The Tale of Timber Town Part 41

Tresco and the Prospector were eating their "tucker" beneath the boughs of a spreading black-birch. In front of them burned brightly a fire of dead branches, suspended above which was the "billy," black and battered externally, but full of fragrant tea.

"I shall go home to England," said Benjamin; his mouth half-filled with cold bacon. "I shall visit my widowed mother, and be the comfort and support of her declining years. There must be over 200 ounces in the tent, and hundreds more in the claim."

"I ain't got a widowed mother," said the Prospector. "_I_ shall go into Timber Town and make The Lucky Digger open house--come when you like, have what you like, at the expense of Mr. William Wurcott. That's my style. I like to see a man free with his dollars."

They had pegged out their claim at a spot where the corrugations in the rocky bed of the creek stretched from bank to bank and a beach of soft sand spread itself along the water's edge.

The first "prospect" that they had "panned off" resulted in a return of a couple of ounces. Next they had "fossicked" with sheath-knives in the crevices of the rocks, and had quickly got something more than half a cupful of gold, in shape and size like pumpkin seeds. The day following, they continued to "pan off" the sands in front of their tent; each dish yielding a handsome return. But as Benjamin found this process difficult in his unskilful hands, he directed his attention to looking for new patches. Wading about in the shallows with a dish in one hand and a shovel in the other, he overturned loose bits of rock which he found lying on the sand. Sometimes he would find an ounce or two, sometimes nothing at all; but upon turning over a flat slab of rock, to raise which needed all his strength, he gave a whoop of delight, for a yellow ma.s.s lay glittering in the rippling waters. With a single scoop of his shovel he had won 80 ozs. of gold.

This rich spot was where the water was but two feet deep, and above it and below it gold could be seen shining amongst the sand and gravel.

When the cream of the claim, so to speak, had been skimmed off with the tin dish, the men began to set up sluice boxes, by means of which they might work the whole of their ground systematically.

In constructing these boxes they received every help from Moonlight, who lent them tools, and aided them in cutting out the slabs. Left mateless during Scarlett's visit to Timber Town, the veteran miner frequently exchanged his lonely camp for the more congenial quarters of Tresco and the Prospector.

It was during one of the foregatherings round the camp-fire, when Night had spread her sable mantle over the sleeping earth, and only the wakeful wood-hen and the hoa.r.s.ely-hooting owl stirred the silence of the leafy solitude, that Moonlight was "swapping" yarns with the Prospector. As the flames shot up lurid tongues which almost licked the overhanging boughs, and the men sat, smoking their black tobacco, and drinking from tin pannikins tea too strong for the urban stomach, Bill the Prospector expectorated into the flames, and said:

"The biggest streak o' luck I ever had--barring this present field, you understand--was at the Diamond Gully rush. There weren't no diamonds, but I got over 100 ounces in three days. Gold was more plentiful than flour, and in the police camp there was two safes full of gold belonging to the Bank, which was a twelve by eight tent, in charge of a young feller named Henery. A more trusting young man I never met. When I went to sell my little pile, he had over 12,000 ounces in a old leather boot-trunk in his tent, besides more in a sugar-bag. He'd even filled one of his top-boots with gold, and its feller stood waitin' to receive my contribution. 'Good morning,' I says. 'Are you the boss o' this show?' 'I'm in charge of the Bank,' he says, just as grand as if he was behind a mahog'ny counter with bra.s.s fixings. 'Then weigh my pile,' I says, handing over my gold. Then what d'you think he done? 'Just wait till I get my scales,' he says. 'I've lent 'em to the Police Sergeant.

Please have the goodness to look after the business while I'm gone.'

With that he leaves me in the company of close on 100,000, and never a soul'd have bin the wiser if I'd helped myself to a thousand or two. But the reel digger don't act so--it's the loafers on the diggings gets us a bad name. I've dreamed of it, I've had reg'lar nightmares about it when I've bin stone-broke and without a sixpence to buy a drink."

"What?" said Tresco. "Gold littered about like lumber, and you practically given the office to help yourself? It's wonderful, Bill, what restraint there is in an honest mind! You can't ever have been to Sunday School."

"How d'you know?" asked the Prospector.

"Because, if you'd ha' bin regular to Sunday School when you were a boy, and bin told what a perfect horrible little devil you were, till you believed it, why, you'd ha' stole thousands of pounds from that calico Bank, just to prove such theories true. Now _I_ was brought up G.o.dly. I was learnt texts, strings of 'em a chain long; I had a red-headed, pimply teacher who just revelled in inbred sin and h.e.l.l-fire till he made me want to fry him on the school grate. I couldn't ha' withstood your temptation. I'd most certainly have felt justified in taking a few ounces of gold, as payment for keeping the rest intact."

"You're talking nonsense, the two of you," said Moonlight. "To rob on a gold-field means to be shot or, at the very least, gaoled. And when a man's on good gold himself, he doesn't steal other people's. My best luck was on the Rifle River, at a bend called Felix Point. It had a sandy beach where the water was shallow, just like this one here. My mate and I fossicked with a knife and a pannikin, and before the day was over we had between 30 and 40 ounces. The gold lay on a bottom of black sand and gravel which looked like so many eggs. After we'd put up our sluice we got as much as 200 ounces a day, and thought the claim poor when we got no more than fifty."

"I 'xpect you had a rare ole spree when you got to town," said the Prospector. "How much did you divide?"

"Between twenty and thirty thousand," replied Moonlight. "I handed my gold over to the Police escort, and went to town as comfortable as if I was on a turnpike road. I didn't go on the wine--I'm almost a teetotaler. A little red-headed girl got most of my pile--a red-headed girl can generally twist me round her thumb. That must have been ten years ago."

"You've grown older and, perhaps, wiser," interjected Benjamin.

"Wonderful thing, age."

"This time I'm going to take a draft on Timbuctoo, or Hong-kong, or some place where red-headed girls are scarce, and see if I can't get away with a little cash."

"Most probably you've got a widowed mother, like me," said Benjamin.

"Go, and comfort her declining years. Do like me: wipe out the recollection of the good times you've had by acts of filial piety. A widowed mother is good, but if you can rake up a maiden aunt and keep her too, that'll be a work of supererogation."

"Of how much?" asked Bill.

"It's a word I picked up in my College days--I'm afraid I've forgotten the precise meaning." Benjamin's face lit up with a smile that stretched from ear to ear. He lifted his pannikin to his lips, nodded to his companions, said, "Here's luck," and drank the black tea as though it had been nectar. "That's the beauty of turning digger," he continued; "the sobriety one acquires in the bush is phenomenal. If you asked me to name the most virtuous man on this planet, I should say a prospector in the bush--a bishop is nothing to him. But I own that when he goes to town the digger becomes a very devil let loose. Think of the surroundings here--innocent twittering birds, silent arboreous trees, clear pellucid streams, nothing to tempt, nothing to degrade."

Tresco might have amplified his discourse as fully as a bishop, but that at this point there was a shouting and the noise of dry boughs cracking under advancing feet. In a moment the three men were standing, alert, astonished, in various att.i.tudes of defence.

Moonlight had armed himself with a pick, the Prospector had grasped a shovel, Tresco drew a revolver from inside his "jumper."

The shouting continued, though nothing could be seen. Then came out of the darkness, "What-ho there, Moonlight! Can't you give us a hand to cross the river?"

"It's my mate," said Moonlight. "I know the voice. Is that you, Scarlett?"

"It's Scarlett, all right," called back the voice, "but how am I to cross this infernal river?"

The three men walked to the edge of the water, and peered into the darkness.

"Perfectly safe," said the Prospector. "She's barely up to your middle."

There was a splashing as of some one walking in the water, and presently a dark object was seen wading toward them.

"Now, what the deuce is all this about, Scarlett?" It was Moonlight who thus expressed his wonderment. "The man who travels here at night deserves to get bushed. That you reached camp is just luck."

"Camp?" replied the dripping Scarlett. "I've been waiting for you at _our_ camp since nightfall with twenty other devils worse than myself.

Don't you ever sleep in your tent?"

"Of course 'e does," the Prospector answered for Moonlight, "but mayn't a digger be neighbourly, and go to see 'is friends?

"Come, and dry yerself by the fire, and have a bit of tucker."

"But Great Ghost!" exclaimed Moonlight, "all the gold's in my tent, in the spare billy."

"Quite safe. Don't worry," said Scarlett. "All those twenty men of mine are mounting guard over it, and if one of them stole so much as an ounce, the rest would kill him for breach of contract. That's the result of binding men to go share and share alike--they watch each other like ferrets."

Jack took off his clothes, and wrapped in a blanket he sat before the fire, with a pipe in his mouth and a steaming pannikin in his hand.

"Well, happy days!" he said as he drank. "And that reminds me, Tresco--you're wanted in Timber Town, very badly indeed--a little matter in connection with the mails. 'Seems there's been peculation of some sort, and for reasons which are as mad as the usual police tactics, the entire force is searching for you, most worthy Benjamin. The yarn goes that you're a forger in disguise, a counterfeiter of our sovereign's sacred image and all that, the pilferer of Her Majesty's mails, a dangerous criminal masquerading as a goldsmith."

"Holee Smoke!" cried the Prospector. "Look to your gold, gen'lemen--there's thieves abroad, and one of us may be harbourin' a serpent unaware. Ben, my lovely pal, consider yourself arrested."

"Do I understand there's a writ out?" asked Moonlight, serious, judicial, intensely solemn. "This must be put a stop to instantly.

Imagine our virtuous friend in gaol."

"Anyway, joking apart, the men I have brought know all about it," said Scarlett. "You've got till to-morrow morning to make tracks, Benjamin."

The goldsmith coughed, and stood up in the full blaze of the fire-light.

"I confess to nothing," he said. "My strong point hasn't been my piety, I own to that. I'm not much of a hot gospeller. I can't call to mind any works of unusual virtue perpetrated by me in unthinking moments. I'll go even so far as this: I'll acknowledge there are times when, if I let myself off the chain, I'd astonish all Timber Town; for there lurks somewhere inside my anatomy a demon which, let loose, would turn the town into a little h.e.l.l, but, gentlemen, believe me, he is bound hand and foot, he's in durance vile. I'm no saint, but I'm no forger or counterfeiter, or animal of that sort--not yet. I have notions sometimes that I'd make a first-cla.s.s burglar, if I gave my mind thoroughly to the business: I'd go to work in a scientific way; I'd do the business in a workmanlike fashion. I've got a strong leaning towards the trade, and yet I never burgled once, I who take a pleasure in investigating locks and latches and all the hundred-and-one contraptions used against thieves. But what is Timber Town?--a trap. The man who goes housebreaking in a little tin-pot place like that deserves to be caught. No, it is too isolated, too solitary, too difficult of egress to foreign parts, is Timber Town. The idea is preposterous, foolish, untenable--excellent word, untenable--and as for forging, the thing is so ridiculous that it isn't worth confuting. But what's this about robbing mails? What mails?"

"The incoming English mail," said Scarlett. "Someone went through the bags before they were delivered."

"Ah!" said Benjamin, "we must look for the motive in the perpetration of such a crime as that. We'll grant that the robbery took place--we'll make that concession. But what was the motive? The thief would expect one of two things--either to enhance his wealth, or to obtain valuable information. Who does the cap fit? Personally, I am as poor as a crow but for this gold: as regards information, all the secrets of the citizens of Timber Town do not interest me--I have no use for scandal--and as I have no rivals in my calling, mere trade secrets have no charm for me. The police are chuckle-heads." Tres...o...b..ried his face in his pannikin, and then re-lit his pipe.

"Very good argyment," commented the hirsute Prospector, "very clear and convincin', but the police aren't open to argyment--they act on instinct."

"Armed with a writ, a policeman is like a small boy with a shotgun,"

remarked Moonlight--"he must let it off. I don't say you're guilty, Tresco, but I say the minions of the Law will have you in their clutches if you don't make yourself scarce."

"An' just as I was acc.u.mulating the one little pile of my life,"

murmured Benjamin. "Sometimes I think the G.o.ds show incompetence in the execution of their duty; sometimes I think there ain't no G.o.ds at all, but only a big, blind Influence that blunders on through Creation, trampling promiscuous on small fry like me." He pulled at his pipe contemplatively. "Decamp, is it? Obscure my fairy-like proportions from the common gaze? But who's to look after my interests here? What's to become of my half of the gold yet ungot?"