Denis Dent Part 20

"Nowhere. We have sold up and are going to start again. Your friend has given us a lift, for which we're much obliged, but I think the horses would stand all right without us."

"Would _you_ like to take over this claim and hole?"

"I have no money," said Denis. Behind him Doherty had given a gasp, followed by something like a sob of disappointment. But the deep-sinker wore the broadest smile they had ever seen upon his languid countenance.

"My dear good fellow, I don't want money for it!" cried he. "I want a worthy inheritor with energy and ideas, somebody a cut above the stupid average, and by Jove you're my very man! Come on: if you don't the whole thing will be jumped by the nearest ruffian. I don't say there's much in the hole; but it's a good, sound hole as far as it goes, and it can't have to go much further. We've worked through the light clays and through the sand, and we're well in the red; when you get through that you can start washing, and I wish you the luck you deserve. Thank me?

What for? If you don't come in some one else will. I am only too glad to leave the little place in such good hands. It was pretty carefully chosen, and if it isn't plumb over the gutter it ought to be."

So the reconstructed firm of Dent and Doherty became possessed of one of the deepest holes and best-appointed claims on the celebrated Eureka Lead, and all within a few minutes; for it took the man Charles no longer to collect such chattels as were worth his master's while to take away with him. Thus, ere the diggings were astir again for the afternoon, the new owners were alone in their unforeseen glory, and one of them at least was still capering and singing in his joy. But over Denis a cloud had already fallen; and there was a blacker cloud on Jimmy when he grasped the cause.

"It's Moseley," said Denis. "This is horribly unfair on him."

"Unfair! How?"

"Suppose we should have as good luck here as we had bad luck on the flat!"

"Well? Didn't he want to be out of it? Wasn't he longing to go home?"

"I don't like it," persisted Denis. "I played a trick on him, but I never thought it would turn out like this. I thought we should spend months doing what we've after all had done for us." He raised his brooding eyes from the ground, and there was the buggy still in view, labouring in and out among the tents. "Jimmy, you stay on the claim!" he cried, and dashed after it on the spur of the moment.

"What's happened?" asked the late sinker, pleasantly. "We haven't forgotten anything, have we?"

"No, but I have," panted Denis, "and if you can help me I'll be as grateful again to you. There's a chum of ours who left us only this morning. He was sick of it; but he little knew the luck that was in store for us. His name's Moseley, and he was going home in the first ship, which will be your ship, but you will probably overtake him on the road to-night."

"What's he like?" asked the spectacled gentleman, who no longer drove; and when Denis told him he was sure he had met Moseley in the forenoon, and felt confident of recognizing him again.

"Then will you tell him exactly what has happened to us, and that he shall come in on the old shares if only he'll come back? Say we changed our mind about Bendigo; and say we must be two men and a boy, and we'd far rather he was the other man than some stranger, especially if there's a fortune in it. Tell him there probably is; and if you will tell it him all from his friend, Denis Dent, gentlemen, I can't say how grateful I shall be to you!"

Denis had an odd reward for his trouble and this outburst. The tall digger shook hands with him for the first and last time.

But the climax of the business was to come long before Moseley's answer.

Denis had not been five minutes absent, yet on his return to the new claim it was surrounded by a fringe of diggers embellished by a posse of mounted men in spruce uniform.

"What on earth is it?" cried Denis, rushing up in alarm.

"The old story," answered a digger. "Joe! Joe! Joe!"

"Traps," added another; but Denis had not been on the diggings two months without learning the meaning of both words. Either was the diggers' danger signal, and signified a raid by the police in search of their licenses; in fact, that very sport whose praises Lieutenant Rackham had sung in the ear of his old crony Captain Devenish.

And it was Rackham who led the present field; dismounted, he had run his man to earth in the bark-roofed hut; and his man was no more of a man than the unfortunate Doherty, who was clinging tooth and nail to the door-post, while Rackham himself, a full-blooded negro in his rage, tugged like a terrier at his ankles.

"Stick to it, little 'un!" cried one in good-humoured encouragement.

"If you don't, the claim'll be jumped afore your mate gets back."

"Hold your row," growled another with an oath. "It's a fine deep hole, and I have a jolly good mind to jump it myself."

Denis burst through them at that moment.

"What's the matter?" he demanded of Rackham; but he had the sense not to lay a hand on the fellow's uniform, and the black devil let go one of Doherty's ankles.

"He's not got his license, and he's going to the Logs," says Rackham, showing his white teeth in the sun. "Who are you?"

"His mate," said Denis. "Do you mind letting go his other leg?"

"And where's your license?" added Rackham, turning on him as he complied.

Denis was feeling in his breast pocket with a smile; before quitting the flat Jimmy had proposed to destroy his Ballarat license as of no further use, but Denis knowing better had got it from him on some pretext.

"Here is my license and his, too," said he, and handed both to Rackham, who now stood livid and trembling with mortification, under a derisive cross-fire of "Joe! Joe! Joe!" from all sides of the claim. "If you will examine them," added Denis, with the politeness he could afford, "you will find that they both have about a week to run; and after this you may trust us to take out the new ones in very good time."

CHAPTER XVII

HATE AND MONEY

n.i.g.g.e.r Rackham had the freedom of the tent on the Gravel Pits, where he would appear sometimes at dead of night, brandishing a bottle and demanding the Welsh rarebit or the savoury omelette at which Jewson had shown himself an adept. Many an impromptu carouse was thus initiated, and it was after one of them that Rackham distinguished himself by whistling for a hansom outside the tent. He was a man of violent appet.i.tes, whose every vein was swollen with sufficiently savage blood.

But he had a crude vitality and a brutal gaiety very bracing on occasion, as when he told of Denis's fortunes in one breath, but undertook his ruin in the next. This was a night or two after their collision at the new claim; the bottle was getting low, and the lieutenant's eyes were like living coals.

"I'll take it out of him! I'll have him at the Logs yet, never fear,"

said he. "There are only two of them; some fine morning there'll be only one, and no license to show. Then away he goes, and if you like you shall jump the claim. But it won't be for another month."

"Another month!" echoed Devenish with a blank face.

"The brutes have taken out their new license a good two days before they need," explained the lieutenant. "That I happen to know, but they don't know I know it. They've had a fight, and we are ready for another raid; if we let them be they won't take such care when this next month's up.

But we must wait till it is up, and we must chance your poor relation growing rich in the time."

Ralph Devenish sat up smoking for an hour when the bottle was empty and his companion gone. He was much the more temperate man of the two, but patience was not one of his virtues, though it had become a necessity of his protracted suit. That only left him with less than ever for the ordinary incidents of life, and his experience as a digger had not made Devenish more patient. He had been as lucky at the start as Dent had been unlucky. In these few weeks he had actually netted some three hundred pounds sterling, out of a chain of shallow workings whereby he and others had been tracing the Gravel Pits Lead down its course: only within the last day or two had the lead run into a drift of water which had flooded all the holes and completely damped Ralph's ardour. It was p.r.o.nounced impossible to sink through this drift without the tiresome operation known as "puddling"; and that proved far too heroic a measure for Ralph Devenish, who was only happy when washing his two or three ounces a day. So one morning he was counting on making his three hundred up to five at least, and by the following night he had found out when the next ship sailed from Melbourne. It was at this juncture that Rackham brought word of a contrary turn in the affairs of Denis. The untimely news checked all Ralph's plans. He was not at all inclined to leave his rival with the ball at his feet, and nothing to stop him but the capricious persecution of a corrupt constabulary.

Ralph might have blushed to put it so even to himself, but that was his actual att.i.tude as he sat smoking into the small hours, and so Jewson stole in and found him in the end. Ralph was not startled; the steward was regularly the last abed; but now his boots were yellow with fresh dust, and the perspiration showered from his peaked cap as he took it off.

"Where have you been?" asked Ralph, raising a morose face to stare.

"I thought you might like an extra drop to-night," replied the steward, winking and grinning as he produced a bottle, "so I've been getting you another of these from where the lieutenant gets 'em. You don't do your fair share, Captain Devenish, sir, and you may want to when you've heard my little report."

"Report of what?" asked Devenish. But the steward would only chuckle and shake a wicked skull until the grog was served out and the pair seated, pannikin to pannikin, on either side of the packing-case that did duty for a table.

"I heard what you were talking about, you see," began Jewson, wiping the gray moustache from which the dye had almost disappeared.

"You generally do."

"And you generally know it, so where's the harm? But when I hear you talking about the second mate that was," continued the steward, showing a whole set of ill-fitting false teeth, "I do more than hear--I listen--and listen I will whenever I catch his cursed name!"

"Well?"

"Well, sir, it's right."