Denis Dent Part 24

"But if you see that you could soon make him like you."

"If he gave me the chance, perhaps."

"He shall!"

Denis was leaning in the moonlight against the windla.s.s staging. There he listened to the lad's strenuous and enthusiastic plea.

"We've never had a mate like that since we've been on Ballarat," urged Jimmy; "and all done in half-an-hour out of our own odds and ends! Why, mister, that steward of yours would make a man of me and a new man of you in less than no time. And he doesn't even ask to be a partner; he's the very man we want, dropped from the stars on to this blessed claim!

If we don't snap him up, others soon will, and we deserve to lose the second-best chance we've ever had."

Denis puffed his pipe in silence.

"I know him, you see," he said at last.

"Of course you do."

"But I never liked him."

"So he says."

"And it was his own fault."

"He says that too. He's said enough for me to see he means turning over a new leaf if you give him this chance."

Denis wavered. If he was going to give the man a chance (and he could always watch him, and get rid of him at a moment's notice) it would be perhaps unfair to let the lad know all he thought about their prospective companion.

"Do you really want him to have the job, Jimmy?"

"I do so, mister. He's the very man for us. I want him bad."

"And you never wanted Mr. Moseley at all, eh?"

"No, mister, I never did."

Denis went on smoking for another minute. The moon was high now, and as pure as ever. The tents further down the gully shone white as from a fall of real Christmas snow; and sounds of real Christmas came faintly from them, and more faintly from far beyond. Denis, however, was not thinking of the morrow, but of many a morrow--of long days of unremitting labour--of short nights when the spent body would be fit but for rest and for refreshment. He felt the better already for this single evening meal. And the man could be watched--the man could be watched.

"Well, mister?"

"It's all right, Jimmy. He shall have his trial--to-morrow--the day after to-morrow--and as many days after that again as he suits us and we him. But never let him know the half of what we take, and never you leave him on the claim alone."

CHAPTER XX

THE JEWELER'S SHOP

Dent and Doherty became the heroes of one of those fairy-tales in which the times were rich. For eight consecutive days, after laying the gutter bare from wall to wall of the shaft, and slabbing the latter down to the last inch, they washed their twenty tubs a day, and averaged rather better than four ounces to the tub. The daily yield only once fell below 300 at current rates; but more than once it impinged upon 400.

Altogether the eight days realized upwards of 50; which was the aggregate amount handed over to the Commissioner, who forwarded it to Geelong by Gold Escort, which delivered it to a firm of gold-buyers whom the Commissioner could recommend, and who presently remitted some 2,400 in hard cash.

These wonderful days were also the most comfortable that the partners had yet spent upon the diggings. They were properly looked after for the first time. They had three good meals a day, to say nothing of coffee and a biscuit before they went to work in the early morning and afternoon tea with hot cakes or any other incongruous luxury which happened to occur to the steward's mind. Denis said it was a good thing they were working so hard. Doherty rolled his eyes and put on flesh. The pair were being spoiled and cosseted by a master-hand, and it did them more good than their success. They were the better workers by day, the better sleepers by night, and this despite the manifold excitements of every waking hour.

Jewson was excelling himself; but an outsider would have said it was well worth his while, for Denis had hit upon a scale of pay which made him after all a small partner, whose earnings might amount to several sovereigns a day, and could not fall below five pounds a week. As prices went, the bargain was not extravagant, and Denis was the first to appreciate the blessing of better food; the steward's prowess was no small a.s.set in the suddenly successful concern, and he must be kept in it by hook or crook; on that the partners were agreed. And yet Denis was as far as ever from trusting the man in his heart, though his original prejudice had abated not a little.

Jewson wore a shade over the blackened eye, which had only been exposed by moonlight; but Denis's distrust was not such as to make him want to lift it, because it never occurred to him to discredit the account of his cousin's violence; and therein is seen the working of another prejudice, on which a cunning brain had counted all along. A simple nature, on the other hand, is simple even in its suspicions; and the worst that Denis harboured were engendered by Jewson's strange practice of shopping at night only and usually being hours about it. Denis sometimes had a mind to follow him, but it was not in his nature to play the spy, and so the real spy went free.

The lucky pair took their luck very coolly, one because he did not understand the value of money, the other because he understood it too well to estimate a thousand pounds at a penny more than a t.i.the of the ten thousand on which he had set his heart. In money matters, however, the point of view is everything, and in none is it more mercurial. A day or two served to inure the partners to the idea of dividing a couple of thousand a week, and Denis began almost to resent the fact that at this rate it would take ten whole weeks for him to reach his minimum; he was also annoyed that in all the gold they had got there was not as yet a single nugget.

"I promised to send the first one home to England," he said openly in the hut. "I would give a hundred pounds to have one worth fifty to send by the mail to-morrow night!"

Jewson was crouching over his camp-oven at the time; his back straightened, and for some moments he sat in an arrested att.i.tude, his head thrown up in undisguised attention; but this was not noticed, and his face could not be seen.

That night the steward was so long upon his rounds that Denis did not sit up for him, but decided on a word of remonstrance in the morning.

Yet when morning came, the coffee was so hot and aromatic, the biscuit so crisp, the fresh air so cool and so invigorating, that he found it difficult to complain just then. And in the first hour of the new day that happened which effaced all untoward impressions from his mind.

Denis had been lowered into the shaft to dig. Doherty had raised one bucket of wash-dirt, and was waiting for the next, when a loud shout brought him to the shaft's mouth.

"A nugget, Jimmy! A nugget in the nick of time! I nearly cut it in two with the spade!"

It was a very small nugget, much in the shape and size of a kidney-bean, but of singularly pure and smooth gold, and Denis declared that it was just the thing. With the point of his knife he removed every particle of earth, and then scrubbed it with soap and water until it was as bright as the last sovereign from the mint. It seemed to give him greater pleasure than all the gold-dust despatched to Geelong; and no more work was done before breakfast, which was taken with the nugget on the table in front of Denis, save when he pressed a piece of twine into the cleft made by the spade and tried how it looked round Doherty's neck.

"Half should be yours, by rights," he said; "but you won't mind if I credit you with the weight instead? Don't be a fool! Of course I'll do that! But it was almost my last promise--to send her my first nugget--and it's been such a long time coming."

"Funny it's coming just when you wanted it for the mail," remarked Doherty in perfect innocence; but the steward spoke up from his self-appointed place beside the fire.

"I only wonder it's the first," said he; "but you take my word it ain't the last. Talk about jewelers' shops! You've opened one of the best on Ballarat. Look at the men you're bringing back to the gully; there'd be a rush if it wasn't for the depth they've got to sink, and that you had all done for you. I sha'n't be satisfied till I see you put your pick into a bit like they took out of Canadian Gully twelve months ago."

Nothing could have been more consistent and withal less officious than the discreetly sympathetic encouragement of the steward; he also knew something about gold-mining, and his un.o.btrusive suggestions were often of value. Denis was indeed more and more unable to reconcile the useful landsman with the ship's steward who had broached the ship's spirits and misbehaved himself in other ways; but after all, a man might pull himself together, and having suffered from a bad master, might well desire to make the most of a good one. So Denis was imposed upon while still as much on guard against imposition as these engrossing days allowed.

And the eight days of harvest were almost at an end; that very morning there was a subtle change in the appearance of a bucketful that Doherty sent up, and Denis forthwith washed an almost wholly unprofitable tub.

He then went down the shaft, and found as he expected that they had struck the bottom of the gutter, and were on the hard paleozoic floor.

The difference was even more marked than that between the red clay and the auriferous drift, here only four or five feet thick. There were still some tubs to take before the corners of the shaft were cleared to the bed-rock.

"And then?" asked Doherty with a blank face.

"Then the fun begins."

"Tunneling?"

"Of course."

"But how do you know which way?"

"Down the gully; nothing simpler. But first of all we can try all round with trowels, in holes just big enough to take your arm, like tasting cheese; then where it's richest we shall tunnel for another three months, and if this is the gutter and not a pocket we shall be well enough off by that time to take a spell and talk things over."

They were for once down the shaft together, and as they stood discussing the situation the steward's small head appeared like that of a pin against the little square of sky high above.