She turned her head quickly, and looked at him with a flash in her eyes as she disengaged her hand and stepped away.

"It will be less than that," she retorted quickly; and he, shamefaced and repulsed, stood hesitating what to do--and so failed. "I am perfectly comfortable here," she went on rapidly, lest he should recover his wits and renew an attack she knew she could not withstand. "Mrs.

d.i.c.kson is very kind, and I've got my horse and all that I want; and besides, I can do a lot for her, and I'm not like I should be if I stayed with any one at Birralong."

He stood awkwardly, looking at her now that her eyes were no longer turned upon him, and wondering, in a dim, uncertain way, whether she was angered at the overtures he had made, or annoyed because he stopped when he did. She, half regretting her brusqueness, feared she had offended him, as he made no apparent effort to speak.

"And you have found gold," she went on, anxious that silence should not come between them at that moment. "Tell me all about it. Was it in the creek where they said it was--Boulder Creek, wasn't it?"

"Boulder Creek's down the gully beyond the Flat," he answered mechanically; for the mistake in locality was one she ought not to have made, and a young bushman is jealous of the landmarks that he knows.

"Oh, of course. How silly of me! It was Boulder Creek where----"

She stopped in time to avoid a reference to a bygone episode which would not be too pleasant at that moment.

"Where d.i.c.kson threw my stirrup-irons and I made him go in after them,"

he said, finishing the sentence for her, and in a tone of voice which showed that resentment was slowly taking the place of the uneasiness at his discomfiture.

"Poor w.i.l.l.y! You always were quarrelling, you two. Why can't you be friends? I'm sure he is good-natured enough."

Resentment was quickly re-inforced by another sentiment as he heard her speaking of d.i.c.kson in a manner which suggested that in her eyes he was the least offender of the two. The words which rose to his lips were angry words, and he checked them because, for a moment, she looked up and met his glance. The angry words died down, but no others took their place, and he was once more awkward and ill at ease.

"What else did Nellie Murray say?" she asked, still anxious to avoid the embarra.s.sment of silence, and unfortunately striking again a line of thought in his mind which did not make for peace.

Nellie Murray, as a matter of fact, had thrown out hints, not by any means too obscure, to the effect that if he hastened to Barellan he might find Ailleen enjoying the society of d.i.c.kson to the exclusion of all else. That had been the reason of his haste; that had been the reason of his precipitate action when he found she was alone--fearing that at any moment d.i.c.kson might appear. In the confusion of his mind subsequent on her repelling his advances, he had lost sight, temporarily, of the suspicions Nellie's words had roused in his mind.

Ailleen's reference brought them again to his memory. What else did Nellie say? It was not so much what she said as what she implied. Before he had gone away from Birralong--before the commencement of the tiff which had come between Ailleen and himself, and which was so steadily increasing in influence and importance, though its origin was impossible to indicate--Nellie's opinion of Ailleen was the same as Ailleen's opinion of Nellie, the opinion of one girl friend for her bosom companion--enthusiastic, unmeasured, and, above all things, loyal. There had certainly not been an excess of loyalty in Nellie's manner, or in her words, when she urged him to go to Barellan; and he, remembering it, was about to say something to that effect, when Ailleen cut him short by exclaiming--

"Oh, look! There's Mrs. d.i.c.kson coming over to the house."

He looked where she pointed and saw the form of a woman walking slowly along by the hand-rail. The sound of a horse galloping made him turn round, when he saw w.i.l.l.y d.i.c.kson going straight for the hand-rail near the house, and near where his grey was. .h.i.tched. As d.i.c.kson came up he tried to make his horse jump; instead, it baulked, and blundered into the rail, carrying away some distance of it and liberating Tony's horse.

In the confusion of recovering the startled grey neither of the three observed how Mrs. d.i.c.kson had walked to where the rail was broken, and stood just beyond it, feeling from side to side, unable to realize where it had gone. Ailleen noticed her, and ran to her a.s.sistance.

"Tony, look!" she exclaimed; and he, seeing what was the matter, also hastened to her side.

d.i.c.kson, resenting Tony's appearance at the station, as well as the way Ailleen behaved towards him, also hurried over.

"A horse has knocked the rail over," Ailleen exclaimed, as she took Mrs.

d.i.c.kson's arm.

"Let me help you," Tony said, as he took the other.

The blind woman stood motionless, with closely compressed lips and eyes that stared in their sightless fixity.

"Here, I'll take her back," d.i.c.kson said abruptly, as he pushed Ailleen aside. "Come on. What do you want mooning out here for?" he added roughly to Mrs. d.i.c.kson, as he caught hold of her arm.

She half shuddered as he spoke and touched her, but moved forward, leaning the more on Tony. At the steps her foot caught against the lowest.

"Why aren't you careful?" d.i.c.kson exclaimed.

She freed her arm from his.

"Show me," she said to Tony, holding his arm tightly; and he gently led her on to the verandah and up to the chair Ailleen moved forward for her.

"Thank you," she said quietly. "Thank you;" and then, speaking as though with an effort, she asked, "Who are you?"

"This is Tony Taylor--my--my friend," Ailleen said quickly.

The blind woman nodded slowly in answer, clasping her hands together in her lap and closing her lips tightly.

"You should not have gone out in the sun with only that thin rag over your head," Ailleen said gently to her. "You look knocked up. Shall I----"

"No," Mrs. d.i.c.kson interrupted quickly and abruptly. "Where's w.i.l.l.y?"

"He's looking at that rail that is broken," Ailleen answered; and Tony, standing by the steps, caught her eye, and forgot the anger he had felt.

"Shall I call him?" he said softly.

The blind woman's hands clutched one another convulsively, and she sat up in her chair, rigid, with compressed lips and pale cheeks, the staring eyes fixed in the direction whence she had heard Tony's voice.

"Tell him to go away. Tell him to go away," she said hurriedly to Ailleen. "I want w.i.l.l.y. I want my boy. Where is my boy?"

Ailleen, meaning only to sign to Tony not to speak again, waved her hand towards him as she bent over Mrs. d.i.c.kson. He, hearing the blind woman's words, accepted the sign as a request to go, and, with anger again rising in his breast, he turned away, caught and mounted his horse, and, without a word or a glance, galloped from the station.

CHAPTER X.

THE RACE FOR GOLD.

A land may be bare and barren, uninhabitable and desolate; the cold winds of the snow-borne North may blow across it, and freeze it into ice-bound sterility; or the blazing fury of the tropic sun may pour down upon it, and scorch it into a dreary waste of glaring, burning sand; but if there is gold in it, and if man comes to know that the gold is in it, desolation, frozen sterility, or scorching waste, are alike doomed for conquest. The gold may lie in the sand; the gold may be held under the ice, or be hidden away in ma.s.sive tiers of rock hard enough and big enough to defy the wear and tear of time through countless ages; but when man comes--man who knows and understands the needs and uses of humanity--the gold will be wrested from whatever holds it, and carried away in pride and glory to the greatest centres of population to grace still further the triumphs of mankind over the grim tyrannies of Nature.

A good many men may suffer in the process. The cold, or the heat, or the lurking fever germ, will own many a victim before they own defeat, and even amongst the men themselves--the men who should be united as in the face of a common enemy--there will be the wherewithal and the impulse to swell the price paid for the hard-won fruits of victory. And so it was at Birralong.

The find of gold on Ripple Creek (as the stream was named where Gleeson unconsciously led the Boulder Creekers to wealth) brought many a change among the men who found it.

For the first few weeks after the discovery each man was too busy winning as much as he could in the least possible time to notice very much what was going on around him. The banks of the creek were pretty well lined with men, and all the men were working wherever the layer of sandy gravel was found under the scanty topping of turf. Higher up the stream the turf lay upon rock, and lower down the stream there was no gravel at all to be found. Only was there the one area, fortunately large enough to give all the men from Boulder Creek working room, over which the sandy gravel occurred, as though at some time in the remote, bygone days a small lake had been formed in the course of the stream, into which the water from higher up had carried down and spread out the gold-bearing drift, until the basin was filled up, and the lake disappeared, as the stream flowed on its way uninterrupted and undetained. As it was, the drift was very evenly enriched by the gold, and each man, as he worked, was happy in his own surroundings, and so did not bother about those of his neighbours. Only when each one began to reach the limits of his claim, and away down the creek the water was re-depositing the rejected sand and gravel from which the gold had been washed, did any one have time to look around him. Then it was seen that the population along the creek was the population of the dirt-holes of Boulder Creek--the teeming thousands whom each one expected had arrived long since, as foretold by Gleeson, were not to be seen. It was curious, for every one had gold enough to keep them for a year with care, and they had no doubt that the drift they had been working in, and had worked out, was to be found anywhere for the looking. But they did not look. Each man had his own fancy to follow, and with money, or its equivalent, the following was easy.

A few, whose faith in the possibilities of the alleged reefs on Boulder Creek was not to be shaken by mere alluvial success, went back with their winnings, and used them to keep the mill going, while they drove and tunnelled and sank in search of the phantom reefs. A few--a very few--thought again of bygone dreams they had had about selections of their own, and set out, bursting with good intentions of taking up land somewhere. But the majority had no such thoughts and no such cares. They had struck a patch; they had money in hand, the result of their toil on the patch; and now they were free to spend it, without a thought or care--spend it as freely as they had made it, spend it in the search of a similarly engrossing delight to that which they had experienced in the finding of it; and when it was gone--if any gave a moment's consideration to the question, it was answered by mentally jerking the head towards the creek--when it was gone, they would come back and get some more. What comes easy, goes easy; and who cares for the morrow when to-day overflows with content?

In search of the delights they needed, their energies were quickened by the fact that Christmas and the New Year were approaching. A twelvemonth before there had been a dearth of entertainment, more than usually p.r.o.nounced, in the neighbourhood of Boulder Creek, and not even the combined persuasiveness of the inhabitants could induce the landlord of Cudlip's Rest to "set 'em up" for luck in an all-round shout. Just to stimulate the spirit of good fellowship, one man had dexterously annexed a couple of bottles of Pain-killer from a hawker's waggon he stumbled across, and those who were in his vicinity toasted one another and the general run of the diggings in n.o.bblers of it; but it was not a success, and the festive season was even less exhilarating to the revellers than it was to those who had not partic.i.p.ated in the "find."

Now the situation was different. There was money in the land, and with the memory still acute how, the year before, the landlord of Cudlip's Rest had been deaf to their blandishments, and proof against their numbers (for he had abstained even from replenishing his stock lest a wave of communistic instinct might sweep up Boulder Creek), they turned with one accord towards the town of Birralong. As they toiled and slaved along Boulder Creek, when they thought of Birralong at all it was to heap upon it and its inhabitants the scorn they considered was justly earned by a settlement which looked at a miner askance, and from whence stores, for years past, had been un.o.btainable save on a cash basis. The name of Marmot did not rank high with the fossickers when funds were low, and the joys of the Carrier's Rest were only known to the man who had "struck it" from time to time in the creek; but the aloofness of Cudlip's Rest the previous Christmas still rankled, and, not for any special admiration or respect for it, Birralong was chosen as the scene of the coming festivities.

Marmot, having completed on the day before the last order he was expecting for the season, was taking it easy on the verandah, sitting, as was his wont, in his shirt-sleeves and with a pipe in his mouth, on the tobacco-box in front of the open doorway, just where he received the full benefit of any draught which might be set up by the heated iron roof over his head and the cool of the shade in the store. There was not much danger of taking cold; rather would a chill have been enjoyable as a change from the sweltering heat of the summer's day. The steady swing of the gra.s.shopper's song--like the wavering hum of a telegraph pole pitched in a high, shrill key--came through the hot air on all sides, until it seemed to spring from the ground in answer to the heat-rays that beat upon it--a response from the great dusty parched crust to the ceaseless throb of the heat-waves pulsing and splashing upon it, like the ripple and rattle of shingle stones at the rush of retreating tides.

There was no wind, not even a breeze; and yet the heat came in wafts and currents, as it comes from an open furnace-door as the up-draught ebbs and flows. The tough, tanned skin of old Marmot glistened with a faint moisture one moment as an extra hot wave rolled by, drying hard and rough a second later as the parched air sucked up the moisture like a greedy flame licks oil.