, now do one; dat a good deal stupid. Before, you go so (erecting a forefinger); now you always so (crooking it). Dat too stupid.” And with this--whir! my lord was off to the woods.

On the head of this came Abner limping in, and told how a savage had been seen creeping after him with a battle-ax, and how he had lain insensible for days, and now was lame for life. George managed to forgive Jacky's unkind desertion, but for creeping after Abner and “spoiling him for life,” to use Abner's phrase, he vowed vengeance on that black hide and heart.

Now if the truth must be told, Jacky had come back to the camp with Jem, and would have marched before this into George's tent. But Robinson, knowing how angry George was with him, and not wishing either Jacky to be licked or George to be tomahawked, insisted on his staying with Jem till he had smoothed down his friend's indignation. Soon after this dialogue Robinson slipped out, and told Jacky to stay with Jem and keep out of George's way for a day or two.

And now the sun began to set red as blood, and the place to sparkle far and wide with the fiery rays emitted from a hundred thousand bottles that lay sown broadcast over the land; and the thunder of the cradles ceased, and the accordions came out all over five miles of gold mine. Their gentler strains lasted till the sun left the sky; then, just at dusk, came a tremendous discharge of musketry roaring, rattling, and re-echoing among the rocks. This was tens of thousands of diggers discharging their muskets and revolvers previous to reloading them for the night; for, calm as the sun had set to the music of accordions, many a deadly weapon they knew would be wanted to defend life and gold ere that same tranquil sun should rise again.

Thus the tired army slept not at their ease, like other armies, guarded by sentinels and pickets, but every man in danger every night and every hour of it. Each man lay in his clothes with a weapon of death in his hand; Robinson with two, a revolver and a cutlass ground like a razor. Outside it was all calm and peaceful. No boisterous revelry--all seemed to sleep innocent and calm in the moonlight after the day of herculean toil.

Perhaps if any one eye could have visited the whole enormous camp, the children of theft and of the night might have been seen prowling and crawling from one bit of shade to another. But in the part where our friends lay the moon revealed no human figures but Robinson's patrol, three men, who, with a dark-lantern and armed to the teeth, went their rounds and guarded forty tents, above all the captain's. It was at his tent that guard was relieved every two hours. So all was watched the livelong night.

Two pointed rocks connected at the base faced the captain's tent. The silver rays struck upon their foreheads wet with the vapors of night, and made them like frost seen through phosphorus. It was startling. The soul of silver seemed to be sentinel and eye the secret gold below.

And now a sad, a miserable sound grated on the ear of night. A lugubrious quail doled forth a grating, dismal note at long but measured intervals, offending the ear and depressing the heart. This was the only sound Nature afforded for hours. The neighboring bush, though crammed with the merriest souls that ever made feathers vibrate and dance with song, was like a tomb of black marble; not a sound--only this little raven of a quail tolled her harsh, lugubrious crake.

Those whose musical creed is Time before Sentiment might have put up with this night-bird; for to do her justice she was a perfect timist--one crake in a bar the livelong night; but her tune--ugh! She was the mother of all files that play on iron throughout the globe. Crake!--crake!--crake! untuning the night.

An eye of red light suddenly opened in the silver stream shows three men standing by a snowy tent. It is the patrol waiting to be relieved. Three more figures emerge from the distant shade and join them. The first three melt into the shade.

Crake!

The other three remain and mutter. Now they start on their rounds. “What is that?” mutters one.

“I'll go and see.” Click.

“Well!”

“Oh, it is only that brown donkey that cruises about here. She will break her neck in one of the pits some day.”

“Not she. She is not such an ass.”

These three melted into the night, going their rounds; and now nothing is left in sight but a thousand cones of snow, and the donkey paddling carefully among the pits.

Craake!

Now the donkey stands a moment still in the moonlight--now he paddles slowly away and disappears on the dark side the captain's tent. What is he doing? He stoops--he lies down--he takes off his head and skin and lays them down.

It is a man! He draws his knife and puts it between his teeth. A pistol is in his hand--he crawls on his stomach--the tent is between him and the patrol. His hand is inside the tent--he finds the opening and winds like a serpent into the tent.

Craake!

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