GUINEA GOLD
GUINEA GOLD
BY
BEATRICE GRIMSHAW
AUTHOR OF "WHEN THE RED GODS CALL" ETC.
NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
1912
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£$5
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Copyright, 1912, by
BEATRICE GRIMSHAW
All Rights Reserved
GUINEA GOLD
CHAPTER I
Three men sat upon the coral shore of Samarai,
and talked about a fourth.
Their six boots — four heavy and nailed, two light
brown leather the worse for wear — projected over
the glaring, flour-white sand, and tinkled among the
broken branches and fans of coral and the derelict
shells from the reef. Pink and pearl and cream,
thick as carved white marble, and as thin as East-
ern porcelain, were these shells: strangers admired
them, and went a-hunting for them on steamer
days. But, when they had their hands full, they
generally threw the fruit of their toil back into the
sea. The shells looked well, nevertheless, they were
dead, and you could see it when you handled them.
Dead shells are those that have had the life and
value burned out of them by tropic suns on far-off
savage shores. They are of no use to anyone; you
can only leave them on the beach, to rot in the de-
vouring sun, and end their lives where they were
cast away. There are many kinds of dead shells to
be found on the coral beaches, south of Cancer and
north of Capricorn, and not all of them own the sea
as their home.
2 ; GUINEA GOLD
The man with the brown boots was not pleasant-
looking: he had only one advantage, that of youth.
He could not have been more than twenty-five years
of age; perhaps he was less. His face was fat, flat,
and full, with a disagreeably small mouth, and pale
blue eyes, somewhat too large for a man. The two
other men were browned and toughened with sun:
his skin was as white as a toadstool's, and his hands
were soft and dimpled. The man looked damp and
soft altogether; one felt certain that he would
squash as flat as a spider if you trod upon him.
The others were of a different stamp from him
and from one another. The person with the long,
narrow face, and yellow walrus-like moustache, is
Rupert Dence : you will hear more of him by and by.
He wears his clothes well, though they consist, to-
day, of nothing but a woollen singlet, a battered
drill coat, and a pair of khaki trousers. His walrus
moustache, his manner of looking and speaking, and
a certain suggestion of an invisible single eyeglass
somewhere, conveyed one knows not exactly how,
create a -dim mirage of London in the nineties about
his neighbourhood. One feels that his clock of life,
like the too-familiar clock of the old street song,
u stopped short, never to go again," in London, in
eighteen-ninety something, for some reason that
Rupert Dence might give you, if you asked for it —
and might not. Again, if you asked him, he might
tell you that his name is not Dence at all, but some-
thing of the picture-poster kind: the sort of name
GUINEA GOLD 3
commonly chosen by Violets and Maries of the
Palace or the Gaiety, to look well upon the bills.
But he would not go further, no matter how drunk
he might be.
Joe Anderson (christened John, but, for obvious
reasons, always known as Joe) has an odd resem-
blance to Rupert Dence. You could not possibly
tell where the resemblance lies, for Anderson has
not a point or a feature in common with the other,
being huge, square, stiff, and strong, with a massive
brown beard and a face that looks as if you could
turn the edge of an axe on its surface. But the re-
semblance is there. More, you can tell by their very
way of sitting and speaking that they like one an-
other, and have something in common. You can
also tell that the third man, Clay, is not one of them,
and that they are not going to ask him to join
them when they detach themselves from the cool
shade of the casuarina tree under which they are
sitting, and trickle away down the beach into the
bar of Figg's Federal Hotel. But they are inter-
ested in what he is saying.
He had been talking with a certain slow volubility,
for three or four minutes on end, when Dence
broke in.
" I beg your pardon, Mr. Clay, but I don't quite
understand. What makes you think that he carries
a paper actually under his clothes? "
" That's my affair," replied Clay, with a small
giggle. " I don't think it either — I know it. And
4 GUINEA GOLD
if it hasn't something to do with the Kikiramu gold-
field, I'll eat it"
The man Joe Anderson let himself slide down
the warm sand until his head rested against the root
of the casuarina tree. Then he put his hands under
his neck and yawned deliberately.
" Cut it: you've been reading too many penny
stories," he said. " This isn't a pirate's island in
the Caribbean Sea, in the eighteenth century: it's
Papua in the twentieth. Besides, what would a
raw new chum know about the Kikiramu, anyhow? "
" I'm not telling you what he ought to know, I'm
telling you what he does," persisted Clay. " Ander-
son, you might pay more attention. I'm putting you
and Dence on to a good thing, and you'll scarcely
listen."
" You must pardon us, Mr. Clay," put in Rupert
Dence, with an accent on the Mr. that apparently
passed unnoticed. " So far all we've heard is that a
certain fellow called Scott, who got off the Matunga
yesterday, carries a paper next his heart. No doubt
that concerns Mr. Scott's best girl pretty nearly, but
it hardly seems to ' hit us where we live.' If that's
all "
" It's not," interrupted Clay, who rarely let any-
one finish a sentence. " This Scott was asking ques-
tions about the Kikiramu goldfield an hour or two
after he arrived. And he said he would like to meet
some of the miners. As to the paper, what I'm tell-
ing you is gospel truth. You may trust me to see
GUINEA GOLD 5
farther into a stone wall than most people. I think
I may fairly claim for myself that I always was
sharper than the next man. I believe I'm speaking
the absolute truth when I tell you that this Scott
has some special information about the Kikiramu,
and I think it's up to you to help me to find out.
I'm not a miner; you are. Where I fail you can
come in. I always know my own limitations, I can
assure you."
" Oh, blow your limitations! " interjected Ander-
son, getting up. " Dence, come on, and leave this
lunatic to rave alone."
" Stop a bit," said Dence, fixing Clay with his
invisible eyeglass, and caressing his long moustache,
till he looked like an early Du Maurier caricature.
" You didn't say how you saw this precious paper,
or what makes you think it is anything about
gold."
" Well," declared Clay with some bravado,
" when they put you two in a room in a place like
Figg's, and a fellow flings about in his sleep in the
other bed, you can't help seeing the outline of a
flat packet. And I came in — I can assure you it was
accidental — this morning after I had had breakfast,
and found Scott with a paper spread out on the
dressing-table — a map, I'm willing to swear — I saw
it over "
" Shut up ! " growled Dence. " That's the fel-
low, isn't i'? "
A man was coming towards the three on the
6 GUINEA GOLD
beach. He had evidently been walking round the
island. Samarai, the island town of New Guinea,
is said by a good many far-travelled people to be
the most beautiful place in the world. The stranger
looked as if he thought so: he was tramping along
the white coral path slowly, between the high
hedges of carmine- and daffodil-leaved croton trees,
staring with all his eyes. Celadon green was the
shoal water of the strait in front; peacock-breast
blue the wider stretch beyond. Islands like bouquets
of palm set in holders of pearl sprang out of the
glass-stilf water. A long way off, on the other side,
dark mountains draped in forest rose straight from
the sea, forbidding, secret, grim.
11 That's . . . Papua, " said the unromantic-
looking Anderson, following the stranger's eyes.
" Something beautiful — and something black be-
hind it."
u Yes, certainly, that's Papua," agreed the Eng-
lishman, Dence. " Smiles at you like a cannibal
queen in love with you, and then biffs you over the
head with a tomahawk first chance she gets."
The steamer passenger, Scott, had strolled past
by this time, still looking at the wonderful pano-
rama of the straits. Clay, getting impatient, dug
Anderson with one finger in the ribs.
" That's him," he said. " Well, are you going
to help me to find out what good thing he's got hold
of when you go up to the Kikiramu again, or are
you not? I'm stuck in this beastly store of King's,
GUINEA GOLD 7
and can't afford to leave it, or I'd have kept it to
myself. I always "
" Damn you and your always," said Anderson,
quite politely. " Dence, take me off for a walk
round the island, before I forget my naturally re-
fined manners, and chuck — that — into the sea."
" You haven't listened," expostulated Clay.
" You won't "
" We've listened enough to know that you were
as near pick-pocketing as circumstances would let
you. We don't want any more. You've got a rat,
anyhow. A man can't bring a map of the country
up but you think you've hit another Treasure Island.
Go and put your head in a bag, and when you've
got your head in, put yourself after it, get some
good friend to tie up the mouth, and chuck yourself
off the jetty when there's a big shark in the
neighbourhood. You'd be doing the public a
service."
The two walked away and left Clay on the shore
regarding his shabby boots with a vicious eye.
Australians wear better boots, class for class, than
English, and this fragment of scum, skimmed from
Sydney gutters, always felt the injustice of Nature
with especial keenness when he looked at his poorly
shod feet. They were narrow, arched feet that,
like his small hands, spoke of submerged " family."
New South Wales is full of such men: prodigal
sons packed off so freely to the ends of the earth, in
the last generation or two, left descendants, acknowl-
8 GUINEA GOLD
edged and unacknowledged, that scarce adorn the
country of their birth.
In the meantime, George Scott, electrical engi-
neer of Belfast, finished his walk round the island,
quite unconscious of the " storm in a billy-can " that
had arisen about his steps, and returned to his
hotel, which, as Clay had explained, was Figg's.
There are four hotels in Samarai, — the Universal,
Bunn's, the Old New Guinea, and Figg's Federal.
The three first are not precisely replicas of the Cecil
or the Langham, but Figg's is worse. It is, so the
white men of Papua say, the worst hotel in the
world. And they ought to know, because the in-
habitants of Papua know more about odd corners
of the earth than the people of any other tropical
colony you could mention.
Figg and Mrs. Figg are obliging and kindly peo-
ple, and they do their best to make their guests
happy. The native boys are told to wash out the
rooms every rainy season, and they do. If anyone
objects to use the sheets that the last lodger had, he
can generally get fresh ones. You are allowed to
choose the company in your bedroom as far as is
conveniently possible, and if your room-mates get
intoxicated every night, and keep you awake, no
one minds your camping, trunks and bed and all, on
the verandah. It is related of Mrs. Figg that her
desire to make the most of a rare real fowl caused
her, once on a time, to salvage the creature's limbs
from the plates whereon they had been stripped, and
GUINEA GOLD 9
serve them up again in a stew, and afterwards (via
the plates again) in various soups, until certain
boarders of the baser sort complained. But she un-
doubtedly meant well. And when the guests at her
table complained that the Kiwai waiter was suffer-
ing from native skin disease unpleasant to the eye,
Mrs. Figg at once gave orders that he was to remain
henceforward entirely in the kitchen and help the
cook. More, when a steamer passenger new to
Samarai objected to the serving of jams undecanted
from the tin, did not Mrs. Figg denude her own
dressing-table of every pomade pot and hairpin case
it contained, and adorn the board with these valu-
able personal possessions? That some of the cus-
tomers took exception to the appearance of hair-
pins, buttons, and stray teeth of combs, in the
ultimate conclusion of pots of marmalade and rasp-
berry, only serves to illustrate the ingratitude of
human nature in the rough.
George Scott, who did not know much of any
country save his own, and had the North-of-Ire-
lander's hatred of muddle and uncleanliness, did not
take Figg's in the humorous style which was the only
way to accept it. He had come straight out from
London to Papua, with only a call or two for coal-
ing, in a cargo boat that had been bought by a
trading company for working the New Guinea
coasts. Missing, in this manner, the magnificent
procession of all the wonders of the kingdoms of
the earth, enjoyed by the traveller who takes the
io GUINEA GOLD
recognised Red Sea route, and stops at all the ports,
Scott came upon Papua as a somewhat unseasoned
traveller. The scenery was certainly beyond any-
thing he had ever imagined, but he did not think, on
the whole, it made up for the eccentricities of the
Federal. However, there was no room in any other
hotel at the time, since Samarai was just then en-
joying a wave of prosperity caused by the develop-
ment of a new goldfield: in fact, he saw he was
lucky to have secured even the half room he had got.
It is time to say a word about George Scott. If
you have ever visited the North of Ireland, you
have met many men a little like him, but none quite
the same — one does not pick George Scotts off every
family tree. He had the tall stature of the Ulster-
man; his eyes were Northern grey, his features well
marked and almost hard, save for the mouth, which
was slightly retreating and soft in outline. You
knew, looking at that delicate mouth forced into
firmness, at the too-fine and silky brown hair, at the
slight stoop of the broad shoulders, that the pro-
fession of George Scott, and the strength of George
Scott, and the existence of George Scott in general,
had cost a big struggle, somewhere and somewhen.
They had. A lad of delicate upbringing and
strength none too great, flung at seventeen out of a
luxurious life into the poverty that lurks always
underneath the splendour of mercantile Belfast,
George Scott had gone through the hell that only
" workmen apprentices " of his kind and class can
GUINEA GOLD n
know. In the bitter winter days he had risen at five
o'clock to get to his workshop by six: had gone
short of food and of fire, while his half-grown
frame was struggling desperately to keep up with the
tale of crushing labour laid upon it: had trudged
black-faced and overall-clad through streets that
used to see him in hunting kit, riding his fine Galway
mare to the meet of the county staghounds. He had
worn his way, he never knew how, afoot through
illnesses that would have sent most men to bed for
weeks: had been always tired for years, always short
of tobacco and tram money, generally out at el-
bows in clothes. He had had more than his share
of the inevitable cruel accidents of a foundry, and
had not been able to lay up when they occurred.
At the last he had worked through: the race with
poverty and sickness was won. George Scott was
a man, and a very strong one: instead of a box of
bones in the Upper Falls burying-ground. The
workman apprentice life of Belfast means one or
other to most gently nurtured lads.
He had his trade now, and had been making a
living at it for some years. The life he had led had
not coarsened him: not one of the oaths that had
rained about him like fiery hail from a volcano for
four long years clung to his own lips now that he
was free. He was temperate and well-living: his
manners were the manners of the class in which he
had been born and educated. The only notable
trace of those cruel early years left upon the man
12 GUINEA GOLD
of twenty-eight was his smile. That was the hard,
bright smile of one who has made himself laugh at
hardship for so long that he cannot drop the habit.
Scott smiled a great deal. The man to whom life
has come easy, glooms, or presents a mask of wax to
the world. It costs heart's blood to learn smiling of
that particular kind.
Men liked Scott, and he liked most people, to a
certain point. You had to know him a good while
before you fully understood that his pleasant man-
ner and his frank talk masked a reserve deep and
cold as the grey-green strait of Stranraer. There
was a woman who had the right to touch the bot-
tom of that unplumbed sea, but neither she, nor any-
one else, had ever done so. Scott was one of the
men who seldom let themselves go.
What, then, was a Belfast engineer doing in this
galley — what had brought Scott to Samarai? His
room-mate had some notion: no one else on the
island knew. Mr. Clay had not told quite the truth
to Dence and Anderson, out under the casuarina
tree. He had omitted one very important fact,
which was, that he had not seen the paper at all, but
had felt it — with his hand inside Scott's pyjamas,
when the newcomer was asleep. Clay had argued
that men who had lived in the North of Ireland
all their lives don't wake at a light touch, in the
heart of the five o'clock slumber. Men who had
lived in places like Papua do.
The Sydney man had not dared to pull the packet
GUINEA GOLD 13
out, but with his thin small fingers he had felt it,
until he was satisfied that it was a single folded
paper in a sheet of oiled silk — not notes or gold.
He had guessed at the existence immediately Scott
began to undress, by a certain awkwardness the lat-
ter betrayed in taking off his clothes. As to the
map, well, Scott was undoubtedly tracing something
out with a pencil on it, a route to something or
somewhere. And he had asked Clay if the boat for
the Kikiramu field was leaving soon. Clay's em-
ployers were the agents for the little coasting
steamer, so the question was natural enough. Also,
it was natural that Scott should ask if there were any
miners in Samarai. But, taking all these circum-
stances together, Clay thought he smelt something
interesting. His diplomacy had broken short off
at the crucial point, as it generally did. Still, that
left him none the less sure that he was right.
CHAPTER II
" I tell you," said Anderson, setting down his
glass with some emphasis, " that if he was eaten,
it was entirely his own fault. The country's as safe
as Sydney Botanical Gardens — safer. Pass the
pickles."
" They're done," said the man next him, a grey-
haired, grey-bearded old fellow in a black flannel
shirt. " Have chutney. As to his being eaten, it
wasn't even proved. None of the bones was split to
get the marrow out. As likely as not he was only
knocked on the head."
u Exactly," agreed Anderson. " Making a fuss
and a row and a scandal out of nothing, as usual.
Those Sydney newspapers ought to know a little
better this time. I've always said, and I say again,
that when a man does get eaten, it's due to foolery
of one kind or another. It never ought to happen,
and never does, to anyone who has any sense. But
to hear people down south talk, you'd think a man
couldn't go out for a week prospecting without get-
ting spitted on a stick and roasted alive."
" There wasn't above six diggers in the whole of
New Guinea that that ever happened to — at least,
that it was proved to have happened to," com-
14
GUINEA GOLD 15
merited the old man, in a voice somewhat muffled
with tinned-meat pie.
" Why, Bodkin," put in Rupert Dence from the
other side of the table, " you know you had a pretty
narrow escape yourself."
The old man swallowed his mouthful hastily, put
down his knife and fork, and half rose to his
feet.
" I had not," he said, in a voice quivering with
anger. " Nothing of the kind. It's a lie — who says
so — who dared to tell you anything of the kind?
You've been talking to tourists, you have — blank
tourists. A-aah, New Guinea's ruined, rotten
ruined, since they let them sort come nosing about
with their cameras and their picture-books and their
double-blank nonsense, talking thrash ! "
A strong South of Ireland accent was beginning
to work out with the warmth of his anger, as a
worn inscription shows up on heated metal.
" It was not thrue, I tell ye. It was nothing at all.
Them Orokivas, years and years ago, I will not deny
it, got me away by force with one of their war
parties, and kep' me in the village for a couple or
three days; but what was that? Sure, amn't I tell-
ing you I got away all right, and, moreover, I
recruited nineteen boys out of that same village not
a year after."
" Come, now, Terry, they broke all your arms and
legs, and left you in a stream to make the meat
tender — you know they did," teased Anderson.
o
16 GUINEA GOLD
Bodkin, who had taken his seat again, jumped up
once more, and dashed his fork on the cloth.
" May the divil choke ye, Joe Anderson," he said,
" but you know well they never did. I won't deny
it's their custom; but what was it they done on me?
broke an arm accidental, when the scrap was goin'
on, nothing more, if I was to die to-morrow.
Aren't ye ashamed of yourself, to be givin' up your
impudence to a man who's done with the fighting,
and can't drive your ugly alligator eyes out of your
secon'-hand doormat head?"
There was a laugh at this, for Anderson's eyes
were as undeniably green as his hair was rudely
luxuriant.
" Let him alone, Joe," advised Dence, who had
taken advantage of the dispute to possess himself
of the one ripe granadilla on the table, and was
rapidly and quietly getting through it unobserved.
" You'll get the worst of it, Bodkin; keep your hair
on, and finish your dinner. It's too hot to argue."
It certainly was. Scott, seated at the next table,
coatless, like everyone else, and with his sleeves
rolled up to the elbow, paused now and then in his
dinner to mop his wet forehead, and to envy the
native boys who were serving the meal. A cos-
tume consisting only of a scarlet cotton kilt, some
bead necklaces, and a row of white flowers stuck
like pins into the depths of the huge mass of brown
woolly hair, seemed sensible and desirable on this
breathless night.
GUINEA GOLD 17
The room was fairly large, and had as many
doors arid windows as a scene in a French farce:
they were all wide open, and through their spaces
one could see dark palms and pawpaws standing
up like black paper cuttings on a purple velvet back-
ground. There were stars visible among the spaces
of the boughs, but they looked hot and still. A vio-
lent scent from the invisible pawpaw flowers, and
from frangipanis a little farther off, mingled with
the odours of cookery and the faint exhalations of
the bar. Along the coral sand of the main street
outside bare feet scuffled by continually: the square
of light thrown out by the open door framed strange,
wild pictures, passing from dark to dark like the
figures in a cinematograph show — big, brown, naked
men, with immense woolly heads full of feathers and
flowers, dog-tooth necklaces, and gay red and yellow
leaves thrust into their fibre-woven armlets and
anklets: house-boys taking the evening air, proudly
costumed in a waistcoat and a cuff : women from the
mainland villages swinging their full short crinolines
of ribbony leaves as they walked, and playing with
their neck-chains of scarlet shell-money: a youth
from the wild outer islands, who had just drawn
up his carved and shell-enamelled canoe on the
beach, and was peeping with astounded eyes at
the wonderful white men and their wonderful s,
food. . . .
11 By Jove, that fellow's wearing a human jaw
round his neck," broke out Scott, dropping the
1 8 GUINEA GOLD
piece of sweet potato on his fork, and staring at
the door.
The man from the outer islands, seeing himself
looked at, melted away like a dissolving view into
the darkness.
Anderson, at the next table, answered the ex-
clamation, apparently out of civility.
" Yes; that'll be a Trobriand boy, I should think.
They often wear jaws."
" Why?" asked Scott, turning his chair a little,
so as to face the other man.
" Oh, I think as a kind of memorial of the dead.
Sort of locket. Not a piece of an enemy, as a rule.
The Trobrianders aren't cannibals."
" There's a good deal of it still elsewhere, judg-
ing by what you were saying just now," commented
Scott.
" There's a lot of nonsense talked about that,"
said the other, and returned to his dinner. Scott
became conscious that all the men at the table were
quietly taking him in. None of them stared rudely,
but keen covert glances were flying like arrows. On
his part he wondered greatly who or what these men
might be — these beings who were so various in dress,
manner, and (apparently) in social position, yet
who bore each one a likeness to the other, and who
were all alike in their callous way of regarding
death and danger. The young engineer had seen
pluck enough in his own profession, but this was
something of another kind.
GUINEA GOLD 19
After dinner the men drifted off into the bar, and
Scott, led by curiosity, followed them. He wanted
to study them, and he wanted, by and by, to ask
them if there were any gold-miners in Samarai.
Business must not be forgotten in the midst of all
these strange new sights and interests.
It was, if possible, hotter in the bar. Twenty or
thirty men were crowded about the counter, leaning
on it and talking. Most of them were of the same
type as those who had occupied the table next Scott's
at dinner. He recognised it at once, but he could
not put a name to it. It began to worry him. What
was it that these men had in common? What gave
them all alike that unnameable look in the eyes —
a look that spoke of distances, of solitudes, of
ghastly things seen long ago and forgotten — that
deliberate way of moving, that inexpressive, out-
ward-looking countenance? Now that he looked at
the men more closely, he was struck also by their
strength. They were none of them young: most
were middle-aged, and some were actually old — but
they were bundles of hard, sinewy muscle, every one,
and the slight stoop that most of them had detracted
little from a certain independence of carriage, al-
most approaching a swagger, that the engineer had
never seen in any man who could not hold his own
with the best.
Observation, however, seemed likely to stop short
where it had begun. There was something reserved
and unapproachable in the manner of the men that
20 GUINEA GOLD
held back the stranger from any attempt at rushing
their acquaintance. Big Anderson, towering over
even the sturdy Belfast man by a good two inches
of height, seemed the only possible bridge of ap-
proach. Scott felt this, without knowing why: the
fact was, that Anderson, knowing more than the
rest, was waiting to be approached.
A word or two about the heat of the night made
a beginning: the inevitable invitation to drink carried
it on. Over a glass of whiskey that was good enough
to explain the carelessness of Figg's in other mat-
ters — why worry about clean sheets and decent table
service if you had the one thing that really mat-
tered? — Scott found a chance of putting his question.
" I beg your pardon," he said, " but I wish you
could tell me — are there any miners in Samarai? I
want to meet some of them."
At this every man in the bar turned round and
looked at him, glass in hand.
" We're all miners here," said Anderson briefly.
Scott said nothing, but he felt himself gaping.
He had rarely been more surprised. Some of the
men began to laugh.
" Bret Harte again! " remarked Anderson, half
shutting his sharp green eyes, with a wearied ex-
pression. " You're disappointed, aren't you? If we
had known >^u were coming we'd have had all the
stage properties to please you — put bullet-holes
through your shirt-cuffs, and gambled with nuggets
on the pudding-plates, anpl shot a man on the veran-
GUINEA GOLD 21
dah after dinner. Not even a red shirt or a pair of
knee-boots! Too bad, isn't it? We do disappoint
the tourists so ! "
" But I'm not a tourist," said Scott. " I'm going
to try my luck on the goldfields myself."
" Do you know anything about the country? "
asked Anderson.
" No," said Scott.
" Anything about mining? "
" No." The second " no " came easier. Ander-
son's green eyes seemed boring into his face. They
made him uncomfortable, and yet — he was telling
the truth. Was he not? He assured himself that
he was, though perhaps not the whole truth.
" Have you enough money to take a team of
boys with you? " asked the big miner.
" I think so," answered the Northerner cau-
tiously. " Is that necessary? "
M Yes. The white man can't do his own work in
this country."
Scott experienced a shock of astonishment. That
such men as these could not do any work, any-
where, seemed scarcely credible. He inwardly re-
solved to see for himself before making up his mind.
But he said nothing. It became incumbent on him
to offer Anderson a drink, and he did so, leaving
his own as nearly untouched as he could. These men
seemed to drink strong spirit like water, but Scott's
nervous system was not of the type that requires
such fiery spurs.
22 GUINEA GOLD
Under his breath he said to himself —
" Miners! Well, I'm Wowed!"
He really had expected something of the kind
suggested by the mocking giant at his side. And if
you think that a hard-headed young Irish engineer
out on an adventurous trip is not likely to cherish
story-book fancies, ask yourself if the dog chained
up in the yard all week is likely, or not likely, to
run hard and far when Sunday morning loosens his
collar for him.
The whiskey, which seemed to have no power to
affect anyone's head as yet, had at all events loosened
tongues, and a river of bush and mining talk began
to flow. Scott listened, evading as well as he could
the too-hospitable invitations that began to shower
down on him, but finding himself nevertheless con-
strained to drink more than he cared for. The bar-
room grew unnaturally bright: small shiny waves
seemed floating in the air. The voices roared like
surf on a pebbly shore.
" . . . What did he die of? Beri-beri, they
reckoned — unlucky thing; those meat-ants seem to
have got at him before he was found, and . . . That
time Whitman was up at Carpet-Snake: he never
did know how to manage his boys, and they ran away
from him, and it was just then that he lit on payable
stuff — tried to work it himself with an extra dose of
dynamite, but he didn't give the fuse time, and if
the Government survey party hadn't chanced across,
he'd never have got down to Samarai with one hand
GUINEA GOLD 23
and a foot and a half: been crawling along for days,
when they found him. . . . Oh no, Coppinger's boys
never ran away, — they liked him all right, — the
trouble was that they got scrapping when he went
down to the store for a few days, and as they were
all man-eaters, and came from different villages, they
went ' kavakava ' when he wasn't there to keep them
in order, and so, of course, when he got back again,
he found they'd mostly eaten each other up, and he
had to start out and recruit some more. . . . Ku-
kukukus? Never attacked me, not once: anyone
who says so is talking through his hat. Came round
the camp sometimes and threw spears at us : noth-
ing else. . . . Well, I tell you, when that boy came
up out of the creek he was spangled all over with
gold like a blooming Christmas cake: dropping off
him it was — so that's how they found it out. . . . "
When do you reckon to start? " asked a voice
out of the mist.
Scott felt clear enough in his head to answer:
" As soon as I can."
" Did you ever hear of Punch's * Advice to Those
About to Marry ' ? " went on the voice — Ander-
son's apparently.
"Yes; it was ' Don't.'"
11 Exactly," said the voice, which certainly had an
acid flavour now, unnoticeable before — but perhaps
it was not real : perhaps . . .
(" I had better get out of this," said Scott to
himself.)
24 GUINEA GOLD
The voice went on.
" You've time to quit yet. Think again, I'd ad-
vise you."
" Why? " asked Scott, with a perfectly clear enun-
ciation. (He was glad of that.)
Anderson's mood suddenly changed. He gave a
loud, hard laugh, and moved off.
" Oh, why, indeed? Why should I trouble, any-
how? " he said. And if the bright waves in the air
had been a little less dazzling, Scott could have
found brain to think that the bitterness of the tone
was more unmistakable than ever — could even have
guessed that it spoke of loss. . . . What had An-
derson lost in that wilderness to which he himself
was hurrying? Lost? He was thinking nonsense:
his head must really be going.
The soft, cultivated tone of Rupert Dence rose
beside him.
" Anderson's right," it said. " But you won't
mind him: no one does mind that sort of thing. I
shall be drunk to-night, but if you will look me up
to-morrow, I shall be delighted to give you any
pointers that I can."
" Thank you very much," replied Scott, wondering
whether he, or the other, was a little mad.
There was no more of Dence then, and no more
of Anderson, but many flannel-shirted men, with soft
hats jammed tight down on their heads, talked for
years about recruiting, and ground-sluices, and
flumes, and something that they called u the wash."
GUINEA GOLD 25
(" It does not mean a wash of clothes," explained
Scott to himself, with immense seriousness — " they
are talking of the working of the mines.") It
seemed possible to get away now, and he began edg-
ing to the door, congratulating himself on having
kept his head.
" All right after all," he said. And then—" No,
by Jove, I'm not — if I've begun seeing things that
aren't here." He looked behind the bar in some
dismay. The stout man who had been serving
drinks was gone, Scott knew not when or how, and in
his place stood a girl. There was nothing remark-
able about this, but it was remarkable, or some-
thing more, that she should be refined and cultivated-
looking, an unmistakable gentlewoman — in the
roughest bar of the roughest town in New Guinea
— and as to her looks . . .
" It has gone to my head," decided Scott in some
dismay. " No girl is as beautiful as that — even if
she were there, and I'm not even sure she is. . . .
I've got to get out of this."
Without any apparent interval of stairs he found
himself in his own room. He felt aggrieved with
himself, as he got to bed, though there seemed no
bodily effect from his excess. But his head was
undeniably affected.
" It's been an impossible sort of day, but she's the
crowning impossibility," he thought, as his mosquito
curtain dropped. " They are not as pretty. They
certainly are not." He fell asleep.
26 GUINEA GOLD
Some hours later, Mr. Clay, emboldened by previ-
ous immunity, and making a second try after the
packet, found himself knocked through the door into
the verandah by something like the kick of a horse.
" You change your room, my son," advised a voice
from under a wrecked mosquito curtain. " I'll have
to take your net, and I don't feel inclined for com-
pany, anyway."
Clay picked himself up, and went off without even
an oath. He went, indeed, as silently as a native
dog. Those who know the native dog will tell you
that when it does this, you had better keep a guard
over your heels for a while.
Scott turned over and went to sleep again.
" The brute woke me when I was dreaming about
her! " he said, as his eyes closed.
But next morning she had so nearly passed away
from his mind that he did not even look in at the
door of the bar as he went downstairs.
It showed the young Irishman's sense and sobriety
alike that he did not worry about his small lapse of
the previous night, but merely decided to turn total
abstainer for the term of his stay in Papua. Ab-
stinence cost him nothing, as he knew by experience,
and there was clearly no middle way among men
who could drink as the miners did. Moreover, he
had not obtained any of the information he really
wanted, and he had been rather nearer talking about
his own affairs than he liked.
Half an hour after breakfast he had found a
GUINEA GOLD 27
comparatively shady and very quiet spot up on the
top of the island — a little glade in the heart of a
cocoanut-grove, surrounded by low-swinging, glitter-
ing fronds that framed, and veiled, and hid, and
showed again the jewelled wonders of the straits
that lay below. Up here not a roof of the little
tin-built town could be seen, not even a turn of the
coral path. One might have been alone on Robinson
Crusoe's island, with the wreck going to pieces on
the beach below.
Here Scott sat down on the grass, after a careful
search for scorpions or centipedes, pulled a paper
out of his clothes, and spread it on his knees. It was
a map of Papua, such as may be bought in Melbourne
for a shilling or two. Some of the rivers were
marked with pencil lines, and here and there there
was a note of interrogation. He studied the map
for a while, then took out a letter, much like other
letters, save for the circumstance of its being care-
fully mounted on a linen backing, and looked at that
too. Finally, he put the letter into its case, and
slipped the case inside his shirt, where it hung by a
cord.
" A partner it must be," he said, and fell
a-whistling softly.
It cannot be denied that Nature sometimes plays
theatrical tricks. Quite after the best traditions of
the stage was the incident that followed. From
the sloping side of the hill, some little way off, there
appeared first the head and then the entire figure
28 GUINEA GOLD
of Mr. Rupert Dence, in a very clean white suit,
with a calm and sober expression on his face, and a
cigarette held daintily between two fingers. It was
he who had organised the dog-fight in the dining-
room which had disturbed Scott's early slumbers on
the night before, and certain smashed glass doors
also were connected with Mr. Dence's ideas of ex-
pressing the joy of living at two o'clock in the
morning. But no one would have thought it, to
see him advancing down-stage through that very
theatrical-looking glade of palms, with the air of
a somewhat damaged jeune premier on the lookout
for the leading lady, smiling, smart, and sociable.
Scott, in his workman days, had been the best fore-
man of a gang that ever the M'Aherin ironworks
had known. His judgment of men, if not instan-
taneous, was quick and safe.
" This man will do," he thought. " Away from
hotels he'll keep right. He doesn't care a hang what
I think of him, and he has pluck — they all have, for
the matter of that. It has to be someone: I might
go farther and fare worse than this."
The two men met, and Dence made no pretence
of having come up by accident.
" Good-morning! I followed you," he said. " I
meant to put you up to something about that room-
mate of yours."
" Did you see him to-day? " asked Scott, getting
up.
" Only in the distance : he seemed inclined to
GUINEA GOLD 29
skulk — looked as if there was something the mat-
ter with his face."
" Exactly. You see you needn't trouble."
Dence laughed. " I see I needn't," he said.
A momentary silence fell. Dence smoked deli-
cately, enjoying his cigarette, which was of a brand
not common in the South Seas. He knew by now
that Scott had something to say to him.
CHAPTER III
It was very quiet on the top of the island. Below,
on the windward side, the reef roared faintly, far
away. You could just hear the rattle of the Ma-
tunga 's winches, down in the invisible harbour, as
she unloaded her cargo. But it seemed almost silent
up here, alone with the wind and the palms.
" I've got to have a partner," said Scott, lifting
his eyes to Dence's face and fixing him with a steady
look.
The man with a hidden history and a false name
met that look fairly. It waked a pinching pain
somewhere or other in his battered personality: there
had been a time, though he could scarce believe it
now, when he too was twenty-something; steady and
straight and diamond-clear down to the bottom of
his young soul. . . . Those waters were muddied
now. Still, he could answer the unspoken question
honestly.
The eyes of English blue and the eyes of Northern
grey read each other for a pregnant instant. Then
Scott stretched out his hand, with an action as
deliberate as the signing of a bond. Dence took it,
and the rough pressure he gave was his promise.
" I've come here on business," said Scott.
M T »
GUINEA GOLD 31
" Stop a bit," said the other, letting himself down
on the grass and leaning against a palm-trunk. " I
begin to think there was something after all in what
that reptile Clay said to Anderson and myself. We
didn't pay much attention to him: we only thought
he was spyin' about because it was his nature to, and
I had an idea you might be carryin' your money on
your person — so I meant to give you a hint. But
let me tell you what he said."
Scott, seated on the grass alongside, with his pipe
going, listened, and nodded his head once or
twice.
" Not so far out," he said, when the recital was
done. " I'm sorry it happened: I did think I was
old enough to take care of myself. But I never
supposed the little rat would get feeling about when
I was asleep — one is only on one's guard about
money, as a rule, and I have mine in drafts. I don't
suppose I need worry, however."
Dence did not answer immediately.
" No — I don't suppose you need," he said by and
by. The subject dropped.
" What I have come here for," said George Scott,
II is to make money. I feel as if I'd give my life
for ten years of a decent income. I've had a bitter
hard time of it, and I wasn't brought up to want,
worse luck. Engineering's my job — just the com-
mon or garden mechanical kind: I've been running
a sort of small repairing business in Belfast, and
making bread and butter at it, but . . . There's a
32 GUINEA GOLD
time in a fellow's life when he wants more : — one
begins to see all the good things there are in the
world, and kick because you haven't your share.
And there's where the ' get-rich-quick ' madness
comes in. And especially if . . . there's someone
else to think of. She ought to have her share — and
there's no one but you to get it for her. And that
makes you feel worse."
He picked at the grass under his hands. He had
been born with the curse of the nervous tempera-
ment, and had trampled it under his feet as St.
George trampled the dragon; but microscopic traces
still lived.
" I couldn't think of any way to do it," he said.
" Without capital there's nothing in any sort of en-
gineering but an endless grind — a fair income, per-
haps, when you're forty, but that's too far away.
I wouldn't try any wild-cat schemes with the little
bit I had. I used to think, and think, but I couldn't
see my way out. And Belfast's a town where it's
simple hell to be poor.
" Well, it came by chance — it's like a fairy-tale.
I was gathering together what I could in the way of
furniture, bit by bit, a chair here, and a set of
shelves there — and one day I was hanging out at a
pawnbroker's sale, trying to pick up an ornament or
so, when they put up a miscellaneous lot — a Chinese
vase, a foreign basket or two, some shells, and a
New Guinea bamboo pipe, poker-worked by the
natives. The lot went very cheap, and as I wanted
GUINEA GOLD 33
the vase I took it. When I got the things home, I
brushed them up, and they didn't look half bad.
The pipe "
" Bau-bau, it's called."
" Is it? thanks — well, I thought it a very rummy-
looking thing, as it hadn't an opening that I could
see, and I wanted to find out how it was smoked.
I found a little hole in one side that smelt of smoke,
so I guessed it was done by sticking the tobacco in
that, and letting the smoke fill up the bamboo. I
had a fancy then to try it myself, so I cut a bit of
plug, and was going to stick it in and light it, when
I heard something rattle inside, held it up to the
light, and saw something like a little wad of paper.
Well, I began to wonder: I didn't think the savages
of New Guinea had paper, and I couldn't make out
what they wanted putting bits in to spoil their smoke
if they had. I went at it with a bit of wire, but I
couldn't hook it out — the wad seemed to have been
forced in through the hole, and it had spread after-
wards. I was getting a bit curious, so I threw a
sixpence — heads I break up the pipe, tails I let it
alone. And it came to heads. And that's why I'm
here to-day."
The south-east hummed in the palm trees: the
rattling of winches down below in the invisible har-
bour went on. Dence listened to the tale, and saw,
as he listened, many things, in many strange corners
of the world, that had nothing at all to do with the
saga of George Scott. You, who have roamed the
34 GUINEA GOLD
world, what does the rattling of those cargo winches
say to you?
" It may be — nothing," went on Scott, " or it may
be something very big. Anyhow, I thought it good
enough to sell my little repair business and clear out
for this country with every penny I had. I've been
wild at myself a dozen times for doing it — and yet —
a man can't always be prudent. And — the — the
girl I'm engaged to — was as — as plucky as old boots
about it. I told her, though I didn't tell anyone
else, and she just said, l Go, and if you come back
a beggar ' "
Another break. Rupert Dence, who knew him-
self born to receive the confidences of other men, by
many experiences in many climes, said nothing at all.
?'"'.:'. . . I'll get two beggars' sacks, and we'll
make bread-puddings of the crusts from the back-
doors, and eat them together,' she said."
Scott shut his mouth on this, and looked very hard
at the violet mass of Basilisk Island shouldering up
behind tall green Sariba.
" So I went," he said presently. " It's something
about gold, and it seems to be a good thing. But
there's one thing quite clear to me from the talk I
heard last night, and that is, that I must have a
partner. I don't know the first thing about mining.
What do you think about joining me? If we agree,
I can show you the paper, and we'll discuss shares
afterwards."
" There are one or two things you ought to know
GUINEA GOLD 35
first/' said Rupert Dence, in the drawling English
accent that contrasted so sharply with the crisp,
clipped tone of the Ulsterman. " First, I drink. I
drink a lot when I'm in Samarai or Port Moresby.
I'm not in the least likely to stop, couldn't if I
would, probably, and certainly don't mean to try."
" Do you talk when you drink? " asked Scott.
Over the tanned face and neck of Rupert Dence,
false-named, unclassed, a slow deep red crept up.
" I did, once in my life," he said.
Then, after a pause —
" I never did again."
" I'm no missionary," said Scott. " We can let
it go at that. If that's all you have to "
" Not quite. I've been diggin' on the Kikiramu
lately, in the big camps — so far as Papua ever has a
camp. I used to dig in Misima : island away off the
south-east coast. I went clean native there : some of
them do. Wore nothin' but a waist-cloth, almost
forgot how to talk, drank kava till my eyes nearly
gave out, and I got a worse kind of jumps than any
whiskey can give you. Killed a Papuan or two, with-
out cause that a jury would have found sufficient.
I'm a bad lot all round: so the respectable people of
Papua would tell you — there are lots of respectable
people in Papua now, since it became Australian.
Some of us liked the old Crown Colony days a good
deal the best. Well, ' dost thou like the picture? ' "
11 Yes, all right," persisted Scott. " That's your
funeral, not mine. If I might ask, why ..."
36 GUINEA GOLD
" Joe Anderson, that's why," said the other, as
Scott paused in some embarrassment. " Anderson
went down to Misima, looked me up in the bush,
fitted me out with clothes, and did the prodigal
father business — or wasn't it the son that was
prodigal? Anyhow, Anderson took me off up the
Kikiramu with himself. And we both did fairly
well. And I spent the result — as I always do. I al-
ways will. Now you know."
" Anything more? "
" Yes. One thing more. Don't go at all."
" Why in— Hades— not? "
" Oh, you'll go — but you'd better not. Papua'll
get hold of you. It gets us all. There isn't a man
in the country who doesn't and didn't mean to go
away again — and they don't. It's the funniest thing
in the world. Every government officer, when he's
goin' south on leave, tells you, as a startlin' novelty,
that he means to get another job, and stay in
Australia. And the B.P. salesmen, when they
go, tell you they mean to get themselves put on
an Australian branch. And the planters are always
goin' to settle in Tasmania or New Zealand. And
the miners — well, the miners — we're the most
shockin' case of the lot. Ten, and twenty, yes, and
five-and-twenty years some of us have been here, —
always goin' to go away. Whoever else goes, you
may take your solemn oath we don't. You see, it's
two things have got us — Papua and the little yel-
low specks. If the one holds like a crab, the other
GUINEA GOLD 37
holds like a devil-fish with eight arms and two feelers
and a beak. We've no homes; we've no wives — to
speak of: and you may take that sentence just how
you like — we've no peace, no rest, not as much com-
fort as a decent dog in a decent kennel : we've done
with everything that makes life worth living: we're
buried, like that old Johnnie in the ' Idylls ' that
Vivien shut up in the hollow oak:
"' . . . dead
And lost to life and name, and love and fame.'
And — we go on."
"Why?" asked Scott, fascinated.
" The little yellow specks," laughed Dence.
" There, I've been gassin' quite long enough. Your
play."
" I should say I've done enough gassing, too,"
answered the other. " You may believe me, or you
may not, but I never talked so much about myself to
any man living as I've done to you this morning."
" Well, don't hate me for it to-morrow," said
Dence acutely. " You're almost feeling that way
now."
It was partly true, but Scott laughed the feeling
off and returned to the main point.
" Business! " he said. " I may be asking you to
help me hunt up a mare's nest: it isn't proved so
far that what I know is of any value. But, assum-
ing that it is, and assuming also that my little bit of
money turns out enough, will you join in with me? "
38 GUINEA GOLD
Rupert Dence was chewing a piece of palm frond
thoughtfully. He took it out of his mouth and
threw it down beside the stump of his finished
cigarette.
" Assumin' that you don't develop any objections
later to goin' partners with a drunkard and a scally-
wag — and assumin' that you aren't barkin' up an
empty tree — yes, I'll join."
" Now for the paper I found in the — what is it?
the bau-bau," said Scott, fumbling in his case.
He felt no reluctance to part with his secret now.
George Scott was cautious, like most of his race, but
he had none of the mean secrecies of a petty nature.
Either he trusted, or he did not. Here, instinct told
him to be open — here, with the " drunkard and
scallywag," whom he had chosen for his working
partner. It was a curious situation for one of the
most respectable young men of the most respectable
city in the most godly and conventional province of
Ireland — but the Papuan sun and moon were to look
down on stranger situations yet, with George Scott
entangled therein.
Dence took the paper from his hand and read it,
not aloud. Scott followed him over his shoulder.
" Kikiramu River, Papua,
Sometime in January, 19 — .
" Dear Gil, — You and I have been good mates
for years through good and bad times, now the end
has come for me. I am writing this with death at
hand, I never recovered from the spear wound I
GUINEA GOLD 39
told you about. Thinking how you saved my life in
that trip up the Mambare helps me in my effort to
write, as I know if you receive this you will find more
gold than you ever dreamed of. Gil, old fellow, I
found what we always thought was there, the reef
that shed the gold in the creek where we last worked
together, you will remember, where the python
caught our dog, at that place there is a large boulder
in the stream snowing about three feet above water,
when the river is very low a granite boulder is ex-
posed for about 8 inches; keep those boulders in line
and go west up the sidling until you come to the same
sort of a tree that we made our box out of at Alli-
gator Creek. From the tree go 30 points north of
east 260 paces, and you will come to a diorite rock
outcropping the edge of the conglomerate, examine
the rock. I need not tell you anything more, I hope
this gets into no other hands than yours, but have
written carefully so that if it goes astray it will profit
no one else, you will understand later. I send this
down to the coast with my best boy, and hope it will
reach T. I. all right, and now good-bye, we have had
our last trip together. — Your old mate,
" Harry Cripps."
" I was sorry for the poor beggar that wrote it
when I read it," said Scott. " It's a pathetic sort
of letter. I traced up where it came from, and found
that ' Gil ' was dead — it was not nearly as much
trouble finding out as one would have thought: I got
at the man who pawned the curios : he was a steward
on one of the B.I.'s who had lost his berth and come
over to Belfast to look for work: pawned his small
goods of various kinds, and was not at all secretive
40 GUINEA GOLD
as to where they came from. The bau-bau, it seems,
he picked up in Thursday Island, at the sale of a
dead miner's things in some hotel: the miner had
gone off rather suddenly with black-water fever, and
they sold his luggage to pay his bill. The steward
had no idea there was anything in the pipe. I didn't
feel bound to let him into the thing, but I dare say
I should never have taken the thing up at all if the
person called Gil hadn't been dead. I judged that he
had not had time to make any use of the paper —
you see, the date is this year, and it's only August
now — he seems to have hidden it away, and then
been surprised by death, as Cripps himself was."
" I can tell you who Gil was," said Dence thought-
fully; " it was a fellow called Gilbert Davidson, who
was always a mate of Cripps'. They went prospect-
ing together in a lot of places. Yes, Cripps died up
the Kikiramu in January last. . . . The reef! Have
you any idea what kind of a thing you've got hold
of, man? "
" Not the least," said Scott promptly.
" Well, it would take me half an hour to explain
to you, in your present state of beastly ignorance;
but just take it from me that if Cripps did get on
to a good payin' reef, he's done what no miner on
the mainland has done yet, though we dream of it
all night, and talk of it half the day, when we've any-
one to talk to — which we haven't, as a rule : that's
why most of us are mad: you may have noticed it.
They have got the reef in Woodlark Island, but it
GUINEA GOLD 41
takes big machinery to work there. If I read right,
Cripps has got the kind of thing they used to get in
West Australia — gold like plums in a puddin'. Oh,
hang it, man, it's enough to make a dog sick to see
you takin' it as coolly as all that — do you know what
you've got? "
11 No : I told you that before. What the mischief
would I be wanting a partner for if I did? Go
easy: there's no royal road to it that I can see.
What about the puzzle part? "
" Hang the puzzle part. Cripps had been read-
in' penny novels, and they went to his head — that can
be worked out — somehow — anyhow. By Jove, old
man, you've hit it with this! "
And the representative of imperturbable England
smacked the son of emotional Ireland on the back.
Scott grinned his hard, bright smile.
" I see rocks ahead," he said. " But I'm game to
try."
The two partners went down the hill together
towards the hotel. As they crossed the pathway a
girl came towards them, walking fast, as if for exer-
cise. She was of medium height, with an extremely
pretty figure, and small narrow feet. Her beechnut-
brown hair broke round her little pointed face like a
sea-wave breaking on a pearl-white coral shore. She
had the features of the typical pretty girl, the short-
ish, straight nose, brief upper lip, and curved small
mouth, familiar on posters and magazine covers — in-
deed, there were quite a number of men, in various
42 GUINEA GOLD
places, who cherished different advertisements and
magazine fancy heads because they were so like her.
Her eyes, when you got a good look at them, made
you think of dark heather honey — perhaps because
of their colour, perhaps because they were almost
cloyingly sweet. She looked just a little sad, just
a little timid: if you were a man, you would badly
want to know the meaning of that look, so that you
could go immediately and break the head of anyone
who had caused it. She was, in fine, that most dan-
gerous explosive — a woman who draws the hearts
of men. And, like almost all of her royal clan, she
looked as though the crown weighed heavy and the
gold were hard.
" I say — is that the girl who was in the bar last
night? " inquired Scott, as soon as she was past.
" She is," answered Dence, in a tone that was just
a shade over-careless. " She's the new barmaid."
" Barmaid? in Figg's? Why, man, she's a lady! "
u Certainly. What else did you think she was? "
aske,d the other, bristling a little.
" Well, one hardly expects What's she doing
here?"
" You might ask her: she's paid to talk to any-
one.
" What's her name, I wonder? "
" Ducane — Charmian Ducane," Dence spoke very
clearly.
" Ducane — Du Where have I heard it be-
fore? Was she ever on the stage? "
GUINEA GOLD 43
" Not to my knowledge."
" Well, I believe I've heard the name some-
where," said Scott, dismissing the struggle to re-
member. " She's most uncommonly pretty."
" So people think. Do you mind telling me just
how much money you can raise for that trip? It
isn't an affair of twopence-halfpenny in this country,
I warn you."
" Come up to my room, and we'll talk it over,"
suggested Scott.
The incredibly pretty girl had passed out of his
mind again. Instead, with a talk of money cropping
up again, he saw the vision that he and a certain
Janie M'Crum of Malone Road, Belfast, had
sketched out together, on many a cold, firelit even-
ing — a little villa residence with a front lawn and
a back garden, somewhere about the Balmoral
suburbs, velvet chairs and sofa in the drawing-
room, leather in the dining-room, a moderate-priced
run-about motor in the little garage, trips to Port-
rush every August, Dublin for the horse-show . •. .
many, many firelit evenings, when nobody should go
home, because everyone would be at home . . . lit-
tle fair heads about the garden, in the sunny morn-
ings . . .
Scott swallowed down his vision with a sigh.
They were at the hotel now. And the vision, some-
how or other, did not cling that night. Perhaps he
had thought about it too often, and grown almost
tired waiting.
44 GUINEA GOLD
. . . Over Sariba and Basilisk Island the light
slunk away. Purple and blood-crimson, fierce with
struggling Titans, and wild with giant fortresses
crashing down to fiery ruin, the strange New Guinea
sunset began to burn above the blackening ranges.
And high in the west, like the crystal lamp of Edith
the Swan-Necked, searching for the body of her
lover on Senlac's bloody field, Love's star shone
down upon the crimson death of day.
. . . Does one love in villa residences in a Bel-
fast suburb, with a good and gentle Janie M'Crum
tending the velvet drawing-room furniture, as one
might love beneath the burning skies of Papua —
Papua, where hearts are strong to dare, and hate,
and love, and where the tiny twinkling planet of the
North becomes the great bright queen of the tropic
world?
If anyone asked the question of himself that night
it found no answer.
CHAPTER IV
There was no moonlight that nighl
This was fortunate, because a gentleman who
climbs upon a roof to listen to the conversation of
other gentlemen naturally prefers darkness. It was
very dark, and no one saw Mr. Clay slip round to
the back of the house, shin up a verandah post, and
get on to the wide, easily sloping iron roof that
covered the nest of partitioned cells known as Figg's
Federal Hotel.
In the outback hotels of Australasia and the Pacific
you will almost always find that a bedroom means
little more than a sort of cubicle partitioned off at
a height of some eight or nine feet from the other
compartments under the same roof. There are
sometimes one or two rooms completely walled off
from the rest, sometimes none. Figg's had one: it
was the room occupied by Scott, and, until lately, by
Clay as well. Clay had removed his traps without
protest, and taken himself completely out of his
room-mate's sight, in the hope that Scott would for-
get all about him. Which Scott, being interested in
other things, naturally did.
But in the heart of Clay there now burned a pas-
sion even stronger than the lust of unearned gain
45
46 GUINEA GOLD
that had possessed him up to this — the passion of
curiosity.
The strength of that passion, in the tortuous,
cloudy souls of certain creatures low in humanity's
scale, is a thing for other and normal minds to
wonder over speechless. There are beings who
seem to live, parasitically, only on the blood of
other minds. Clay had the obsession in its worst
form: the mere thought of a secret that he could,
and ought to, know nothing about set the blood
drumming in his ears with desire to get at it and
suck the life out of it. He had a reason for want-
ing money at any cost that will be heard of later.
But stronger now by far was the unsatisfied ache of
curiosity. He had seen Scott and Rupert Dence
coming back to the hotel together, suspected their
conference, and chewed his nails with agony to think
that he had not been there. When they went up
to Scott's room together, after dinner, he slipped
round to the back verandah, bare-footed, and got
on the roof, swiftly and without sound. It would
have been easier to go into an adjoining room and
put his ear to the partition, but Clay was no novice
at the game, and he guessed — rightly — that Scott
or Dence would take a look into the next room
before settling down to talk.
The iron roof sloped low down upon the room
beneath: there was no carpet on the floor, and very
little furniture to deaden sound. Lying on what
was practically a vast sounding-board, Clay con-
GUINEA GOLD 47
trived to hear most of what was said almost as
plainly as if he had been in the room.
They were discussing the cost of a trip to the
Kikiramu River goldfield, including four or five
months' prospecting in the neighbourhood. Dence
put it down at £400, and this seemed to trouble
Scott.
11 I have £300," he said, " but I must keep a
hundred back in case of failure. And even if I
didn't, I shouldn't have enough, according to what
you say."
" Well," said the other voice, " I can't put up a
halfpenny more than I said, and that leaves me
nothin' at all. D'you like to try someone else? I
engage to forget all about it, if you do."
u No," came Scott's voice thoughtfully. "No;
I won't do that. I think I'd like to have you in it,
anyhow. It looks as if we'd have to make a syndi-
cate of it. Rather a pity, but "
11 Anderson could just about fill the gap. That
would leave two shares to you, and one each to him
and myself. You can trust Anderson all right."
" I can believe that. I don't know that we can
do better. I haven't taken awfully to Anderson, it's
true, but that may be my fault."
M It is. Reason why you took to me like winkin'
was because you knew I was weaker than yourself.
Reason why you aren't takin' to Anderson first
jump is because he's just about as strong a character
as you are. You'd shake down together all right.
48 GUINEA GOLD
You take it from me, a fellow that anyone and
everyone takes to right off, like me, is rather more
likely than not to be a bloomin' waster — like me."
" I never heard anyone talk like you in all my
life," declared Scott, somewhat puzzled.
u It's only because I'm so beastly clever. Don't
you be clever: it's so jolly bad for your chances in
life. However, I don't think you need be afraid."
" Thank you."
" Not at all. And now suppose you stop talkin'
all this beastly frivolous nonsense and get down to
business."
(Clay, up on the roof, shifted an uneasy leg along
the hard iron ridges, and prepared to listen.)
" First thing I want to tell you is, you're up
against the hardest job you've ever had, as well as
the biggest payin', in this thing. You don't begin
to have a notion what this country is like, in the in-
side — nobody has until they've seen it. You'll have
to risk your life in a dozen ways: and you'll have
to live harder than you ever dreamed, and you'll
have to take what's comin' to you, even if it's dyin'
very quickly and very nastily, without kickin' at it
by so much as half a word, no matter what it is.
That's what the New Guinea miner is. He kicks
all the time about the Government, or the weather,
or the way his neighbour's usin' up his water-power,
or things of that kind — but when it's starvin', or
dyin', or bein' worked all out in a way you don't
know the very beginnin's of yet, or bein' smashed
GUINEA GOLD 49
up with dynamite, and havin' his mates take off an
arm or a leg for him with bush-knives and no
chloroform, or any little thing of that kind — why,
he takes it as all in the day's work, and doesn't even
know he's what people would call a brave man.
There's not another man but me in the whole of the
diggin's could even tell you that. They're so close
to it they don't know."
There was silence in the room for a minute, and
then Dence's voice recommenced.
" Well, about that reef of Cripps'. The first
thing we have to do is to find out where the boys
are that he employed on his trip, and get as many of
them as we can. We might find out from them
whereabouts he was workin'. Then we can recruit
what more we want and start up the Kikiramu River,
because it's evidently somewhere in that part of
the country. No use tryin' to work out the puzzle
part till we get there."
" It sounds simple," said Scott reflectively.
" Does it? I'm glad; you just keep on thinkin'
that way as long as you can. Now I think, if you'll
be good enough to excuse me, I'll go and spend the
rest of the evenin' in my usual state of beastly
intoxication, and you can read the last annual volume
of the Reports of the Young Men's Christian Asso-
ciation "
There was the sound of a trunk lid opening here,
and a pause, broken only by a slight rustling of
paper. Then, in Dence's voice —
50 GUINEA GOLD
"Well, I am— blessed!"
" Receipt for my last year's subscription. I'm
careful about receipts."
" Well, I am "
" So you said. They've got a good library and
gymnasium, you know. And we aren't quite as
Christian as you think. All the same, I go to church
most Sundays. And I used to have a class in the
Sunday school whenever they were short-handed."
" Well, I am — well, they do say we're all mad
here, and there was once someone who called Papua
the Country of the Impossible. But a Young Man
Christian — a Sunday-school teacher — among the dig-
gers ! Will you kindly let me go and get drunk at
once? Good evening. See you to-morrow."
The footsteps died away on the verandah. Clay
slipped like a snake from the roof to the rail and
disappeared. He had heard enough to go on with.
He thought he should sleep to-night.
Scott slept well, and did not dream — not even of
the Malone Road on a summer's evening, with some-
body beside him on the narrow top seat of the tram.
But towards the morning he woke up all of a sudden
and found himself sitting upright in bed. The win-
dow was wide open to the breathless night: outside,
about the top of a pawpaw tree, the wings of an
unseen flying-fox thrummed like the propeller of a
motor-boat. The sea breathed low on the reef, very
far away.
" Charmian Ducane! My God! the poisoner! "
GUINEA GOLD 51
He remembered now. He had read all about it
in the home papers, just before he left. The woman
who had been divorced by her husband, down in
Sydney — the woman in whose jewel-case had been
found a bottle of poison, cunningly designed to kill
without leaving dangerous traces — the woman whose
lover was a doctor, skilled in the use of uncommon
drugs — the woman who had threatened to kill her
husband, and had put the poison in his very glass —
the woman who had not been tried for her life, be-
cause her husband had not taken the drink, but who
had been divorced, under circumstances of the deep-
est infamy : whose name was a byword in the mouths
of decent people — Charmian Ducane ! Well might
he think he had heard the name before. The heroine
of that scandal — with an innocent, childlike face,
and soft, frightened, honey-sweet eyes: the little lady
he had seen walking round the island.
Well, in truth this was the Country of the Im-
possible, and Charmian Ducane was the most impos-
sible thing in it.
Scott slept no more that night.
It seemed to Scott that events had been raining
very fast and thick during the first day or two of his
stay in the Impossible Country, but the calm came
close on the heels of the storm.
He had to wait. Anderson had gone off sud-
denly, at half an hour's notice, in a schooner that
was running down to Ferguson Island: he wanted
52 GUINEA GOLD
to recruit boys from that place, and it was not at
all certain when he would return. Dence declared
there was nothing to be done for the present : so the
" new chum " settled down, with what patience he
might, to the waiting and hanging about that are
the inevitable portion of travellers in Papua.
The arrival of a mail, with letters for himself,
made a welcome break. There was one from Janie :
the first he had had since leaving home. He took it
out with him to read at the windward cool side
of the island, where there was a comfortable
seat fixed on a rock looking towards China Straits.
What the straits had to do with China, Scott never
knew: does not know to this day. Nor did he ever
find out why the authorities of Samarai had placed
the typical " lovers' seat " of the island right up
against the wall of the explosive magazine — unless
through some symbolic fancy scarcely to be expected
of a grave Government official.
Leaning up against the magazine he opened his
letter and read it through. It was not a very senti-
mental letter: Janie was less sparing of deeds than
words where her affections were concerned. It told
the little happenings of her daily life: spoke of a
carpet she had bought, at a reduced price, which
might do for the dining-room of their house: of the
Intermediate Examinations, in which her pupils
(Janie was a school-teacher) had done well: of
weather and mutual friends. And at the last it broke
into one little wave of reminiscence :
GUINEA GOLD 53
" . . . It's summer now, and the trees are just
big castles of green along the Lagan River, and
sometimes of an evening I go out for a walk along
the tow-path, all by myself. Last summer, when the
leaves were out, it was you and I that walked along
the river. I wonder will we ever walk there again?
Oh, George, the men who go away never know how
the women feel who have to stay behind. Do you
remember the song we used to sing — i Teddy
O'Neale ' ? — and how the colleen said good-bye
' with tears in her eyes, and a stone on her heart ' ? I
have a stone on my heart when I think of you, and
that is always.
1 Says he, 'twas to better his lot he went roving,
But what would be gold to the joy I should feel
To see him return to me honest and loving,
Though poor still, my darling boy, Teddy O'Neale ! '
Good-bye, my man — come back some day. — Your
" Janie."
Scott grinned as he folded the letter and put it
away. He was not in the least amused, but he had
picked up a mechanical habit of smiling when he
was hurt. Something in Janie's letter hurt him: he
could hardly tell what.
" They trust us so," he said. " They trust us
so . . ."
He looked up to see the woman from the bar com-
ing across the narrow causeway that led to the seat.
Since that sudden awaking in the middle of the
night, Scott had seen and heard almost nothing of
Charmian Ducane. He had not been into the bar
again, and the girl was seldom seen about. In truth,
54 GUINEA GOLD
he had not had a good look at her, save on the day
when he had met her out walking. He had thought
about her a good deal, however, — first with disgust,
then with curiosity, at last with a feeling that there
must be another side to that awful story, if one could
only hear it. I will not swear that there was not
also a touch of patronage in the mental attitude of
George Scott regarding this charming little sinner.
The virtuous woman who honestly feels it her duty
to " do good to " attractive male prodigals is not
without her counterpart in the opposite sex.
It seemed that Charmian Ducane was out walking
again. In the island town of Samarai there is just
one walk — round the coral path: twenty minutes
slow, fifteen minutes fast — and you are sure to meet
everyone else out walking too, if you only go often
enough. Mrs. Ducane seemed to have as many
rounds of the island as she wanted when she reached
the magazine. She was looking tired, and she
glanced at the seat desirously. Scott was on his feet
at once.
" Please don't let me turn you out," she said,
looking at him with the half-mechanical smile of the
very pretty woman. As a matter of fact, she hardly
saw him. She knew so exactly what he would do
and how he would look — the long warm stare, the
gleam of teeth under an upward curved moustache,
the little bend of homage, the old, familiar phrase —
men had so few — " Delighted ! " " It's a pleasure ! "
GUINEA GOLD 55
" Only too glad ! " . . . But the man said nothing at
all. He merely lifted his hat for an instant, and then
took his seat again. And Charmian Ducane dropped
down rather wearily at the other end of the bench.
She supposed it would only be a minute or two
until her companion began edging up to her end and
looking under her hat, and when that began she
would get up and go, as she always did. For the
moment she might rest.
But the man sat quite still and looked out to sea.
Charmian began to wonder.
If she had only known, the man was wondering
too: and the subject of his wondering was — " How
could anyone say she did? " He had had one good
look at her this time. The — pretty picture-poster
face was overlaid with a certain surface coquetry, but
underneath there was
Purity. Yes. He would have staked his life
on it.
Charmian also had had one good look since she
sat down. She had been curious about the new-
comer, and wondered what his business in Papua
might be. She liked the look of his fine height and
strong make: his Northern fairness and his steady
grey eyes.
" I suppose he is just like all other men when you
get to know him," she said to herself, " but he
looks . . . kind. O God! men aren't kind, what-
ever they look. You always think they are, and
then . . . you find out.
56 GUINEA GOLD
" He will tell me it is a cool day, by and by," she
thought. " And then he will ask me if I admire the
scenery. And then he will say all the usual things.
They are never different, really."
But the man still said nothing.
The blood-warm water beat upon the rocks, toss-
ing up foam. The dry, sword-shaped leaves of the
stilt-legged pandanus behind the magazine rustled
thirstily. Some minutes passed. Then Scott stirred
as if about to go.
And Mrs. Ducane said hurriedly —
" It is almost a cool day, isn't it? "
" Yes, comparatively cool," answered Scott, turn-
ing his head politely and pushing back his Panama
to feel the breeze.
" He has a forehead like a child," thought the
woman. . . . " Don't you admire the scenery here
very much? "
Then happened a thing that Scott has never been
able to account for. Instead of replying that he
did admire the scenery very much, and thought the
views from the coral walk unequalled, he spoke
straight out what was in his mind — what he had
been turning over and over, ever since the girl from
the bar sat down on the rustic seat.
" You are Mrs. Ducane," he said. " I can't be-
lieve it was true. I can't, somehow."
The honey-brown eyes grew suddenly darker with
the dilation of their pupils. It was plain that
Charmian was moved. It was also plain that she
GUINEA GOLD 57
might have shed tears if she had not been tired of
crying. The swollen skin under the eyes proved
that, and the tiny droop at the corners of the mouth.
How much pain must a woman — a girl — endure be-
fore she grows weary of tears?
" A great many people have said that," answered
the soft, tired voice. " I don't think they meant it."
" Well, I should think you must know I do," said
Scott. Where was the virtuous thought of u im-
proving " wicked Charmian? . . . Where were the
sun-dried spots of spume that had fallen on the
burning rocks half an hour before?
" I don't know. If I told you— but " She
hesitated.
Scott was unlike his new friend Dence in that he
hated to be confided in. He saw it was coming
now, and he set his teeth, mentally.
11 But — I don't know you, and I suppose you
would not be interested," said Charmian, with a
sudden change of mind.
Scott was amazed at the pang of disappointment
that shot across his mind. He felt absurdly like
the lady of the comic papers who has braced herself
reluctantly to meet the shock of a proposal, only to
find that it dpes not come after all.
" I would be interested," he said promptly. " I
would be very much interested."
After all, — blue air and sea, gold sun and waving
palms, the turn of a romantic country, and a beau-
tiful penitent ready to pour out her heart into your
58 GUINEA GOLD
more or less sympathetic ear, — it was a moving
situation, Scott did not think at all that this
Charmian was a white-winged angel: but he was
ready to believe that her feathers were a good deal
less black than they had been painted.
" Well," said the girl, speaking in a tired, monot-
onous tone, like one who has said the same thing
over and over till it has almost lost meaning — " the
things they said weren't true. I never gave any just
cause for a divorce. I never tried to, or wanted to,
poison anyone. I did say I wished my husband were
dead, and I did say I would kill him some day. Mil-
lions of women say and think the same thing, but
they don't really mean it. I did like that doctor,
until I found out what he was. It was because I sent
him away that he would not tell the truth. He gave
me the medicine for myself: it was a nerve tonic, and
it was poisonous if you took it in anything but very
small doses. I thought perhaps if things got worse,
and if I'd the courage, I would kill myself, so I put
it in my jewel-case to be safe. And I went so far
as to pour some of it in a glass, and my husband
found it. And the man lied about that and every-
thing else. So it looked badly. And my husband
believed Well, anyone would have: everyone
does. But it wasn't true. That man compromised
me on purpose, thinking if Mr. Ducane — he was
my cousin, so I have the same name still — if Mr.
Ducane divorced me on his account, I should have
to marry him. Mr. Ducane never would have sued
GUINEA GOLD 59
for a divorce, only for the idea that I had tried to
poison him: he just went mad about that, and
wouldn't listen to anything anyone said. You see, he
made a kind of slave of me. I married him when I
was seventeen, and he never let me have a thought
of my own. He loved me, I suppose: I could have
got on somehow or other if he hadn't, but that was
what made it hateful, because he knew I never cared
for him, and he just kept me chained. I was afraid
of him, and I hated him — I . . . hated . . . him."
Her little knuckles tightened till the bones showed
white.
" It makes you feel so wicked. You can't think.
If I'd done everything they said, I don't think I'd
feel as wicked as I do whenever I think of him. It
makes one feel one isn't anything human, but just a
sort of devil, to hate anyone like that. I — I'm not a
strong sort of character. I'm rather weak; and he
had hold of my soul with his great coarse hands —
somehow. I couldn't even find strength, ever since I
was seventeen, and I'm twenty-four now — I couldn't
even run away from him all by myself. When he
left me, and wrote that he was going to divorce me,
and have me tried for my life if he could, I — I — I
was glad, when I could get breath enough to think.
I thought of never seeing him again, and it seemed
like heaven. I just didn't think beyond the divorce.
. . . But then, you see, I had to think, because there
was no money, and when the decree was given, the
other men — the other men ..."
60 GUINEA GOLD
She was almost crying again: but it seemed as if
the tears would not come: as if they had been all
cried away. There was a thickness in her voice as
she went on —
" They all believed . . . everything. They came
like crows round a corpse. ... I went to a pawn-
shop in the dark and sold everything I had. I saw
an advertisement in the Herald for a resident gov-
erness for Samarai, to teach the families of several
people — music, and so on. I answered it, and hid
away till I heard. They said I could come. ... I
called myself ' Mary Ducane ' — Mary is my sec-
ond name. But when I came up here they had seen
the pictures in the papers, and they knew, and they
said . . . Oh, it doesn't matter. But I was so glad
when the Figgs took me as barmaid. They're kind,
and the work isn't nearly as bad as I thought it
would be. Nobody is rude. You wouldn't think how
good those miners are. I was most afraid of them
of all — but one day a commercial traveller from
the boat hung over the bar and tried to kiss me, and
one of the miners took him and flung him right
out into the gutter, and said he and the others would
do the same for anyone who dared to treat that lady
disrespectfully. . . . And you know, they must all
think . . . everyone does. You do too: you need
not trouble to tell me you don't."
She ceased speaking. . . . How fierce was the
blue flame of the sea ! how dazzling and shadeless
the green fire of the low-growing bush upon the
GUINEA GOLD 61
white-sanded islands! Out in the straits a black
three-cornered fin, shaped like the sail of Death's
own boat, cruised up and down, questing for prey.
A cruel, formidable land, this Papua, for all its
beauty: a land for strong men to seize and break
and tame, it might be, but for little, weak, unhappy
women? . . .
Scott was strangely moved. The tired, sweet
voice: the uncomplaining tone: the certainty of be-
ing misunderstood and disbelieved, now and always,
that ran like a sad accompaniment to a plaintive
song all through Charmian's simply told story —
these things seemed to him, somehow, intolerable.
Why should she suffer so? Could not anyone help?
Could not he?
He turned round to face her, on the bench, push-
ing back his hat again, as was his way when excited.
Charmian thought once more, u How noble, how
good he looks ! If any man in the world were really
what some of them seem ! " He spoke with de-
liberate, deep emphasis.
" I believe every word you say, Mrs. Ducane. If
it helps you at all to know that, I'm very glad indeed.
If I could do anything for you . . . "
The woman laughed a bitter little laugh.
"What can a man do for a woman?" she said.
" When a man says that, he doesn't mean anything.
Or rather, he does mean ' anything,' and anything's
nothing."
" Well, if you can tell me what I could do. . . .
62 GUINEA GOLD
I'm sorry. Believe me, I — I am — I — what can one
say? Words are such useless Mrs. Ducane,
can you ask me to do anything? Ask me what you
like."
" There's nothing," said the girl. " I've got to
work out my future by myself. If I didn't get so
tired. . . . But that's not being brave, and I just
have got to be brave: that's all that's left me. I
do think you have helped me a little, if you like to
know — just by talking to me as a human being. If
you knew how sick a pretty woman gets of being
taken always from the one point of view — of acting
the part of Circe and turning people into brutes —
though she may hate it all the time — well, you'd
understand why this talk has been like a — like a
drink of fresh water when one has had nothing but
syrups and brandies. There, that reminds me of
my work: I've stayed out far too long. No, don't
come with me — I like to be alone. Good-bye — and —
thank you."
When Scott went back to the hotel he found
Rupert Dence extended on a long chair on the veran-
dah, smoking.
" Will you come and go over those figures again
with me when you've finished your smoke? " he said.
He was feeling jovial and good-humoured and in-
clined for work. Doubtless this was due to the
south-east wind which had sprung up strongly in
the course of the afternoon, cooling and clearing the
hothouse atmosphere of the island.
GUINEA GOLD 63
Dence got up from the lounge and walked off
towards his own room. There was a sulky look in
his usually amiable blue eyes.
" Don't feel like it," he said.
" Fever? " queried Scott.
" Perfectly fit, thanks. Just been for a walk
round the island." He went into his room and
slammed the door.
CHAPTER V
Charmian Ducane, gentlewoman by birth, and
barmaid at the Federal, had always been a lonely
little soul.
Men's admiration, it was true, she had had in
overflowing plenty, ever since, at barely fourteen
years of age, her singular prettiness began to de-
velop under the influence of the burning Queensland
suns. She was an orphan, brought up by a some-
what cold and unsympathetic English grandmother,
who smelled evidence of bush-ranging ancestry in
every departure from the standards of South Ken-
sington. And Charmian had none of the blood of
South Kensington in her veins. She was her mother's
daughter all in all — the child of beautiful Mary
Eves, whose father . . . Well, in the old Queensland
days nobody thought cattle-lifting the worst of
crimes : and a too hasty use of rifle or revolver was
easily forgiven.
Charmian " took after " the Eves' side of the
family. Grant Ducane, her second cousin, resembled
the English side. Charmian used to think it was
small wonder the Ducanes had emigrated to Aus-
tralia : surely any country that was cursed with the
whole family would do its best to get rid of as many
6 4
GUINEA GOLD 65
as possible. . . . And at seventeen years of age
she married Grant.
She was not in love with him. But old Mrs.
Ducane was dying: there was no money in the family
except what Grant possessed, and everybody said
little Charmian would come to a bad end if she were
not looked after. She had had admirer after ad-
mirer, all penniless and few " serious ": she had
been half engaged to one at fifteen, entangled with
two a year later, and jilted another before her next
birthday. She did not care particularly about any
of the crowd — who cares for what is won so cheaply?
— and when Grant told her she was going to marry
him, she accepted the fact with resignation, not un-
mixed with pleasure. There would be a wedding,
and a white satin dress with a long train, and a cake,
and a bridal journey — all sorts of pleasant things,
with only Grant to take the edge off them. And
Grant had always been a kill-joy in her life: he
wouldn't be any worse now. He was so old —
thirty-five or more — she hardly felt as if he could
have much to do with her. They would go their
different ways, like lots of married people. And it
was something to have a house of one's own — be-
sides the wedding fun.
She did not get the wedding fun. Grant did not
want to be laughed at for marrying a girl nearly
twenty years younger than himself: he insisted that
the grandmother and Charmian should travel to
Brisbane and have a private ceremony early in the
66 GUINEA GOLD
morning. There was not even a cake. There was
no white satin dress — the little bride cried her eyes
red over this the night before the wedding, and
Grant scolded her next day for having made a
figure of herself. There was no house of her own.
Grant's business took him to a dull inland town and
they lived there in an hotel. They went straight to
the hotel from Brisbane, and there was no wedding-
tour. Charmian wondered indignantly what was
the good of getting married at all.
She discovered before long that it was possible to
hate Grant much more than she had ever done be-
fore. She discovered that other men were sorry for
her, and that they seemed very kind. There were
storms that gave the other people endless food for
talk. And the women began to look coldly on
Charmian.
She discovered more things as the months and
years went by. She discovered that the other men
were not really kind at all, only wicked. She cried
and cried when she found this out. What was she to
do when the women hated her and the men were
wicked? Was she never to have anyone to talk
to? She grew ill with worry of mind, and a doctor
was called in. He seemed different from all the rest,
and Charmian, only three-and-twenty as yet, confided
all her troubles to him. She told him how she hated
Grant, and what a lonely life she had. She told
him that the other men were wicked. The doctor
was sympathetic and patient: he was rather re-
GUINEA GOLD 67
ligious too, and that pleased Charmian: when a man
quoted texts to you — the Song of Solomon and other
Bible things — he could not be bad. Charmian, at
this period of her married life, used to pray for the
doctor every night, and quite seriously thank Heaven
for having sent him to her. She did not like wicked
people, and there were so many in the world, and
they all wanted you to be like themselves. The
doctor told her he loved her for her purity of soul.
It was after this that the explosion came — the
volcanic eruption that laid waste the dull and homely
garden of Charmian's life, and cast her out to wan-
der in the wilderness. She never knew how they
missed that train, lost their way, got left in the little
country inn. The doctor knew, but he never told.
He told her a great many other things — things she
had never thought to hear from him — but not that.
Charmian, burning with indignation and sobbing
with bitter disappointment, went home next day to
tell her husband, and bear his sarcasm, his reproofs,
even perhaps his violence. " It will only be another
row," she said to herself . . . there had been so
many, though he was always saying he loved her.
Grant Ducane was gone. Their rooms were
given up. There was a letter for her, written that
morning and left with the manageress. The woman
stood by and watched her read it, with a greedy
eye. Charmian was always sorry that she had so
nearly fainted — it must have pleased the harpy who
watched her.
68 GUINEA GOLD
The letter told her that he had found her out, that
he would have her disgraced and imprisoned, and
that she had no home with him any more.
She lived on the remains of her last quarter's
allowance till the case came on. She was not ar-
rested on the poisoning charge, for Grant Ducane
had found there was not evidence enough. Never-
theless, he believed firmly that his downtrodden little
wife had intended to free herself by a crime, and
during the hearing of the divorce case his counsel
brought in so many references to the unlucky bottle
in the jewel-case, to Charmian's one frantic threat, to
a certain dose of the poison, mixed and poured into
a glass Ducane occasionally used, that for some time
the question of arrest really did hang in the balance.
On the public mind the final effect was much the
same as if Charmian had been tried and barely ac-
quitted. Most people believed she intended to com-
pass the death of Grant.
The divorce was given without question. The
doctor denied everything smilingly, and as if from
mere conventional motives. Charmian's innocent
walks and talks, the incidents of her illness, the
stay at the hotel, all appeared black as night,
under the clever handling of Ducane's counsel. The
doctor employed no counsel at all. He knew him-
self to be ruined professionally, but he had come
into money not long before, and could snap his
fingers at that. He expected to marry Mrs. Ducane
in six months' time: true, she had expressed the
GUINEA GOLD 69
strongest disgust and hatred for him; but, after all,
she had been very fond of him to begin with, and
what could she do for a living?
What Charmian did has been told. She was
mortally afraid of the doctor, as she was afraid of
the man from whom she had been freed. She did
not think it impossible that her lover might succeed
in worrying and driving her into a marriage — the
little creature felt herself, instinctively, destined to
be a quarry in the struggle of life. But hunted
beasts are swift, if they are not brave. She fled.
New Guinea seemed to her a sanctuary, by reason
of its remoteness, and once landed under the leaning
palms of Samarai she felt safe.
The insult that had driven her into the bar of
Figg's hotel really did not trouble her much.
Women had always been hateful to her: had always
talked and hinted and cast sly stones. They were a
little more open now: that was all. She was very
lonely at times. But then, she had been lonely all
her life.
She liked Rupert Dence. He had been senti-
mental about her from the first, just like all the other
men, and when she told him something of her story,
he had promptly said he believed her. She felt,
indeed, that, whether he did believe or not, he didn't
care — that if the tales had been true he would have
shot those long glances from his sleepy blue eyes at
her, and pressed her fingers when she handed him
his glass, just the same. That, she supposed, was as
70 GUINEA GOLD
much credit as she could ever expect from anyone
again. And poor Rupert, if he had not been such a
drinker, was a lovable soul. As to the drinking —
well, you cannot act as barmaid in an Australasian
hotel for several months without losing a good deal
of the ordinary feeling on such matters. Charmian
was rather in danger of classing her men friends, in
these days, by the various ways in which they got
drunk. Some were so much less objectionable than
others.
Then came George Scott.
He did not drink at all, after the first evening.
He went to church on Sundays, whenever the mis-
sionary held service. He had nothing to do with
the native girls. He did not swear (Charmian had
never heard him in an engine-room wrestling with
a refractory piece of machinery). He was a gen-
tleman every inch, in spite of his hardened hands:
and he treated her like a gentlewoman. And he
was brave. One of the pearling men from the Tro-
briand Islands, where the saints do not come from,
called him a " wowser," on a certain Sunday morn-
ing, as the Ulsterman was starting out to church.
Scott did not understand the term at first, but being
told by a Melbourne traveller that it meant, in the
" Australian language," the most offensive kind of
canting sneak and hypocrite, he said that it was a
work of piety and necessity to teach the pearler
better, and that he would stay home and do it.
On which the whole population of Figg's adjourned
GUINEA GOLD 71
to the top of the island, where they spent the hours
of divine service enjoying the spectacle of the best
fight that Samarai had seen since the good old, bad
old Crown Colony days. The pearler was the worse
damaged of the two, and public opinion voted him
" served right." Scott went to evening church, black
eyes, swollen nose, and all. He said he would teach
any confounded beach-comber in the Pacific to dic-
tate to a decent Belfast man: but it seemed that no
beach-comber, confounded or otherwise, desired any
further lessons on the subject.
Charmian was delighted: she had not very much
religion herself of any kind, but she could not help
respecting a man who was ready to defend his beliefs
so vigorously. It was about this time that she began
watching for Scott's boots on the staircase. From
the back of the bar you could see the boots of people
going up and down the stairs, though you could not
see their bodies or faces until they crossed the hall
and came out into the street — and if you were busy
serving at the crucial moment you did not see them
at all, which was bitterly disappointing. She got to
know every pair of boots and shoes the young Ul-
sterman possessed, as well as she knew her own face
in the glass. By and by she used to feel a jump
of the heart that nearly made her drop the tumblers
when that pair of brown boots with the heavy strap-
ping, or the black leather shoes with the wide laces,
or the canvas deck-shoes, trodden long and narrow
by the light Irish foot, came quickly down the stair-
72 GUINEA GOLD
case. She didn't want Scott to drink like some of
the others, but she did wish he would come in now
and then for a glass of beer — where was the harm of
that? A man needn't be so very, very good.
She began to be conscious now of a gnawing little
hunger that beset her every morning when she had
not seen Scott since the previous night. It was a
desire to look at him again. She used to come out
into the front of the bar and stand in the breeze,
because it was so hot. . . . From this point of view
you could see people going upstairs — all of them. A
good view of the clean white " patrol " suit, with the
fair bright head topping it, seemed to give her
enough to go on with for the morning. But after
that the hunger would begin again, and the sight of
a pair of long narrow shoes taking the stairs three
at a time was no better than a crumb of bread to a
starving man. She did not know how to live till
four o'clock, — when one was off duty one could go
round the island, and sometimes one passed the white
patrol suit on the coral track so near that one could
see the very threads in the stuff. Every time she met
Scott, after an interval of half a day or so, she de-
cided that his face was better-looking than she had
remembered it. She was never quite sure that his
eyebrows were really jet-black, in spite of his fair
hair, until she had had another look. " If he were a
girl," she said, " nobody would think it real." And
she could never believe that his forehead was really
so white and so broad and smooth, just like a little
GHJINEA GOLD 73
child's, till she had seen it again. " It makes him
look so innocent," she said. " But men are not —
none of them are really good."
She could not understand why he did not talk to
her more. After that hour on the bench beside the
magazine, when he had been so kind, — or seemed so
kind: she had to remind herself that it was always
seeming, — she had certainly expected that he would
ask her to go a walk with him, or come into the
bar for a bottle of mineral waters, or linger near her
corner of the verandah when she was likely to come
out of her room. He did not. He looked at her
in a merry, bright-eyed Irish way when they met by
accident, and sometimes he stopped for a moment's
talk — but Rupert Dence took three times as much
trouble to please her. Dence used to go over to the
islands in the Straits to find bush flowers that she
liked: he was always asking her to go boating, and
sometimes she went, — and he was never out of the
bar. Even when he had taken too much whiskey, as
he did every night, he was civil and kind to her:
when he found he had almost reached his limit he
would slip away as best he could, to avoid offending
her eyes. If he grew violent, it was always after she
had gone to bed and Figg had taken her place in
the bar. Rupert, according to his lights, thought
much of her, and considered her.
Did Scott?
Well, yes, she thought he did. She had no reasons
at all for thinking so, which made her all the more
74 GUINEA GOLD
certain. But if he did, why did he stay — just where
he was? Other men were ready enough, and quick
enough, if they got so much as a crumb of encour-
agement: sometimes when they got none. And
Scott . . .
She did not understand him.
In the long days that had to be worn through
somehow, waiting for Anderson's return, Scott
avoided much intimate conversation with himself.
He had the habit of hard work, and made it serve
him. There was a steam launch that had been sunk
and salvaged: her engineer found the job of repair-
ing the machinery almost too much for him, and
Scott, with his solid Belfast training at his back, and
his kindly will to help anyone who needed helping,
came in at the right moment, like an angel into,
rather than out of, a machine. The engineer's trou-
bles melted in a morning, and his heart was filled
with gratitude for this aristocrat of his profession
who was so ready to waive his superior position, and
come down to labour all day among strained and
rusted machinery with a little Tyneside rat who had
never a certificate to his name, nor a shade of gentle
manners in his whole composition.
Working hard all day in a tropical climate, and
going to bed early, left not much time or inclination
for musing. Scott did not muse. Sometimes, how-
ever, irrelevant scraps of poetry would float into his
brain and stick there an entire day, keeping time
GUINEA GOLD 75
to the sound of his tools on the rusted steel, or to the
low " sss-frssh " of the waves on the spit of sand
where they worked. . . . There was a poem of
Adam Lindsay Gordon's : he could only recall stray
fragments, but they haunted him all one burning
day, when the trades had blown themselves out, and
the sea was white-hot glass, and Normanby Island's
three thousand feet of sapphire cliff stood pale and
clear on the horizon of the Straits, forty miles
away.
"... You in your beauty above me bent,
Spoke to me, touched me without intent,
Made me your servant for once and all.
From a long way off, to look at your charms
Made my blood run redder in every vein. . . .
. . . The gusts in the gloomy gorges whirl
Brown leaves and red till they cover your bed —
Now I trust that your sleep is a sound one, girl!"
Would she live long — that beautiful, ill-fated soul?
"Now I trust that your sleep is a sound one, girl!"
The sea was saying it: the hot waves that crisped
upon the blinding shore. Would she be sorry when
the long sleep came? Would it come soon?
1 Desdemona should have been her name," some-
thing inside the man was saying. " Desdemona — ill-
fated."
u If you wouldn't mind 'olding that axle a bit
stiddier "... came the apologetic voice of the
76 GUINEA GOLD
little man from Tyneside. And Scott begged his
pardon. " Give it to me," he said. " You'd better
do the holding, and I'll fix it."
u Do you take quinin' now and again? You
should," said the other. u You look as if a dose
wouldn't do you any 'arm. That fever's always on
the pounce after a new chum."
Next day it rained: a roaring, stamping, drown-
ing rain, that made the Ulsterman understand once
for all how the two-fathom annual rainfall of Sama-
rai came about. It was impossible to go on with the
launch. One could only tramp restlessly up and
down the verandahs, looking out through a grey cur-
tain upon drowned white coral streets, downbeaten
pawpaws, flooded cricket-ground. The noise was so
great that one had to shout when speaking. It was
not really rain that fell, it was water in great sheets :
one felt as though one stood in the perilous passage
behind Niagara, seeing the ceaseless fall swing down
before one's face. Every moment one felt that it
was pouring so hard that it must stop: and every
minute it seemed to take breath and pour harder.
It got on Scott's nerves — it, the relentless rain of
Samarai, gets on the nerves of most people. Most
of the day he tramped ceaselessly, feeling the veran-
dah boards sag beneath his feet, but hearing no more
noise from his steps than if he had been deaf.
Something beat in his brain to-day, as yesterday, but
it seemed to have reference to nothing in particular.
All the more it tormented him, and would not leave
GUINEA GOLD 77
him, chanting throughout the day to the magnificent
orchestra of the rain . . . just a scrap of Shake-
speare out of his old school " Reciter," marked with
the mechanical emphasis of the book: first one word
in prominence, and then another —
"But Brutus is an honourable man , . ."
"For Brutus is an honourable man . . ."
Late in the day, when the dark afternoon was
glooming down to night, a call of " Sail-0 ! " sounded
from the beach. A small white schooner, driving
dim and ghostlike through the rain, came up from
China Straits and fluttered to the jetty.
Rupert Dence came out of his room and looked
from under the pouring eaves.
" That's Blackwood's schooner," he said. " An-
derson's back."
CHAPTER VI
" . . . Easy? I'm glad you think so: just you
keep on thinkin' that way as long as you can."
Scott was beginning to understand what Dence had
meant when he said that. They were well started
on the gold-hunt now — Dence, Anderson, himself,
and four-and-thirty native carriers — and the way of
the traveller in Papua was unfolding itself.
First, there had been a trip of several hundred
miles along the coast, in a cranky toy steamer meant
to carry nine passengers in her cabins and twenty or
so on her decks. She carried nineteen and eighty-
one. The nor'-west season was setting in, and the
weather was uniformly bad. There were storms
every .day, and they could seldom anchor at
night, which was annoying, because much of the
Papuan coast is hardly charted at all, and if you run
in the dark you take chances. The Cora Lynn took
them, also much of the Pacific Ocean in sections.
They got to the Kikiramu in time, nevertheless : and
the captain said he had really thought she was gone
this time; another trip like that would finish her,
because there wasn't a spot in her plates you couldn't
rip up with a tin-opener. Nobody minded what he
said: they had heard it all before, and the Cora
Lynn still laboured up and down the coasts.
78
GUINEA GOLD 79
Arrived at the Kikiramu, it seemed that the
launch which travelled irregularly up and down the
river was out of reach at the upper end, and not
likely to appear until her engineer wanted cocoa-
nuts or fish. Scott's party, and the various other
miners going up to the Kikiramu field with their
boys, were dumped out on a black sand beach in the
midst of the mangrove swamps and left to wait.
They waited two weeks, living in tents, using up
their provisions, and swearing. When the Dragon-
Fly launch turned up, she took forty or fifty carriers,
and ten white (she was built to carry two in her
cabin and eight or nine on deck) , while the remain-
der waited another week. It rained atrociously: it
was as hot as the inside of a Turkish bath: the
sand-flies bit, and mosquitoes stung, and if you went
along the beach in the dusk, to get cool, you ran
the risk of being taken by an alligator. Scott found
this out the first night that he tried a solitary stroll :
something that sounded like a torpedo leaving its
tube charged at him in the dark out of the water, and
if he had not spent five years in the shipyards of
Belfast, where clumsiness of movement means
wounds and death, there would have been a full-fed
crocodile that night on the banks of the Kikiramu,
and an empty tin plate at the miners' supper. But he
jumped quick enough — just — and ran as he never
had thought he could run, reaching the lighted tents
much out of breath. Nobody thought his adventure
remarkable, though some laughed at it. Nor was
80 GUINEA GOLD
anyone excited when a miner came in exhibiting an
ugly barbed throwing-spear which he had found
sticking in the wall of his tent a few minutes earlier.
Anderson said they were cross-grained little beggars
about here, and related, as an excellent joke, an
adventure he had met with on Ferguson Island, while
recruiting. Taking French leave, he had entered
the house of an absent trader, and while enjoying a
capital night's rest in the trader's good new bed,
fitted with a real chain mattress, he was awaked by
several violent blows from underneath, followed by
enraged and embittered howls. He snatched a lan-
tern from the table where it was burning, and made
a dash out underneath the house. There he found
a Ferguson Islander yelling over the loss of his
treasured spear, which was hopelessly entangled, ow-
ing to its barbs, in the meshes of the chain mattress.
The native fled at his approach, crying with rage
and disappointment, and accusing the absent trader
of witchcraft — also, incidentally, of unsportsmanlike
conduct, and not playing the game.
The story was received with roars of laughter.
Dence remarked that some of the D'Entrecasteaux
traders put sheet iron on the wicker floors under
their beds, and further observed that he had known
a whole Papuan family (down in Mekeo, where
they sleep in a huge native-cloth bag, to keep off the
mosquitoes) speared like snakes in a sack by a war-
party, who never so much as entered the house.
More laughter greeted this tale. Scott turned into
GUINEA GOLD 81
his bed — a sack stretched over a frame of poles —
wondering at the local taste in jokes, and feeling
thankful that the solid sand of the beach was his own
flooring that night.
Then for four days they chunked and rattled up
the river, a great cocoa-coloured flood full of snags
and reefs, in the tired little launch. All day they
lay under the awning of the engine-room roof, where
they could just find space to crawl about: enduring
as best they could the three-times-heated furnace of
the sun, the engine, and the stove, where meals were
cooked. Food was served among the sprawling
boots of the company, and eaten from their knees.
At night they landed, holding on by teeth and eye-
lids, on a perpendicular bank topped by trees set as
close as hairs in a brush. The boys started clearing
immediately, and swung their axes to fine effect: in
half an hour the dense undergrowth was gone, and
space left among the great trees for tents and fires.
They had supper in the ©pen, where they could
stretch their cramped limbs, and they slept under the
hastily slung flies of their tents, the fresh-smelling
earth of the forest floor beneath them, and the un-
trodden, unknown vistas of the primeval wilderness
looking at them through the open flaps of the canvas.
It was always possible that the Karivas, a ghostly
night-wandering tribe, never yet seen by the white
men of Papua, might attack the camp in their silent
way and carry off a dead body or two out of the
tents without the others being a whit the wiser. It
82 GUINEA GOLD
was not impossible that a hungry alligator might
creep up out of the river and take his luck where
he found it. And it was clear — judging by the death-
adder that dropped from the fly of the tent right
into Anderson's supper-plate one night, and the
lively tiger-snake captured under Scott's mosquito
net — that other drawbacks to the simple life might
be discovered along the Kikiramu River. But the
miners " took the chances." . . . Scott began to
know the phrase.
During the journey he thought it well to learn as
much, and say as little, as he could. The miners
seemed to like him, though they called him a " new
chum " and a " kid " — they were all much older than
himself, some of them beginning to display grey
beards on their unshaven chins as the days went on.
They talked a good deal of the field, and the best
ways of prospecting, and the possibility of the reef
being found some day — up on the spurs of Albert
Edward or Victoria, perhaps, or it might be some-
where on Scratchley. Scott learned that " alluvial "
mining is mere scraping and washing out of gold
that has escaped from the mother-source: he heard
that all the gold found on the mainland of Papua had
been of this kind, and that none of it began to com-
pare with the richness of some of the Australian
fields in the early days. You didn't get nuggets in
Papua, he heard : you might, if you were very lucky
indeed, and if you were not a new chum, find a patch
GUINEA GOLD 83
where there was as much as eight or ten ounces a day
to be got for a little while (What was an ounce
worth? Three pounds, fifteen shillings), and, say,
two or three ounces for some months. But in gen-
eral, if you got a couple of ounces a day, you did
very well. And you had to work for that, and you
had to feed and pay your boys out of it. What did
you want boys for? Well, you were to wait till you
got to the field and you'd see.
None of the other miners knew the real object of
Scott's party: it was supposed that they were merely
out on an ordinary prospecting trip. They had suc-
ceeded in finding two of the late Mr. Cripps' boys,
by the simple process of going down to the village
where he had recruited his carriers and asking where
each available recruit had last been working. But
they had asked no questions so far.
"What a native don't know, he can't tell: we
don't want to get them talking when we're passing
through the field," said Anderson.
They had gone over the paper again at Samarai,
and Anderson had given it as his opinion that Cripps'
reef might be found, though it would take a good
deal of finding. The dead man and his mate had
started from the Kikiramu field into the unknown,
on their last journey, accompanied only by their
boys. None of the miners knew exactly where
Cripps had gone, or what he had been doing when
he met with his end. They only knew that his
mate had come back to Samarai alone, abandoning
84 GUINEA GOLD
the trip because it was unsuccessful, and that, later
on, the natives had brought down news of Cripps'
death. That was all.
Anderson had taken command of the little party
from the first, and Scott, not without a grimace or
two, had let him do it. He was not fond of being
" bossed "; but the tall, tough, quiet miner had the
knack of inspiring confidence, even in those who did
not like him. Lying on the hot roof of the engine-
room, and watching the mysterious black walls of
the forest slide endlessly by, Scott thought once more
of his favourite poet, and decided that certain lines
of Gordon's — describing a horse, it was true — fitted
Anderson to a hair.
"The lean brown head of the Blacklock breed
And the resolute eye that loves the lead."
Dence was a much more likable character, even al-
lowing for his destroying weakness — but Anderson
was the man to take them through what they were
going to face, or die in the attempt. And here, on
the Kikiramu River, the second clause seemed to
carry a meaning more than merely rhetorical.
He also thought, much and long, of Charmian
Ducane. Not for a moment did he attempt to dis-
guise from himself the thing that had happened to
him. It was just what had happened to millions of
other men, in fiction and in real life. He had found
out, after binding himself to a woman, that she was
not the one woman, and that someone else was.
GUINEA GOLD 85
That other had been shapen and made for him from
the earliest dawn of life and time, and he loved her
to the remotest corner of his soul. But he was not
to have her.
Yes, it had certainly happened to millions: he
could believe that. What he could not believe
was that it had hurt any of the millions as it hurt
him.
Well, pain could be borne. But there was some-
thing worse. Truth and untruth, honour and dis-
honour, seemed to have changed places. Was it
not wrong, even wicked, that he should leave his
own woman, Charmian, and marry the other, the
good, noble, loving girl who yet was not created and
marked out for him from the world's beginning?
Almost adulterous that union looked to him — now.
. . . Had not he and Charmian lived before, been
married in some former existence? He had always
laughed at crystal-gazers and their kin, but if one
of them were to come to him now, and show him in
the depths of the magic ball strange pictures of a
life of long ago, when he and Charmian had been
bridegroom and bride, had travelled together, lived
in the same house for years and years, brought
up and married their children, grown old and died
together — why, he would have believed every bit of
it. He almost believed it now. Could a man have
such a sense of passionate right to a woman without
foundation for that right existing — somewhere,
somewhen? He found himself thinking of Char-
86 GUINEA GOLD
mian's divorced husband as a man of the Middle
Ages might have thought of a robber-knight who
had carried away and imprisoned his lady. The
lady was freed: the robber had never had any right
to her: she had hated him, and gone with him all
unwillingly — in God's name, then, forget, and let
her come back to her home !
But the gate of home was barred — something in
time and space had gone wrong, and she might not
enter any more. So she was out there all alone on
the open road, where cruel storms might break on
her unprotected head, and other robber-knights
might come riding by and carry her off again. And
he to whom she belonged of right could only look at
her across the bars- and turn away. She had called
to him (he knew well that Charmian loved him),
but he could not answer.
. . . Could he not? Was it really right to
spoil three lives instead of one? Down went the
balance with a clang on the side of expediency.
. . . Was there such a thing in the world as
honour? Up flew the scale and down on the other
side. What would any decent man say, if one asked
him? Why, of course he would say . . . but then,
the decent man would not know the circumstances:
he would think that this was an ordinary love-
affair, whereas . . .
Scott almost burst out laughing. Was not every-
body's especial love-affair unique? And had he not
supposed himself, a year ago, that the feeling he
GUINEA GOLD 87
had for Janie was without parallel in the history of
humanity?
Then — this new love of his — was it something
that he would forget and make little of, some day?
No, by God, it was not. He had no reasons: he
could not have made a statement of his case, in
speech or in writing, worth twopence. He could not
find words to express or prove anything at all in
connection with the whole affair: it seemed to have
no more to do with words than music had to do with
the symbols of algebra — but this was — IT. This
made him understand what Antony felt for Cleo-
patra. This told him why Parnell had sold Ireland.
This made plain to him the excuses claimed by
seeming-virtuous wives and husbands when they
broke through the fences separating the Good from
the Bad, and fled hand in hand with their disgrace-
ful loves to obscurity. Why, if he, George Scott,
had met Charmian before her divorce, he could
have imagined himself smashing through that very
fence with small remorse, — if he had been free.
But now . . .
It seemed a much worse thing to desert Janie. It
seemed so bad, indeed, that he could not do it.
" And I would like to know," groaned Scott,
"where my ideas of decency have got to if I can
look at things in such a crooked way? "
" All the same," he said to himself, " crooked or
straight, it comes to the one thing — I can't be a
beast to Janie."
CHAPTER VII
He had something else to think of before long.
The lazy days were ended at last — the long, slow
crawl up the coast, the wait at the river-mouth, the
leisurely chunking up the river, the mornings and
afternoons when one lay on the deck of the Dragon-
Fly smoking and dreaming and watching the flights
of gargoyle-headed hornbills rise screaming out of
the reeds, or the rare red birds of paradise rocket
from tree to tree. Already the world of trains and
cities seemed almost incredibly remote, the very
ports of Papua itself dim, unsubstantial as mirages
seen and forgotten on a long desert journey. And
yet the real work lay all before them.
One morning, about eleven o'clock, the miners
began to get astir, packing their canvas " swags "
and shouting directions, in pidgin-English and in
scraps of many dialects, to their boys. The car-
riers themselves, who had spent the days of travel in
one long orgy of betel-chewing and Jew's-harp and
tin-whistle playing, began to collect their own ef-
fects, their beads and bits of dried fish and sticks of
sago, their shell armlets and . dog-tooth necklaces,
and Manchester cotton singlets. It was plain that
the landing-place was near.
&3
GUINEA GOLD 89
In another half-hour the Dragon-Fly had stopped,
and a stream of excited Papuans was spilling over
her bulwarks on to the muddy river-bank, like ants
running on to a plate. Sacks, bags, and cases were
chucked ashore; owners jumped after them. The
launch began vomiting cargo to an incredible extent,
and the crowd of fresh carriers who had been wait-
ing for her arrival, encamped in a small clearing,
came forward with their sacks and poles to carry
the goods to the little split-log store just visible some
distance off. There was a dwelling-house beside the
store, — a mere hut piled together of miscellaneous
bush material, — and here, in company with the one
lonely white in charge of the store, the miners spent
the night, camping in their tents as before, and busy-
ing themselves all evening over the packing of their
goods in carrying-swags for the journey to the gold-
field, two days' march away.
By seven o'clock next morning the storekeeper
had his own boys — a crowd of thirty-nine naked
savages, marshalled by a wild-looking Kiwai in a
crownless hat and half a pair of trousers — away on
their march to the field. The miners spent the day
breaking open countless cases of their own, cov-
ering the muddy ground with small mountains of
tinned goods, — meat, fish, vegetables, fruit — with
mats of rice and sacks of flour, with oblong tins
of kerosene, sides of bacon in canvas, canisters of
tea, bottles of sauce wrapped in straw, matches,
tobacco, blankets, billy-cans. Scott took a hand in
90 GUINEA GOLD
the work and in the subsequent stowing away of
everything into small swags for the backs of the
carriers. Loads were light, no more than fifty
pounds was given to any man, and some had less.
It looked as though there were work ahead. Scott
was not sorry: he rather fancied his walking, and,
as the youngest man in the company, thought he
might be able to show them a thing or two.
But next morning, when they started, it took ex-
actly half a mile to dispose of that illusion — half
a mile of the Kikiramu track, which was not, as
some of the men assured him, by any means the
,orst in the country. Scott would not have known it
was a track at all if he had not been told. When
you could see it, it was mostly a river-bed, with
the river in full possession, or else a ninety-foot
log, worn and slippery with rain, slung across some
precipitous gully at an alarming slope, and guiltless
of handrail. Sometimes it was a swamp of scarlet
clay, glutinous, holding, and half-knee high. Oc-
casionally it was a bit of " corduroy " logging, laid
in black slime and more than half-buried in it: as
soon as you got over this, you stopped to pick the
leeches out of your socks, and you did not bother to
wipe the trickles of blood off your boots, as you
knew there would be plenty more by and by.
When you were not staggering over the corduroy or
balancing with set teeth and throbbing heart across
one of those atrocious log bridges, or jumping from
rock to rock in the midst of a foaming rapid, you
GUINEA GOLD 91
were climbing endlessly up a sort of purgatorial
staircase composed of roots and slippery clay, help-
ing yourself with your hands, lifting your feet to
the level of your waist at every step, and feeling, as
the relentless tramp went on and on, that you would
certainly die before the end of it, but that you would
rather die — much rather — than give in.
" Good God, what are they made of? " groaned
the u new chum " to himself. " This would be a
fair-to-middling pace on an ordinary road, in a
cool climate — whereas here ..."
It did not look as if they were going fast — they
seemed to be strolling — strolling up precipices, over
bridges made of half a dozen plaited creepers,
strolling from tip to tip of rocks buried in roaring
foam, strolling from bristling log to log, in a chaos
of felled trees — always in a temperature that set
every pore gaping wide, and kept it streaming —
just strolling. It was not the pace, but the unvary-
ing rate, that was killing. Scott got left a dozen
times, struggled up as often, got left again, and
kept the party waiting, but shut his teeth and stuck
to it. They did nine miles of this fearful country
between two o'clock and six, with the help of one
long downhill that came as near diving on land as
anything Scott had ever seen, and stopped at last in
what was evidently a favourite camping-place — a
brown clearing in the forest, walled in by cliffs of
vegetation so knitted together with orchids, creep-
ers, and the long Jacob's ladders of the lianas, that
92 GUINEA GOLD
it seemed as if not even a snake could have wound
its way through.
The miners' small army of carriers were almost
all up as soon as the masters: some of them had
beaten the unloaded whites by half an hour. Tents
were got up and fires lighted with as much speed as
possible, for the afternoon rains, which had held
off amazingly so far, seemed now about to burst.
They did burst before supper was fairly over, and
the men finished their meal sitting almost in one
another's laps, inside the narrow shelter of the
canvas flies. All night the thunderous torrent
roared down, drowning every other sound; the
swollen Kikiramu seemed to run silently over its
rocky bed below; the carriers laughed and chattered
round their sheltered fire apparently in dumbshow.
When the camp had gone to rest, Scott slept but ill
on his sack-and-sapling couch. Something was op-
pressing him, he could scarce tell what . . . not the
thought of Charmian — that was just a dull pain that
he had learned to bear — it was something new. So
new in his experience that it seemed nameless.
He fell asleep at last with the weight still on his
mind; woke in the dead hour of the night, with the
last sparks of the camp-fires out, and the rain thun-
dering ceaselessly, and knew what it was. It was
the terror of the wilderness !
"What a country! what a country! " he said to
himself, over and over, feeling all the time that it
was not the country, but something behind it: a
GUINEA GOLD 93
giant, sinister, unfriendly power — a thing that the
little handful of whites in the country fought against,
as cavemen might have fought against " dragons of
the prime " with their little useless sticks and slings.
. . . Those awful ridges buried in knitted forest,
over which they had been creeping — the plunging
scarps and precipices — the torrential rivers, the
blue, far, unscalable mountain horns that looked at
him mockingly through rents in the choking forest
wall — what were they, ant-like little human crea-
tures, that they should dare to challenge such
powers? Here, in the interior of the last uncon-
quered territory of the world, life floated as pre-
cariously on the tossing surface of a thousand war-
ring forces as a shipwrecked swimmer floats on a
furious sea. Men were nothing, Nature — not
Mother Nature any longer, as in the lands of golden
fields and smiling hills, but " Nature red in tooth
and claw," was everything. . . . And it was out of
this appalling welter of unbroken primeval world
that he, and Dence, and Anderson, meant to rip the
secret of Cripps' gold — they three against the uni-
verse.
" Oh, Lord, I must go to sleep! " groaned Scott,
worrying his head down into the bundle of clothes
that served him for pillow^ " I'll never keep up
to-morrow." /
The rain thundered; the forest smelt fresh and
wet, through the opening of the fly. There was an
odour of something tropical and scented; there was
94 GUINEA GOLD
an oozy whiff from the river, there was the acrid
breath of dying fires, and rising through all there
was the smell of the night itself that wanderers and
campers know. Scott, the man house-reared and
city-bred, lying there beneath the little shelter of
the fly, with the men of the wilderness sleeping by
his side, began to feel that this day and this night,
and the days and the nights that had gone by be-
fore, had been an initiation. Something in him had
changed since the Cora Lynn lurched out of Sama-
rai. Something that had been lost . . . how long
ago? Gods of the doors that close behind our birth,
how long? . . . was found.
The task ahead looked no less gigantic; but the
miners' phrase gathered meaning in the face of it.
" Yes — ■ one takes the chances/ " thought Scott.
And now the camp was all asleep.
The next day was a little better than the first.
Scott found himself keeping back the party not so
much, and suffering somewhat less than the utmost
extremity of physical agony himself. This was an
improvement; but the log bridges almost annihilated
it, for they were much worse on this section, and the
newcomer found himself obliged to get down and
cross them at an ignominious crawl, shutting his
eyes to the rocks and rapids far below — while the
miners went before and after him as lightly as tight-
rope dancers, smoking and talking as they crossed.
It dawned upon him to-day, in the midst of the
GUINEA GOLD 95
eternal scrambling and sliding, wading and climbing,
that they were, and had been, passing through mag-
nificent scenery. The mad monsters at play, who
had apparently seized all those mountain ranges and
precipices and rivers, and beaten them up together
like smashed eggs in a bowl, had effected some com-
binations very wonderful and beautiful to see in the
process. There were bird-songs to be noted, too,
when labouring lungs and straining muscles allowed
one to pay attention. The loveliest birds, such as
the fiery Raggiana, the snow-white, golden-crested
cockatoos, the rare black velvet rifle-bird, only
squawked and scolded; but there were little tinkling
notes of infinite sweetness from unseen recesses of
the bush, and cheery fluting of the impudent pied
butcher-bird, and, best of all, the deep, bell-like toll
of the giant Gaura pigeon, Clara Butt among birds,
calling with a velvet voice from somewhere dim
and shadowy and far away. . . .
. . . But, after all, one had to keep up — and if
one listened or looked too much, one fell behind,
which was unbearable. Scott was well aware by this
time that these toughened pioneers could give him a
mile in every three, and more, that they were kindly
men who would grant him just as much law as he
asked for — when he asked it. Just for that reason
he asked none. He could not swallow a bit of
tinned meat or a fragment of biscuit at the midday
halt for lunch; he burned with thirst, but kept his
pannikin slung to his belt, scarce wet all day, know-
96 GUINEA GOLD
ing that too much water is the end of all things on
a heavy march. And he kept up.
Near sundown someone said they were close upon
the field, and Scott said the heartiest prayer of
thanksgiving that had left his lips for many a day.
Just as he was calculating that they must be within
half an hour's walk, came the last insult of Nature
and New Guinea — a ridge like a wall, four hundred
feet high, with a rough log and liana ladder set upon
its face among the tangled trees that hung down and
out over the empty air. The heart of the " new
chum " died within him, but he set his face to the
wall and climbed himself blind. He could scarcely
see where he was, or stand upon his feet when he
reached the top. Dence had gone on; the rest were
invisible, far ahead. Only Anderson stood at the
top of the ridge, with one foot on the upward and
one on the downward slope — for it was no wider
than the roof of a house — holding a whiskey-bottle,
cork out.
" Take two or three swallows; it'll get you down
to the camp," he said. His manner was cold, but
there was approval in the hard green eyes; and
Scott, his ragged-out nervous system responding in-
stantly to the fiery drink, felt warmed in body and
mind. Absurdly glad, too, that he had pleased
Anderson.
They waited for a moment on the narrow spine of
the ridge, Anderson standing as still as a tree-trunk
and looking at something a long way off. The
GUINEA GOLD 97
miners always seemed to be looking at something a
long way off. Scott, while he got back his strength,
and let the whiskey do its work, sat on a fallen log,
staring up and down, and wondering where the field
was; for he had heard you could see it from the top
of the ridge, and he was eager for the sight of that
wonderful and fateful thing, a goldfield.
Under the toes of his boots there were treetops
garlanded in wreathing cloud: below, more and
more treetops, veiling a tremendous gorge deep-
furred with forest that had shot up close and spindly
to reach the far-off light. At the bottom one could
hear an invisible river wrangling over rocks and
falls. Opposite, the wave of forest that swept
down to the river from the crest of the ridge gath-
ered itself again for a splendid rush up again into
the zenith of the sky. Beyond were green and
blue fragments of the crests of other incredible earth
waves — one could almost feel the colossal down-
ward rush and upward sweep of every billow. It
seemed as though the ridge on which one stood must
by and by swing loose and hurl its tossing forest
crest at the very sun in heaven.
An appalling landscape, if a lovely one. But. . .
where was the field?
Scott began to .understand. A few thin streams
of smoke rose up through the trees, here and there,
indicating camps and fires. In one spot there was
just so much bush cleared away as would allow one
to build two or three little brown huts; and there
98 GUINEA GOLD
was a thin scratch of track leading down to the
clearing. This, no doubt, was the store and the
warden's office. For the miners it was clear that
they lived, like fish, groping about at the bottom of
the deep green sea of forest, a hundred feet re-
moved from the light of day.
" What a country! " he thought.
" Ready? " asked Anderson, turning his iron-bark
face and shaggy beard towards Scott.
Scott was not ready, for his limbs felt like lead,
and his internal organs were fighting each other for
place and space that seemed to have suddenly failed.
But he was up at once, and footing it down the
gorge, as gaily as he might. There was a sort of
staircase of rough logs here, and a handrail to hold
by — it was possible for a very, very tired man to
walk as if he were not tired at all. And here was
the store, after only a few minutes — a long, low
hut built of split slabs from the bush, with a wide
verandah and a rough bench set on the ground be-
neath, and a score or more of miners, raising a
shout as Anderson came down the log ladder. He
was a favourite, it seemed.
Some of them greeted Scott too, and Dence, who
was already rather above himself (having clearly
been sampling the goods of the store), called out
patronisingly, " Not too bad for a new chum."
That night the men slept in mosquito-netted rows
under the verandah roof, while the inevitable rain
poured down, and somebody's gramophone snarled
GUINEA GOLD 99
tiny songs from a neighbouring hut. Scott felt at
peace. They were well on the way to fortune now —
to fortune and . . .
Janie?
Why, of course. What other possibility was
open — to Brutus, who was an honourable man?
" And so that's how you get gold? "
Anderson, standing in the bed of a river, shook
the last of the wet stones and gravel out of the
shallow tin basin he was holding. In the midst of
the round of white metal were one or two pinhead
specks of dull yellow.
" That's how you get it," he said.
Scott looked on, fascinated. Gold! The thing
you had to wring from other men, all the world
over — the thing you sold your liberty for, lied and
cheated for, maybe; worked for, six days through,
so that on the eve of the seventh day another man
might, grudgingly, hand you out two or three little
pieces of it — gold, here, before his eyes, dipped out
of the Kikiramu River — free!
, You hired your team of boys, you took up your
claim and worked it, you lifted tin dishes full of
gravel and clay out of the water and shook them.
And in your hand was gold.
Here, in the heart of New Guinea, the im-
memorial bargain of the world — so much liberty,
so much of the free winds and the stars and the seas,
so much of your own soul and your own hopes and
ioo GUINEA GOLD
dreams against so much hard yellow metal, held no
longer. You paid with your body for what you got,
not with your soul. You were hard-worked and hun-
gry and thirsty, you held your life in your hand, you
faced dangers, and abandoned luxuries — but it was
at your own command. And the gold you won was
clean. There was none in the world so clean as
this. Other gold came soiled by a million hands,
bloodstained, tarnished with sweat and tears. This
at least was pure: no one had ever cheated, slaved,
or oppressed to get it. You had never seen
or thought of the dirt on all the other gold,
but you saw it now, because of the cleanness of
this.
Something of the kind passed through the new
chum's mind as he stood beside Anderson in the
welter of mud and water where the jolly Papuan
boys were working hard with pick and shovel. That
the gold had not been got without labour was clear
enough. This claim was Anderson's, lying vacant
under the nominal care of the warden for the last
few weeks, while the owner went to recruit boys.
What he had done here in the course of a few
months, with his own head and hands and some
dozen untrained Papuans, was almost incredible to
Scott. The claim looked like a railway in process
of making. The dense forest trees had been re-
moved, the ground, cut down into a fifty-foot hol-
low for near a quarter of a mile, so that a wooded
flat was transformed into a raw red cliff; hundreds
GUINEA GOLD ioi
of tons of loose rock had been cleared away, and
strata of earth peeled off like the skins of an onion.
A fair-sized river had been coaxed down from its
course two miles away, by means of a long race and
several " flumes " or aqueducts, built bridge-wise
over intervening gullies. This river had been let
loose over the new cliff and the new valley, and now
ran down Anderson's claim, clearing away the over-
burden of earth that lay on the stratum of gold-
bearing " wash," and driving the gold, day by day,
into the " box " — a hollowed log lined with stones,
which was cleared out every week or so. You might
at any time wash a dish for yourself, and see how
much was probably draining into the box. This
was what Anderson had been doing.
They were to start in a day or two on their
prospecting trip; in the meantime, Anderson was
occupying some of his leisure in showing Scott over
a few of the nearer claims, including his own. This
he was just about to give over to a friend, as mining
law forbids a man to hold two claims, and the trip
would necessitate empty hands on the part of all
three prospectors.
The engineer Was fascinated; he had no idea that
gold-mining could be so interesting. He showered
questions upon Anderson, and picked up facts — as
the miner afterwards admitted, out of his pupil's
hearing — like a pigeon picking up peas. Scott's
intellect was a good tool finely handled; he was no
genius, but his mind went where he wanted it to go,
102
and did what he required it to do. In the course of
that morning he learned more about gold-mining and
prospecting than many another would have learned
in a month.
Anderson, the iron-faced, the silent, began to like
him, and even to feel somewhat proud of his new
chum pupil. It was with a view of showing him off
that he took him down to another claim a mile or
two away, and introduced him to another miner — a
white anaemic creature with glittering eyes, who was
seated on a log overlooking the boys.
It seemed that his day's work was done, for he
rose as they came up and began shaking the clay off
his boots, tightening his loosened belt and pushing
down his hat on his head, while the boys, who were
doing something to the u box," straightened up at
his whistle and began to climb the bank. Down
here at the bottom of the river-gorge, stifled by
overhanging trees, one felt the heat oppressively;
the afternoon thunderstorm was banking up in the
north-west, purple and pewter-grey, and the witches'
dance of cloud-wreaths was beginning across the
dark green summits of the valley. It certainly
seemed time to go home.
"Going up to the store?" asked Anderson of
the white-faced man, who looked as if he had been
literally boiled in the steaming woods of the Ki-
kiramu, and boiled so long that he was quite over-
done.
" No," said the other, looking at Scott.
GUINEA GOLD 103
" Been washing up, haven't you? " asked the lat-
ter. "What did you get?"
The white-faced man looked at him again and
replied —
" Did you ever hear how Tom Mackay grew so
fat?" (mentioning a publican well known in the
territory) .
11 No," replied Scott, rather bewildered.
" It was," said the miner, pausing at the turn-off
of another track, " by minding his own business."
He turned his back and disappeared down a dark
green tunnel of leafage lit with dangling orchid
blooms.
" I reckon I've got to do some talking to you,"
observed Anderson at this juncture. " You'd bet-
ter understand that we don't ask each other ques-
tions like that. You're my partner, and I didn't
mind your asking me just now what I was getting
out of my claim, though it was no particular business
of yours anyway — but don't ask the men what
they're making, and, particularly, don't let a man
think you're spying about his wash-up. Do you
understand? "
" I do," said Scott, with a good temper that dis-
armed the other at once. " And now I'm going to
do some talking to you. Why hadn't you savvy
enough to see what he was wearing round his
waist? "
M Round his waist? "
" His belt was snakeskin — an unusually big
104 GUINEA GOLD
python, if I may make a guess after being so short a
time in the country.'*
"Snakeskin?" Anderson was still puzzled.
" ' Where the big python killed our dog,' " quoted
Scott. " I'm no Sherlock Holmes — neither are you,
it seems — but that looks to me enough of a clue to
be worth an inquiry or so."
" My word! " A pause. " I'm going after him;
I'll see you at the store."
When the three partners met again that evening
round the log table that was fixed outside the store
building for meals, Anderson was wearing a snake-
skin belt, made from a very large python.
" I paid four weights for that," he remarked,
pointing it out.
Scott was about to say something, but Anderson
checked him with a glance. They were alone at the
table: privacy, however, was scarce compatible with
a split log wall behind, and a cook getting ready the
dinner within short onion-range of the human nose.
At the store kept on the field by the philanthropic
Carter and his wife (the latter absent for the mo-
ment) no one was charged anything for meals or
beds. True, meals were plain tin and biscuit for the
most part, and beds meant a yard or two of space
beneath the verandah wherein to pitch one's mos-
quito net. Also, the miners got most of their stores
there, and they drank " for the good of the house,"
so that Carter's pickle-jars of coarse river-gold
waxed many between the runs of the launch; and
GUINEA GOLD 105
Carter's castles in Spain, which were situated in the
Toorak quarter of Melbourne, grew wide and tall.
But, nevertheless, he was a good-natured old fel-
low, and liked to see his boarders enjoy themselves.
After dinner was over the three partners, at a sign
from Anderson, strolled away from the store and
up on to the great log staircase that led to the top
of the gully. In any other country the staircase
would have been regarded as a fine piece of difficult
road-making — it is not the easiest thing in the world
to make a way, practicable for heavily loaded car-
riers, and stable in a constant rainfall of several
feet per month, up a greasy clay slope of one in
three, through dense forests matted with under-
growth. But in the Country of the Impossible, im-
possible things have to be done every day. A hand-
ful of raw cannibals had made that track in a week
or two, and made it well. The miners topped it as
lightly as girls tripping in satin shoes up a ball-
room stairway. Near the summit there was a shady
bit where you could sit down on one of the cross-
way logs close to the big trees on the top of the
ridge and look away over the rolling sea of treetops
to the peeping blue crests of some unknown Ger-
man New Guinea range.
The three men got out their pipes and began to
smoke. Then Anderson spoke, looking at the far-
off fingers of lilac smoke that marked the camps in
the dense green of the " bush."
106 GUINEA GOLD
" You got it all right that time. Gabriel told me
about the belt. He bought the skin from Cripps'
cook-boy after he died. I didn't want to ask too
much about it, and Gabriel is a bit of a hatter any-
how — almost forgotten how to talk, he's been here
so long. But he did say something that's going to
be of use to us."
Anderson paused provokingly to draw at his pipe.
In the moment before he began to speak again the
two others saw brilliant and amazing visions, — little
parcels the size of your hat, sewn up in ship canvas
and monstrous heavy, like those the storekeeper had
in his safe — suites of state cabins on the P. & O. —
long grey motor-cars with glass wind-shields built
to do seventy an hour — horses in a string, clothed
and hooded and out for exercise on an empty heath,
under grey skies of the North — thousand-ton yachts
with clipper bows and mirrored saloons, and the
blue-and-biscuit coloured shores of Italian coasts,
and bays showing up through the satin-hung ports —
the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them
... all to be wrenched out of this wilderness of
the Kikiramu bush.
" It seems," went on Anderson, " that the cook-
boy died too — he pegged out with dysentery not long
after he got down to the Kikiramu camp. But be-
fore that he'd sold the skin to Gabriel, and told
him where it was got."
Two eager faces were turned to Anderson. The
afternoon thunderstorm was coming up fast: it was
GUINEA GOLD 107
nearly over the valley now, darkening the dark of
the treetops, blackening the shadowy wolf-throat
of the gorge.
The river, hidden far away below, talked thin
and clear through the threatening hush of the skies.
" He said," went on the miner, " that Cripps
killed the python on an island in a creek, where it
had been living in a hollow tree. Now, that must
have been a fair-sized island, and a big tree, I
reckon, for the python was an all-right big one. He
said, too, that Cripps and the boy had a big fight to
kill the brute, and that it smashed their dog up in
its coils like a bit of biscuit. That shows the other
boys weren't there — so they couldn't have told us
where the brute was killed. All we've got to go
on is that bit of description, but it may be worth
everything to us. I think our chances don't look too
bad. The two chaps we got on Ferguson can prob-
ably find the country he was working in, and once
we get so far we can locate the creek if we've any
luck at all. That was a lucky shot of yours,
Scott."
Scott's eyes were sparkling with pleasure, but
Dence looked more sober.
" It sounds all right, but this is a rotten bad
country for givin' you surprises," he remarked.
" However, we'll know before long. Scoot, you
fellows, if you want us to miss that storm: it's just
openin' its mouth."
It did open its mouth with a vengeance some two
io8 GUINEA GOLD
or three minutes later, but by that time the three
were under shelter in the verandah of the store,
after a flying dive down the giant stairway that
would have given points to Graham-White or the
Wright Brothers. There was nobody seated on the
rough log bench or lounging over the long table that
the store proprietor had made by the simple process
of leaving four young trees in their native earth and
nailing packing-case boards across the stumps. The
store building clung to the hip of the gorge like
a swallow's nest set on a wall: from one side of
the verandah Scott could throw the ashes out of his
pipe right into the young, salad-green foliage at the
top of a hundred-foot tree. In front the immense
drop-curtain of dark forest that shut off a full third
of the sky was swiftly disappearing behind a curdled
flood of mist. Before the men had shaken off the
stray drops of rain from their hats and faces the
landscape had been spirited away, and the store, like
some new Noah's ark, was set afloat upon a track-
less sea, islanded only by the tops of the highest
trees.
They stood looking down at the driven breakers
of mist and at the snapping sheets of lightning that
leaped between almost ceaseless stamps and thump-
ings of thunder. And in the mist they saw — what
the men of Phoenicia saw when they set their high-
beaked ships for unknown Africa — what Cortez and
his steel-breasted soldiers saw when they fought
through Mexico in search of the Land of Gold long
GUINEA GOLD 109
ago : what the men who made West Australia saw,
in the drought-smitten nineties, when they tramped
across the fiery plains strewn white with skeletons of
horse and man, to the deserts and gullies that bore
"Death in their hands, but gold!"
" If we don't get off to-morrow," said the ' new
chum/ " will you let me go down and work your
claim for a day? "
" I reckon we shan't get off," answered Ander-
son. " One or two of the boys seem to need a spell.
Yes, of course you can : I'll make you a present of all
you get — it won't be much."
" I don't care whether it's much or little," de-
clared Scott, his boyish face lighting up with a
certain hard eagerness, " and I don't want to keep
it — but I feel as if I must go and handle it some
more — wash out the dirt, and see the little yellow
specks at the bottom, and put them together. . . .
This gold-digging's a queer thing — it gets hold of
you, somehow."
" A few other men before you have noticed that,"
observed Anderson dryly.
" The little yellow specks! Don't say I didn't
warn you against them," put in Dence. " There's
nothing like them for getting hold of you, body and
soul ! Whiskey isn't in it. A girl isn't in it — even
if she is a lovely little "
no GUINEA GOLD
" What? " said Scott, turning round sharply.
" A lovely little lassie in the North of Ireland,"
finished Dence, with something that Scott described
to himself as " a rather three-cornered look." " Or
a dozen — I'm sure you left quite a dozen of the
braw Antrim leddies crying into their Robins and
Beaver linen handkerchiefs on the Fleetwood boat
quay — agh, man dear, sure ye did!"
" I don't care for that sort of joke very much,"
said Scott patiently.
" Then I'll change the conversation to something
altogether different. Do you know that there's a
mail going out to-morrow? The R.M. is sending
down boys to the landing to meet the Dragon-Fly
before she goes back."
"A mail to Samarai?" said Scott, and could
have bitten his tongue out immediately after.
" To everywhere, via Samarai," answered Dence,
the three-cornered expression just a little more vis-
ible than before.
" Then I'll see about getting some letters ready,
if there's pen and ink to be had here," said Scott.
But, somehow or other, after he had directed and
stamped the pencilled letter to Janie that had been
growing at odd moments all the journey through, he
did not feel like finishing his correspondence. How
could you write letters that . . . letters which . . .
well, anyhow, important letters — sitting at a log
table on an open verandah, with stray miners pass-
ing in and out of the store every now and then? Be-
GUINEA GOLD in
sides, there was too much noise. When people had
gone to bed . . .
By eleven o'clock lights were out, and mosquito
nets up all along the verandah. The Kikiramu,
swollen with rain, sent up a leaden rumble from the
bottom of the gorge. The mopokes wailed like
homeless ghosts away in the blackness of the bush.
There was no moon; the rain poured in the
dark.
Scott slipped out of his bunk, pyjama-clad, and lit
a hurricane-lamp. No one was in the store, and the
big counter made an excellent writing-table. He
covered several sheets of paper, writing without a
pause, closed, stamped, and directed the envelope,
and put it in the box left for mails.
When he crept back to his bunk he did not sleep,
but lay thinking for a long time.
" I'm glad I wrote," he decided. " She will feel
she has a friend. ' Anything I can do, at any time —
call me — send for me ' — yes, that was the right
way to put it. If we make a lot out of this dis-
covery — why, if one has money enough, and will
enough, one can do almost anything — without people
finding out. And she'll want help — little Charmian !
the little bird that should have lived in a safe, quiet
nest . . . she'll never make it, all alone. ..."
For he knew what Charmian did not, that even
the small foothold she had secured, in her uncon-
genial work as barmaid, was tottering beneath her
feet. Figg had been repenting his generosity in
ii2 GUINEA GOLD
engaging her, for some time, and had not scrupled
to say so. It was true that she was pretty, but that
didn't do much good to his bar, when she was so
shy and stuck up that hardly a man dared to speak
to her, — why, she was enough to frighten away his
custom into Bunn's! A bouncing North Queens-
land girl, who would joke and laugh, and take her
share of drink, for the good of the house — that
would have been a dozen times better.
Mother Figg, for the moment, was holding out
in favour of Charmian: she was, as has been ex-
plained, a thoroughly good-natured woman, and felt
sorry for the innocent little waif. How long her
good nature would continue to hold out against a
diminishing tale of receipts was another matter,
however. . . . Yes, Scott felt glad he had sent the
letter — though he was not certain, now he thought
it over, that he had not worded it a little — perhaps
a good deal — more warmly than was fair — to the
other.
But even if he had she would never see it: and,
Heaven knew, he had meant no disloyalty.
Next morning the rain was over, and the river
had run itself down a good deal. Anderson pro-
nounced his claim quite fit to work, if Scott really
wanted to try his hand, and told the newcomer what
to do — to take one or two of the boys, and set them
to work shifting the big stones in the creek, so as
to leave the " wash " free: to see the boys loosen it
GUINEA GOLD 113
up with their picks, and spade the gravel that car-
ried the gold into the current that led through the
" box " : later in the day, to lift the big stones out
of the hollow tree-trunk through which the water
ran, gather up all the small stones, gravel, and
clayey stuff at the bottom by degrees, and wash it
out in the prospecting dish over a still pool. What-
ever he got he might keep, Anderson insisted, with
the miner's generosity: and Scott agreed, for the
excitement of the hunt had got him, and he ached
to finger gold of his very own, found by himself.
In any case, Anderson meant to dispose of the
claim before leaving the Kikiramu; so all that was
got was saved from some unknown successor.
He did not return all day. It grew very hot : the
treetops in the gorge rose up still as spires in the
windless noon: the distant peaks of the German
ranges rumbled coming thunder. Anderson was
quietly busy, tallying stores with Carter and over-
looking the painted canvas swags for leaks or tears:
answering questions now and then, as other men
drifted into the store, and asked him about his pros-
pecting trip. He was very quiet, very unembar-
rassed i quite ready to discuss the journey with any-
one who wanted, but not much interested in it or
anything else. The miners " reckoned " he did not
expect very much from the trip, but thought it bet-
ter business than working on a rather poor claim in
the unprosperous Kikiramu. Dence was drinking
more than was good for him, and seemed inclined
ii 4 GUINEA GOLD
to be quarrelsome: one would almost have thought
he had something on his mind.
Dinner passed over: it was rather a good dinner,
considering the poor materials, and the few miners
who had dropped in, after the casual fashion of
the Kikiramu, remarked on the cooking. Carter, a
nebulous little person, all beard and hat, who was
supposed scarcely to know his own name, unless his
wife were there to tell it to him, murmured some-
thing about a cook: new fellow just come up from
Samarai: lazy brute who slept in the cookhouse all
the time he wasn't getting meals, but was well worth
his tucker and screw, because he could do more with
a tin of " dog " and a handful or so of flour than
most men could. Hadn't wanted a cook, but had
to take him when he came along the other day, be-
cause the fellow was " stony," and had scarce a
pair of boots to his feet, and anyhow, there was no
harm in him. Seemed he meant to start prospecting
when he had got enough to hire a few boys. More
fool he: the Kikiramu 'was nearly about done.
Thus Carter, mumbling in his beard, and not listened
to — no one ever listened to Carter, his wife least
of all.
It grew to afternoon: the rain came up roaring,
fell, and passed, leaving a pleasant freshness in the
stifling valley. The sun got behind the crest of the
giant forest billow above the store, sent out mag-
nificent rays of gold and thunder-blue through the
treetops, and disappeared. The German peaks were
GUINEA GOLD 115
yet in full day, but darkness was coming very fast
down in the gorge where the Kikiramu ran.
Not till the rising flood of night lay deep on stone
and stream and washed about the higher reaches of
the great log staircase on the cliff did Scott return
from his work. The boys trailed after him, hungry
and tired. They had had their usual " spell " and
food, but the Taubada (chief) had taken neither,
and had driven them all day as the mule-drivers
drove the mules that carried from Port Moresby to
the ranges of the Astrolabe. There was no sense
in the thing, for they were not on good gold — no
one knows better than a trained mine labourer just
what his master is getting — and there was therefore
no precedent for frenzied working, such as the
older boys had seen and joined in, time and again,
with willing hands, when Jimmy So-and-so, or Bobby
The-Other, had struck it rich, and was taking more
out of a few yards in a day than half a dozen other
claims were producing in a week.
If the boys were tired, however, Scott, who had
been working harder than any of them all day,
looked quite fresh. He was unspeakably dirty, but
that seemed to trouble him not at all — though as a
general rule he was somewhat of a dandy about his
clothes, and always eager for a clean up when he
had had a dirty job to do. Now, he came into the
store, dripping clay and water all over the dry
earthen floor, and, leaning on the bar, flung down
an exceedingly unclean pocket-handkerchief tied into
n6 GUINEA GOLD
a knot in the middle. Undoing the knot, he spilled
the contents into his dirty palm, and held it out to
Anderson.
" How much is that? " he said eagerly.
Anderson put the few flakes and grains of dull
gold into the store-keeper's scales.
" Just on fifteen weights," he said. u Not too
bad for a beginner. I dare say you let as much get
away down stream."
" That's two pounds sixteen shillings," com-
mented Scott, gazing at the gold hungrily. " It's
an awfully rum thing, but, do you know, I feel as
if I'd never got any gold that was really mine be-
fore."
He took the grains back into his hand and caressed
them.
" It is — fascinating," he said.
Dence, somewhat " flown with insolence and
wine," strolled into the bar from his lounging-seat
on the verandah. That dimly perceptible aura of
long-ago London — London of hansom-cabs and vic-
torias, of camellia buttonholes, of the early days of
Gilbertian comic opera — clung close about him to-
day: and the phantom single eyeglass was almost
plain to see. He pulled his drooping yellow mous-
tache with one hand and surveyed the curious little
scene before him. Scott, curled over his gold like a
cat with its kitten, did not notice him.
" The mail is gone," said Dence, his English
drawl a little more marked than usual. " Carriers
GUINEA GOLD 117
got away early; they'll catch the Dragon-Fly to-
morrow, and the letters will get to Samarai in time
for the Matungcts down trip."
" Eh? " said Scott absently, stroking a flake with
his finger-tip.
" The mail's away."
" What mail?"
Dence laughed — unpleasantly — and moved out
again. Scott looked up with the expression of one
who awakes.
" Oh — the mail — of course ! " he said.
Anderson, busy with swags and tins, cast a glance
of his imperturbable green eyes in the direction of
the two. You could not have told what he thought.
You never could tell what Anderson thought.
CHAPTER VIII
Green forest was round them, dark green forest
always. Green forest was over them, a hundred
feet above their heads. They saw green forest
wave on wave, when they halted half a day on the
crest of a hill to fell a lookout, and find where
they might be. When the forest was far away it
looked purple; very far away it looked pale blue.
It reared itself up towards the sun-bleached sky
sometimes, on the necks of the shouldering ranges,
three, and five, and eight, and ten thousand feet:
it flowed down again, smooth and deep, over
straight-falling precipices and gigantic foothill
stairs, into unsounded depths of river gorges. And
at the bottom of the forest sea the explorers strug-
gled on, day by day, towards the creek, and the
island, and the gold.
" Go up the Iri first of all," had been Anderson's
decision. The Iri, one of many rivers unmarked on
any map, and only known some ten or fifteen miles
back from the mouth, had always been considered a
" likely " stream by the miners of the Kikiramu
country. Cripps had certainly started up that river
when he left the field on the last journey of his
chequered life. After striking the Iri, Anderson
118
GUINEA GOLD 119
said they would find out from the boys what creeks
or branches Cripps had followed. On one of these
creeks — impossible to guess where — there would be
an island with a big hollow tree: and from that
island they would begin the tracing out of the prob-
lem indicated by the letter. Scott, new to the work,
and as eager to " fling his heart before him " here,
in the Papuan bush, as he had been long ago when
steering a four-year-old across stiff country behind
the Killultagh Harriers, wanted to map out the
whole plan of campaign in the evenings after sup-
per, while the three white men sat under their nar-
row fly, smoking and sheltering from the steamy
rain. But Anderson, who knew better than he the
risk of getting a fixed idea on the brain, in these
formidable solitudes, declined to go into the matter
at all, beyond what was necessary from day to day.
They had to find the creek and the island first, he
said. They had better take things easy, and not
worry.
In truth, as the days went on, the high-strung
Celt, with his nervous pluck, and that other, whose
brain was eaten into at the finest points by the
nibbling caterpillar of drink, felt more and more
strongly the advantage of journeying under the
guidance of such a man as Anderson. For him
" the hardest work was never too hard, or the
longest day too long." He was never anxious, never
discouraged. His iron-bark face never showed an-
noyance or fear: to the latter, indeed, he was as
120 GUINEA GOLD
nearly insensible as a human being could be. There
was one hideous day when the little expedition, im-
prisoned in a deep stone-walled gorge they had been
following for some days, found themselves likely to
be caught like sewer rats in a drain by a thunder-
storm that was threatening above their heads. If it
came and got them there — there, where they had
to climb and leap down the centre of the river on the
tops of the boulders, because there was not footing
for a fly anywhere near the edge — not one of the
party would live half an hour. Scott knew this as
well as the others, for he had seen the mountain
rivers of Papua rise after rain, and knew what they
could do when confined to a natural race like this
gorge of beetling stone. In such a place the rapids
raised by a sudden flood might be heard half a mile
away, like the roar of countless railway trains all
approaching one junction together. . . . You would
not hear another sound, even if four-and-thirty
human beings, caught in a trap, were being beaten
to death among those cruel rocks. . . .
That afternoon the expedition walked in the
shadow of near and ugly death from two o'clock
till six. The roll of distant thunder from the ranges
sounded in their ears like the turning of the hinges
on Eternity's opening gates. A flash of lightning
stabbed as if it had struck. A drop of rain falling
on a man's hand came heavy as coffin-lead. For, if
the clouds once broke, and still there were no way
up and out, twenty brief minutes would see the end.
GUINEA GOLD 121
The poor black boys, heavy laden with their
swags, scrambled along at top speed, frightened,
yet not realising all the danger. Dence made little
jokes now and then about " old Peter " looking
out for them at the gate, and about the white night-
dresses and spiky crowns they would have to try
and sleep in that night. Scott, sickeningly reluctant
to die, could do nothing but hold his tongue and get
along over the stones, his whole being aflame against
the relentless powers that were threatening to blot
him out, here and now, without the gold, without
the woman, without anything at all but a black cold
vacancy into which he scarcely dared to look — alone.
And Anderson
Anderson kept the party at the highest pace it
could make, slacking when necessary, pressing on as
he saw the boys and the white men could stand it.
He watched the sky, and he watched the beetling
walls of the gorge. He climbed those walls again
and again, and again and again fell back, beaten,
bleeding, but not discouraged. Dence was swag-
gering in the face of death, Scott, in his heart, was
cursing, but Anderson was just as he was when
checking goods in Carter's store, or overseeing the
clearing of their track. He had something to do,
and was doing it. He would go on doing it till
there was no more to be done.
And Scott, through all the struggling, and the
exhaustion, and the smothering heat, and the grow-
ing dark — dark that might never lift to dawn for
122 GUINEA GOLD
them — saw, and wondered at, the soul of a man
who knew not fear.
They escaped. When the rain had actually
broken, and the ominous talk of the river about
their feet was rising to a rattling snarl, one of the
mountain boys pointed out a crack in the side of the
cliff. Anderson was into it and swarming up like
a chimney-sweep in a chimney before the boy had
finished speaking. There was a moment of suffocat-
ing suspense, and then —
" Sling me a line,'' called Anderson above the
gathering death-roar of the river. " You can all
get a start up the cliff if I haul."
Dence was very gay in the camp that night, up
on the crest of the cliff, with the flooded river
thundering below. He sang comic songs, and was
imitative, and witty, and rather profane. Scott felt
tired enough to sink through his canvas bunk into
the ground beneath : his store of nervous force was
an emptied cistern, run dry by the strain of the day.
Anderson sewed rough patches on his clothes, and
made a few remarks about the favourite for the
Melbourne Cup. The afternoon was over: he was
not thinking about it at all.
"When are we going to strike the In?" asked
Scott.
There was — for once — something of a view this
GUINEA GOLD 123
morning. They had camped on the top of one of
the usual knife-edge ridges, just where the fall of a
huge cottonwood had cleared away a canon of forest.
There, one could look out and away, over the bil-
lowing world of treetops, coloured dainty emerald
green in the six o'clock sun, and creased here and
there, deeply and softly as an arm creases at the
elbow, to show where the unseen river valleys ran.
One could see the royal purple of the five-thousand-
foot peaks, with the mists of day just beginning to
gather in bridal veils of cloud about their heads,
and ' one could glimpse, very far away, the chal-
cedony blue of mighty unknown crests, Dianas of
the mountain world, ever desired, and ever un-
won.
It was a magnificent view. But when you have
spent a week or two in learning the inner meaning of
magnificent views, considered not as landscape, but
as routes of travel, you are likely to look upon the
most beautiful of scenery with a somewhat callous
eye. The three white men only saw that the coun-
try ahead was " the same old thing," and Scott, at
least, sighed a little.
Half a dozen of the boys, who had been looking
anxiously (in a direction many points removed from
the right one) for a glimpse of the sea that would
take them back to their island homes, created a
diversion by flinging themselves upon the ground
and weeping bitterly.
" We-fellow never go back some time no more,"
124 GUINEA GOLD
wailed the biggest, a sturdy little savage with a mop
of hair as big as a sofa-cushion. " Altogether we-
fellow finish along this place. No good this place."
He howled like a dog.
" Oh, stop your confounded row!" said Dence.
They had all been hoping to get a sight of the Iri
from this point, and everyone was feeling the dis-
appointment too much to have any sympathy with
this Papuan Mrs. Gummidge, who persisted in
" feeling it more."
" I don't know," said Anderson in reply to Scott's
question. " This is all untrodden country, and no-
body knows exactly how the Iri runs: we can only
guess at the way it ought to. We're far enough
up country now to strike the upper waters, if we
could find it — you know, there's no looking for gold
on the lower waters of a river."
" What are you going to do? "
u Strike west of this, I reckon. By the lie of
those hills there should be a big river somewhere
near the horizon. We might hit it in a couple of
days."
"Or mightn't?"
" Or mightn't. We'd better, though. The tucker
won't last forever."
11 Well," said Scott, after a minute's pause, " ex-
ploring is interesting enough — and exciting — but it
isn't at all like what one fancied."
" I know what you fancied," observed Dence.
u You were to start in the early morn, with the dew-
GUINEA GOLD 125
drops twinklin' on the grass, and step out gaily over
a palmy plain, carryin' your trusty shot-gun, and
singin' as you went. You'd camp for lunch beside
a boundin' brook "
" They bound all right," put in Anderson dryly.
11 Don't interrupt my beautiful English — beside a
boundin' brook, where you'd light a fire and roast
the deer and the bears and the wild boars you'd shot
as you came along. In the evenin', beside the glow-
in' camp-fire, song and story and jest "
" Oh, shut it, Dence, I'm not a new chum now,
and I never was such an idiot as you make out. But
it's true enough that I didn't realise the food diffi-
culty. It seems that every expedition splits on that
rock."
" Sooner or later — the idea is to make it as late
as possible," said Anderson. " I suppose it's about
the hungriest country in the world. You get a pig
or a wallaby once in a blue moon, and as to food
from the natives, it's like what the Frenchman at sea
said when they asked him if he'd had his breakfast
— ' Quite the contrary.' "
" Yes, I rather guessed what they meant when
they pinched our arms and legs at that little village
the other day," agreed Scott. " And small as it
was, it was the only one we've seen. This is a God-
forsaken place."
" As to God-forsaken, I won't argue," said An-
derson. " But as to men — there are probably a
good many more than we've any idea of."
126 GUINEA GOLD
" Do you mean they're stalking us? " asked Scott,
with a queer little adventurous feeling stealing
through him.
" I wouldn't worry about that. Look here, do
you see where the country seems to take a bit of a
lean down towards the west? That's where we're
going to head for now. Time we got off. Dence,
don't loaf, it's your job to see the tents struck, and
you oughtn't to want telling. You hurry up and
help me with the carriers, Scott: get a move on you.
I believe we'll have the rain early to-day."
The party took up the hand-to-hand fight with
nature once more, at the point where it had been
abandoned last night. . . . All day scrambling up
and plunging down: edging along impossible gorges
where indignant white cockatoos skimmed and
shrieked through blue vacancy, below the toes of
your rusty, string-laced boots : climbing down where
you never could get up, and up where you certainly
never could get down again: creeping, half a mile
an hour, behind the boys and their slashing knives,
through dense green jungle where the sunlight
dripped down like starshine into a well; seeing your
hands wrinkle up like a washerwoman's with the
ceaseless soak of perspiration, and watching the
other men's shirts stick in black patches to their
back and arms: smelling the forest smell of wet
earth and sopping mosses, and hearing — when the
party halted for a moment to bring some straggler
GUINEA GOLD 127
into line — the aloof, unfriendly murmur of the giant
trees that shut away the day, and the treacherous
low-voiced talk of baffling rivers that struck up
hands of prohibition across your track, a dozen
times in a morning. . . .
Yet withal, to-day was not quite as yesterday.
The brooding sense of solitude was gone.
One listened for cracking sticks in the forest.
One saw shadows that moved . . . did they not?
... in the dark where the river walls curved in,
behind the many waterfalls. One fancied the birds,
that rose screaming out of glades as deep and green
as the midmost Coral Seas, had been frightened
... by what?
When one halted for lunch, one sat on a fallen
log, eating one's measured ration of tin and biscuit,
with an odd feeling about one's shoulder-blades —
a feeling that made one want to look round — at
nothing — and reflect, without any apparent reason,
that a brick wall was a comfortable thing to lean
against ... if one had it.
And when the tiring hour of three o'clock came
round, that hour that tests endurance and spirit, for
men on the march, as surely as Wellington's three-
o'clock-in-the-morning tests military courage, one
felt, as always, that sundown, supper, and sleep were
as far away as Paris or St. Petersburg: and one
felt, too, that something else — something intangible,
a brooding weight upon the heavy air, a shade upon
128 GUINEA GOLD
the shadow of the eternal forests — was . . . not
so very far away.
About four o'clock, as they were creeping in In-
dian file up the face of a deeply-wooded slope, some-
thing happened. An arrow out of nowhere in par-
ticular (who could tell, in that chaos of jungle?)
went past Dence's shoulder with a kind of low
whoop, and plunged a foot and a half into the earth
of the rise. Another skimmed so close to Scott's
head that he was not sure whether he had been hit
or not, until he saw the weapon quivering in the
trunk of a tree. It went deep into the solid wood.
. . . One could not help thinking, in a swift, un-
pleasant " aside," that the human body was a mushy
sort of thing at best. Soft tearable skin, pulpy
internal organs, that a chance prick would disable —
what an unsatisfactory fragile engine wherewith to
confront the — there it went again ! just missed the
head boy, and set the others howling ! Was anyone
hit?
" Put down your swags, and get your rifles ready,"
said Anderson to the boys, in exactly the same tone
that he used when ordering them to halt for lunch.
The boys, chattering with excitement, obeyed. The
white men had already shouldered their arms. They
were all facing the same way — across the track — it
seemed that Anderson, at least, knew whence the
arrows were coming. Scott caught a glimpse of
Dence's face, and scarcely knew it: it was suddenly
younger, and the blue eyes glittered. He saw his
GUINEA GOLD 129
own left hand extended along the rifle barrel, and
felt the cool steel of the trigger against the middle
finger of the right.
" Look out. Now then, fire into the bush ! " said
Anderson, firing himself as he spoke.
The boys had been drilled now and then through-
out the trip, but their excitement got the better of
them now, and a good many shots flew up into the
tops of the trees — some went perilously near the
whites. Anderson, Dence and Scott aimed for the
thickest part of the forest, and shot straight into it.
The smoke cleared away. The chorus of bird-
screams died. Silence, a hundred times more still
than the virgin quiet of the forest undisturbed by
man, fell upon the bush and track. Then, from far
away in the gloomy green, a cry rose. It lifted and
lifted, thin and sharp-edged. It sank, full of pro-
test, rattled and broke. And Scott, who had seen
men die, but never heard one before, knew, never-
theless, that in the seconds of that cry, the green
forest, and the sun, and the good days and nights of
warm, familiar earth had dropped away, for one
poor Papuan soul, into the dark.
11 That's enough," said Anderson, lowering his
rifle. He opened the breech, and replaced the
cartridge just fired. The boys dropped their guns,
and fell into line again. Dence, with that sparkle
still on his face, ranged up to the other men.
" I believe I bagged the bird," he said. " That
cry came from the very place I aimed at."
130 GUINEA GOLD
" I'm glad I didn't," said Scott, a sense of relief
passing over him like a breath of cool air. He felt —
not exactly sorry, not shocked, but just a little sea-
sick. Anderson threw a glance at him.
" It has to be done," he said, and started the
column again.
One of the boys, an Orokiva, was so delighted
with the little brush, that he could not be got on for
a minute or two; he seemed to have gone " kava-
kava " for the moment, and stood and danced in the
pathway, singing a war-chant.
" Stir that beggar up with a stick, Dence, and
let's go on," called Anderson from the head of the
column.
" Hold on a bit," said Dence. u He's singin' a
very rummy sort of song, this Johnnie, and I want
to hear what it is. I know some Orokiva."
" Oh, you know every lingo in the country, 1
reckon," said Anderson, " but this isn't a time for
studying philology. Get him on."
"•You wait," persisted Dence.
The boy finished his song, came down to earth
again, and promptly demanded tobacco. Dence, as
promptly, poked him in the back with his rifle, and
started him into the column.
" Got the artistic temperament bad, that chappie,"
he observed. " Always wants refreshment after
expressin' itself, the artistic temperament does.
Prima-donna needs Perrier-Jouet in her dressin'-
room, painter and his model have a can of beer
GUINEA GOLD 131
from round the corner, I want half a dozen drinks
of any sort you like, when I've been more than com-
monly eloquent and amusin'. And this Papuan
Johnnie wants tobacco, after doin' his little
bit."
14 You're talking too much," said Anderson, with
pioneer simplicity.
44 I'll talk more by and by," answered Dence, fall-
ing silent. Scott thought his behaviour rather odd,
but there was plenty to think about just then, with
the pace that Anderson chose to set through the
jungle, and the impression did not remain long upon
his mind.
No one said much about the attack; it seemed to
be a matter of small importance to the two old
hands, once it was over, and Scott himself was as-
tonished to find how little it had really impressed
him, beyond the immediate horror of that dying
cry. They halted to cut a small lookout, by and by :
and Anderson informed them that the Iri was not
very far away. Nothing whatever was to be seen
but the usual ocean of treetops, but the trend of the
various slopes seemed to have conveyed something
to the eye of the trained bushman, that Scott was
powerless to understand.
44 There's a big sago swamp down there," said
Anderson, pointing to a slight variation in the tex-
ture of the forest at one spot a good way off. " If
we can make that before sundown, we'll camp near
it. We shall have to start crossing it early to-
i 3 2 GUINEA GOLD
morrow : one had better not get stuck in a swamp in
the dark."
" Might get drowned, I suppose?" asked Scott.
" I don't think you'd get drowned," was Ander-
son's reply. " Go on, boys."
At sundown they were near the swamp, and there
was fair camping-ground available, also water.
After supper, pickets were chosen from among the
boys, and Anderson told the white men that they
also would keep watch and watch through the night.
He did not expect any attack, he said, but in this
country it was as well to leave no possible loophole
for accident.
After supper, at eight o'clock, Scott and Anderson
turned in, while Dence kept watch. At eleven, Scott
was to relieve him. Anderson would take duty at
two, and wake the whole company at five.
They were all rather more tired than usual that
night, and Scott's turn seemed to him to come be-
fore he had fairly closed his eyes. Dence had left
him part of a billy-can of strong cold tea (Anderson
had forbidden fires), and he swallowed it at a
draught, to drive away the sleepiness that held down
his eyelids. It was very dark, and very still. The
boys were sleeping like the dead, beneath their
faintly glimmering white flies, all save the two
yawning sentries, who had to be found and felt for
in the dark now and then, and poked up with the
butt of a rifle. Apart from that duty, one had noth-
ing to do but sit on a log, wonder if there were
GUINEA GOLD 133
many snakes in the neighbourhood, and listen to
the soft sliding of the little creek beside which they
had camped, into the unseen swamp.
Scott opened his watch and felt the face. Twelve
o'clock — two hours more. It was getting almost
cool; his hands were dry, and the perspiration had
ceased trickling down the back of his neck. A bell-
bird sounded from a long way off — tank-tank ! — just
like a horse-bell.
One o'clock. Scott began to want a drink. It
would be easy to step down into the bed of the little
creek, where it widened out to join the swamp, and
put one's face in a pool. . . .
Three or four steps in the dark — this liana stuff
was a nuisance; one could not bend down. . . .
By heaven, that was a curious smell ! Could the
water be good to drink? was there anything dead in
it? And yet — the smell was not exactly like putrid
stuff ; it was loathsome, yet scented in a way — like —
like — a perfumed corpse.
Scott sniffed — sniffed again. He did not like it,
though he could not tell why. Something impelled
him to turn backwards in the dark up the sloping
bank, and find his way to the flies again, thirsty as
he was. After all, it was only half an hour or so
now. . . .
Close on two o'clock; almost time to awaken
Anderson. He would. . . . Great God, what was
that?
There are no cattle in the Papuan wilds, but it
134 GUINEA GOLD
sounded like the roaring of a bull. There are no
ocean liners on the Iri, yet it seemed as if the siren
of a steamer had been suddenly let off within fifty
yards of the camp. A horrible sound, a sound to
make a man's blood run cold, heard in those mys-
terious wilds, in the dark, with that loathsome smell
so close at hand.
Scott stood still where he was, rifle ready to swing
up on his shoulder, listening to the stirring and
cackling of the awakened boys. It was only a few
seconds before he felt Anderson's hand on his arm
in the darkness.
" We'll have to chance the natives, and light a
fire," said the miner. " This place is full of alli-
gators — there ! "
It was the hideous snarling bellow again, so near
as to send a trembling through the air. From some
way off, another answered it. A third and a fourth
took up the cry. And the loathsome scented smell
suddenly grew thicker.
" They're too close," said Anderson. " This must
be the rendezvous of half the alligators in the coun-
try. I never heard so many together. This won't
do."
He had half a dozen of the awakened boys up in
a minute, and started them cutting wood by the light
of a hurricane lantern. A fire was made, and the
natives crowded round it, pushing each other almost
into the flames, shuddering, looking back over their
shoulders into the dark.
GUINEA GOLD 135
" Does a fire keep them off? " asked Scott, stand-
ing beside Anderson, and watching the impenetrable
black under the trees.
" It ought to. There's really not much risk with
a big party. Two or three natives by themselves
would probably not have much chance. The fact is,
you never can tell what an alligator will or won't
do. Mostly, he's a cowardly brute, but sometimes
he isn't. He gets desperate when really hungry —
or if there are a lot of them. There it is again.
Must be a sort of home for lost alligators, to judge
by the row."
He slung his rifle up on his shoulder, and walked
a few yards away.
" Can't see anything," he said, " but you can't see
them in daylight often, when they're close at hand.
I suppose they've smelt us out, and that's what is
bringing them about. We have to cross the swamp
to-morrow, but I think it'll be all right then."
The bellowing sounded farther off after the fire
was lit, but did not cease altogether till sunrise. In
the daylight, the swamp looked ugly enough. It was
mostly black mud and slime, cut up by channels of
stagnant, ill-smelling water. So many trees had
fallen, however, that there was little difficulty mak-
ing a way through, and when there was a big gap
of choking mud, the boys readily bridged it with
another tree. The mud was boiling with crabs and
creeping things; the sun, scarce tempered by the
thin fronds of the sago palms, struck fiercely on
i 3 6 GUINEA GOLD
the slow-moving column of Papuans and whites. It
was less than two miles across the swamp, but they
were not clear of it for near two hours. All the time
the boys kept an eager, frightened watch for alli-
gators, and the white men, too, were on the alert.
But not a claw or a snout showed among the poison-
ous green weeds and grasses, not a sound rose from
the simmering pools of scum.
" You see, they don't trouble in daylight," said
Anderson.
He saw the last boy out of the swamp, set the way
up another of the usual razor-back ridges, and took
the lead. Dence and Scott were left as rear-guard.
" I say," said the latter, "what on earth did
Anderson take us through that place for, anyhow?
You can't ask him questions, unless you want your
head bitten off, but I really want to know."
" Oh, it was reasonable enough," answered Dence.
" By the way the Iri valley runs, we have saved a
day's march, if not two, taking this route. We
should have had a five thousand foot range to cross,
which we've escaped."
" What would you take, to go across in the
dark?"
" Nobody would take anything, to be such a
bloomin' fool."
They were partly up the rise now, and they turned
to look back. The swamp stretched below, black,
simmering, sinister — a very witch's cauldron of evil.
Years afterwards, Scott remembered just how that
GUINEA GOLD 137
other looked — the glitter of the blue English eyes,
staring far away at something that seemed beyond
the range of his own sight: the sudden shadow that
swept across those fine, worn features, like a dark
wing fleeting over a sunny field. ... It was gone —
if it had ever been. Dence turned to face the hill
again.
14 ' A goose walking over my grave ! ' " he quoted,
with a laugh. Give us a smoke, Scott — I'm out.
This blessed country gets on your nerves."
44 What was the boy singing yesterday?" asked
Scott, by and by, when they paused to breathe the
carriers.
44 A queer thing," answered the other. " He was
chantin' his own bravery, of course, and about the
guns, and the arrows the little beasts in the bush
had been peggin' at us. And then he was singin'
about "
"What?"
44 Don't quite understand it. He said his white
men were brave, and the Orokivas were brave, but
the other white man ran away into the bush. Now,
there wasn't any other white man."
44 No, of course."
44 But — I picked up a queer thing on the track —
that time I went back for half a mile to find the
compass I dropped — in the morning."
44 Yes, I remember. What did you pick up? "
44 Sprig belongin' to a boot. Now, that's nothin'
much — but Anderson's boots have all the sprigs on,
138 GUINEA GOLD
and so have yours — I looked at your tracks. I lost
one, but it was a week ago."
" Did the boys pick it up at the time? "
" Maybe — and maybe not."
" Why, what do you think? "
" Don't know what I think — don't know that I
think anythin' — a fellow had better not think, out
in the bush. . . . What the mischief are the boys
raisin' such a hullabaloo about? "
The column had started on again while Dence and
Scott talked, and was crawling, like a snake, a bit
at a time, over the crest of the ridge. Those who
were up had raised a cry of delight.
" Coo-ee! " yelled Dence to Anderson.
" The Iri ! " called Anderson in reply.
" That's as good as a bottle of beer apiece ! " said
Dence, suddenly galvanised into speed. The two
fairly raced up the ridge, and arrived at the top
together, panting and steaming, eager to see the river
that was to lead them to their goal.
After all, they could see nothing, for the forest
was deep and unbroken, but they could all hear the
voice of an unmistakably big river, rumbling away
far below. Anderson was standing on the spine of
the ridge, his leathery face showing something like
human satisfaction for once.
" She takes a turn to the west — just as I guessed
she would," he said. u This saves us days. We'll
camp on the bank to-night, and begin going up the
river to-morrow."
GUINEA GOLD 139
" How are we to find Alligator Creek? M asked
Scott. " Where the box was, you know."
" If Alligator Creek isn't the creek that drains out
of that swamp into the Iri, you may call me a
Chinaman," averred Anderson. " Boys, we're get-
ting on ! "
That night in the camp by the side of the great
dark river they had sought so long, many a Spanish
castle was built, many a story told of wonderful
finds, in the Magnet, in the Klondyke, in sun-dried
Mexican river-beds, in monkey-haunted kloofs of
inner Africa. They were all a little excited, and
sleep was long in coming to the white men's tent.
As for the song of the Orokiva, it was forgotten.
CHAPTER IX
The days that followed were among the pleasant-
est of the trip.
In the first place, they had a rest. Anderson did
not want to forego the chance of re-provisioning
offered by the sago swamp : so camp was pitched on
the bank of the Iri, and there three whites took it in
turns to escort the boys back to the edge of the
swamp every day, and oversee them while they cut
down palms, chopped out the inside pith, washed it
in troughs made of hollowed trunks, and collected
the starchy matter that drained off. The floury,
crumbly mass that resulted was not in the least like
any sago ever seen in shops, but it was nourishing and
palatable food, boiled with a little sugar, and whites
and natives revelled in it, after the inevitable short
commons of the march.
While the boys were busy making sago, and put-
ting it up in mats of roughly plaited leaves, the white
men repaired swags and flies, mended their clothes,
wished they had anything to read, and talked a great
deal. Anderson had removed the embargo on dis-
cussion, now that they had successfully accomplished
the first stage of their search, and the letter (which
everyone knew by heart) was talked over and over
— especially at night, when the three were together.
140
GUINEA GOLD 141
It was a wonderfully lovely spot, this elbow of
the Iri, where they had made their camp. The river,
like all Papuan streams of the hinterland, was wild
and precipitous; it ran boisterously over a bed full of
rocks, and dashed foam and spray upon the dangling
ferns and lianas, and rare flames of orchid bloom,
that overhung its waters. There was a great boom-
ing waterfall quite close to the camp, with tree-
ferns like green lace parasols hanging over it, and
scarlet D'Alberti flowers, shaped like wistaria, spot-
ting the cool gloom of the over-arching forest roof.
Birds, crested, spangled, aigretted, orange, crimson,
gold and blue, swooped and skimmed above the
water-pools in the downward-spreading light of
dawn, or in the strange green sunset glow — that
" Ragnarok, Twilight of the Gods," known to all
Papuan wanderers. Butterflies, strong bird-winged
creatures, gold and velvet-black, vermilion, verdigris,
and sapphire, struck the heart with their beauty, as
they sailed like living flowers across the river of
sun that cut the gloomy forest, above the river of
rock and water. Dragon-flies, red, green, and yel-
low: inch-long flying things that scintillated in the
sun like some new jewel, half-emerald, half-
turquoise; how lovely they were, and how lovely it
all was, to a man who was marching no longer, and
had time and strength to note the wonder and the
beauty of the unknown lands !
Scott liked it. He liked the colour and the still-
ness and the solitude, and yet more the feeling, new
i 4 2 GUINEA GOLD
and wonderful to him, of being in country where, in
all probability, no white man's foot had passed — for
they could not tell what route might have been taken
by Cripps and his mate. To look at the great fall
of the Iri, and know it was marked on no map — that
the river leaped into the knowledge and mind of man
just here, where his own eyes met it; beyond that
little range of his sight, existed not at all, till he
should find it — this was a sensation of keenest pleas-
ure. To think of all that lay somewhere among the
branches and tributaries of that stream, of the for-
tune that the wilderness held in its grip, for him and
his mates to find, was an intoxication. Did the whole
world hold a better way of making fortunes than
this?
The ache in his heart was wonderfully soothed.
Nothing was changed, but he felt as men do feel in
the far-out places— that everything beyond the little
circle of the daily task was very dim and distant, and
that sorrows belonging to the outer world were al-
most as sorrows belonging to someone else — things
that pained you with a gentle, impersonal sort of
melancholy alone. . . . He began to understand how
it was that the real men of the wilderness, these min-
ers and their mates, who had lived on the fringes of
the Never-Never half their lives, seemed so curiously
detached from all human affections or ties. It was
hard to believe that the men he had met on Kikiramu
had mothers or brothers or relations of any kind —
that they had ever had homes, or ever taken the
GUINEA GOLD 143
morning train to anywhere, with a daily paper in
hand, or ever footed it in the merry dances of the
Australian bush, when selectors' daughters and
" cockatoo farmers " and stockmen and shearers
made the earthen floors rise up in dust to the music
of accordion and violin ! Surely they had lived all
their lives just as they were living them now — just as
he was living his — in the dark of the eternal forests,
hunting down and gathering the little yellow specks,
and . . . what was the blank verse Dence had
quoted?
"Lost to use and name, and life and fame . . ."
Not lost, of course — that was nonsense. Ab-
sorbed, perhaps — as he was absorbed. Who could
think of Sydney and of London, of Germany's in-
tentions towards Morocco, of the newest way to
drop bombs out of aeroplanes upon an enemy's
head, when he was thinking of, and looking for —
gold?
u ' . . . The tree that we made our box out of,
at Alligator Creek,' " quoted Anderson, one morn-
ing. Quotations from Cripps' letter were as com-
mon in the talk of the three, these days, as texts in
the mouths of Cromwell's Ironsides.
" * That we made our box out of . . .'" He had
got up from the felled log they used for a seat at
meals, and was standing with his back to the river,
looking into the bush, and pulling his long beard
thoughtfully.
144 GUINEA GOLD
" That means," he said, " that they got something
on Alligator Creek. It wasn't good, or they'd have
stayed instead of going farther on. But we'll have
to find it, I reckon, if we want to know what tree to
look for at the right time."
Dence, in the full enjoyment of his after-break-
fast smoke, looked up, and followed Anderson's
eyes.
" Behind the swamp, of course," he said.
" Yes — a goodish bit, I should think. I don't be-
lieve Cripps came through just here. I've been
working it out, and I reckon he struck Alligator
Creek a good way farther up, and prospected there —
it would be full of alligators all along, I suppose:
some creeks are — and by and by moved on same as
you and I would do, in the direction of the Iri: he'd
strike a tributary some good way behind this, and
probably got — what he got — there."
" Why not on the Iri itself? " asked Scott.
" Too big and too deep, here or anywhere near.
You don't get gold — alluvial gold — where the water
would carry a big steamer."
" And why do you think he didn't follow the Iri
up to its higher waters? "
" Wasn't long enough out, from all I could
gather. Take it from me, the gold's within two or
three days of here — one way or another. We'll
prospect Alligator Creek to-day, to try and find the
first working and the box."
"Shall I get the boys together?"
GUINEA GOLD 145
" You might. I want to look about a little at the
mouth of the creek and see what size it is, before we
start."
" Thirty-two boys, isn't it? "
" No, thirty-one. What's the matter with you,
Scott, that you can't remember the number of boys,
after all this time? "
" Well, the counting hasn't been my job, because
I didn't have them in the afternoons — but I cer-
tainly thought it was thirty-one."
" What did you say thirty-two for, then? "
" Because yesterday, when I went home in the
middle of the day, I did happen to count them before
I left, and there were thirty-two."
11 You counted wrong."
" I did not. There were thirty-two. I counted
three times."
" All our own boys — no stray natives from round
about?"
" They'd all got red ramies on, and were making
sago together."
" You must have been mistaken."
" I was not," repeated Scott, getting hot. " I saw
them, and counted them."
" You take ten grains of quinine, and don't keep
out in the sun without your hat: I've no time for peo-
ple getting sick," was Anderson's only comment, as
he walked off down the river.
Scott said something forcible, and Dence laughed.
" Quit laughin', you ! " ordered the Ulsterman,
146 GUINEA GOLD
his native accent coming out strong, as it usually did
in moments of irritation.
Dence, for the ten thousandth time in his life,
quoted under his breath: "Ifs not that one is so
clever oneself: its only that other people are so
stupid. . . " \
" I wasn't laughin' at you," he said. " Only at
Anderson. For a death-or-glory kind of leader to
an expedition, there isn't his match in Papua — but I
really think he has even less brains than you,
Scott."
" Thank you," said Scott, sensing an obscure com-
pliment wrapped up somewhere or other. He could
not always understand Dence, especially when the
Englishman smiled with sleepy blue eyes, and spoke
in the low, velvet voice that was so peculiarly his
own. Dence had the power of creating odd illusions
about himself. To-day, standing beside the stained
arid sagging tent that was all their home, his roughly
booted feet set in river mud, his ragged shirt scarce
holding to his sun-blackened shoulders, he contrived,
somehow, with his voice and his eyes and his manner,
to suggest a dim ghost of evening dress. . . . Just
so men spoke and looked who wore costly raiment
of finest black and white, who stood in stained and
mullioned window embrasures lit with the late-setting
English sun, and looked down upon terrace and ter-
race, lawn and lawn, statue and stone balustrade and
sunk Italian garden — all the pomp and the beauty of
the life that Scott had just glimpsed at as a boy, that
GUINEA GOLD 147
" Dence," who was not Dence, had lived and known
— how long?
Some transfer of thought, touching the sensitive
Celtic brain, made Scott point derisively to the tent
and the log table and begin to repeat:
"The stately homes of England, how beautiful they stand!
Amid the tall ancestral trees ..."
The explosion that followed struck him dumb.
M Lord ! where did you learn to swear like that? "
he said, when he had recovered his breath. " And, if
I may ask, why? ..."
11 You may ask nothing," said the other, with flam-
ing eyes. " That poem — that poem ! " He nearly
choked.
" I won't quote it again, if that's what you mean,"
said Scott, still puzzled. For only the Englishman
or the Irishman, torn in two by half-caste Celt and
Saxon blood, can know how those formal schoolroom
lines of Campbell's stab, with a poisoned blade for
every letter, the man who may see the " stately
homes of England " never more.
Dence recovered himself instantly, and answered
Scott's first question with as much ease as if nothing
had occurred.
11 Why, a man can scarcely spend all these years
in Papuan mining camps without picking up a swear
or two," he said.
" You don't swear like a miner," commented
Scott. " You swear like a — like a — cavalry officer."
i 4 8 GUINEA GOLD
" Do I? " asked Dence mockingly. " You show
an occasional gleam of intellect, certainly. Try
turnin' it on to the reason why you couldn't count
the boys, and see what you get."
" Don't get anything," said Scott. " I can only
say what happened — or what I thought hap-
pened."
" Well, I'd advise you to stop talkin', then, and
help me muster the boys."
They mustered the carriers: Anderson returned:
the start was made.
" How many boys are there? " the leader jerked
over his shoulder.
" Thirty-one," said Scott.
Anderson laughed.
" I'll remind you of the quinine when we camp
to-night," he said.
But when it came to night, nobody was thinking of
anything so commonplace as quinine. For the march
had been an unusually light one, and they had gone
quite a long way up Alligator Creek, leaving the
deadly swamp miles behind, and, close to sunset,
there had been a yell from one of the boys (who
all knew by this time what their " Taubadas " were
looking for), " Bokis, bokis! "
The native eyes, trained to the bush, had beaten
the white man's sight. Yassi, a fur-headed small
person clad in a red rag and a necklace of dog's
teeth, had spied a hollow log lying jammed in a cleft
GUINEA GOLD 149
between two stones — a log that had evidently been
shaped by steel tools — and was giving tongue to his
discovery.
The three men precipitated themselves on the
worn and weathered fragment of wood. It was a
piece in the puzzle — a thread of the clue. . . . From
what tree had the " box " been cut?
Cedar, evidently. Now cedars were not very
common in the valley of the Iri: no one could
remember having sighted more than one or two.
It would not be difficult to locate the cedar that
marked Cripps' discovery — if they could find the
creek.
" Yassi, you and Kobo come here/' said Anderson.
Yassi and Kobo were the two boys formerly em-
ployed by Cripps, that Anderson had managed to find
and engage. Heretofore they had been of no use in
finding the way, for an East End Papuan, taken
away from his own district, cannot remember a
monotonous route through unbroken forest with any
more success than might be expected from a " new
chum " white. But now it was possible the two
might be of service.
" How long you stop work along here, one time
you come along Kippi (Cripps)?" asked Ander-
son.
A week or two, it seemed; after that, they had
gone through the bush a long way, Yassi and Kobo
could not say where. And by and by they had very
little kai-kai left, so Kisi, the other white man, had
150 GUINEA GOLD
gone back to the Kikiramu, and a great many of the
boys had gone too. But Yassi and Kobo had been
kept, and some more, and they had gone with Kippi,
and Kippi had found gold, but Yassi and Kobo did
not know where, because the boys were not told to
work it — Kippi made them stay in camp, and he
worked it himself. And they liked that very much,
because there was kai-kai enough since the other boys
were gone, and they sit-lie-down and smoke all day.
But by and by some bad fellow shoot Kippi, and he
get sick, and he die, and all the boys plenty frighten,
and they go back to the Kikiramu very quick. And
they, Yassi and Kobo, had had nothing to do with
killing the white man : they wanted the Taubadas to
know that, for they were frightened when someone
talked of Kippi; they feared the white men at the
Kikiramu would be angry, but there was nothing bad
they had done.
So much from Yassi and Kobo, their pidgin-Eng-
lish being translated. It was clear that they knew
nothing of Cripps' great discovery, and clear, too,
that they had been very shy of mentioning him at all,
lest they should be implicatedinhismurder. Whether
they deserved to be or not, Anderson considered an
open question. One never knew with natives, he
said, and doubtless the boys had been anxious to get
home again. The Karivas might have done the job,
or Yassi himself — impossible to say, and it didn't
matter now.
The search went on.
GUINEA GOLD 151
Now, for the first time, the pleasure of the hunt
took hold upon these three. Before, it had been
merely a matter of travel, of a long fight against the
daily, hourly, momently difficulties of the way : of a
set task to be got through between every dawn and
dusk, with sleep, delicious sleep, as payment at the
end. There was nothing exciting in the adventures
of the way: even Scott, new to the bush, felt this.
The peril of the flooded gorge — the attack in the
dark forest — the night among roaring alligators —
these things stirred scarce a pulse of fear at the time,
scarce a throb of interested recollection after they
were over. Take a man into a powder factory once :
he will go with strung-up courage and beating heart
and talk of the adventure long after. Set him to
work there eight hours a day, and in a week you
will find him handling high explosives like so much
corn out of a bin. . . .
So, in the pioneer lands, do men learn to confront
danger and hardship, not with the excited pluck of
over-civilised man, but with the cold emotionless
courage that grows only in the soil of constant risk
and death. They are wrong who call this bravery the
pluck of the savage. No primitive race ever knew
it. True, it is the strength of Antaeus, regained from
the ancient earth that bore him — but Antaeus came
back to the earth for the strengthening embrace, first
having left it far and long. Who never leaves it,
who never comes back, knows not this strength.
Thus it was into the midst of something like monot-
152 GUINEA GOLD
ony and boredom that the first scent of the hidden
gold arose, like a breeze into a stifling forest track.
In a morning all was changed. They left the upper
waters of Alligator Creek and started to prospect
the tributary streams leading into the great sweep of
the Iri, with interest and excitement vividly re-
newed. For men may readily learn to look upon
the face of death with indifference, but never upon
the gleam of gold.
It is over now, years over, and they who took part
in the chase, and in the strange happenings that fol-
lowed and attended it, are, some of them, dead, some
of them mewed in cities, some of them ... I know
not, nor does anyone know. It came and passed,
one flying picture in the long cinematograph of time.
Scott remembers it to-day, but he cannot tell you
much of the time they spent in searching for the
wonderful reef, because a man may recall a time of
incident, happening by happening, but he cannot re-
member very clearly a time when sensations were
events, and incidents took but second place. And in
those days hope and fear, despair, delight, wonder,
disappointment, speculation, seemed, in after recol-
lection, to have sponged out the landscape and the
marches, and the little happenings of every day, as
the wreathing mists of afternoon blot out the green
hills and blue ranges and serried forest crests of the
Papuan mountain lands.
One day after another day they tramped up river-
beds, crossing the stream thirty and forty times be-
GUINEA GOLD 153
tween sunrise and sunset, cutting their way along the
banks, climbing the walls of gorges, circling behind
waterfalls, and all the time looking out for what they
knew would be the sign of success in their long, long
quest — the island in the midst of the water, with a
great hollow tree upon it. Yassi and Kobo, at first
relied on, proved afterwards to be of no use at all,
for they were perfectly certain that each and every
tributary of the Iri was the very one that Cripps had
been prospecting when he found his gold. It seemed
evident that he had been up at least five or six rivers,
and that the boys had got hopelessly mixed in con-
sequence. After a day or two, Anderson paid no
attention to them, but made his own observations,
and led the party as seemed best to himself.
Over and over again they would see something
that looked like the island and the tree, and the man
who saw it would call out, with dry throat, and the
others would scramble hurriedly to his point of sight
and look. But always it turned out to be an island
with an ordinary tree on it, or a peninsula that looked
like an island, or a sandbank that had caught a
drifting snag, and held it aloft, wreathed with green
lianas, to deceive the eager eyes of the wanderers.
And after every one of these false alarms their
hearts would sink, and they would say hopeful things
to encourage each other, every man feeling hopeless
himself.
The spectre of famine, that creeps close at the
heels of every Papuan exploring party, now began
154 GUINEA GOLD
to dog their track. Flour was running low, meat was
opened only every second day, and, worst of all, the
tea was done. They had tobacco, but it was neces-
sary to husband that, for tobacco is the coin of the
Hinterland, and they hoped constantly to find some
native village where- they might purchase a little
food. But it was becoming clear that the upper
waters of the Iri were uninhabited, save for wan-
dering predatory tribes like the Kariva. A beauti-
ful, luxuriant, yet an utterly hungry land was this
that they were travelling through.
Anderson began to press his party. The pace of
the weakest member was necessarily the pace for
all, but he had chosen his boys well, and they trav-
elled under their lightened loads fast enough to
give the half-seasoned Briton as much as he cared
for, during the burning hours of climbing and splash-
ing and scrambling up the endless tributaries of the
Iri. Looking for a needle in a hayfield seemed
to Scott a simple task compared with the chase they
had undertaken in this primeval wilderness; but An-
derson seemed to know what he was about, and
had reasons for going up this river, and abandoning
the other, that gave the hunt some air of purpose
and direction.
It was a race now — a race with hunger and the
powers of the wilderness. They must find the gold
before the last loads were broken into, the last tins
opened. Enough must be left to take the white men
back to the Kikiramu: as for the boys, they could T
GUINEA GOLD 155
at a pinch, manage well enough on a few loads of
native sago, gathered from the swamp on the way
back.
The short allowance of food, the want of tea, and
the small supply of tobacco, were felt by all the party,
but no one complained. It was in the nature of things
that one should suffer depression, weariness, unsatis-
fied cravings for many things on a prospecting or
exploring trip. One gambled with one's power of
enduring these pains against the hostile forces of
Nature. Sometimes Nature won, sometimes man.
It was the way of the explorer in Papua. These
explorers did not mean to be beaten in the game.
" How far are we from the sago swamp? " asked
Scott one weary evening when they were all lying on
the platform of the fly, too tired to sit up, enjoying
their tiny allowance of trade tobacco before going to
sleep. It was very dark at the bottom of the forest
sea : one could not tell whether there was a moon or
not. The crowding tree-trunks dripped slow moist-
ure from leaf and bole: the air smelt rank with
decay.
You could see strange blossoms of flame in the
darkness, where lily-shaped fungi grew on the fallen
logs; and fire-flies, soaring and hovering, made green
spangles against the black of the woven boughs.
" Not more than eight or nine miles, in a direct
line," was Anderson's reply. " We've been making
a track like a spider's web. That swamp's a nui-
sance, anyhow — it's in the direct road to the Ki-
156 GUINEA GOLD
kiramu, and if we get gold about here it'll make no
end of trouble for the carriers going to the field."
" First catch your hare," quoted Dence.
" We'll catch it all right," affirmed the leader, with
his pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth. There was
something in his tone that gave the others confidence.
They slept well that night.
Three ragged men, waving their arms and yelling,
stood on the top of a peaked and battlemented preci-
pice, against a sky of thunderous black. They would
have been dancing, only for the fact that an ill-
considered step might have danced them into eter-
nity. They had to hold by trees in order to wave
their hats and arms. They held on, and waved, and
shouted, red in the face and sparkling-eyed. And
the carriers, strung out along the crest of the preci-
pice for a quarter of a mile behind, took up the cry
and yelled in their turn, though they did not know
what it was all about. But they had a shrewd idea
that this yelling meant a halt and a rest by and by,
and that was heaven to them.
Below the explorers a new reach of the river
opened out. The stream they were following was
one of the many unknown tributaries of the un-
mapped river Iri. Here the tributary widened,
spreading out from the narrow gorge they had been
following all the morning into an open shallow
reach bordered by bush-covered slopes. The differ-
ent greens of tree-fern and bush and vine, of palm
GUINEA GOLD 157
and banyan and huge New Guinea rubber trees,
stood out in incredible brilliance against the thunder-
clouds behind. In the steely mirror of the open
reach one plumy bouquet of glowing emerald rose
up alone ... an islet, with a streak of shadowy
black across its heart.
" The island, the island — look at the trees!"
howled Scott.
''Hooray!" cheered Dence, thumping Scott on
the back.
" We're getting warm, boys — we'll be hot by and
by!" roared Anderson, shaking the thick sweat-
drops off his arms and face. They all spoke as if
the party had been suddenly smitten with deafness,
and there was not an inch of room in anyone's mind
for amusement at Anderson's incongruous remark.
The excitement of the hunt filled them to the brim.
Almost, they sighted their game — for the gold had
become a living thing to them now, after these weeks
of famished chase. They felt that they were going
to get something by the neck, and worry it — soon!
After the moment of ecstasy came plain prose for
a while. The party had to be got down to the river,
and that took time, as the precipice was almost bare
of hand- or foot-hold, and bush ropes of liana had
to be used. Then they were down on a muddy bank,
and stumbling through the ooze towards the open
space of steely-grey water. And then, regardless of
possible alligators, they were all into the lagoon,
down over their knees, splashing and stamping to-
158 GUINEA GOLD
wards the islet. The carriers stayed on the shore,
squatting on their haunches, with their loads laid
down, and watching the white men with dark, ex-
pressionless eyes. They were not in the least curious.
It was a small islet, but it stood high, and sup-
ported quite a number of trees, palms of different
kinds for the most part, with trunks scaled and
diamonded like snakes, or lifting slim white stems
far into the sky, or standing up on the quaintest of
tall wooden stilts. But one tree, a massive cotton-
wood, had a solid trunk like an oak, and that trunk
was split by lightning from root to crown, leaving
a wide dark hollow, deepened by time and weather
into a chamber that would easily have sheltered two
or three men. Beyond all doubt it was Cripps' tree
— the tree of the great python. From this point,
then, might be unwound the clue that led to riches —
to the opening of all the doors of all the delights in
all the world. . . .
It was midday now, but no one thought of lunch
or rest. To unwind another turn of the clue, here,
at once, was all that anyone desired. What next?
" ' A large boulder in the stream, showin' about
three feet above water/ " quoted Dence. " There it
is, as plain as the nose on Anderson's face. ' When
the river is very low a granite boulder is exposed
for about eight inches ' — well, the river is low, but
not very, judgin' by the bank. Should think the
granite boulder must be awash or underneath."
" It's bound to be upstream, anyhow," said An-
GUINEA GOLD 159
derson. " He was going up the river, and would
naturally take his bearings the way he faced when
going after the reef himself."
" What had we better do? " asked Scott, chafing
at the little delay.
Anderson called up the boys, and set them to wade
about in the river, feeling with their bare feet for
submerged boulders. A curb of granite rewarded
the search before long, just under water.
" Put a stone on it," ordered Anderson. " Now
we can see our way. We have to get those two
stones in line, and go west up the sidling."
"What's a sidling?" asked Scott.
" A ridge. That in front of us. If we go west,
according to my compass, we'll strike gradually into
the bush."
" Till we come to ' the sort of tree they made their
box out of,' isn't it? "
" Yes. It's a good scheme, but I reckon I could
have bettered it."
11 Lucky for us Cripps slipped up a bit."
" He didn't, much. It was the chance of finding
the python skin, and the luck of getting the original
box, that helped us. Leave out chance, and we'd not
have been here. Nelson said you must always leave
something to chance, and it's a true saying — miners
could tell you that."
They were edging into the bush now, led by the
trembling needle of Anderson's compass. The
juicy, rank-smelling underwood clung round their
i6o GUINEA GOLD
knees, the thorn-studded vines caught at clothes and
flesh. The two carriers who had been chosen to
accompany them had to get out their great clearing
knives and cut the way. Farther and farther from
the river they crept, among the gnarled and but-
tressed trunks of the forest, under the swinging gar-
landry of air-plant, orchid, and bird's-nest fern. It
was damp and dark here, and the cheerful talking
of the river began to die away. A dozen times at
least they saw the cedar tree in fancy before it came,
but at last Scott sighted it plainly enough in a little
clearing that it had made for itself by dint of starv-
ing out the feebler growths that struggled beneath
its shade.
Under its boughs they stopped to mop their
streaming faces and arms and consult the compass
again.
" ' Thirty points north of east, two hundred and
sixty paces,' " quoted Anderson. " We're close on
it now. That would take us pretty near back into
the river again. Boys, we can't miss it — that gold's
somewhere within three hundred yards of where
we're standing at this minute, unless Cripps was
mad — and I don't think he was, though most of us
are, more or less."
He set the course by the compass again, and they
headed away at a slant from their former track,
counting paces as they went in tones that gradually
rose from a whisper to a shout. They smashed
through vines, they tore away their bleeding arms
GUINEA GOLD 161
and hands from the myriad thorns of the bush, they
flung themselves over logs, and took gullies at a
flying leap. Behind them the carriers toiled, assur-
ing each other that their masters had certainly been
bitten by ghosts in the night, or had eaten roots be-
witched by some mighty sorcerer.
" It is very good to lie under the roof of your
house when the sun is high up, and chew betel-nut all
day long," panted Yassi, in the Orokiva tongue, pull-
ing his black shins out of a tangle of many-hooked
" lawyer."
" Yes, we were mad to come with the white men
again — what is a little trade stuff? " lamented Kobo.
" Work was meant for women, not for men. Ow-
wow, I wish I were back in my yam-garden, stirring
up my wives with a stick when they do not dig quick
enough !
14 But I will make them work when I get back —
I will make them work ! " he added thoughtfully.
" Listen to that! The Taubadas are going mad-
der than ever," commented Yassi, as a yell broke
out ahead, followed by a sudden smashing and
crashing through the low bushes.
" If they go altogether mad, we will hit them on
the head with stone clubs when they are not looking,
and then we will eat them, and then we will go back
to the coast with all the goods, and tell the other
white men they were killed by the Kariva. And then
we will go home, and we shall be great men in our
villages."
162 GUINEA GOLD
" Great men!" chanted the other Orokiva ex-
citedly.
But at this point Scott and Dence came crashing
back through the undergrowth, faces and eyes on
fire.
11 Go back! " they said, using the pidgin-English
which is the lingua franca of Papua. " Altogether
you fellow go back. No more you come up along us.
You go along river where big tree stop ; you go out
island; you makem camp there."
" Scoot! " added Dence, in a tone that sent the
carriers flying.
M The Taubadas are certainly mad," babbled
Yassi, as they ran through the underbrush, not dar-
ing to look back.
" If one of you leaves the island, we'll shoot
him! " came the voice of Scott, retreating in the dis-
tance. Silence fell on the forest, save for the scurry-
ing noise of the carriers hurrying down to the river.
They splashed through the shallows, reached the
island, and flung themselves down in the shade. Not
two o'clock, and halted for the day! Surely some-
body's pet sorcerer was working well for him, far
away in the delightful coast villages where pigs and
cocoanuts flourished, and where a man might live a
man's life, smoking and chewing idly under his
pandanus thatch. ...
Out in the forest, a quarter of a mile away, Dence
was hugging Anderson round his brawny neck, and
GUINEA GOLD 163
swaying to and fro, while Scott sat on the ground and
cried. The nervous temperament had got its own
with him at last. But nothing any one of the three
could have done at that moment would have aston-
ished the others. They were past astonishment, past
feeling of any kind save one. Had the woman who
spoiled Anderson's life years before (you never
heard of her, and never will), had the girl with the
honey-brown eyes, who was loved by Dence and by
Scott, to the sorrow of both, stepped suddenly into
that theatrical-looking glade, among the palms and
fern trees, hands outstretched and lips smiling for
a kiss, it is long odds that not one of the men would
have taken any particular notice of her. Had the
brooding thunderstorm above them broken in a roar
and a flash that shook the earth they stood on, and
split the trees that were their shelter, nor Dence,
nor Scott, nor Anderson would have moved an inch
from where he stood. They had found the gold.
Running for thirty or forty feet through the
scanty underbrush — here poor and feeble, because
of the rocky soil — was a little rugged wall of some-
thing whitish — a hard, milky stone, stained here and
there with dull red. It came up out of the ground
edgeways, with a sharp cant to one side; rough grey
granite overhung it, and bluish diorite underlay it,
making it into a sort of mineral sandwich. The
meat of the sandwich — the whitish quartz — was set
thick with streaks and lumps of gold, ounces and
pounds of it full in sight. Pieces that had broken off
1 64 GUINEA GOLD
the reef lay half buried in trailing green, showing
gold in their fractures and edges. One, near as
big as a bucket, was studded all over with yellow
lumps, as a school-feast pudding is studded with
blocks of suet.
" My God in heaven! look at that! " exclaimed
Anderson, breaking loose from the polar-bear hug of
Dence to put his hands about the lump and heave
it from the ground. " There's three hundred ounces
in it if there's a single weight."
"Gold!" sobbed Scott, with heaving chest.
" Gold ! " He got up, the tears running unshamedly
down his cheeks, and began picking at the reef with
his nails. Dence was patting and petting it as if it
had been a favourite horse, swearing strange cavalry
oaths as he did so. In a minute he straightened him-
self up and turned to Anderson, who had just let
go his gold-studded boulder. By a simultaneous im-
pulse, all three men seized each other's hands, and
began swaying about together, shaking and gripping
one another's dirty fingers, and uttering half-articu-
late cries of delight.
" Three cheers ! " cried Dence at last. They gave
them, and three more to follow, and three more
after that, till the arches of the forest rang as they
had not rung since creation's dawn. And then, being
suddenly very tired out indeed, the adventurers sat
down upon the reef and looked at one another's mar-
vellously altered faces.
It felt — how did it feel ? As if a window had
GUINEA GOLD 165
suddenly slipped down and shut out the noise and
rush of a hurrying midday thoroughfare, leaving, in-
stead, a silence almost bewildering. As if one had
been rushing across a continent in an express train,
engine screaming, dust flying, landscape quivering
past — and in a moment found oneself standing still,
on a quiet little country platform, with the sunshine
sleeping on the empty rails, and the far-off throb of
the train dying away in the distance. . . . The
struggle, the chase, the fight with time and space
and peril and hunger were done. And to the three
hungry, weary, overworked, and excited men the
sudden blank was staggering.
" I can't believe it, somehow," said Scott, with
a rather weak laugh, absently fingering the wonder-
ful reef.
" Nor I; but it's true," said Anderson, his eyes
fixing themselves on the bucket-shaped fragment,
with its glittering incrustations, as if they could never
detach themselves again. " Dence, I can't keep my
hands off this much longer. Suppose we send back
to the camp and fetch our picks and some tucker,
and get all we can out of this show before
dark?"
11 Righto," assented Dence. " I'm aching to be
at it. Who'll go?"
" I don't mind," said Scott, who felt as though he
needed a little sobering. " We don't want the boys
here at present, I suppose."
" You suppose right," answered Anderson em-
1 66 GUINEA GOLD
phatically. " They're not needed to work this sort
of thing, and the less they know the better."
" I thought so when you sent us back to stop them
as soon as you caught sight of the reef."
" Hurry, hurry! " urged Dence, who was fidgeting
about the reef, picking away with a penknife. An-
derson had already got hold of a sharp fragment
of stone and knocked a bit of gold out.
"Yes, hurry! " he added, hitting away with his
improvised hammer.
They had had a tiring and exciting half-day, and
every one of the three was more or less weak for
want of proper food. The heat, as the day wore on,
became appalling, down in this airless glade, shut off
from every breath of river air, and canopied by
thickly gathering thunderclouds. Yet they worked
that afternoon as if the Last Day were upon them,
and salvation purchasable by the gold they should
win before the dark came down. They tore and
smashed at the rock with their picks, and clawed it
with their hands. They put the broken fragments in
an iron camp oven, and beat them still smaller, and
picked the gold out of them in flakes and lumps and
pieces. They pooled their gains in a quart billy-can,
and saw the gold cover the bottom, and begin to
climb up the sides, before the four o'clock storm
broke upon their heads. And in the middle of the
storm they went on, swinging their picks under a
ceaseless crackle and roar of bellowing flame that
GUINEA GOLD 167
lit up the dripping caves of the forest with blue lights
like signal-flares, and turned the rain to streaming
glass, and showed the lines of weariness on the three
tired faces, as they passed continually, in the alter-
nating leap of the flashes, from glare to gloom. . . .
That night, in the camp by the river, white men and
black slept as sound as Cripps himself, lying in
his unknown bed beneath the sodden earth and leaves
of the " untrampled forest floor." There was no
sentry set, and no one waked, so the little point of
flame that rose and brightened and died away, a long
way off down the river, was seen by none.
CHAPTER X
Mr. Rupert Dence was thinking.
Two days had passed since the finding of the reef,
and almost two nights. It was the second night now
— still and blue and moonlit, the river black glass in
the shadows, silver glass in the light; the forest in-
digo and moss-agate green beneath the pouring flood
of the wonderful tropic moon. She was past the full
to-night, and so rose late. The camp by the river
had been long asleep when Rupert Dence stirred on
the rough sacking of his bed, stretched, sighed,
awoke, and looked out from under the fly upon a
slumbering world.
There is no man or woman but knows that three
o'clock waking, when the little nibbling care that has
lain drugged by labour throughout the day, and by
weariness through the early night, stirs to life again,
and sets its teeth at work. " Sleep no more ! " it
cries, like the voice that grieved Macbeth. " Sleep
no more — I have been waiting for the moment when
your tired body should rise for a moment like a
corpse through the drowning sea of sleep, and I
have set my fangs into it, to make sure that it shall
not sink again. Wake, and listen, and feel ! "
Rupert Dence had been haunted by just such a
little rat-like care, ever since the day in the forest
168
GUINEA GOLD 169
when they had met with the invisible Kariva bow-
men. Something had happened that day which puz-
zled him. Something more had happened on the
day when Scott failed to count the carriers right.
And only a few hours before a third thing had hap-
pened — he thought.
He was not sure — that was the worst of it. When
a man is constantly tobacco-hungry he imagines the
smell and taste of tobacco, at times, where it does
not exist. Dence, like all New Guinea miners, was
a heavy smoker, and the daily reduction of his allow-
ance irked him not a little. That evening, when
the sunset wind was blowing up the river, he had
been washing himself in the stream, and he really did
think that the faintest possible whiff of " navy cut "
not stick, which was all the expedition carried — had
been blown for an instant to his hungry nos-
trils.
If it had been? If they had allowed the hunt and
the finding of the reef to blind them to things they
should have remembered . . .
The madness of gold was upon them; they could
think and speak of nothing else. All that day, from
sunrise to dark, they had been labouring desperately
at the reef, tearing from it its shining treasure, hardly
believing their eyes as they saw the richness of what
they had got, yet talking constantly of the untouched
millions that might lie buried in the earth below.
Before those millions the hundred that they were
garnering with their picks from the exposed outcrop
170 GUINEA GOLD
seemed almost poor. Anderson calculated, at the
end of the day, that they had won about four hundred
and fifty among the three, and nobody thought it
nearly enough.
For all that, they were wild with the excitement of
the work; not one of them went back to the camp for
food or rest during all the long, hot day. They
hacked open a couple of tins, and bolted the contents
from plates of ship's biscuit, drinking out of the
bucket of water they had brought from the river in
the morning, and feeding themselves from hands cov-
ered with clinging dirt, and curiously spangled about
the nails with gold. They talked gold all day. They
told each other what had been got in Westralia in
the early times of the rush; they spoke of the cruel
Klondyke; they went back to tales of Ballarat and
Bendigo, and the era of the u Forty-Nine." They
threw bitter contempt upon the moderate gains of
old Papuan fields, Yodda and Lakakamu and Ki-
kiramu, and sneered at the Woodlark Reef, which
you had to go after four hundred feet underground,
and which didn't work out more than an ounce or so
to the ton when you got it. Now and then one of
the three would break off into an account of what he
meant to do with his share, but that part seemed far
off, and unreal, and did not really interest anyone
very much in these first hours of furious gold-getting.
The royal metal seemed aim and end in itself.
So they worked, and went home, and slept. And
so Dence woke up, late in the night, with the little
GUINEA GOLD 171
rat of anxiety gnawing away in his mind, and de-
manding to be noticed.
Was there anyone else on the river?
Most unlikely — well-nigh impossible. . . . Yet —
was not Papua the Country of the Impossible?
Rupert Dence sat up on his bunk in the moonlight,
his eyes looking down the river, his chin set on his
knees — and found no answer to his thoughts.
Anderson and Scott, rising at the dawn of day and
making haste to get breakfast over, so that they
might begin their work again as soon as possible,
found the third partner disinclined to get up. Dence
was in one of his nasty moods. He was not sick, he
said; he was simply tired and sleepy, and he meant to
stop where he was. When they tried to punch him into
getting up and taking his share of work, he swore at
them elaborately, and wrapped his head in his blan-
ket, out of which proceeded, afterwards, certain muf-
fled sounds, having reference to the folly of losing
your night's sleep under any circumstances, espe-
cially when it did no adjectived persons any ad-
jectived good, and brought you no adjectived thanks.
" Let him alone," advised Anderson. " Dence is
a queer fish, and won't stand being interfered with.
There isn't any terrible hurry."
It was pleasant walking through the bush to the
reef again, in the cool of early morning, pink and
lilac orchid flowers smelling sweet on the branches
of the great dusk trees, bell-birds tank-tanking, and
172 GUINEA GOLD
Gaura pigeons ringing golden chimes. The two men
spoke little. They were filled with quiet, dreamy
happiness, the calm of feeling that follows on the
storm, whether of joy or grief. They saw before
them long years of luxury and ease that they had
bought with toil and danger unspeakable. They felt
the weight of common human anxieties lifted away
for ever from their hearts — those anxieties that'
are carried all through life by almost every man;
fear for the " rainy day," fear for the grey, cold
years when the grasshopper shall be a burden, fear
for the vulnerable body so easily hurt or crippled,
and fear of the bitter bread that broken men must
eat. There were no such fears for them. The little
white curb of quartz, with its yellow spots and
streakings, was high enough to wall them off for ever.
They walked into the clearing that they had made
about the reef.
Astride the curb of quartz sat Clay of Sama-
rai, his pasty face terrible with fear and twitching
with evil triumph. He had a loaded revolver in
each hand. A bunch of native carriers squatted on
the ground behind him. Some few yards from where
he sat, the morning sun rays shot through the trees
straight upon a new-cut wooden post hammered into
the ground, and bearing a paper, on which some
words were written in blotted ink.
Scott stopped dead on the verge of the clearing,
dumfoundered. He could not believe he saw rightly.
And what the mischief . . .
GUINEA GOLD 173
He caught the expression on Anderson's face,
and it struck him like a blow. The miner had
turned a horrible white, and his greenish eyes had
dilated till they looked nearly black.
" Good God in Heaven ! " he choked. " The little
devil's jumped our claim! "
" I don't understand," said Scott, with a feeling
of cold fright creeping up his back. " What has he
done? What business has he here? Kick him
out!"
" I can't," said Anderson, still in that low, choked
voice.
" You can't! You can't!" crowed Clay, like a
rooster with the croup. He was terribly frightened,
and the revolvers swayed in his grip. " You never
pegged your claim. I've a perfect right. The
Government will support me. My boys are witnesses
— I pegged out the claim first, early this morning —
read the notice. It's all in order. I — I — I'll shoot
any man who touches it."
He laughed the high whinnying laugh of abject
fear. But it was not the fear of the creature that
was so disgusting to see; it was his dreadful courage
— the courage of a starveling dog over a stolen bone.
The bone is life to him — if its loss were death to
you, or a thousand of you, he would keep his teeth
in it just the same.
" Finding's keeping! " he whinnied. " Don't you
dare touch me. You'll hang if you do. This — this
isn't your old Crown Colony days. We've got a
174 GUINEA GOLD
Government of our own. You'll be hanged, I tell
you."
There seemed to be something in Anderson's face
that induced him to harp on the question, for he
called out yet once again that they hanged you in
Papua nowadays, before he fell silent, looking at the
two miners, and trying to keep his chin from jerking
up and down.
" The question is," said Anderson, speaking quite
quietly, " whether it isn't worth hanging — for you."
" I'll shoot you," babbled Clay.
" I've seen men strung up — for much less," stated
Anderson. " In Venezuela. And other places."
He seemed to be communing with himself, and mak-
ing up his mind — under the wobbling barrels of the
two revolvers. Scott clinched his teeth as the gleam
of the trembling steel crossed his own face; he could
see that Clay was scarcely responsible for his actions
at the moment, and he wished himself well out of
the range of those threatening muzzles. But one
could not move away, while Anderson stood look-
ing right into the clump of lead-nosed barrels, coolly
deciding what he should do.
There was always a chance of surprise from stalk-
ing Karivas in these unknown regions, and the three
adventurers had fallen into the habit of wearing
their own revolvers all day long. Anderson's swung
loose on his hip in an open holster, and Scott saw his
fingers stealing round to it, while Clay, half blind
with fright, kept babbling and exulting, and waving
GUINEA GOLD 175
his weapon in the air. . . . The big miner's face had
changed — was changing . . .
"No, by God, you don't! "
Scott never knew whether he said the words, or
merely thought them. But he had Anderson by the
arm in an instant, and with all the strength of his
shipyard-toughened muscles was tugging him back
into the bush. Before you could have called out,
they were struggling and scrapping confusedly
through the undergrowth, one hauling, the other
resisting — a wrestling bout that meant life or death
to Clay.
Clay had sense enough to see that, and, still clutch-
ing his revolvers, but forgetting that he held them,
fled into the forest. And the two partners fought,
among the thorny citron bushes, and the tangled
lianas, and the spindling, long-branched gum trees —
smashing, tripping, and shouting out.
" Quit it, Anderson, ye fool ! " gasped the Belfast-
man. " Quit, I tell ye ! I'm not going to stand by
and see ye commit murder."
a You'll feel me commit it, if you don't let me
go ! " roared the other. " Do you know what he's
done? LET GO!"
" I will," said Scott suddenly, releasing his hold.
He had seen Clay disappear in the bush.
Anderson glared round him like a tiger robbed of
its prey.
" Where's he gone? " he demanded.
" Now, you don't suppose I'm going to tell you
176 GUINEA GOLD
that. Can't you keep your hair on for a minute, and
tell me what's happened? " Scott was fastening up
his shirt, torn nearly off his back. He seemed much
the cooler of the two, but in reality a horrid fear
was thumping at his heart. What must the injury
be that had so transformed the iron-natured Ander-
son?
" Happened? " said Anderson, breathing quickly,
and catching hold of a tree-fern trunk, as though he
needed its support. " He has taken the reef from
us. That's all."
"How?" asked Scott, with dry lips. This was
very bad.
" Pegged out a claim — all over the outcrop. I
didn't need to look at the notice — it was the one
thing he would do. It's his — by mining law, and
Commonwealth law."
" Why didn't we peg out our claim? "
Anderson groaned.
u Why didn't we? Because Dence and I were two
of the wretchedest fools that ever . . . But there
wasn't a white man within a week's march. — How
could one Scott, we've been bad mates to you.
We've ruined you."
" Oh, that's all rot; if you can stand it, I can. Of
course, I didn't know "
" No— and we didn't think. . . . The little devil's
been at the Kikiramu all the time. That cook must
have been him. He must have got Carter to grub-
stake him, with some plausible tale or other, and
GUINEA GOLD 177
followed us up almost as soon as we started. A
child could have traced us by our track. And there
were his boys making sago in the same swamp as
ours — the day one of them got into our crowd, and
you counted thirty-two. . . . Why didn't we see? "
he groaned.
They had both quieted down now. They were
beginning to realise what it meant. The golden
dream was gone. There would be no triumphal
voyage down to Sydney in the best cabins of the B.P.
liners — the gates of all the delights in all the world
opening wide before them as they went — no magic
raft to float them up above the struggles and mis-
eries of a drowning, moneyless humanity — no latter
end secure from the fear of dependence, that haunts
a brave man worse than the fear of death. They
would be — like other people. Nothing more.
Slowly, as beasts that have received a deadly
wound, they crawled home. The camp was as they
left it; the natives had not finished their billy-can of
rice they were beginning when the two had started
out. Dence, coiled in his bunk, still slept.
The Australian and the Irishman sat down upon
the ground and looked at the carriers wolfing their
food. A flight of hornbills, dark green bodied,
orange necked, crossed the river. A wild pig, far
away in the forest, crashed among the trees. It was
very quiet; you could hear the insects crawling in
the bush and the dead leaves dropping in the stream.
They had not the heart to speak.
178 GUINEA GOLD
Presently Dence took his head from under his
arm, untwisted his legs, and woke up.
" I've had a good sleep," he remarked, turning
out of his bunk. " Did you fellows eat all the kai-
kai? I could manage half a pig, if we had one."
u Dence," said Anderson, sitting on the ground,
" there's only one damned fool to match you in the
world, and that's me."
" But why? " queried Dence, pulling on his boots.
" No use looking so down in the mouth about it,
anyhow, if you have found out the truth once in a
way."
" I'm not having the loan of you," said Anderson.
*' I'm serious. Clay has sneaked after us and pegged
out our claim."
Mr. Dence finished pulling on his boot without
any comment. He looked under the bunk for the
other, pulled that on too, and then came out from
under the fly, hair on end, and shirt open over his
chest. He looked at Anderson with a quizzical eye.
11 You are a funny devil, you know," he said.
"Hang you, we're not making fun!" shouted
Scott. " It's true. Go and look at the peg he's put
up, if you don't believe it." He was feeling very
sore indeed against the two for their neglect in peg-
ging out the claims — though he knew that not one in
a thousand would have done so, in such a place as
this — and the effort to keep back any reproach made
him vicious.
Dence, being out of the tent, looked deliberately
GUINEA GOLD 179
round him for a tree with a good, steady trunk.
Having found one, he leaned up against it, shut his
eyes, opened his mouth, and laughed till he nearly
choked.
" I never — never — knew — such a good one," he
panted. " Oh, to see your faces " He was off
again. u Stop me, Anderson, I'll shake my ribs
loose. Oh — I can't breathe. Oh, by Jove, it's too
rich." He yelled louder.
Scott stared in utter bewilderment, tinged with
annoyance. But Anderson's eyes were beginning to
glitter, and the colour was coming back to his face.
He got up, looked at Dence, saw his laughter fit was
hot likely to come to an immediate end, and de-
liberately emptied a bucket of water over the laugh-
er's head.
"Confound you, what did you do that for?"
spluttered Dence, all the laugh washed out of him.
" I reckoned it was the best way to treat hysterics,"
said Anderson dryly. " Out with it. What have you
done?"
" Got up in the middle of the night and pegged
out three claims, one for each of us — 75 by 400
apiece. We'll see to the extra reward claim to-
morrow. (Where's there a towel? You've half
drowned me!) Put the four pegs in all right and
stuck up the notice. Took Here, you needn't
pound my ribs off my backbone — who's got hysterics
now?"
" Good for you ! Good old man ! " Anderson was
180 GUINEA GOLD
exclaiming, to the accompaniment of hearty slaps
upon Dence's back. Scott had leaped to his feet with
a spring like a wallaby, and was pumping the Eng-
lishman's arm up and down, using, in his excitement,
expressions that would certainly not have passed
muster in the Young Men's Christian Association.
" Unhand me, sir ! " commanded Dence loftily.
" My Lord, I conjure you let me pass — I would go
and clean myself in the river."
" No, you don't," Anderson assured him. " We
want to hear some more."
" There isn't any more. I dated it, and took
Yassi and Kobo with me to see what I did, by the
struggling moonbeams' misty light, and the lantern
dimly burnin'. Then I went back, and lay like a
warrior takin' his rest, till you two came back. . . .
And Clay got up very early, did he, the little bird,
and went out to catch the early worm? And why
didn't the little bird see that the bloomin' little worm
was caught already? "
" Oh, that's plain," said Anderson, who now
looked ten years younger than he had done a few
minutes earlier. " He was afraid to take up time
marking out the proper square, so he put in a datum
Peg "
"What's that?" asked Scott.
" What you saw. A peg put up to claim a cer-
tain area — 75 by 400 is the limit — in the two direc-
tions mentioned on the notice. It's as good as the
other — if it gets there first. Of course, he had to
GUINEA GOLD 181
take up a smaller area, so he never saw Dence's
pegs at all — they must have been out of sight in the
bush."
"Then we're really all right, after all?"
" You bet."
44 Three cheers for Dence ! " yelled Scott, throwing
up his hat.
They gave them, and another to follow, Dence
very obligingly joining in himself, because, as he
explained, the cheer would have been spoiled if he
hadn't. Clay, skulking about in the bush, as near as
he dared, heard the cheering, and felt his heart sink
with fear. Why should ruined men cheer?
He found out before very long, when the ruined
men, quartering the bush among them with scientific
precision, started out to run him down. He heard
them coming, and made widely for the river, hoping
to reach the canoe he had left tied up under a log in
time to get away. But his boys, who liked their
master not at all, and considered the hunt an excel-
lent joke, frustrated his efforts by getting in his way
at every opportunity, so that the chase was short and
disastrous — for the quarry. In less than ten minutes
Clay was struggling and howling in the grip of
Dence, while Anderson and Scott, roaring with
laughter, tied his hands and feet with " bush ropes "
and slung him on a pole, after the fashion of cannibal
Papua preparing for a feast. His own boys, at the
order of the miners, took him very readily upon
their shoulders, and carried him through the bush
182 GUINEA GOLD
to the camp by the river. The miners followed, still
laughing; Clay filled the bush with terrified cries
and entreaties and threats of Government vengeance;
the native carriers, uplifted and excited, sang a war-
song as they went. And above all the noise made
by the strange procession, rose the frantic screeching
of the great white cockatoos that lived on the cliffs
above the river; for your cockatoo is the natural
sentry of the wilds, and gives ample tongue to his
suspicions at the least suggestion of trouble.
Before they reached the camp, they carried their
prisoner round by the reef, and showed him every
one of Dence's pegs, bumping his head soundly on
each, to impress it upon his memory.
" The Government will protect us," they told him.
" You'll be hanged if you look crooked at us.
There's law and order in the country nowadays."
They carried him down to the river-bank, and
deposited him, none too carefully, on the ground.
His doughy face was green with fright, and he kept
crying on them, in God's name, for Christ's sake, to
let him go.
" Hear the brute ! " said Anderson disgustedly,
spitting into the river. " He's enough to make any-
one turn atheist."
" Do you think," said Dence, with a sidewise wink,
" that it would be better to drop him into the river
just as he is, or give him to the boys to play with?
We've a few young devils of Orokivas who would
enjoy a little fun."
GUINEA GOLD 183
At this, Clay began to fight wildly against the re-
straining ropes. Kobo, who was a fine, upstanding,
well-mannered boy, came forward eagerly, his eyes
glowing, and pulled the lianas tighter.
" Taubada," he said, with an ingratiating smile,
" more better you give him along we-fellow Orokiva
boy. All the time we-fellow no got betel-nut, no got
dance, no got fight, no got nothings, makem play
belong Orokiva. All the time belly be long we-
fellow all same one big stone he stop along him.
Suppose you giving bad-fellow white man, Orokiva
boy he plenty like."
"What will you do with him? " asked Anderson
gravely.
14 By n' by we breakem leg belong him, takem one
stick-fire, put him along eye," said the Orokiva, with
a delightful smile. " Behind, he stop one day, two
day, we look along him, no can run away, plenty
we talk along him, make sing, make dance. By n'
by makem plenty big pyre, puttem that fellow along
pyre, he cook all same pig, all same dish. Plenty he
sing out, altogether grease belong him he fell down
along fire. Very good, my word! Taubada, you
like?"
It seemed to the Orokiva that his employers were
showing signs of a more liberal-minded sporting
disposition than he had believed them to possess,
and he was ready at once to meet them on their own
ground. A New Guinea savage is not really sur-
prised.
1 84 GUINEA GOLD
But Scott had had as much as he wanted, for
Clay was beginning to howl.
" Shut up, you silly brute ! " he said loudly.
" They're only taking a rise out of you. No one's
going to hurt you. Go on, you bushman, and clean
the billy-cans," he added, throwing at the Orokiva
the epithet that for some incomprehensible reason
grieves and reduces to submission almost any native
of New Guinea.
" Me no bushman ! " protested the warrior, in a
mortified tone, slinking away to his scullion-work.
" Well, since Scott has given the show away,
there's no use keepin' it up any longer," remarked
Dence. " Anderson, I vote we make this thing use-
ful, as we'll have to keep it here for a good bit. It
can cook, it seems, so we'll make it cook and general
orderly, and pay it wages, so that it can't say it
hasn't had a fair deal."
11 Right," said Anderson, slashing through the
ropes with his knife.
It was arranged later in the day that Scott, as the
least experienced miner, should go back in a short
time to the Kikiramu field to place the applications
with the warden, and fetch up a fresh supply of food,
taking a number of carriers with him. For the pres-
ent, and until the miners thought well to release him,
Clay was to look upon himself as a prisoner. There
was no fear of his running away, since he could not
get back to civilisation without carriers or stores.
In the evening the three mates sat on a log near
GUINEA GOLD - 185
the river smoking, beating off the mosquitoes, and
talking. Clay's tent had been put up within sight
of the others, but he was given to understand that his
company was not desired in the white men's camp,
so, like Achilles, he skulked apart.
" It was the oddest thing to see him defy us," said
Scott, relating the incidents of the morning yet again.
" It gave one quite a turn, just as if a sheep had made
for you and bitten you. Seemed sort of unnatural."
" Nothing's unnatural," said Dence.
11 Well, what was that?"
" Perfectly natural. Anything that has life will
fight, if its motive is strong enough. I happen to
know Clay's motive."
" Oh, the gold."
u Not quite — or not only. What's the next
strongest passion in the world? "
" You don't mean to say that thing's got a girl? "
" I don't. That's the trouble."
"How?" asked Scott, puzzled and interested.
He felt at times that Dence went a good deal beyond
him. Clay, to his vision, was a mere human rat —
how could a rat have any motive or feeling save the
rat-like one of greediness?
11 Did you ever think," asked Dence, smoking
slowly, " you and Anderson, what it would be like
if no woman cared for you — ever had, or ever
could?"
Two right hands went up to two moustaches and
twisted them a little knowingly. Anderson only
186 GUINEA GOLD
smiled. You could see he thought of many things.
Scott answered quickly.
" No, by Jove, I did not — but it would be — well,
it would be "
He wished very much that somebody were here to
boast for him. Though a modest man enough, Scott
was not blind to the fact that Janie, and the girl with
the sweet brown eyes, were — what could one say? —
well, scarcely singular in their tastes.
" Just so," said Dence. " Well, there are men,
not very many of them, but some, who have never
been liked by anything that wore a skirt. Clay's
one. Any woman on earth would fancy a humpback
sooner than him — fancy a blind nigger — fancy Satan
himself. Why? You ask women; they might tell
you — I couldn't, for I don't know, but there it is. He
isn't exactly an ugly fellow, in a way : he's as big and
strong as the average; if he lies and sneaks, so do
thousands who are liked by women whose shoes they
aren't fit to tie. But — women won't count him in
the game. Never did. Never will. I've known
Clay a good while, and I know that's true.
" Well," he went on, " it's pretty well poisoned
his life, and — naturally — made him hate men who
are liked by women. And he dreams of turnin' the
tables, somehow or other, some day. He dreams of
being rich, so that he can buy a handsome wife, as any
rich man can — just as you buy a horse at a fair, and
put a halter on it, and tie it in your stable. And he
fancies how he'd be seen drivin' in motor-cars with
GUINEA GOLD 187
famous actresses and singers, who wouldn't go out
to lunch with the handsomest man he knows, unless
they got somethin' out of it — he reckons he'd have
diamonds enough handy to make them play they liked
him, anyhow. And he'd flash his money about to
such an extent that the girls who like all the other
men he knows, and who have given him the ugly
set-down, would just come crawlin' round. Oh, some
of his notions are not so far out — for a little rat
with a rat's brain. And, if you want to know, that's
why Clay has done — what he has."
" I don't see how you know," commented Scott, a
little acidly. The subject Dence had started held
certain drops of bitterness somewhere — for that
company.
" I know," said the man who had lived too much,
and, as he sometimes told himself, too long. " There
are keys that unlock most doors. . . . Deuce of it
is, they cost such a lot, that by the time you've got
the bunch, you're pretty well bankrupt."
Well, I'm for bed," said Scott, stifling a yawn.
CHAPTER XI
They were taking round the eleven o'clock tea in
Samarai.
Only in the Land-of-Lots-of-Time does eleven
o'clock tea really flourish. In England, it sulks
ashamed about back drawing-rooms and housemaids'
pantries, cherished as a secret vice by the women of
the house, and contemned by the men. It lifts its
head to the status of a tolerated luxury in Australia,
where the station owner and his hardy sons are not
ashamed to sit down on the verandah with wife
and sisters and temper the heat of the morning with
a refreshing cup or two before they set foot in stir-
rup again. And in Australia's outback colony,
Papua, it finds its own at last. For here eleven
o'clock tea is actually an institution of the country,
recognised by Government.
It was eleven, and a beautiful, molten-gold-hot
morning. Up and down the little white coral path-
ways, between the ranks of scarlet crotons, and
under the shadow of the tossing palms, trotted the
Government boys, brown-legged, blue-tunicked, bear-
ing jugs and plates to the Government offices. On
all the verandahs of the bungalows and hotels spoons
tinkled and china clinked. Men who did not drink
tea, because their tastes were for stronger stuff,
188
GUINEA GOLD 189
drifted into the bars of Figg's Federal, and Bunn's,
driven irresistibly by the universal thirst, and there
comforted themselves with beer.
Charmian Ducane was kept busy serving, for the
town was full at present, and the morning was un-
usually warm. Her little soft hands, once white, but
reddened now by the constant washing and wiping
of glasses, were hard at work drawing and handing
drink, taking money, giving change, and marking
down scores. She had found the calculating part
almost impossible at first; even yet she depended
a good deal on a paper and pencil, and more on the
kindness of the men who frequented the bar, and
who were always ready to help her out with a sum,
or to protect her against taking bad money. She
had taken a good deal at first, especially on steamer
days. Figg had scolded her, and she had cried so
much about it that her eyes were very red. Then a
couple of Yodda miners had asked her what the
matter was, and she had told them. After that the
word had gone round in Samarai that anyone who
was caught giving her bad money would suffer for it.
Thenceforward pewter florins and composition sov-
ereigns came no more to the Federal till.
Figg, however, was dissatisfied. He had engaged
the heroine of the Ducane trial with certain ex-
pectations which had not been fulfilled. He had
never supposed she would make a smart barmaid,
but he did anticipate that her notoriety would draw
all Samarai to his hotel, out of sheer curiosity. It
ic,o GUINEA GOLD
did, for a fortnight — no more. In the tiny island
town, with its stationary population, everybody had
done all the staring that curiosity demanded, very
soon, and there was nothing to keep up interest, once
the nine days' wonder had subsided.
And Mrs. Ducane was not a good barmaid.
Anyone could see that she hated the work, and
felt degraded by it. She tried to be pleasant to
everybody, for Charmian was an honest soul (else
had she paid back Ducane in his own base coin,
years and years ago), and she knew that her smiles
were considered in her salary. So she wore a gal-
vanised little grin that was the most piteous thing
about her piteous position, and she did not slap the
customers in the face, as she really wished to do,
when they squeezed her fingers as she was handing
glasses. But she could not manage to look as if she
liked her work or her patrons, and, what with the
fear of being too civil, and the fear of not being civil
enough, she always seemed half scared — more and
more to the annoyance of landlord Figg, who began
to think that charity was too expensive a luxury for
the Federal Hotel.
This day, however, she was brighter than usual,
and even talked to the men she was serving with
something like the old gaiety of manner that had
made Mrs. Ducane's at-home days the most popu-
lar in North Queensland — once upon a time. The
wave of take-it-easiness that floods all Samarai about
the coming of the eleven o'clock hour had settled
GUINEA GOLD 191
down upon Figg's ; the boarders who had something
to do had slipped away from doing it, to lounge
and loaf away a quarter of an hour in Charmian's
bar. The boarders who had nothing to do (and they
were many) were lying about the seats on the veran-
dah, where they had lain since breakfast, drifting
in and out of the bar now and then, and all the time
exchanging sleepy gossip with the people who came
in from the streets and stores.
More than usual this morning Charmian disliked
it all — the smell of liquor, the reek of tobacco, the
heat and the dry rattle of the palms, and the glare
from the fierce blue sea outside. Yet she felt better
able to stand it than usual, for she had a letter in
her pocket, crackling every time she moved, that had
put new light in the golden brown of her eyes, and
had caused her, for no reason except a general up-
lifting of heart, to put on her very best muslin dress.
Who shall separate cause and effect in the tangle of
gratified emotion that induces, and accompanies, the
wearing of a pretty woman's prettiest dress? Char-
mian felt twenty per cent, happier than usual when
she got the letter, and ten per cent, happier still when
she had preened her feathers to celebrate its com-
ing. In spite of the ill-smelling bar, and the glaring
light, and the rude talk of the men about her, life
looked pleasant this morning. Scott's letter, hidden
away in her pocket, where she could feel it crumple
as she moved, shed its own glamour upon the bar,
and the town, and the island — even upon the world
i 9 2 GUINEA GOLD
beyond, that had been so cruel to little Charmian.
After all, her trouble had rid her of Grant Ducane;
was not that one glorious fact compensation enough
for anything?
She wiped glasses industriously, tripping about the
bar with a lighter foot than usual, and singing softly
as she moved. The hot sea creamed hissing on the
scorching sand, at the other side of the road the
palm-vanes struck their huge dry hands together with
a sound like rain. From the verandah one could
hear the steady stream of talk that flowed among the
lounges and long chairs — news from the pearling
islands a day to eastward; chatter about Kikiramu
goldfield news, just brought down by the coasting
steamer; ship talk of every kind — when the Govern-
ment yacht was due, what had happened to So-and-
so's schooner; whether the German boat would call
on her upward trip . . .
"Not she; the North German Lloyd never calls
without she's got forty pounds' worth of passenger
to fetch at the least, and there's no one due from
here to Singapore. She won't call," maintained a
fat trader in a worn suit of khaki.
"What's the next boat in from south, then?"
asked some invisible person.
" Matunga's due in three days," they bab-
bled on.
Charmian felt half asleep as she stirred about her
bar, drawing beer for a couple of men who had come
in, and listening dully to the interminable shipping
GUINEA GOLD 193
talk. It did not interest her at all. How stupefying
the smell of beer was !
Of a sudden a howl arose from the natives on
the beach—" Say-0 ! Say-O ! "
" Sail-0 ! " shouted the men on the verandah,
everyone jumping to his feet. In the direction of
China Straits the imperial blue of the morning sky
was stained by a thin smear of trailing black.
"It is the German boat!" triumphed the man
who had been arguing with the trader. " Nothing
else could make such a smoke. Never calls going up,
doesn't she? "
" She must have passengers to land — a good lot
of them," maintained the trader. He was really
mortified, for they take the doings of ships mighty
seriously in Samarai, and the trade of marine prophet
— in the absence of telegraphy, wireless or wired —
carries some repute.
But when the great yellow-funnelled Norddeut-
scher Lloyd had come to anchor in the Straits before
the town, looking absurdly big there, as she towered
up among the schooners and luggers and oil-
launches, it became plain that she had not come to
land passengers — at least, of the ordinary kind. The
doctor was signalled for, and went out as usual; he
remained a good while on board, and when he came
ashore, it was only to tell his hospital assistant that
a bed would be wanted for an accident at once, and
to oversee the preparing of a stretcher. Then he
went on board the steamer again, and helped to
194 GUINEA GOLD
lower a sick man into his own whaleboat. A pas-
senger on the ship had fallen down a hatchway, and
had been so badly injured that the ship's doctor re-
fused to subject him to the chances of wind and
weather for the rest of the run to Singapore. As
Samarai had a doctor and a hospital, he must be
landed there. So ordained the Herr Doktor, and so
it was done.
Therefore the German boat called, and therefore
she got away again as quickly as she could, having
landed her accident case. All Samarai was in a flut-
ter of excitement; they are habitually on short com-
mons as regards happenings of interest in the island
town (save for murders in the interior, cases of
cannibalism reported from the islands, and other
everyday incidents about which nobody cares) . The
doctor was fairly besieged on his usual rounds that
afternoon. Who was the man? What was the mat-
ter with him? Where had he been going? Was he
going to recover? How would he get away again?
And a hundred questions more followed the busy
official as he went up and down the park-like walks
of the island, from Bob of Woodlark, the latest
miner to blow off his right arm fishing illegally with
dynamite, to Blank of Ioma, brought in a week ago
with blackwater fever; from Mrs. Q. and her baby,
to young R. the magistrate and his " New Guinea
sore leg."
The man, according to the doctor, was no less a
person than Kenton, lately of Lemba Plantation — a
GUINEA GOLD 195
man who had made money in Papua, and gone away
to enjoy it, travelling about the world. He had
smashed a leg, and several ribs, and the lung was
perforated. He had been on his way to England,
via the Malay States. He was certainly going to
recover, now that he was off a rolling ship, but he
wasn't to be visited. He would get away again when
it pleased Providence and Dr. Cornwall. (The doc-
tor was young, new, and a locum tenens ; which is as
much as to say that he took a dignified and solemn,
not to say sacred, view of his responsibilities of
office.)
It happened that evening that Dr. Cornwall, being
kept rather long at Figg's Federal Hotel in attend-
ance on a sick trader, thought well to dine there,
instead of climbing up to his own Governmental
residence on the top of the island. It happened
also that the doctor, who advocated teetotalism in
hot climates, but did not practise it, turned into the
bar after dinner and refreshed himself with a glass —
or two, or three — of Figg's excellent whiskey. And
it also happened that he talked, perhaps rather more
than a doctor should.
He discoursed, with excellent learning, on the
state of his patient's injured limbs and organs, and
on the natural processes that would assist his own
healing efforts. He was patronising about Lister,
and mentioned " old Ambrose Pare " with kindness.
He said that Frederick Treves was a good fellow
if people only wouldn't spoil him, and observed that
ig6 GUINEA GOLD
he personally never had. He went off at a tangent
into the oath of Hippocrates, and remarked in
the same breath that Kenton's evidently intemperate
habits wouldn't improve his chances of keeping his
leg; also, that Kenton's acquaintances and bosom
friends down in Sydney, as evidenced by his conver-
sation, did not do him credit. Being now well
warmed up by the whiskey, he proceeded to give
instances. He said that Kenton was a regular pal
of the doctor who had been mixed up in that dis-
reputable Ducane divorce (Cornwall was very new
to the island, and had never heard Charmian's
name), that the doctor had died lately, and Kenton
had been with him. Somebody kicked Cornwall
fiercely on the shin at this, but Cornwall, being more
than half intoxicated, only swore at him, and went
on. This Kenton, he said, had told him a queer
thing. The doctor, who must have been a frightful
blackguard — intemperate fellow, too, they said — had
told Kenton, when he was just about going, that the
evidence he gave in the divorce case was false, and
the whole charge a lie. Told the whole thing, how
he had What, in the name of several ugly
things, did his neighbour (a lean, leather-faced
miner, in a flannel shirt) mean by digging him, a
Government officer, in the ribs like that? (This
with great dignity.)
•" Hold your tongue," said the miner plainly.
" That lady's Mrs. Ducane."
The doctor, who was really not a bad young
GUINEA GOLD 197
fellow, being in truth nothing worse than an
over-educated, under-vitalised slip out of a college
nursery-garden, not yet acclimatised to the winds
of the open world — set down his glass confusedly
and begged the pardon of the extremely silent and
pale-faced girl who was standing behind the counter.
He thought she looked rather sick, and wondered
why.
" You want a — want a — tonic, my dear," he told
her, staring at her glassy-eyed. " I'll s-send you
down some stick-stick — some sticknine to-morrow.
If you're Mrs. Ducane, my dear, got good news for
you."
It scarcely seemed possible that any human being
should turn paler — yet she did.
" Good news," repeated the doctor, nodding his
head. " Kenton says — Ducane heard all about it —
most awfully cut up — heard you were here — Kenton
told him — he's comin' up by Matunga, day after to-
morrow. Bygones be bygones, an' have another
wedding — that's what he says, Kenton says. Wish
you luck. You let me sen' that sticknine? Pretty
girl like you shouldn't look "
The floor was concrete ; the bottle that Charmian
had been holding made a fearful crash as it fell, and
instantly the bar was filled with the pungent fumes
of (alleged) green Chartreuse. She did not even
stop to pick up the fragments. She made two steps
to the door at the back of the bar and was gone.
No one saw her face as she went.
i 9 8 GUINEA GOLD
Somebody told Figg that Mrs. Ducane was taken
ill, and the landlord, with an ill-grace, left his after-
dinner nap and came into the bar himself. More
than ever he was resolved to-night that the Federal
should know no more " charity."
Charmian, alone in her dark little bedroom, where
the day-long heat from the iron roof and walls re-
mained all through the stifling night, was lying face
down on her bed, praying God to let her die to-
morrow.
In the strange little island town of Samarai, the
expression of every human feeling is strictly regu-
lated by geographical conditions.
When you are in love, you walk round the island.
You walk round it always, because this is the only
available form of athletic exercise, but love makes
you walk round it a great deal more than usual,
partly because love is restless, and partly because
you have always a chance of finding the beloved ob-
ject somewhere on the circular track. When you
are very much in love you walk round it in the moon-
light, and sit on the seat below the powder maga-
zine — not alone. If your love takes the regrettable
form of a passion for one who is already " an-
other's," you entice your Helen out boating to the
quarantine island, and get sociably seasick in her
company, while Menelaus, jealously surveying you
with an opera-glass from the Government jetty,
gloats over your agony. When you marry, you go
GUINEA GOLD 199
away in a cutter, the bride's white veil fluttering
over salt green water, as you head for the cocoanut
plantation down the coast that has been lent you for
the honeymoon. When you die, they put your coffin
in a whale-boat, and the mourners sit all round it,
cramping their legs out of the way, and you are
taken to the cemetery island and buried there, and
the mourners go back in the boat without you, to
finish their mourning in the bar of Bunn's Hotel.
And when you are in trouble, with love and marriage
and death and money and misery all mixed up to-
gether, like the ingredients of the witches' brew in
Macbeth, you must inevitably go and sit on the top
of the island, because that is the only spot in Samarai
where, among the palms and the wet long grass, and
the uncleared, untracked brushwood, you can be
reasonably sure of a chance to cry unseen.
On the day before the Matunga was due from
Sydney, via " ports," there was somebody up on the
top of the island, in a quiet little spot where no casual
passer-by need be feared — a place where the palms
were young and small, and shut off all the splendid
panorama of the Straits, with their low-swinging,
criss-crossing feathers of gold-green. On the ground
under the palms sat the refugee from the town, her
arms clasped about her knees, her head on her arms,
crying — crying — crying.
It was Charmian's way of meeting the emergencies
of life. She had never been able to face things, or
fight things, like stronger women — women who wore
200 GUINEA GOLD
black cashmere skirts and white blouses and flan-
nelette petticoats, who did their hair in little wal-
nuts on the top of their heads, and bargained with
the butcher and the milkman in loud, firm tones.
Charmian had never been able to bargain, or to make
sensible clothes for herself, or to stand firmly upon
flat-soled boots, and defy the people who differed
from her. She wore the pretty things bought for
her by the men who loved her — with a sigh for an
impossible dream of pretty things bought by a man
she might love herself: she gave in to anyone who
spoke in a bullying tone : she did what she was told
to do, whether she hated it or not: and when trou-
ble came, she cried, or ran away.
Troubles had come in plenty to her sad little life,
and now they were gathering again, thick as the
rainclouds gather of a north-west afternoon, in the
main range country of inland Papua. They were
worse troubles than ever this time. Figg had dis-
charged her: Scott was away in the un-get-at-able
interior: Grant, hateful Grant, was coming up by
the Matunga to-morrow to find and claim her again
— after all that had passed — after all that she had
paid for her wretched little freedom ! — and worst of
all, she could not run away. How could one run
away from an island? where to run to, if one could,
in this terrible country that was a mere welter of
jungle, river, mountain, and marsh, inhabited by
man-eating fiends and hungry alligators?
Remained but one thing to do, and Charmian was
GUINEA GOLD 201
doing it, bitterly, despairingly, soaking her hand-
kerchief through, and spotting her dress, wishing,
amidst the gusts of her misery, that she had only
courage to go out to the end of the Government
jetty, where the water was deep and green, and
finish it all with one little jump into oblivion. . . .
" I do think I could, if it were only drowning,"
she sobbed into her wet muslin knees. " But those
horrible sharks. . . . Oh, if God would just let me
die, any time before to-morrow ! He knows I've got
to die some time — what can it matter to Him whether
it's now, or in forty years? and it matters such a lot
to me. I can't, can't, go back to Grant — and yet I
know he will make me: he always made me do
everything he said. And what is there to stop him?
Oh, if I'd only married again — anyone, anyone! it
would not have mattered whom, so long as it wasn't
him. If George were here he'd help me. He would-
n't let Grant have me again, he's so strong — and
brave — and good. Oh, George! "
The vision of Scott rose up before her, clear as a
" living picture " in a cinematograph — the tall, big-
boned figure with its slight stoop, the grey Irish eyes
that were so kind and so pure: the smile, like sun-
shine of the North, bright, yet almost cold. . . .
Behind it, overlapping it, driving it out, came another
face — gross, red-skinned, shiny with high living — a
face with murky, fiery eyes, with thick lips, half shut
over cruel teeth, with black and grey hair growing
low on the low forehead, and a heavy neck and chin
202 GUINEA GOLD
that rose in waves behind the fine, smart collar and
costly tie.'. . . The features were well-marked and
regular: the figure of the man was good, though
over-stout. There were many women who called
Grant Ducane a handsome fellow. There was one
to whom his face and himself were as the face and
self of Satan — mid- Victorian, Calvinistic Satan, with
horns and hoofs and tail and the flames and smoke
of hell coming up out of the dark for back-
ground. . . .
. . . Charmian had done crying. She was lean-
ing against the trunk of a palm, tired out, and scarce
able to see with her swollen eyes. She knew she
would begin again by and by, but for the moment the
pendulum had swung back. Was it indeed hopeless?
Could nothing — no drop of comfort or hope — be
squeezed out of that letter of Scott's that she had
carried night and day since it came? " Any trouble
— call me — send for me " He meant it, she
knew. Most men didn't mean such things when they
said them — they were only trying to make you think
they were to be trusted when they were not — but
Scott was of another kind.
Yet — how to send, when there was no time? when
Grant would have come, and made his hateful ex-
planations, and asked for the pardon that he did not
deserve, and forced her to give it, and taken her
away again to the old detestable life in England or
somewhere far away — long, long before a letter
could even reach the place where George had gone ?
GUINEA GOLD 203
Charmian pressed her hands tightly together, and
braced her body back against the tree as she sat.
She would think. She would plan. There must be
a way. A clever person would have found one out.
Well, she had got to be clever — or else she had
got to be brave enough to face the Government jetty
— to-night, under the stars, when the town was
asleep. . . .
" I will be clever," said Charmian, wiping her eyes
and setting tight her soft mouth. " I will. Please,
God, make me clever — make me think of some-
thing! "
There was much of the child in Charmian. She
closed her eyes and put her hands together, palm to
palm, as she prayed her odd little prayer — just as
she had done when she was three years old. She
opened her eyes and unclasped her hands when she
had finished — and there was a tall, strange woman
climbing up the side of the hill.
The woman was not young, and she came slowly,
with heavy, audible breathing. When she had
reached the top, she looked about her; saw Charmian
sitting under the palm, and walked straight up to
her, with an air of decision and command that sat
upon her as naturally as the fine crown of yellow-
grey locks under her black shade-hat.
" Get up at once," she said. . . . " It's been rain-
ing all night, and you'll catch your death."
Charmian rose to her feet, because she usually
did what she was told.
204 GUINEA GOLD
" No such luck," she said, with a quiver in her
voice.
" That's naughty talk," said the tall woman re-
provingly. " I'm afraid you're a naughty girl alto-
gether, to sit crying up here in the wet grass, and
then say you want to catch your death. When a
girl behaves in such a silly way it's generally because
she's been getting into mischief. Bless you, I know
girls: I've got six daughters of my own; and if I'd
ever caught one of them behaving so foolishly, I'd
have taken her home and spanked her! Look at
your dress — tut, tut ! And you've been crying fit to
make yourself sick. What do you mean by it? "
The tall woman stood above her, extremely erect,
and shook her slightly by the shoulder, like a nurse
remonstrating with a wilful child.
Charmian, her breast still heaving with the ground-
swell of the storm that had passed, her mouth half
trembling, half laughing, felt suddenly and inexplic-
ably safe. Had the stranger caressed her and purred
over her, after the usual fashion of women consoling
each other, she would have submitted, escaped as
soon as possible, and gone back to her miserable
problem unmoved. Caressing and purring was the
way of women, in Charmian's experience: also
scratching — one mattered as little as the other.
But this stranger, with the six feet of almost
masculine strength, and the manner of Queen Eliza-
beth, shook her and scolded her . . . and immedi-
ately the lost and terrified feeling began to slip away.
GUINEA GOLD 205
There was safety and help somewhere in the world,
after all.
She turned her eyes on the woman — Charmian's
beautiful eyes, with the innocent soul looking out of
their sad depths like snow-white Undine from her
troubled pool — and fixed a steadily inquiring gaze
upon the strange new friend. It was someone she
had never seen before — of that she was certain.
Who could forget such a personality?
She had not to wonder long.
" I'm Mrs. Carter," said the woman, still keeping
hold of her shoulder. " Came in from my island
to-day, and going up to my store at the Kikiramu
to-night. And who are you, you silly, naughty girl ? "
Charmian's eyes brightened: she knew all about
Mrs. Carter — who in Papua did not? The Queen
of North-West Island, she was called : and if half the
tales told about her were true, she fully deserved
the name. Twenty years before, when New Guinea
knew neither law nor order, and every man who
landed on its inhospitable shores went with his life
in his hand night and day, Mrs. Carter had come
to North-West Island and taken possession of it.
There was gold there in those days, gold long since
worked out. Mrs. Carter had kept a store for the
diggers, nursed them when they were ill, traded with
them when they were well; mothered them, advised
them, kept them in order — with rifle and revolver
sometimes, in the days when the scum of Sydney
and Melbourne gutters streamed into the far-away
206 GUINEA GOLD
island, to try its luck digging or fleecing the diggers,
as might seem easiest. When the diggers went, she
cleared and planted her land, built a handsome
house, and ruled the native population of the place
as never a resident magistrate, with police and
Government to back him, ruled elsewhere in Papua.
In North-West Island alone the natives were clean,
orderly, peaceable, and industrious, cultivating their
land without quarrels, and gathering up the small
remains of the gold from the worked-out diggings,
year after year, to purchase luxuries for themselves
and their families from Mrs. Carter's store. While
over almost all the mainland, and the neighbouring
islands, cannibalism, murder, and tribal warfare
flourished unchecked.
She had even wiped out the native language of the
place, or at least made it bi-lingual, for every North-
West Islander spoke good English: and this excel-
lent deed, in a land of Tower-of-Babel confusions,
she had accomplished by means of a process that left
Ollendorff, Gouin, and the inventors of Esperanto
hopelessly in the shade. She had enclosed her house
and grounds with a palisade, within which no word
of the island language might be spoken, under pain
of immediate and violent expulsion. It did not mat-
ter whether the offender had had any opportunity of
learning English or not — like Nature herself, Mrs.
Carter heard no excuses, listened to no pleadings.
Out the speaker of alien tongues must go — away
from the store where all the treasures dear to the
GUINEA GOLD 207
native heart were kept, and from the big backyard
where the Queen, from time to time, gave royal
feasts to all the natives she employed and many be-
sides. No shopping, no feasting, no looking at the
wonders of the house and verandah, and the aston-
ishing children with white faces and straight yellow
hair — nothing that made life worth living on North-
West Island unless one learned the tongue of the
Queen . . . the giant white woman who could shoot
a bird flying high in air with either rifle or revolver,
who laid it on to erring subjects with a big stick in
a mighty hand, and whose husband, wonderful to
see, was among the very humblest of her slaves. . . .
They learned to talk English, or North-West, and
they learned it quick.
Mrs. Carter's sons were grown up and gone away,
all to Australia. They said, in their simple way,
that New Guinea seemed too crowded for them,
somehow, when they and mother were in it together :
so they went south to the Northern Territory, and
became drovers of cattle (it takes men to drive cattle
in the Never-Never country of the North) and
southward still, to West Australia and the goldfields,
and away in pearling luggers along the burning
coral coasts to Thursday Island, and to Broome.
Mrs. Carter's daughters were married to various
New Guinea traders and officials. Remained, Mrs.
Carter's husband, a useful man to the Queen, and
invaluable as a manager of her store on the Kikiramu
goldfield. She visited the store now and then; but,
2o8 GUINEA GOLD
for the most part, in her kingdom of North-West
Island, or in her trading-stations here and there
about the coast, or in her allamanda- and bougain-
villaea-covered cottage at Samarai, she was well con-
tent to reign alone.
All this Charmian had heard, and she looked at
the tall woman with suddenly awakened interest.
Mrs. Carter was certainly like Queen Elizabeth —
very like. The arched, commanding nose, the de-
termined mouth and pointed chin, the heavy eyelids
and bright brown, gem-hard eyes were all Eliza-
bethan. So was the mass of wavy yellow-grey hair
above the high forehead: so was the poise of the
head: so were the long thin hands. These last were
work-worn and hardened, for Mrs. Carter had
handled broom and frying-pan, pick, oar, and bul-
lock-whip, in her day, doing the work of woman or
man, or both together, as circumstances seemed to
need : but they showed innate refinement, and power
of command, to any eye trained in the spelling out
of bodily signs. Her dress was made after a fashion
of her own, suggestive of the eighteenth century.
Where other women of Samarai, old and young, m
wore the inevitable dark cotton wrapper of a morn-
ing, and the inescapable coarse white muslin, with
ugly lace trimmings, of an afternoon, Mrs. Carter
was always seen in stately trained robes, made with
the sacque pleat of Boucher and Watteau, and meet-
ing the sun's fierce stare with soft reflections of
heliotrope, gauzy black, or cloudy grey. She wore
GUINEA GOLD 209
a hat that sat like a shady crown : she carried a fan,
for the most part, and held it like a sceptre.
It was with this fan that she now tapped Char-
mian's shoulder, a. trifle impatiently, repeating her
question —
" What are you doing here, you naughty girl, and
what's your name? "
That name! Charmian felt like a leper of the
Middle Ages, forced by law to carry a bell, and ring
it to tell the unspotted people here and there that he
carried with him a curse. . . . She must take up
her bell and ring it. . . .
" I am Mrs. Ducane," she said.
It came — the inevitable surprise and dismay: the
inevitable chill in the friendly eyes. Then
" Why, why, I've been hearing — they say the story
wasn't true — they say the man confessed when he
was dying ..."
The eyes warmed up again : the fan ceased tapping
her shoulder, and a hand took its place.
" Now aren't you really a very, very naughty girl,
to be up here crying and talking of getting your
death, when all that trouble's blowing over for you,
after all? Of course I heard about it. Everybody
did. But, bless you, my good girl, I think I would-
n't have believed it anyhow — after a look at you —
even if this news hadn't come. You haven't kick
enough in you to serve any man out like that — or to
serve him out in any way at all. One hears he didn't
treat you too well. Your own fault, I'll lay. You're
210 GUINEA GOLD
not the girl to keep your end up. Put them down,
keep them down, my dear — that's the only way to
manage the men. I hear he's coming to take you
back: very right and proper of him too, but mind
you put your foot on his neck this time and keep it
there."
Mrs. Carter beat her own handsome foot on the
earth, and ground it down as though the neck of the
despised sex were indeed beneath the sole of her
Sydney shoe.
" Put them down," she said again, with a flush on
her faded cheek: and the thoughts in her eyes were
not of Charmian at that moment.
The girl, mopping her wet face and her small
pink nose with her wet handkerchief, looked up.
" I'd rather die in the bush and be eaten by meat-
ants than ever see his face again," she said: and
there was a driving force behind her words that made
the woman look at her narrowly, as at something she
did not quite understand.
" Tut, tut! " she said, after a minute. " A mar-
ried woman's best to keep on terms with her hus-
band. What can most of you do? You've got to
give in, or starve. Make him pay for all he's done —
it was mostly the fault of the other man, wasn't it?
— make him pay well, and take him back."
Charmian did not answer, but her face grew white.
So this refuge too was failing her!
She turned from Mrs. Carter with a sudden move-
ment, and looked down upon the sea below — down
GUINEA GOLD 211
upon the Government jetty, where the water was
deep and green, close inshore.
Something pricked Mrs. Carter's heart quick and
keen. Something came back to her, at that look,
which would have meant nothing at all to ninety-nine
women in a hundred. As one might see a world of
rocks and precipices, behind a veil of driven cloud
lifted for a moment by the wind, she saw a vision of
Charmian's little figure standing on the steps of the
jetty, hands out to the water. ... A girl had stood
like that, on the rocks that border the deep green
waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria — a girl with
brown eyes and yellow-red hair and a plain gold ring
on her hand — a tall, big girl with a heart as big as
herself: too big for the keeping of little Tim Carter
... in Queensland, thirty years ago. There had
been times since then when the Queen of North-
West had wondered why the girl had turned back
to the land. If there had been times when she wished
the girl had not, she never told herself.
There was silence for a moment under the palms,
and then Mrs. Carter took Charmian by both arms
and swung her round.
" Now, look here," she said, " who's the other
man?"
14 George Scott," said Charmian, paler than ever.
44 He's never — never — but I'd die, ten times over,
rather than go back."
"Then what's the trouble?" asked the big
woman.
212 GUINEA GOLD
" Grant will make me. He always did. Let me
go — please! "
u I'll do no such thing. You only want to go off
and cry again, and you sha'n't do it. I can't make
head or tail of you and your nonsense unless you tell
me the whole thing from beginning to end. I see I
sha'n't have time now to look at the building sites
up here before lunch, so I may just as well give it up
to you. Out with it, miss ! "
And Charmian told. From the beginning of her
marriage through to its disastrous end, and down
even to the letter that she carried in her pocket, she
told the whole story. She did not cry any more : Mrs.
Carter's sharp Elizabethan eye was fixed upon her,
and she was afraid to let the tears go, under that
keen scrutiny. The Queen of North-West Island
listened, silently and critically, and did not say a
word till the other had done. Then she unfolded
the fan with a sharp jerk, and began fanning herself,
rapidly and strongly.
" Why doesn't Scott ask you to marry him? " she
demanded.
" I think — he hasn't any money, except what he
wants to go looking for gold with. And there's
something else too. I don't know what. Sometimes
I think there's another woman. If there were, I
think I'd just die."
" Oh, pff ! you make too much yap about dying! "
said the pioneer woman contemptuously. " Does
he want you, that's the point? Don't put on school-
GUINEA GOLD 213
girl airs, but just say, does he, yes or no? You're
the kind they all want, more or less — you ought to
have had experience enough to guide you."
" Yes, he does, then," answered Charmian, al-
most defiantly. " I do know. But I believe in my
soul there is another woman."
" Why?" snapped Mrs. Carter.
" Well — just — because."
Mrs. Carter, being a woman herself, acknowl-
edged the weight of this feminine reason sufficiently
to accept it in silence. She bit the top of her fan
and thought.
" There's only one way for it that I can see," she
proclaimed. " You're just what you say — the sort
that would allow your Grant to come back and carry
you off like a dingo carrying off a turkey, with hardly
a cheep for yourself. Well, the Cora Lynn sails
for the Kikiramu at nine to-night, and there won't
be another thing going for a fortnight — unless it's
a stray cutter, that might take a month to get half-
way, with this north-west weather. You pack up
and come with me to the Kikiramu field, and if Scott's
half the man you say he is, he and the Resident
Magistrate will put it out of your Grant's power
ever to worry you again, inside of half a day."
Charmian turned scarlet.
"How could I?" she said.
" Now don't make mouths, missy: you know you
would rather go there than anywhere else on earth,
and you needn't feel shy about it, either — I'll take
214 GUINEA GOLD
you as my visitor, and you can help me with my sew-
ing at the store as long as you like. As for the
other woman, why, wherever and whoever she is,
she isn't in Papua, and better a living dog than a
dead lion, say I. It's your innings, my girl: don't
you trouble about her."
" I wasn't," said Charmian simply. " I wish she
was dead."
" You and your dying ! Such funeral talk I never
heard. Wipe your eyes, and put your hair tidy, and
come down with me to the town : you'll want to do
some shopping first, and buy sensible boots and hats,
and I'll see you do it. And if you're one minute late
when the steamer whistle sounds to-night, don't think
I'll keep her for you — I'll leave you behind for
Grant. Girls like you are never punctual or tidy.
I know the lot of you ! "
Like a collie driving a lamb, she hustled her on
to the pathway and down the long hill again.
Many people saw Figg's barmaid, who was under
notice, going on the Cora Lynn in the starlight, after
dinner. Half the town was going on to the vessel
also, to gossip and to see off friends. But nobody
noticed that, when the clumsy gang-plank was with-
drawn, and the last whistle had sounded, the shore-
going party did not include little Charmian Ducane.
CHAPTER XII
" Did I ever tell you," said Mrs. Carter conver-
sationally, " about the time when I had a murderer
chained under my bed for six weeks? "
11 No, you did not," answered Charmian, looking
up at her hostess with a slightly startled expression.
She had not become quite accustomed to Mrs. Car-
ter yet.
The two women were sitting on the verandah of
the little brown mountain house where Carter kept
store for the Kikiramu goldfield. The morning was
hot and clear. There was not a shred of mist in the
river-gorge, or on the great drop-curtain of forest
that shut off the unknown inland ranges. Thirty or
forty feet below the verandah rail two huge sapphire
butterflies were sporting about the summit of a tree:
in all the valley there was not another sign of life,
save the stray columns of smoke that rose here and
there above the crests of the leafy sea, each marking,
like bubbles from a diver's helmet, the spot where
a human being was living and working far below, hid
from the light of day.
Charmian had been on the Kikiramu field for some
days now, and the wonderful peace of the bush was
beginning to flow over her heart, deep and still as
the still deep forests that flow over the inland val-
215
216 GUINEA GOLD
leys and hills. The journey had been very rough and
hard, even though Mrs. Carter cut the ordinary
day's marches into two, and saw to it that a hammock
was always ready to carry Charmian, whenever the
track allowed. But the woman of cities and draw-
ing-rooms had never faltered or complained. She
only wanted to get away from Samarai as soon and
as far as possible: the more difficult the way, the
safer she felt from pursuit.
Here, in the heart of New Guinea, where she
could look up her position on the map, and see that
the little store lay actually over the edge of the
known country, right in the blank white space beyond
the dotted ends of guessed-at rivers, she felt that,
for the present at least, she might surely call her-
self safe. Grant would not even know for some time
where she had gone. Of course he would ferret it
out in the end — the Cora Lynn had called at various
plantations down the coast, and the news of her being
on board would filter back at last to Samarai. But
even then it might be some time before he could
find any means of reaching the west end. And be-
fore he did — she might be safe.
She thought much about that, lying of nights in
her quaint little bird-cage of a room, above the tree-
tops of the gorge, with the night-long rain of the
mountain lands roaring down upon the sago-thatch
roof, and the unseen river rumbling away below.
She realised that most people would be on her
husband's side — would say that the wrong which had
GUINEA GOLD 217
been done her could only be righted in full by a re-
marriage, and that her reputation could be restored
in no other way. Ducane, it appeared, was very
penitent. The man who had caused the trouble, who
had lied and perjured himself, and bought false wit-
nesses, was dead — having confessed his infamy in
the very hour of death. No doubt the public knew.
No doubt they would look for a reconciliation. Less
than no doubt Ducane would want it and have it —
if she could not make herself safe.
. . . Arguments, defiances, objections — what were
they? They could not help. Against every argu-
ment of hers he could bring a dozen. Against her
little straw of defiance he could sweep the flame of
the overruling will that she had known and suffered
under all her life. . . . No, words were not to be
trusted.
But facts? Facts fought for you. You could hide
behind their shield, and say no word at all. Before
the fact of another marriage, argument, entreaty,
command must die on the lips that spoke them.
k The words of Scott's letter flamed before her in
the darkness of the nights.
" Any trouble you are in . . . send for me . . .
I would do anything in the world to be of help to
you. ... I cannot say all that I would wish. . . .
1 am always yours. . . ."
The woman who had been loved of men since her
childhood could make no mistake as to the meaning
2i8 GUINEA GOLD
of such words, though they stopped short of those
three words that had been worth all the rest.
One could wait here . . . there was no harm in
that. One could help Mrs. Carter with her sewing,
and see the strange life of the goldfield, and listen
for every word that bore upon the return of the men
who had gone to look for gold . . . and hope.
Carter thought the party would run out of tucker
very soon, and come back. He didn't think that they
would get anything: but then, they might. That
stone-broke fellow who had come up from Samarai
last boat to cook for him had been quite certain there
was gold up the Iri : so certain that he had bounced
him, Carter, into " grubstaking " him (provisioning
him on credit) and helping him to get a few
boys.
Of course if they did get anything, the Kikiramu
would be deserted straight away. Meantime, Carter
thought it a good thing his wife had brought a visitor
up with her: it was lonely for her when she came, as
a rule, being the only woman on the field. And if
Mrs. Ducane liked, he'd be glad to take her a walk
about, and show her some of the claims, whenever
she chose.
Charmian went out under his guidance here and
there, down the giant staircase, through the riverbed,
from one dim isolated camp in the wilderness to
another, seeing the black boys at work, lunching in
" bushes " on tinned foods and biscuits, talking with
the strange, silent, bearded men who won the gold,
GUINEA GOLD 219
and refusing, with difficulty, presents enough of their
gainings to have stocked a small jeweller's store.
For months after, in many a lonely camp and clear-
ing, her visits were remembered and talked over,
and her beautiful, sad, sweet face (in which the sun-
shine of peace began to dawn these days) floated
among the stars of midnight before the eyes of soli-
tary men, who sat awake among their sleeping
" boys/' with only the dying fire for company. No
one thought it strange that she should have come to
stay in that remote fastness. They said, " their
oath, it was a shame and a waste "; but they them-
selves had, most of them, more or less secret reasons
for choosing to live beyond hail of civilisation, and
they asked no questions of Charmian, as they asked
none of one another.
So, on that hot still morning, with the jewelled
butterflies floating in the sun outside, and unseen
birds of paradise sending long calls from the bush,
Charmian sat on Mrs. Carter's verandah and listened
to the pioneer woman's tales.
" It was a good few years ago," said Mrs. Carter,
biting off her thread. " My husband had gone down
to Queensland to see about buying some cattle, and I
was alone on North- West, except for the kiddies.
The natives had been quiet for a long time, but just
about then, one of the fellows from the far end of the
island, where they were pretty wild, started lording
it over the rest of the place, killing and burning
alive and eating everyone he'd a fancy to. Now,
220 GUINEA GOLD
you know, that made me mad, for I thought I had
both ends of the place in such order that there wasn't
a cheep out of one of them — but you never know
these natives. Well, I made up my mind to shift my
gentleman out of that, quick- and lively, and I took a
few of my own boys, armed with Winchesters, and
a bit of tucker, and my little mare that I'd had up
from Charters Towers, and off I went to teach the
fellow what for."
" What did you wear?" asked Charmian, with
interest.
Mrs. Carter, being quite as much a woman as her
guest, saw nothing remarkable in the inquiry.
" Well, now, I'll tell you," she said. " I wore a
blue denim skirt, made very short, and a pair of my
husband's bluchers — he has a very small foot, and
they fitted me. And I had a red Turkey cotton
blouse on my back, and a white flannelette, to change,
in the swag the boy was carrying. And I had a navy
blue leather belt, with a black leather holster on it,
and a 45 Colt in the holster. And I'd a ten-inch
knife in a black sheath at the other side of the belt.
My hat was a big Panama, with a red silk scarf
round it, and I'd a navy blue tie."
" It would have looked better if your holster and
knife-sheath had been blue," said Charmian thought-
fully.
" It would," agreed the Queen of North-West
Island, " but they don't make fancy colours, not in
revolver holsters. Well, to cut a long story short,
GUINEA GOLD 221
I and the boys had a two-days' hunt before we got
him; and even when we'd found him, the people of
the village were that afraid of him that they would-
n't give him up, so I had to take my Colt in one
hand and my riding-whip in the other — they were
about the same afraid of the two — and hunt through
all the houses till I got him — hidden away under a
roll of mats, if you please, and not looking a bit
like the devil of a fellow they said he was, with all
the war-paint running in streaks over his face, on
account of the heat of the mats, and the feathers in
his hair tumbling out and smashed. I gave him a
good thrashing on the spot, just to teach him that
I would have no cannibal nonsense going on in my
island, and then I tied him with a long rope to my
saddle, and made him follow me home — with all the
natives raising a howl as if he was dead, and flinging
themselves down on the ground, and cutting their
faces.
" Well, when I got him home, there was the diffi-
culty. I wanted to have him taken away to Port
Moresby to be tried and hung, but I'd had prisoners
before waiting for the Government yacht, and, some-
how or another, most of them had managed to get
away — you see, the natives would help them, being
frightened of them for the most part, and anxious to
get into their good books — specially if they were
sorcerers. He was a bang-up sorcerer, this gentle-
man, and I was sure they'd have him out if I put him
in any of the stores. So I just took him down under
222 GUINEA GOLD
the house, and ran a chain from his waist up through
the floor right on to the leg of my bed in the room
above. And then at any time of the night, if they
tried to get the chain off him, I was bound to know :
besides, I could more or less see through the floor,
it being sticks, as usual. And so I kept him there
till the Merrie England called, and then they took
him off to gaol in Port Moresby. He wasn't hanged,
but he got ten years, and died before two were out;
and the natives thought the Government had eaten
him, so it had an excellent effect. Indeed, it was
the last case of cannibalism that happened on the
island."
Mrs. Carter took another needleful of thread.
" Would you have feather-stitching or French
knots on the edge of the collar? " she asked thought-
fully.
" French knots, I think," answered Charmian.
' They're very smart in black. . . . Didn't you think
they might have eaten you? "
" No fear: I'd like to have caught them at it! "
replied Mrs. Carter, with a fine disregard of physical
possibilities. "I'm afraid I can't do the French
knots right. Can you manage them? "
" Oh yes, do let me. I'll embroider it all over for
you, if you like — any kind of embroidery you
choose," offered Charmian, eager to help.
" Could you? " asked the pioneer woman a little
wistfully. " And you can speak French, and play
the piano, and all that sort of thing, I reckon? "
GUINEA GOLD 223
" Why, yes, but I don't know that it has ever done
me much good."
" I wish I'd had more education myself," mused
Mrs. Carter, looking a long way off over the valley.
" Old woman," said the shadowy Carter, suddenly
popping out from the doorway of the store, " don't
you wish any such thing. You're that clever as it is
that no one would want to see you more so. If you'd
had education on the top of it, maybe you'd have
been in gaol by now."
" And I daresay that's true," agreed Mrs. Carter
composedly. " Mrs. Ducane, I won't ask you to
embroider it all over, but I should like the French
knots, if you think you could manage them. I'm glad
to see you picking up and taking your tucker these
few days. You're not quite as silly as you were when
I first ran across you. If I'd the handling of you' a bit
longer I'd make a smart sensible girl out of you yet."
" She's coming round," Mrs. Carter told her hus-
band that night as they were going through the store
and putting out the lights. M My word, Tim, you
should have seen her dancing to herself just about
sunset, out on the track, when she thought there was
nobody about. . It's a way she has, and the prettiest
way I ever saw. She picks up her skirts, and she
sings a little bit, and she floats in the air, or it looks
near like that — just like a flower tossing in the
wind. You'd think she didn't know she was doing it,
any more than the flower itself. I declare to good-
ness she didn't look a day over sixteen — and she all
224 GUINEA GOLD
of five-and-twenty. Of all the babies to be a mar-
ried woman — but there, I always did have a weak
place for babies."
" She's a baby could do mischief whenever there
was men about," observed Carter, piling his mats of
rice into a sturdy bulwark. " The men's been com-
ing in here something amazing since you brought
her — just to get a look at her round the corner."
" I daresay," said the Queen contemptuously.
" Baby faces are the thing to fetch you, all the lot of
you, like sugar fetches flies. And whether the baby
face will look as nice to you across the top of a
burnt pie, or a batch of bread gone sour, is a thing
you never think about, no more than a New Guinea
nigger thinks about heaven. Their looks have to
sweeten their cooking, for the most part."
" Well, old woman, your cooking doesn't need
that sweetening," remarked Carter, with some ob-
scure intention of a compliment.
" Pff ! " said the Queen. " Don't you forget to
lock that door."
It was very hard to take a walk at the Kikiramu.
You could take a plunge, or a dive, or a climb —
in fact, you were obliged to take one or the other as
soon as you left your house. You could let yourself
down hundreds of feet of log stairs, hanging back
by the liana hand-ropes, until you got into a dim
green wilderness of forest and riverbed, and broken-
down flumes, and abandoned races: and then you
GUINEA GOLD 225
could climb and wade along the edges of the river,
unfil you got wet through, and had to go home for
a change. Or else you could scramble up three or
four hundred feet of the other staircase — the giant
one, with the steps as big as dinner-tables — and get
caught in a sudden thunderstorm in the very middle
of it, with no more possibility of crawling away in
time than if you had been a fly in a treacle plate.
Or you could cross the ridge at the top of the valley,
climbing slowly, with hands and feet, and immedi-
ately take a header down the other side. But if
you wanted a walk, it was hard to get.
There was just one place where you might manage
it. After you climbed the great staircase, you could
find a piece of track that ran for a little way along
the top of the ridge before it plunged down the long
six-hundred-foot drop that tired the carriers so, when
they came up laden from the lower reaches of the
river. On this comparatively level bit you might
walk up and down, like a captain pacing his bridge,
and, like the captain, look about you and see all over
your little kingdom.
And here, in the afternoons, before the breaking
up of the four o'clock rains, Charmian used to walk
alone, up and down, looking into the depths of the
formidable forest, and thinking.
Always her thoughts went one way — Scott. This
little creature, made for love, had no interests, recol-
lections, ambitions, in her life, save those that were
linked to love. Love light and amusing, sugar-kiss
226 GUINEA GOLD
flirtation — that was girlhood. Love tyrannical, pos-
sessive, selfish — that was marriage. Love treacher-
ous, leading to perilous swamps by the lure of poison-
sweet flowers — that was romance. And all these
loves, with her, had been love accepted, not given.
The men who had made her life for her had not
asked her for anything but acceptance.
To Scott alone she had given. And it came upon
her now that whatever the end might be, this free
giving of hers was what none of the other loves
had been — life itself. Loving her might be what the
other men had lived for — so they had said, more
than one of them. But no one had wanted to know
what she lived for: nor did she know herself — in
the time that was past. Now she knew.
When would he come back?
She had gone up to the top of the ridge one after-
noon, a still, scented day, with a purple-grey sky of
brooding heat. She had spent half an hour at her
looking-glass before leaving the house, as she al-
ways did, " just in case . . ."
She was sure, somehow or other, that he would
come that day, and she waited long, bitterly dis-
appointed, till it was almost too dark to get down
the great log staircase . . .
And, after all, he came that night.
Charmian was asleep in her little stick-walled
bedroom, " papered " with calico. The Carters were
asleep in their lean-to close at hand — a curious apart-
ment walled with split logs and floored with the tops
GUINEA GOLD 227
of packing-cases. The native carriers attached to
the store were asleep in their shed a little way off:
they had eaten a big python, an iguana, and the
best part of a wild pig for supper, and lay gorged
and stupid about the fire that they had built to keep'
off ghosts. The rain was making so much noise that
no one heard the approach of Scott and his train
until the verandah, all of a sudden, shook and thun-
dered under the tramp of an army of bare feet and
the shock of twenty loads thrown down. Charmian,
springing half out of bed in a wild alarm of Karivas,
was stopped by the sound of Scott's voice loudly
hailing the Carters, and the answering exclamation
from the storekeeper's room. In a moment, it
seemed, lights were flitting everywhere, wood was
being chopped in the cookhouse, men were waking on
the back verandah (where the spare beds were put)
and jumping up with loud thuds, dogs were barking,
natives and whites calling to each other. The whole
house was awake — not only awake, but excited.
Surely something beyond the ordinary return of an
ordinary party had happened !
Charmian, barefooted and in her nightdress,
slipped over to the wall that partitioned her room
from the main verandah, tore a thread or two of
the calico screening, and peeped though the sticks,
her heart thumping so that she could hardly stand.
The verandah was full of men, mostly in pyjamas, —
Jacky and Jimmy and Harry and Mike, bearded,
strange-eyed men from the outer camps, who had
228 GUINEA GOLD
"come in" the night before: another visitor, the
resident magistrate and warden, an angelic-looking
young man with curly hair and a sweet smile, who
was as tough as pinwire, and about as hard: Carter,
bringing whiskey out of the store, and setting it down
on the log table: Mrs. Carter, stirring round after
the house-boys, and getting plates and food carried
in from the kitchen : a crowd of native carriers, lay-
ing down miscellaneous bundles of tent-flies, cook-
ing pots, sago, sacks of food, rifles, and shotguns,
and drifting away to the boys' house in the yard, ab
they rid themselves of their loads. The dull orange
light of two or three hurricane lamps fell on the glit-
tering bodies of the carriers, wet with rain, on the
white tooth necklets they wore, and the red and yel-
low leaves in their mountainous hair. The white
men's striped pyjama suits stood out gaily against
the black curtain of night and rain beyond the veran-
dah rail. On the table, pink ham, a crusty loaf, a
tin of butter, lobster, asparagus, peaches, and other
canned luxuries from the store, were rapidly sur-
rounding the bottles, glasses, and cups. It looked
as though the Carters were minded to make a feast.
All this Charmian saw with half an eye, in half a
second. Almost instantly her glance swept on to the
central figure in the strange, uncivilised scene — Scott.
He stood in the middle of the whites, leaning up
against the verandah rail as though he were tired
with the day's tramp, and patiently answering the
showers of excited questions cast at him by everyone
GUINEA GOLD 229
who could get in a word. She could not hear what
they were saying, because of the noise of the rain,
but she could see that something had happened, and
that Scott was telling about it: also, that he was
fagged out, and wanted rest and food, and the other
men would not let him have either. She burned with
rage and pity — what brutes men were to each other !
Standing there in her nightdress, with the wet
warm wind blowing through the chinks of the crazy
wall, she took her fill of gazing. . . . He was
changed. He had grown older and graver, even in
those few weeks — so quickly does the Land of Mys-
tery set her seal on those who serve her. But the
bright, cool sunshine of his eyes and smile — the
sunshine of that far Northland that she had never
known — was the same.
She found herself seeking for words to clothe a
thought that floated before her, naked, dim, elusive.
She had never been good at handling and clothing
ideas, though her active brain brought forth its full
share. People had not asked her to have ideas, or
to express them. They had asked her to be pretty
and charming, no more.
And now she was trying to be more, and she
could not.
The idea was one of importance: she knew that.
She stretched out at its flying wings with the fingers
of her mind, frowning as she thought, and still
looking through the chinks at Scott.
. . . The love of the North. . . . The love of the
230 GUINEA GOLD
South. . . . Dark and true and tender is the North,
and bright and fierce and fickle is the . . .
" No — oh no! " said little Charmian, her lip be-
ginning to quiver. " . . . Fickle is the South — no
— if I only were!
" There's something I'm afraid of in his face,"
was what she sobbed to herself at last. " I could do
anything with poor Rupert. And Scott loves me
far more, but with him There are men who
would break your heart and their own just as they'd
break a thread — a leaf — I can't say it, but I know
what I mean.
" I've been saying all my life that men are too
bad," she told herself, " and now there's one who's
too — too — good.
" But I'm thinking such nonsense," she said. " I
don't know what I mean myself. And I must hurry
up and dress at once. Oh, I wonder would it be
wicked to pray that I may do my hair really well?
" At any rate," she said, " it would do no harm.
I'll pray God to make me look very, very pretty
indeed: that'll include the hair."
She prayed rapidly and inclusively while she
dressed, not forgetting, all the same, to " keep her
powder dry " so far as to select her prettiest blouse,
and her long Sydney riding-boots, because they
looked so well under the brief skirts one had to wear
at the Kikiramu. The trade glass on the wall gave
back a gratifying reflection by the light of the hur-
ricane lamp.
GUINEA GOLD 231
" Thanks very much, O Lord," she said. " I
don't think I ever looked nicer . . . if I weren't so
pale."
There was a little pot of rose-red powder in her
trunk. She took it out, looked at it thoughtfully,
then put it back.
" I won't," she decided. " He would think it hor-
rible if he knew " (he in this case meaning Scott,
not the Almighty). "And, anyhow, rouge is only
for women who are wicked, or women who are
dreadfully miserable, and want to hide it. It's really
bad to put it on for mere becomingness, and I never
did, so back it goes."
Nature, waiting with the rose of life in her hand,
out there on the verandah, invisible, but strong,
touched the cheeks of the girl with the petals of the
immortal flower as she came into full view of her
lover, and Charmian, feeling her own beauty run
through her veins like wine, knew that no rouge was
needed.
So, like a rose indeed she came into his sight,
shining out in the rabble of rough whites and naked
savages, under the flickering glare of the hurricane
lamps, against the background of the dark and roar-
ing rain.
And when Scott saw her he ceased speaking.
" Go on ! " yelled half a dozen voices. " Sticking
in the reef like plums — go on ! How much of it was
in sight — how far do you reckon it runs down?
How . . ."
232 GUINEA GOLD
They drowned each other in questions. They
seemed half mad with excitement: every man's face
was red or pale beyond common, and some of them
were thumping wildly on the table, or half dancing
on the shaky floor. Mrs. Carter seemed to be keep-
ing her head better than the men: she was busy with
plates and glasses, listening, but asking no ques-
tions, and her face showed no especial pleasure.
Tim was transfigured: he was hanging on Scott's
words as though they were veritable gold: he was
uttering strange ejaculations, and giggling like a
girl.
But the crowd were left to ask unanswered when
Charmian came in. Straight to her went Scott, and
" the light that never was on sea or land " was in his
eyes as he took her hand.
"You here!" he said. "Charmian, I thought
it was your ghost — your little ghost — when I
He dropped her hand, and suddenly his eyes,
though looking into hers, were veiled.
" You have come up to see the field? " he said, in
another voice. " I hope you'll have a pleasant time.
You'll pardon my going back to these men, won't
you, Mrs. Ducane? The fact is, our party have got
onto very good gold, and they are all anxious to hear
about it."
" I am glad you have been fortunate," said Char-
mian, feeling her transient roses ebb away.
" We have : I must tell you by and by," said Scott,
GUINEA GOLD 233
moving back to the men and being instantly absorbed
once more.
Charmian joined Mrs. Carter and began helping
her with the supper.
" That's a good girl," said the lady of the house,
with something less than her usual sharp decision of
tone. " Come out to the store and help me to open
some more tins: they'll be wanted."
In the comparative quiet of the store, as they took
down the tins and sawed them open, tumbling the
contents into plates, the two women had a chance to
speak.
" What's it all about? I don't half understand,"
said Charmian.
" Why, I reckon they've struck it rich, somewhere
up on the Iri. Scott's come down to file the claim for
the lot of them, with the warden here. He'll be off
again as soon as he's loaded up with tucker. Every
mother's son on the field will be off too, I reckon,
Carter among them."
" And you? " asked Charmian, her head bent very
low over the clumsy tool in her hand.
u And you, you mean," corrected Mrs. Carter,
with a hard laugh. u It's all the same, however.
You and me together don't go for so much as a rot-
ten stick in the Kikiramu in flood — now. You've
got to learn, my girl, how much a woman counts in a
gold rush."
She swept her tin-opener round the top of a can
234 GUINEA GOLD
of grapes, and poured them bubbling out on to a
plate.
" I hadn't seen Tim — not for a year/' she said, in
a dry, indifferent tone. " Hand me that pickle
bottle. He gets asthma sometimes. Always bad in
the high country under canvas. And he lives in wet
clothes day and night, out of sheer damn foolish-
ness. Some of these days Men are babies, the
whole lot of them. You don't know — you're a
girl."
" I think you forget I'm a married woman — or
was," said Charmian quietly.
11 Oh no, I don't forget you've been to church
with a man," answered the other woman, piling bis-
cuits on plates with the rapidity and precision of a
machine. " But you aren't a real wife, and you never
was. You don't know. You've been a man's pet
cat, and purred on a cushion to please him. There's
all sorts of marriage, and a lot of it isn't marriage
at all. If you'd ever been a real married woman,
instead of just a plaything that a man had to pay
for with a ring, you'd know they was all babies —
you'd know your husband was far more your child
than any of your children. ... If you're done, pick
up them forks — you'll find more in paper in the
drawer, and come along. Don't drop anything —
you girls are that butter-fingered. ..."
Charmian, a little dizzied by the hail of hard
facts that had just been rained about her ears, fol-
lowed mechanically in her hostess's track, without
GUINEA GOLD 235
asking herself why she, a gentlewoman, delicately
bred, should act parlourmaid to all these rough
men. Here, in the Never-Never land, where so
many of the small things of life seemed to have been
sifted away, the big things stood out with uncom-
promising plainness. It was the place of a man to
protect a woman, to put a roof over her head, and to
keep her. It was the place of a woman to see to the
comforts of a man. You did not ask, first of all,
whether the man were on the dinner-list at the Fed-
eral Government House, and if he used the proper
kind of engraved visiting-cards when he went call-
ing, with the right combination of boots and suit
on, and the right kind of tie, tied by hand. . . .
This was the Never-Never country, where such
things did not matter. If you did not like it, you
could go back to Sydney.
11 If you'd been a real married woman, you'd
know they was all just babies. . . . " The sentence
buzzed in her ears as she came out into the verandah
again and set down her load on the table, about
which the men were beginning to gather. Scott had
been set free at last, and had found a place at the
end of the log bench. He was reaching hungrily for
tea, and his face, through the yellow tan of the bush,
was white with weariness. Charmian slipped into a
seat and helped herself to something, she scarcely
knew what, in order to have an excuse to stay and
look. It was so delightful to see him eat. He had
236 GUINEA GOLD
got some salmon on his plate now — and bread —
and pickles.
Tears almost came into her eyes. She would have
liked to stand beside him and help him to all he
wanted. She would have liked to feed him with a
spoon. . . . Would not he shout with laughter if
he could read her silly thoughts! Yet — she sup-
posed — most women cared for men.
" You'd know your husband was far more your
child than any of your children."
"Why — that's what she meant! " thought Char-
mian in a flash of illumination. " How I used to
hate to watch Grant at his dinner ! He ate so much
and his face grew so red! But if ... he ... ate
too much, I wouldn't mind. I wish he would: he
never eats enough. I wish they wouldn't keep him
talking so much."
The food on her plate turned to sawdust then,
and she could not get on with it, for she remembered
what it was they were talking about — this find of
gold, this hateful thing that (she felt in her heart)
would put yet another obstacle between her and him.
Another . . . ? What was the first? Well, about
that she did not want to think.
It was near three in the morning now, and sup-
per was done, but talk still kept on. The rain had
stopped: the valley below was full of sweet wet
smells, and a cold night breeze was beginning to
blow down from the far main range. The Kikiramu
sang a deep, full-throated song at the bottom of the
GUINEA GOLD 237
gorge — the war-chant of the wild, unbroken land
that these strong men were seeking to break and
tame.
Charmian crept away to bed with the sound of
that song in her ears. Scott had looked at her many
times in the course of the evening — but he had come
near her, or spoken to her, scarce at all.
When she slept she dreamed that she stood some-
where in empty space, " whether in the body, or out
of the body," she knew not; and that Scott stood
near her: but that she could not reach him, or touch
his hand, because of two strange shapes that pressed
her away. One of the shapes was veiled and dim:
the other was clear to her sight. It was the figure
of a woman, dark and savage, with cruel beautiful
eyes and bloodstained mouth. With one hand the
woman held her away, and with one she held the
man, tight as the white-toothed alligator holds in
the steaming swamps of the river lands. And the
name of the woman was Papua.
Charmian awoke. She had thrown off the sheet,
and felt cold. The house was still at last, and the
dawn was creeping down, purest gold, from the
peaks of the German ranges. The girl sat up and
flung aside her net to look out across the valley.
" They say this country is full of witchcraft," she
thought. u I believe it was a vision. I believe,
between them, they will take him away."
CHAPTER XIII
Melba was singing in the Kikiramu valley.
In the full white blaze of morning, from the rocks
of the riverbed to the trembling finials of the trees
that crowned the ridge, rose and sank down the
golden voice. Across the leaf-embroidered heights
of the giant staircase, away to the broken flumes
and bush-grown races in the branchy depths below
— from the great drop-curtain of forest that might
well hide peering eyes of the dreaded Karivas, to the
little cleared and built-on piece of land, where stood
the rough brown buildings of the store — Melba was
singing.
"Falling leaf and fading tree . . .
Shadows rising on you and me,
Shadows rising on you and me."
Here, where never leaf seemed to fade, or sum-
mer to die, Melba was singing of waning suns and
dying flowers.
"The swallows are making them ready to fly,
Wheeling out on a windy sky,
Good-bye, summer— good-bye, good-bye!"
Down in the gorge a scarlet bird of paradise went
by, like a comet dropped from heaven : little jewelled
238
GUINEA GOLD 239
king-birds, swaying on scented orchid bloom, bathed
their shining feathers in the sun that never failed.
"Hush! a voice from the far away,
Listen and learn, it seems to say,
All the to-morrows shall be as to-day,
All the to-morrows shall be as to-day,
The cord must break, and the lamp must die,
Good-bye to hope, good-bye, good-bye!"
Scott was climbing up the giant stairway at the
head of his trail of carriers. All the way the voice
beat upon him as a wave beats on a swimmer half
buried in the surf. Its golden spray deafened and
blinded him. It seemed to fill the world.
"Good-bye, summer — good-bye, good-bye!"
Under the diamond rays of the New Guinea
morning, with the scent of unfading flowers rising
among trees that were always green and young,
summer was dying.
"What are we waiting for, O my heart?
Kiss me straight on the brows, and part. . . ."
Not even a kiss ! not even a kiss to take with him
on the long journey into winter and dark that must
last the rest of his life. How could a lover be alto-
gether unhappy if he had a kiss to carry with him?
But he had not had a kiss from Charmian. He had
held Her hand, and let it go, and gone.
"What are we waiting for, you and I? . . .
Good-bye for ever! good-bye! good-bye!"
240 GUINEA GOLD
The voice, the marvel of a century, rose into a
passionate cry that embodied all the pain of all the
lovers' partings in all the world. How could one
feel such pain and live? How could one go on,
stumbling up the ferny steps of the great staircase,
with the forest ahead, and the brown, naked, can-
nibal carriers behind, — the long day's tramp to come,
the rivers to ford, the camp to make in the wilder-
ness at night, — as though the world held nothing of
her?
He did not know how. He only knew that he
was going.
"Good-bye for ever!"
They had reached the top of the ridge. The
voice was growing faint.
"Good-bye! Good-bye!"
They were over and plunging down the steep.
Melba's voice was still.
Tim Carter, sitting on his verandah, took the
finished record out of his new gramophone and
slipped in another.
" I don't think much of that," he remarked to
himself. " I'll have something tastier this time."
And in another moment the valley rang to the
strains of " Stop Yer Ticklin', Jock! "
He had scarcely settled down to enjoy the song
when a terrible thing happened. Someone, tall, furi-
GUINEA GOLD 241
ous, and very much out of breath, swept on to the
verandah like a " gooba " (a New Guinea hurri-
cane), there was a rush, a smack, and Tim fell half
over the side of his canvas chair, rubbing his ear.
" Old woman! old woman! " he groaned, without
looking up. " What have you got against me now?
What is it I've done this time? "
" Got against you?" demanded Mrs. Carter,
dropping into a chair and speaking between ex-
hausted gasps. " If I could have climbed up that
confounded lower ladder in time, I'd have let you
know! I was down at Mick's camp — he's ill — and
I heard you begin that thing when I was half-way up
those steps from the river — and I could no more
hurry — Tim Carter, you're a born fool, if ever there
was one! "
u Well, well," said Tim pacifically, content, as he
had been content a hundred times, to accept what
he could not understand, " better take a bit of a
rest : there's a lot to do by and by, with all the men
getting off, the stores coming up from the landing.
There's fifteen carriers from the Dragon-Fly in half
an hour ago — they brought my new gramophone."
" Oh, you — you " Mrs. Carter was on her
feet again. " You and your gramophone ! " the
words were charged with blistering scorn. Mrs.
Carter fanned herself fiercely, and looked at her
husband as though she could say a good deal more,
but refrained, for reasons known to herself, and in-
comprehensible by him.
242 GUINEA GOLD
Her silence, as she rose again, and moved across
the verandah in the direction of Charmian's room,
was of such a highly charged kind that Tim, fearing
to cut the wire by some unguarded word or act,
fairly held his breath until his better half had dis-
appeared. Then he slipped away on tiptoe, out to
the native carriers' shed in the yard, carrying his
silenced gramophone in his hands. Shortly after,
the raucous scream of a Cockney recitation rose on
the heated air, mingled with the delighted " Woofs "
of the house-boys.
Mrs. Carter, left alone, stalked, like a tall Fate
with a flat hat on, into Charmian's bedroom, and
planted herself beside the bed.
Charmian was lying on her face, with the heels
of her shoes pointing up to the sago-thatch ceiling.
Her hair had come down, and was spread all over
the pillow. . . . Her round waist and finely sculp-
tured thigh, beneath the twisted folds of the cotton
dress, had the beauty of the wind-blown figures in
the Elgin Marbles. And no marble could have been
more still.
" She's taking it hard — confound Tim and his
1 Good-byes! ' " thought Mrs. Carter. For a min-
ute or two she waited. A bird in the forest called —
" O-tui O ! O-ree ! O-ree ! " It was half dark in the
brown-walled room: light shot in long spears
through the floor.
Charmian lay still.
" Tui ! Tui ! " The mate of the bird was an-
GUINEA GOLD 243
swering from far away. " Tui ! Tui ! I hear you,
love ! " The thousand warm scents of the tropic
forest, the glory of the eternal tropic sun, were in
that call. The bird loved, and was happy.
Charmian stirred restlessly, and flung her hand
across the edge of the bed. A long sigh passed
over her, shaking her as the wind shakes the spear-
grass at sundown.
" Mrs. Ducane," said the tall Fate.
" I want to be alone." Scarcely to be heard,
muffled by long brown hair, came the reply.
11 I know you do," answered Mrs. Carter, " but
I'm not going to let you. It's not time to cry till
you know you've reason."
" I'm not crying." Charmian turned on her side
and looked up. Her face was deadly white, and her
eyes were underlined with splashes of purple, but she
was not shedding tears, nor had she shed any.
" Things you can cry over aren't ..." Her
voice trailed away. " If the end of the world came,
you wouldn't . . . cry ..."
" My God ! how you do lie down to things ! " said
the woman who had tamed North- West. " Before
I'd let a man treat me like that "
u Did you marry the man you cried about most? "
asked Charmian, sitting up and flinging back her
hair.
Mrs. Carter's hard, handsome face grew slowly
red.
" No," she said.
244 GUINEA GOLD
" Then I don't see how you can talk." Charmian
was aroused now, and looked at the other with the
instinctive hatred of woman against woman, that
flashes out beneath the crust of civilisation when
love's volcano-fire begins to play.
" You're a lot braver and stronger than I am, but
you couldn't help yourself either. You needn't
come and triumph over me. We're all unhappy to-
gether — women — that's the truth. I don't believe
in the story of the snake and the apple, but there's
something true in it somewhere. Life couldn't be
so abominable to us if we hadn't somehow done
something that had to be punished."
She put her hands over her face suddenly.
" Oh, I'm talking — talking," she said, " and he's
going away ... all the time, I don't know why I
can't cry. I'm . . . broken . . . somewhere."
" Look here," — Mrs. Carter had sat down on
the bed beside her and taken her hand into firm
custody— " let's drop all that skite and come to
facts. Why has he left you? This week or two
that he's been here you was never away from one
another. You was walking on the ridge, and sitting
on the log staircase, and spooning on the verandah
in the moonlight, and getting up to see the sun rise,
and — well, what does it all mean? "
11 It means — the other woman," said Charmian.
The momentary excitement had faded: she was sit-
ting in a crumpled heap on the bed, her eyes like
gold-brown flowers that had faded in the rain.
GUINEA GOLD 245
" What other? " Mrs. Carter spoke with a cer-
tain sharpness, expressive of her contempt for the
ways of men in general.
" He never told me. He only said — to-day —
when his boys were ready, and they put the loads
on — he just said, ■ If I were free ' and then he
took my hand, and then he went away."
" Did you tell him about the Ducane man? "
" Yes. Yesterday. He said I must never go back
to him."
" Oh, he did, did he? And did he tell you how
you were going to manage to live — not that I would-
n't keep you as long as you like, my girl, but I
know you "
" No, I wouldn't — thanks. What does it matter
how I live? I shan't live long! "
She had propped her little chin on her hands, and
with her hair falling all about her, was looking out
through the low window, a long, long way, beyond
the valley, and the forest curtain, and the far high
peaks of the German ranges — whither?
" Don't look like that: you give me the blooming
shivers," said the other, shaking her slightly. Char-
mian turned away from the window and sank back on
her pillow again, face hidden. You could see the
life slipping away from her as you might see the sap
in a withering flower.
" Oh, hell ! " said the woman of the backblocks,
standing up straight and tall, with her hands on her
hips, and setting her face in a baffled frown. For
246 GUINEA GOLD
once she had met with a situation she could not
handle.
She swung her foot irritably as she stood — a trick
she had in moments of annoyance. The toe of her
shoe struck against a parcel lying on the floor, half
under the bed. In spite of the swinging stroke the
parcel moved not at all. Mrs. Carter looked at it.
It was a smallish oblong packet, sewn up in ship
canvas, rather like a loaf of bread in shape and
size. She bent down and put one hand under it to
lift it. It stirred no more than if it had been nailed
to the floor. She took both hands and raised it with
a mighty heave. In spite of her strength she could
scarcely hold it.
11 My Oath ! " she panted. " Gold ! " She set it
down on the bed, and the crazy piece of furniture
creaked with its weight.
" Here," said Mrs. Carter, pulling Charmian up
with small ceremony, " what on earth do you mean
by having a fortune lying on your floor? What's
the gold? Where did you get it? My oath! there's
every weight of eight hundred ounces in that. If
Scott left it for you to take care of "
11 He didn't," answered Charmian in a dull, unin-
terested voice. " He gave it to me."
" Gave it to you! " Mrs. Carter could scarcely
find words. " Why, it must be every bit he's got! "
" It isn't. He said it was half."
" And you leave three thousand pounds, or there-
abouts, lying under your bed ! "
GUINEA GOLD 247
" I didn't know it was so much," said Charmian,
her face showing some disquiet. " It was such a
small parcel. . . . He gave it to a boy to carry to
my room. He said it was half of his gold, and I
was to keep it, to prevent my having to go back
to . . . He was saying good-bye — and I couldn't
think of anything else. . . . What does it matter?
He's gone."
Her face was like an alabaster lamp when the
flame is dead within.
"Matter?" said Mrs. Carter vigorously. "I
should think it did matter. If you're going to take
three thousand pounds from him, you may as well
have it put away in Tim's safe. . . . My word! they
must have struck it rich all right — there won't be a
digger in New Guinea but will be up on the field in
another month — and from Australia, too. . . . Half
of what he got! Eight hundred! — There, let's take
it to the scales."
She trod heavily out of the room, carrying the
parcel of gold nursed in her arms.
" Tim ! " she called. " Tim ! You come along
here, quick and lively. Tim!"
" Eight hundred and sixty-three ounces ! " she
proclaimed, returning by and by with the parcel still
in her arms, freshly sewn up. " Three thousand
and sixty-three pounds, or thereabouts, in money.
Over fifty pounds sheer weight, avoirdupois. And
what am I to do with it, Mrs. Ducane? "
248 GUINEA GOLD
There was no answer from the bed. She bent
down and looked at the girl. Charmian seemed
asleep, but she did not wake when spoken to, and
her pulse, when Mrs. Carter lifted the delicate wrist,
was very slow and faint. It grew fainter as the
older woman held it.
" Brandy! " called Mrs. Carter, sending the gold
under the bed with a kick. " Brandy, Tim — she's
got a heart attack, or something like it."
The shadowy Tim drifted in with a bottle and
glass, waited while his wife poured out and applied
the remedy, saw the fluid trickle down unswallowed
on the pillow, and watched still, while Mrs. Carter
briskly, efficiently, yet with a growing shade of
anxiety in her face, tried one fainting-fit remedy
after another — to no effect. Charmian breathed
quietly, her pulse beat, though slowly. But she
did not regain consciousness.
Some white men came in from the camps, bound,
like all the rest, for the new discovery. Tim went
out to attend to them, to sell them stores from the
stock that had arrived by the Dragon-Fly, tell the
story of the golden reef over and over again, and
served drinks that grew stiffer and more numerous
as the day went on. There were several men sing-
ing and quarrelling on the verandah before the sun
began to sink. A train of boys, apparently master-
less, came down the log staircase, and began drifting
about among the carousing men.
GUINEA GOLD 249
" Here, you, where do you come from? " shouted
Carter, overbearing with drink.
No one could make out. They were unable to
pronounce the name of their " Taubada," as is usu-
ally the case with Papuans. They spoke very little
English. One of them was able to explain, indis-
tinctly, that their leader had gone on in front of
them, and they had expected to find him at the
store.
" Well, he ain't here," said Carter. " You go
long house belong boy, you kill some tin meat, you
cook tea. By and by he come."
It grew on towards evening: smoke began to rise
from the cookhouses, and there was a sound of
chopping wood. Rain piled up in the north-west,
threatened, and came down. It became dark: the
yellow-flamed hurricane lamps were lighted, and
hung out in the verandah and store.
Mrs. Carter came out of Charmian's room at
last. She was wiping her forehead with her hand-
kerchief, and looked dishevelled and tired, but re-
lieved.
" My word, Tim, I have had an afternoon ! " she
said. " Never came round till about half an hour
ago, she didn't. I thought she was going to peg out,
sure and certain. She seems all right now, and only
thinks she fainted a little."
"Well, didn't she?" asked Carter, insinuating
the corkscrew into a bottle of beer.
" If that's for the man you may go on with it.
250 GUINEA GOLD
If it's for yourself, put it back on the shelf: you've
had enough," ordered the Queen.
Carter meekly put it back.
" Faint? " went on his wife. " No. Nor heart
attack neither, so far as I can see. Looked to me
more like something I've never seen in a white per-
son — yet."
"What's that?"
" Well, you know how those niggers can die in
half a day, without anything being the matter with
them, if they happen to lose interest in life, and
reckon it isn't good enough to go on? "
" Oh yes, I know that, same as everyone does."
" I'll swear," said Mrs. Carter, with some emo-
tion, " if she hadn't been a white woman, I'd have
been certain sure she was just going off like that.
She's right now — more or less — and I'm going to
make her eat some tea, if I have to choke it down her
throat for her."
"Where's the gold?" asked Carter, with a sud-
denness that was one of his most astonishing char-
acteristics. You would have thought him half
asleep, as a general rule : but he waked up when least
expected.
Mrs. Carter changed colour and stepped quickly
back into the bedroom.
" Under the bed," she said, with a glance and a
kick. " Tim, you gave me a turn."
" You ought to have a turn, old woman, leaving
it there. Of course there isn't a digger on the field
GUINEA GOLD 251
would touch it, but these Kiwais are too fly alto-
gether about gold: any one of them ..."
" Lord Almighty! " said his wife, making a sud-
den dart outside the house into the fierce rain that
was beating on the track — " if that isn't Scott coming
back, you may call me a Chow! "
CHAPTER XIV
The track to Cripps' Reef — the new track that
Anderson had marked out for Scott to follow on
his way back — was already unmistakable to the eyes
of any bushman. Coming down, Scott had gone
mostly by compass, and by the lie of the Iri River,
which, as it turned out, ran much nearer the Ki-
kiramu, in the lower part of its course, than anyone
had supposed. The men who went over the track
sometime after him went by the footmarks of scores
of carriers, by campfire ashes, by felled bush and
torn-away vine, by rough log bridges newly thrown
over unfordable rivers — by all the signs showing a
road that has been passed over many times. For the
rush had begun.
A very small rush, as yet — only the men from
the claims around the Kikiramu store, and a few
who had " come in " from the outer camps, after
Scott's arrival. The news was even now going down
the Kikiramu River in the Dragon-Fly launch, and
before another three weeks had gone past, would be
flying by the fortnightly mail-boat, and the Aus-
tralian telegraph wires, south, east, and west, all
over the great continent. About the same time it
would filter through to the outback posts of civilisa-
tion in Papua itself, to the northern and north-
252
GUINEA GOLD 253
eastern divisions, and the isolated D'Entrecasteaux
and Louisiades. Then the rest of the Papuan miners
— a body of some three hundred in all — would come
by steam-launch, cutter, or canoe: on foot through
leech-infested forests, and alligator-haunted swamps,
over huge ranges, choked with forest, where never
white man's foot had trod, to the new El Dorado, as
some of them had found their way in the old days,
to the fever-smitten fields of Misima and Tagula:
to the workings of the Yodda and Mambare coun-
try, inhabited by the fiercest race of cannibals in
Papua : to the scarcely accessible Waria and Wood-
lark Island, and all the other fields, now mostly
worked out, that had been discovered and exploited
at the cost of many scores of lives.
Rupert Dence, coming down to the Kikiramu for
reasons best known to himself, found the track as
plain as a high-road, if scarce as easy. It was only
a three-days' walk, by the newly marked out way —
the prospectors' wanderings had taken them far
away from the goal at first, and by the time they
reached it, they had verged back within thirty miles
or so of the Kikiramu field. If you crossed the
alligator swamp — a reasonably safe thing to do in
daylight — you could even manage the trip in two
days and a half, with loaded boys. Dence took care
to strike the swamp before sundown: he did not
want to go round by way of an unnecessary range of
mountains, and lose half a day . . . now.
As he had started in the middle of the night from
354 GUINEA GOLD
Cripps' Reef, it was the middle of the second day
when he reached the spot where the new track to the
Iri struck into the old track along the Kikiramu.
There was a well-worn camping-ground here: trees
had been cleared a little, and rough bush sheds for
carriers had been built. Skeleton tent frames — the
two pairs of gabled posts, the two horizontal side
supports on four crotch sticks, which are so familiar
a sight to camping folk — stood in the empty spaces.
There was water, an elbow of a tributary stream,
with a good gravelly bed. There were traces of
fires everywhere, and bits of native baskets, and
abandoned carrying-poles, and a stray emptied tin or
two. The ground was leafy and boggy, and crossed
with trunks of fallen trees.
" We'll kai-kai here," said Dence to his head boy,
picking out a log under the shade of a huge but-
tressed trunk. " Get water — make fire."
The Papuan went down to the river, and the
Englishman set himself upon the log, and lit his pipe.
It was good to rest and smoke after the tramp of the
morning. It was pleasant to watch the long clouds
drift through clouds of trees, and see the sun make
spangles of white fire upon the varnished leaves in
the clearing — sheltered oneself by the age-old clois-
ters of the bordering forest.
There was time for a good long halt, and he took
it, letting the boys prepare the midday rice and meat
at their leisure. They brought him his dinner in a
tin plate, and he ate it with the knife from his belt,
GUINEA GOLD 255
drinking milkless tea out of his metal pannikin. If
you had seen him there, and known his history, you
would have thought, perhaps, of the days when
Rupert, not called Dence, had eaten off silver plate,
and drunk vintage wines from engraved glasses;
when he had had other service than that of brown
naked men with red leaves in their hair. . . . But
Rupert, called Dence, had well-nigh forgotten those
days now: having moulded himself, like the rest of
us, to the medium in which he lived.
He had pleasant thoughts as he sat and ate, and
yet anxious ones, too. He frowned a little at his
food, and often stopped, half-way through a mouth-
ful, to consider. The head boy thought the rice
was badly cooked, and trembled over his own din-
ner, for the soft-voiced Rupert had a heavy hand,
on occasion.
... If one could divert the Taubada's mind to
anything else there was, perhaps, a chance of escap-
ing trouble. ... If there were any game to point
out — any traces of nomad tribes to find and make
much of . . . anything —
The Papuan stopped eating, and sat still as a
figure of wood, listening. Why, surely, there was
something — feet advancing in the far distance . . .
the faint, faint tread of a white man's boot, the far-
away pad of bare soles ...
" Taubada, one white man he come! M cried the
boy, springing up.
" Some more of the men coming up," said Dence
256 GUINEA GOLD
to himself, and lifted a bladeful of rice. He watched
the turn of the track before him without interest,
until the white man at the head of the column of car-
riers came into sight. Then he jumped to his feet
and uttered an exclamation. The turn was very
near, and he had seen the expression on Scott's face.
Hag-ridden, desperate, white, wearied with fierce
exercise that had failed, after all, to ease the torment
of his mind — the man's whole aspect spoke aloud of
defeat and of pain.
It was only for a moment. He saw Dence almost
as quickly as Dence saw him, and instantly the blind
was drawn down, the bright, hard smile lit up like a
lamp, the bent shoulders straightened. Scott, when
he tramped into the clearing, and held out a hand
to his mate, was Scott as everyone knew him : tired-
looking, perhaps, but pleasant, cheerful, ready to
talk and even to joke. You would not have sup-
posed he had a care in the world, other than that
of making good time, and getting up to his camping-
ground at dusk — unless, maybe, you had been a
woman, and had loved him. Or unless . . . you had
been a man whose eyes were made keen by the
mighty power of jealousy.
In the days of Samarai, which seemed so long ago,
Dence had almost loved this man, and Scott as-
suredly had been drawn to him, as he was not drawn
to any other man in Papua — not even to the fine
nature and noble courage of Anderson, their leader.
Now, the two met with pleasant words on their lips,
GUINEA GOLD 257
but the hate of hell itself in their hearts. The upper-
most thought in each man's mind that moment was —
"Does she care for him?" — and the undermost
thought . . .
I think that neither Dence nor Scott knew what
that thought was. But the savages who stood about
them knew. And one from the Aird River country,
where they kill men for pastime as a child might kill
flies, began to chant a low, fierce song, and to cast
devilish looks and laughs behind him at his com-
rades.
Meantime, the white men were talking.
" Only getting back now?" said Dence. "I
thought I'd have met you a good deal farther
out."
" Why, what's bringing you down, anyhow?"
asked the other, speaking more lightly than he felt.
"Bringing me down?" replied Dence thought-
fully, as if he had been set a riddle. Then, brightly
— " I'll think it over, and let you know as soon as I
find out. Do you know, I was just wondering about
that myself? Couldn't suggest anything, could
you?"
This was insolence. Scott felt his blood warming
up. For the moment he dared not trust himself to
reply.
Dence seemed to draw new life from every line of
Scott's worn face and body, as a vampire draws food
from living veins.
" Had your kai-kai? " he asked, breaking into a
258 GUINEA GOLD
gay whistle as soon as the question left his lips, and
staring about him in the forest.
" No," answered Scott
" Have some? "
" No."
" Reef's pinchin' out, Anderson thinks. Hard
luck for all the Johnnies who are comin' up now.
What?"
" Is that why you left it? "
" No. I left it," explained Dence, smoking as he
talked, and speaking very gently, " because I — as
dear old Micawber would say — ' in short, chose.' "
The Aird River boys did not know English.
There was a certain universal language that they
did know, however, and they kicked each other
with delighted anxiety. Were the Taubadas going
to give them some fun?
Under the black shade of the great buttressed tree
there was silence for a few seconds. The sea-like
murmur of the forest grew very clear. You could
hear the tinkling of the carriers' beads and neck-
laces as they breathed.
" The diggers have told him. . . . He is going to
her. . . . She is alone — unhappy — afraid of Du-
cane. . . . She liked him before. . . . She will!
She will do it! ..."
" He has left her. . . . He is keeping faith with
his Irish girl. . . . By God, it's my turn now!
Charmian, Charmian! "
There was not a word spoken. The two men
GUINEA GOLD 259
looked at each other. And in that look the fate
of three lives took shape.
Scott, remembering in the after years, knew that
he had not thought at all, after seeing — what he
saw — in Dence's eyes. He had only acted. Three
thousand years of evolution shredded away from
his mind as bark shreds from a tree before a light-
ning blast. He became as the naked savages who
stood beside him. And the new (or was it the old?)
Stone Age man in him laughed consumedly at the
incomprehensible madness of rejection and sacrifice,
so nearly committed by the fool, George Scott.
It was Scott as others knew him, however, who
turned to the carriers with his usual kindliness of
manner, and bade them open their food-bags and
dine: who took meat and biscuit for himself, and sat
down on a log to eat it, with the calm purpose of
a man who had work to do, and means to neglect
no aid towards the doing. Dence looked at him
oddly. He could not understand this sudden silence,
this ignoring of himself. He did not altogether
like it.
" The poor devil can't bear to talk to me: he's
so beastly jealous," was the solution that he tried
to make himself accept. But it did not satisfy him.
He made a remark or two, as the meal went on.
He was answered quietly: but conversation dropped,
heavy as lead, into unfathomable silences. The boys
finished their food. Dence cleared his tin plate.
Scott broke the last piece of his biscuit.
260 GUINEA GOLD
" Well, I suppose we must be going," observed
Dence.
The carriers hoisted up their loads again, and
took leave of one another, with many strange cries
of farewell. Dence beckoned his boys out on to
the track.
"Well, so long!" he said, with the touch of
swagger in his bearing that always made one listen,
unconsciously, for the jingle of spurs. He held out
his hand.
Scott did not take it, or return the salute.
"Out of friends, eh?" asked Dence, twisting
his moustache. The idea did not seem to displease
him.
" Not at all," replied Scott coolly. " I'm coming
with you."
" Coming with me? " His face grew dark.
" Certainly. We ought to get in by six o'clock,
without pressing the boys."
" And may one ask," said Dence, with more than
a touch of insolence in his manner now, " the rea-
son of this curious proceedin'? "
" Oh, yes, one may," answered Scott, smiling very
pleasantly, " it's because I — ' in short, choose.' "
No white man's tongue could tell — it is probable
that no white man's brain could imagine — the disap-
pointment that took possession of the Kiwais and
Orokivas and Goari-Bari men as that strange after-
noon wore on. They had been certain that the Tau-
GUINEA GOLD 261
badas were going to fight — possibly to kill one an-
other with the desirable little six-throated guns that
they wore in their waistbelts. They, the carriers,
had smelt blood in the air, and were half-drunk on it
already. . . . After these long months of unutter-
able ennui — eating and working all day, sleeping all
night long with never so much as a midnight stab-
bing raid, or a skull smashed in with a pineapple
stone club, to give a bored unlucky heathen a little
taste of amusement — they really had had hopes
that things were beginning to brighten. And now,
there were the Taubadas walking one after the
other, hour by hour, along the track, and up the
steep knife-ridges, and through the riverbeds, ex-
changing no word, it was true, but never so much as
reaching out to make a stab at a bare, sweating neck,
or a jab into an unprotected back, between the
shoulder-blades, with their knives! This, too, on a
track that offered every facility for good, effective
fighting, according to the standards of sensible folk
— a road that furnished ambushes uncountable,
drops and down-slides of unimaginable tempting-
ness, and that never for a moment allowed two men
to walk easily abreast!
There was still one hope left, and the boys dis-
cussed it eagerly among themselves as they padded
on under the steamy shades of the forest. When the
two white men saw the woman (no one who knows
the Papuan will need to be told that the cause of the
trouble was as plain to these simple savages as it
262 GUINEA GOLD
would have been to a whole drawing-room full of
black coats and silk dresses) — when they saw the
woman, there might be fun after all. The Orokivas,
and the Goari-Baris, and the Yassi-Yassis, and the
Kiwais, knew quite well, by experience, how exceed-
ingly annoying it was, even to the best-tempered
men, to have another man actually bothering round
in the presence of the woman you happened to want
yourself. All sorts of things were liable to happen
in a case like that— even with a really good-natured
man, who would not so much as roast a captive on
a stick, alive, or bite off an enemy's nose. . . .
It began to rain at four o'clock, and kept hard on
all the rest of the way. Dark came down soon after
six: they climbed the heart-breaking height of the
cliff more by feeling than by sight, and reached the
summit winded, scratched, and bruised by a dozen
falls. They had kept together, silent, throughout
the afternoon, and they did not speak when the lights
of the camp blinked into view through beating rain,
some hundreds of feet below. On Scott had fallen
the calmness of a resolution made for good and all.
The new, strange man in him smiled quietly at the
thought of the fool with the breaking heart who had
climbed up that height in the silver of the early
sun, rocks and valley ringing out into his ears:
"Good-bye to hope— good-bye, good-bye!"
He was breaking the most solemn promise of his
life: he was jilting an innocent girl who loved and
GUINEA GOLD 263
trusted him: he was, in fine, a blackguard. Cer-
tainly: agreed: allowed. It didn't particularly mat-
ter. Nothing had mattered very much, since, in the
forest clearing he had met that look on Rupert
Dence's face, and had seen, in the sudden lightning
blaze of prevision, Charmian with Rupert's lips on
hers.
And Dence?
The stream of wild fury in his heart raged like
the torrent of a mountain waterfall. So far the sav-
ages were right. So far had they read well that his
hand had indeed been near the haft of his knife
more than once during that silent march through
the forest. Almost he had called out on Scott to
halt — to draw his knife, or take his pistol from its
holster, and see once for all which was the better
man of these two who loved one woman. Only one
thing held him back — the hideous knowledge that,
in sober truth, there was nothing to fight about: no
chance to stake. Scott held all the cards. Charmian
loved him. She might marry another man — indeed,
Dence told himself bitterly, she would marry a
dozen times, if a dozen times set free, being in truth
no more able to help herself than a little soft-eyed
hare loosed among a pack of dogs — but the chance
that he, and others, might have, would only come
through Scott's defeat. And, save Scott himself,
who was to defeat him?
So, sick at heart, and blind with rage, he fol-
lowed Scott down the long staircase, scarce knowing
264 GUINEA GOLD
why he followed, but determined, all the same, not
to leave him until . . .
What? That remained to be seen.
"Mrs. Ducane! Mrs. Ducane!' ,
There was something in Mrs. Carter's voice that
snatched Charmian from her bed like a hand laid on
her shoulders. Yet the pioneer woman had not even
touched her. She had put her head inside the door-
way of Charmian's room and spoken her name.
And in an instant Charmian was out, and up, and
. . . at the looking-glass.
Mrs. Carter burst out laughing, with a cry some-
where in the laugh.
"Yes!" she said. "He's there. He's back.
Put up your hair, and pull down that blouse of yours.
Doll yourself up as much as you like, and come
out!"
She was gone. She took Tim by the ear and led
him into the store and told him to stop there. Stray
carriers were swept off the little side verandah like
leaves before a storm. Miners wandering about
were somehow conjured away. The leaf-thatched
verandah, with its rough table and sapling floor, was
empty of all save one white figure with a small, pale,
glorified face, when Scott, big, ragged, mud-smeared,
with eyes like grey Irish diamonds alight beneath
his black-set brows, stepped out of the night and
the rain.
" Charmian, I've come back," he said.
GUINEA GOLD 265
.The pale ghost of the other woman, and the dark
ghost of the spirit of Papua, faded away. . . .
Charmian held out her hands to the man who was
only hers. And the kiss that had haunted the wak-
ing and sleeping hours of Scott, from the coral
shores of Samarai to the long reaches of the Iri
River, through all the wonders of the unknown
secret lands, through thirst and hunger and peril,
and the spilling of blood, and the search for gold,
was his at last.
A few seconds later Rupert Dence walked into
the store, lifted a case of whiskey from one of the
shelves like a feather, went out without a word of
greeting, and plunged away down the lower log
staircase into the dark.
As he went, several disappointed heathens crept
out from under the house, where they had been
eagerly watching the course of events, up to the
moment when Rupert had turned away from the
lighted oblong of the verandah doorway. Chant-
ing their disgust and disillusionment in loud major
thirds, they made their way to the cookhouse in the
yard. If there were going to be no games, there
would at least be bread.
CHAPTER XV
Mr. and Mrs. Carter were breakfasting.
After the rain the morning was magnificent.
Sweet cold scents of orchid and jasmine rose up
from the river valley. Beyond the treetops the
mountain peaks stood out in facets of blue crystal
against a sky of primrose-gold. The world, the un-
soiled, unhandled world of the virgin forests, was
new and pure.
" Tim, it's a fine morning," observed Mrs. Carter
over her plate of cold boiled cassowary. u And
that girl loafing over her tea in bed. . . . Ah! I've
no patience with girls — they're a rabbit-headed crew,
all the lot."
" You took her her tea," observed Carter, out of
his own cup.
" Had to : she's fair shook up. But she's no busi-
ness to be. That's what I quarrel with. Nerves !
If I'd caught a daughter of mine havin' such a thing
about her "
" I reckon they knew better," said Carter im-
personally.
" And, as you can bear witness yourself, there
wasn't one of the six performed like that, wedding-
day or no wedding-day. Up they were, as bright as
bees, baking "
266
GUINEA GOLD 267
" Wedding-day ? " Carter interrupted, with small
ceremony, the amazing entomological parallel just
commenced by his wife. " Whose wedding-day is
it?"
" Scott's and hers, of course," replied Mrs. Car-
ter calmly. " I wasn't going to stand no nonsense,
so I told them both last night, when I saw they'd
done canoodling on the verandah. There's the
Dragon-Fly due to leave the landing the day after
to-morrow, and there'll not be more than time to
send off a notice of the wedding, if it goes to-day
with the carriers. They've muddled about this job
long enough: time it was settled for good and all.
I must say Scott was very reasonable : he said he had
no objection in the world, and sent a message to the
warden right off. He's coming up some time before
lunch to marry them, and he's lending them his
house into the bargain. As for that girl, she cried,
and told me — had the face to tell me — she oughtn't
to marry him, because of some nonsense about an-
other woman. Said she was making him act against
his conscience: he'd never mentioned the other girl
to her, but she was sure of it, all the same. And she
yesterday morning breaking her heart because he
hadn't left the other ! I declare, Tim, my patience
just pinched right out, and I said to her: ' You get
to bed quick and lively, and if I hear any more yap
about not marrying, my girl, I vow I'll smack you ! '
Off she went like a lamb: but she's all nerves this
morning, and says she's wicked. Wicked? Trash 1
268 GUINEA GOLD
I'm going in to help her to doll up by and by, and
then I reckon we'll hear no more about wickedness.
I've got a nice muslin dress that I brought up to
make for Mary's girl: it'll do her all right, with a
tuck or so — and, by the way, Tim, just you send one
of the boys down to the warden's house for a bit of
that orange blossom he has."
" Widows don't wear orange blossom," objected
Tim.
"Widows? She ain't a widow: she's only got
rid of a bad bargain, and she'll be married like a
regular decent bride, or my name isn't Ann Carter.
Did you ever hear of any law against a divorced
woman marrying in white and orange blossom?"
" Only widows," allowed Tim perplexedly.
" Well, then, send that boy off, and sort up the
store : all the men that aren't away by one o'clock
will be there, so we'll want room to stand."
"What about that parcel of gold?" asked'
Tim.
" Man, you're like a bluebottle fly. I tell you it's
all right. I saw it — and kicked it — this morning.
Where d'you think we are? In a back alley of
Melbourne, or up on the Kikiramu? If it was lying
on the counter of the store, instead of under her bed,
there isn't a man here who would touch it."
" Well, old woman," maintained Carter, with the
curious persistence that he could show at times,
u I'm not saying anything against anyone, but I
don't see what we've got an expensive safe for, that
GUINEA GOLD 269
near killed three carriers out of ten, on the way up,
if it isn't to put gold in, when gold's in the house."
" I suppose you're right: you do seem to be right,
once in a way," allowed his wife grudgingly. " She's
dressing now: I'll give her this muslin, and as soon
as she's out of her room, I'll get you the gold.
Now you go and see to having the store swept."
To Charmian, being a beautiful woman, even the
signs of sleeplessness and nervous strain were not
altogether unbecoming. Any ordinary woman would
have looked plain, with black shadows under her
eyes, drooping mouth, and colourless cheeks. But
under Charmian's lovely eyes the dark stain of
fatigue looked like an Eastern beauty's touch of
kohl: the paleness of her pearl-white face seemed
designed to make the lips look redder: the very
droop of the mouth invited kisses. When she had
finished dressing, and taken a long look in the glass,
there was scarce a shadow left of the nervousness
that had aroused good Mrs. Carter's wrath. Char-
mian loved her- own beauty too well not to know all
its different phases, and she saw at once that her
looks to-day had touched their zenith. More, surely
more ! There was something added — a perfume to
the flower, a sun-ray to the jewel. She had never
looked so in all her life before.
Knowing this, she felt suddenly and completely
happy. What if she were luring Scott away from
the shadowy woman to whom (she guessed) he had
270 GUINEA GOLD
given faith! Look what she was giving him! She
was so beautiful!
She put on the white laced muslin that Mrs. Car-
ter had given her, and spent a delicious half-hour ad-
justing and arranging it, and fastening in her hair
the cluster of orange blossom brought her by Car-
ter's messenger. She knew it was all wrong, this
white dress, these bridal flowers, for her, Grant
Ducane's discarded wife : but that troubled her little.
The only thing that mattered was that her looks
should be brought to the highest point of perfection
possible. Was not George Scott giving up his best
prospects in life to marry her, with her stained name,
and his honour, to free himself for her? The value
for which he had bartered these things should be
as high as possible: it was her business to see to
that.
^yhen she came out on to the verandah there was
no one there. The miners — some ten or fifteen,
who were waiting for the arrival of provisions from
the landing-place, to make a start for Cripps' Reef
— had gone off to tidy themselves up; Razors were
at a premium in the camp, ties urgently demanded,
and the bitter remonstrance of one or another, un-
lawfully bereft of hoarded clean shirt or " flash "
new belt, sounded among the outbuildings of the
store. Scott, with characteristic energy, was getting
his train of carriers in shape to start: they were to
get away for Cripps' Reef as early as possible,
loaded with the food that Anderson required, in
GUINEA GOLD 271
charge of a miner who had secured his own pro-
visions and boys, and would start that day. Mrs.
Carter was in the cookhouse, making her boys fly
round as she began the concoction of a wedding
breakfast out of the few supplies procurable. For
the moment there was peace and quiet in the camp,
and Charmian was glad of it as she dropped on to a
long canvas chair, and shut her eyes, to rest.
Being tired after her restless night, she half
dropped off to sleep. She heard a bustle in her
room by and by, people moving about, somebody
talking, somebody else hushing him or her. She did
not pay any attention — there was only one thing
in the world that mattered to-day.
Feet began to sound about the house — heavily
booted feet that came from many quarters, and met
together somewhere about the doorway of the store.
The talking in the bedroom was drowned by the in-
creasing hum outside. It swelled to a shout, by and
by, and voices could be heard raised in loud greeting
to Phillips, the magistrate and warden, who was
evidently coming up the lower series of ladders,
from his bungalow across the valley.
Charmian jumped up and went to the rail . . .
Phillips, the gay young fellow with curly hair whom
she had seen in the store on the night of Scott's
arrival, was almost at the top of the stairs: he wore
a white suit — a thing seldom seen on the Kikiramu
— and a newly pipe-clayed helmet: and his snowy
shoes made it plain to the eyes of all present that he
272 GUINEA GOLD
had carried a pair with him, and put them on at the
last flight of the muddy ascent from the river.
The miners, Micky and Bobby and Jack and Dick,
and German Billy, and Cortland, and Otto Riddick,
and the rest, were all round the doorway of the
store, waiting. They had managed to find clean
shirts and trousers, and to fasten pins in the place
of missing buttons, and every man who did not wear
a beard was shaved. They looked a rough crew
and a mixed one — there were men among them who
had taken university degrees, and others who could
barely write a dozen words of an ungrammatical
letter: there were men who drank themselves half
to death once or twice a year, and men who were
strictly sober: men who were lads when gold was
first found in Australia, and men who remembered
nothing older than the Boer War . . . men
who ...
" That is it," said Charmian to herself, pausing
on the constant repetition of one word — " they are
lots of different things, but they are all — men.
Most men aren't."
She became conscious that something was drag-
ging. There was a delay: a pause. Where was
Scott? The magistrate had gone into the store:
the miners were following. She waited for him to
fetch her. What was keeping him?
Nothing much, apparently: he was coming now —
she could hear him hurrying along the verandah
from the Carters' room. He arrived almost out of
GUINEA GOLD 273
breath, glowing and gay as became a bridegroom,
dressed in a white suit exactly like the magistrate's,
and evidently borrowed from him. He had a white
orchid in his buttonhole: his hair was brushed
smartly, and he trod as though the floor were india-
rubber.
" You're to take my arm," he laughed, " and I'm
to lead you into the store, and you're not to dare to
be nervous, and you're to speak up and be sensible.
That's what Her Majesty the Queen of North-West
Island says. Come, Charmian ! Isn't it a lark, get-
ting married! "
He took her by the arm, and ran her along the
verandah: they entered the store at a gallop, Char-
mian laughing, blushing, and remonstrating; Scott
with a flush on his face, and shine in his eyes, and a
gaiety about his whole demeanour that made him
look almost as though he had drunk of some stimu-
lant more earthly than the pure wine of happiness.
But most of the people in the store had seen men
married before, — some few had even been married
themselves, — and they were not slow to recognise
a well-known variety of bridegroom's nervousness.
As for Charmian, who had been crying with agita-
tion and doubt only an hour or two before, she was,
and looked, as calm as the still lagoons of the Coral
Sea.
The magistrate married them, and Mrs. Carter,
stepping forward, gave the bride a hearty kiss, al-
most before the last words were well pronounced.
274 GUINEA GOLD
" Good luck, my girl ! " she said.
" Good luck! " echoed shadowy Tim, taking the
bridegroom's hand.
" Good luck! Good luck! " shouted the miners,
pressing round and shaking hands freely. They
raised a cheer for Scott, and a cheer for his bride,
and shouted themselves nearly hoarse. And then
big Mike, the man who was the recognised leader
of the Kikiramu field, suddenly produced a bag made
of white moleskin, and tied up closely at the mouth,
and handed it to Charmian.
11 Just a little present, to show our goodwill," he
said. Letting go the bag as if it were red-hot, he
turned tail and bolted out of the store, followed by
all the other men, who instantly assumed the de-
meanour of criminals fleeing from a crime.
" Hand over, you'll drop it!" ordered Mrs.
Carter, taking the bag from Charmian's fingers.
" Tim, there's a good twenty ounces in that! "
" Oh, George, how can we take it?" remon-
strated Charmian, tears in her eyes. " From those
few men — when we've so much — all that great par-
cel of gold — and most of them haven't done any-
thing like so well ! "
Scott looked rather odd for a moment, and then
burst out laughing, somewhat over-loudly.
" Don't let that turn your hair grey, sweetheart,"
he said. " We'll have to take it, anyhow. They
would never forgive us if we didn't."
" Well, will you give them our thanks — our very,
GUINEA GOLD 275
very best thanks?" asked Charmian of Mrs.
Carter.
" I will, certainly," said the Queen, with her
queenliest manner.
" And I'll take the gold off of you this minute,
and lock it up," said the unexpected Carter, grab-
bing at the bag and disappearing like a vision.
The breakfast was over: the miners (who had
come back after all) were dispersing.
"Time we started on our wedding-tour: put on
your hat, Charmian," suggested the bridegroom.
While the bride was absent in her room, the three
in the store (Carter having returned) put their
heads together and talked. Charmian caught a
word or two as she came in again.
" Don't tell her," was what she heard.
" Of course not," answered Scott. Then he
turned to meet her, and gave her his arm, and to-
gether they went down the track leading to the log
ladder, and the flumes and the riverbed, and the
little bungalow house away alone in the forest.
11 Tui ! Tui ! O-tui O ! " sang the happy bird in
the valley, calling to its love.
Above, in the store, there was trouble.
While Charmian was dozing on the verandah,
waiting for the wedding-party to assemble, Mrs.
Carter had gone into her room, intending to take
away the small, weighty parcel of gold that had lain
underneath the bed for a day and a night, and put it
276 GUINEA GOLD
in the safe. She stooped down and put her hands
round it. It did not come up ; it seemed appallingly
heavy. She gave another tug and another heave,
and now it lifted with a vengeance, ripping some-
thing as it came away, and sending her staggering
back against the wall.
She knew in an instant what had happened. This
was no soft, creaking parcel of gold-dust that she
held in her hands: it was a hard, irregular bundle
of metal, roughly sewn up, and not half as heavy
as it ought to have been. A bit of fishing line passed
through the floor, and a rip in the canvas of the
parcel, told her why it had not rolled away when
she kicked it, once and again, to feel that it was
there.
Strong woman though she was, she felt sick at the
greatness of the disaster. Three thousand pounds
gone at a stroke ! And in her house ! Much she
feared, too, that it was her own fault for neglecting
to have the gold put away in the safe.
She tore open the canvas, and out dropped a num-
ber of tomahawk heads, falling on the bed with a
thump.
The eye of Mrs. Carter lightened ominously.
" This is no native's work! " she said. " I don't
know who's the skunk we've got in camp, but if once
the men catch him ..."
She paused, on a long stride doorwards, with the
ripped canvas in her hand. She hung irresolute for a
moment, then laid the stuff down, and walked quietly
GUINEA GOLD 277
out to the back, where Tim was packing his swag
ready for the afternoon.
"Here!" she said. "Something's happened —
but keep it quiet till the wedding's over : no use up-
setting her again."
" It's the gold," said Tim instantly.
Mrs. Carter swallowed in her throat.
" It is. I suppose now you'll be crying, ' I told
you so,' for the rest of your natural. You may as
well be right once in a lifetime, for fear people might
forget you'd any sense at all." She was greatly
agitated: her neck worked under the low collar of
her dress, and her breath came quick.
Tim finished the task of ramming down a pair of
boots on the top of a flannel shirt.
" Well," he said, straightening himself, " who
done it? When did it go? "
" It's well to be you, that can take it like as if it
was a thruppenny bit disappearing off of a collection
plate in church! " said Mrs. Carter scornfully. " It
was a white man stole it, and none of your Kiwais.
When I went to lift the parcel, there was nothing but
a lot of old tomahawk heads sewed up in the canvas,
and tied to the floor, so that it wouldn't roll away
when I kicked it."
Carter fastened up the top of his swag and went
into the bedroom, followed by his wife. He pulled
out the bed, and examined the stick floor.
" Look at that," he said, lifting half a dozen of
the saplings that had been cut away from the rest
278 GUINEA GOLD
by the simple process of severing their lashings of
bark fibre. " There's how he done it. He was
standing under the house in the dark, and seen you
carrying the parcel about, and got it when she was
asleep at night, most likely."
" Who got it?" asked Mrs. Carter irritably.
u You'd make a flash detective, wouldn't you? "
" No use performing about it," commented Car-
ter. " We're trying to find out who. When did you
bring it to me to weigh — about midday yesterday,
wasn't it? "
11 Yes, about — talk quietly, man, or she'll hear
you outside there."
" Then she took ill, and you was working over
her all afternoon and half the evening. And the
men was all over the place, buying stores, and hav-
ing drinks, and annoying of me to tell them when
there'd be more stores up by the Dragon-Fly, which
I didn't know, no more than a dead Kiwai.
And "
" You needn't say it was Mike, or Riddick, or
any one of the lot; it just isn't in them, and no one
knows that better than you," declared Mrs. Carter
in a fierce whisper.
" I didn't say it was anyone, but we've got to think
about it, seeing it was our house it was lost in,"
maintained Carter. " I'm going on about yester-
day. . . . Then them carriers that belonged to no-
body came in "
He stopped suddenly.
GUINEA GOLD 279
" Ah ! " said his wife sharply. " One of those
boys "
" It wasn't any boy," persisted Carter. " It "
11 If it wasn't, they know something about it, and
I'll have it out of them, or knock their blooming
heads off! " declared Mrs. Carter in the same fierce
whisper. In a moment she was gone.
Carter sat down and employed himself cutting
up stick tobacco in the palm of his hand. His face
was devoid of all expression, but he listened. By
and by, from the yard at the back, there came the
howl of a frightened native, and the sound of Mrs.
Carter's voice raised in rapid and threatening speech.
Afterwards was silence.
She came back like a human whirlwind, and
dragged her husband away into their own room,
panting.
" Tim that — that " She could hardly speak.
« The cook "
" You mean the feller that came up from Samarai,
and went off prospecting after? "
" Yes ! It was his carriers — he came down from
Cripps' Reef a day or two after Scott, and got in
just at sundown, before those boys — yesterday! No
one saw him come in, and the boys think he got
bushed somewhere or other. Bushed? No fear —
he got in here when the lamps was lit, and saw you
and me with the gold. And he sneaked under the
house after, and cut the lashings of the floor, and
took the swag through and emptied it, and put that
280 GUINEA GOLD
iron in, and — and — my God, Tim, if I had him here
I'd cut the hide off of him!"
" I've no doubt you would, old woman," agreed
Carter soothingly, " but that don't do us any good
now. My oath, I never liked the fellow, and there
was some yarn about his having been chucked out
of the store he was in, in Samarai, for stealing.
He's got it, all right. He's off to catch the Dragon-
Fly with it, too, I'll lay, but he won't, because I'll
send one of them Yassi-Yassi boys after him, to take
a letter to the ingineer."
" You don't savvy any more than a Yassi-Yassi
boy yourself." Mrs. Carter was recovering her
spirits with the prospect of regained superiority
over her husband. " What do you think he'd want,
going down by the launch, with you and me ready to
stop him the minute it was found out? No fear.
He'll hide himself a bit, and then get a canoe some-
where, or make a raft, and go down the Kikiramu
by himself. It's risky, but the feller that carried
off that swag won't stop at . . ."
" What's the matter now? "
" You wait." The whirlwind blew itself out into
the yard again, with a frightful fluttering of incensed
petticoats, reversed its course, and blew itself
back. Mrs. Carter, out of breath, dropped into a
chair.
" I knew it! " she panted. " One of the boys is
missing."
"Missing?" Carter had finished cutting up his
GUINEA GOLD 281
tobacco, and was packing it into his pipe with his
little finger-tip. " Where is he? "
" If I knew that, I'd know where that little ser-
pent, Clay, was. I just remembered that the gold
weighed over fifty pounds, avoirdupois, and that a
man loaded with that couldn't carry his tucker, un-
less he was a sight more of a man than that — two-
faced centipede was. I asked if they was all there,
and the boys says no, there was one of them come
in with the rest, but he strayed off somewhere, about
dark, when it was raining a lot, and they never saw
him again. Of course, like natives, they didn't think
it good enough to mention such a trifle till they was
asked!"
She gasped and fanned herself for a minute or
two, Carter meantime stolidly smoking. The miners
were gathering in the yard outside for the wedding,
and Scott's footsteps sounded, coming in.
" We've got to tell him," sighed Mrs. Carter.
" You tell him, old woman," said Carter placidly.
" He'll be proper vexed."
The Queen went out with a somewhat heavy step,
and returned by and by.
" He was a bit cut up," she said, frowning at the
world in general. " He wouldn't allow it was our
faults: said it was hers, and he thought he could
manage to forgive her that much, specially to-day.
She's not to be told, now or any time, he says: he
thinks they'll get back the gold all right, and, any-
how, she isn't to be bothered. Bothered? He don't
282 GUINEA GOLD
know much. She'll never bother. Some women
would want to know what had become of a parcel of
that kind if they didn't see it about, but she won't
never think about it again, now she's going to get
him: she'll just take it for granted he has it. I've
no patience with her — never had — she's as silly as
they make them, which, I suppose, is why all the men
in New Guinea is half mad about her! "
Tim, declining to be drawn into a controversy on
the cause of attraction between the sexes, sucked
at his pipe.
" Once the wedding's over," said Mrs. Carter,
a we'll tell all the men, and rake the matter right
to the bottom. But there can't be no upsetting
things now."
" No, old woman, so put your best bonnet on and
come," suggested her smaller half. " The warden's
on the way."
And the wedding, as we have told, took place.
CHAPTER XVI
There was a brown house in the forest. Its
thatch was brown sago-palm leaf. Its walls were
peeled brown sapling, set close, and laced together
with strings of brown bark fibre. Its floors were
brown sago-palm sheath, hard and slippery, and
springy to the foot. The doorway was closed with
curtains of brown sail-cloth. Through the chinks
among the saplings and the palm-sheaths light sifted
softly, amber-coloured and dim. The gabled pitch
of the roof, high above the branch-woven partitions
of the rooms, was almost dark.
It was a house of dreams. There was no sound
there but the soft pouring of a little waterfall away
in the green of the forest. There was no light but
the honey-coloured glow that came through half-
transparent walls. There was nothing beyond — no
world, no thunder of great cities, no murder nor
unrest. Sea upon sea, river upon river, range upon
range, the remotenesses, mysteries, obstacles of the
unknown lands rose round the little cottage and
cloistered it in.
You could hear your own thoughts in this small
brown house that lay clasped like a nut in the great
green hands of the forest. You could loose the
283
284 GUINEA GOLD
orchestra of your strangest fancies, and listen to
the wild Valkyrie-ride they made, beneath the umber
gloom of the gabled roof that had never echoed to
any sound but that of the leaves, and the rain, and
the waterfall. You could lie in the stream of cool
air between the doors, and sleep softly, with the
scented breeze of the forest pouring over your face,
so that you might dream of secret islands and
strange, uncharted seas, and wonderful, unvisited
valleys, and magic cities hid among remote dim
mountain peaks. . . . The winds of the Never-
Never can work strange wizardry on sleep-loosed
brains : who knows the wild countries knows this.
It was a house of dreams, and of a dream — the
dream that lies deep hid in lovers' hearts, of some
exquisite secret place, shut from the world, with
leaves and water and the song of birds about it: a
little place, fit to hold the happiness that is so much
too great for palaces. And in the little secret house,
Charmian and George, hand-fast at length, were
living through that which not one life in twenty
thousand knows — a dream come true.
She was more beautiful than he had thought.
She was dearer than he had ever imagined. He
told her so many times a day — the hard-bitten Bel-
fastman, who buried his emotions as men bury their
dead, beneath a face of stone. He told her every-
thing in his life. He told her secrets that were
those of other people, just as all the world's best
and greatest men have told the things they should
GUINEA GOLD 285
not tell, to the one only woman. He told her that
he would die for her, and that no man had ever
loved as he did: and the outworn words seemed
made anew for him as he spoke them.
He saw the sunrise and the sunset with her, and
the miracle-play of the thunderstorm; and all these
things were new created, here in the forest, for her
and him.
As for Charmian, the woman made for love, she
spoke but little. No well-informed, capable, lecture-
nourished woman in the world but would have felt
a fine contempt for her conversation, for her lack of
interest in serious matters, for the lazy way in
which she lay about the little brown house, singing
a little, reading a little poetry, dreaming a great
deal. She seemed to have sponged out past and
future from her existence; she never spoke of either.
Heart and soul, she had minted herself into a single
coin, and flung it royally upon the board of life.
The game was played.
In the very midst of his new unbelievable happi-
ness that thought struck coldly upon Scott. It shut
the future from his mind too. He could not picture
the years ahead. He did not know what was to come
after. Beyond the brown house in the forest — and
a darkly looming separation, when he must go back
to the Iri — and a vague thought of a return to
civilisation, somehow, some day — he could see noth-
ing.
He told all this to Charmian, of course, and she
286 GUINEA GOLD
laughed at him, and got up from her lounge to dance
in a streak of sun on the sagging palm-sheath floor.
She whistled lightly for herself as she danced: no
bird in the forest fluted so sweet and true. She
stopped whistling to laugh, and stopped laughing to
dance again, her hair flying loose as she swung from
foot to foot. She seemed the very spirit of the
passing hour.
" You dear fool, don't try to wake," was all she
would say. " You might wake me. Keep the
dream."
" But, Charmian " Scott began.
Charmian was singing now, in a very soft and
sweet soprano:
'I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand. . . .
Ah, why can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
Ah, why can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream
.
"Where did you get that?" asked Scott, struck
by the wild, sweet air and strange words.
" It's an old, old song. A poem of Edgar Allan
Poe's, I think."
She had sunk down on the floor now, with all her
soft white draperies billowing round her, and was
sitting with her chin propped on her folded hands.
A lance of the westering sun stabbed through her
GUINEA GOLD 287
fleecy hair, and turned it to nets and webs of gold.
" I don't want to wake," she said, her amber eyes
set on something very far away. " I shall wake
some day, and then . . . "
"What then?" asked Scott, drawing a lock of
the beautiful hair through his hand.
" I . . . don't . . . know," said Charmian slowly.
Her eyes grew dark, and she turned to hide her
face in his arms.
" Take care of me ! " she said, with a little shiver.
u The world makes me afraid."
Since they came to the little brown house — he
scarcely knew whether it was a week, or a year
ago — Scott had written a letter and received one.
The letter he wrote was penned with his very
heart's blood. It was to Janie, and it told her that
he was false to her.
The cold airs of the North blew on his face as he
wrote. He tasted the salt tang of the breeze from
Belfast Lough: he saw the purple profile of Cave
Hill, lying like a giant asleep above the roaring,
many-windowed mills. He smelt the odour of
crushed grass along the tow-path of the Lagan, where
Janie and he had walked. He heard the grinding
cringe of the train as it rounded the curve leading
into the station of Portrush, where Janie spent her
holidays, and where he used to run down to see
her. . . . The very names of the stations rang in
his head like bells. Ballymena — a long way off:
288 GUINEA GOLD
one smoked, and read, and looked at one's watch.
Glarryford — one was coming near her now. Bally-
money — only three stations — she would be putting
on her things and leaving the house. Coleraine —
one got eager and excited now, and could not keep
still: the train seemed to scream with joy as it
rushed out under the bridge. Portstewart — oh, the
look of the little copse by the rails, and the bending
trees, that began to feel the push of the wild sea-
wind! and the sheer delight of having to give up
one's ticket, and know that it was done with, and that
one was all but there ! Then the last seven-minutes'
run that was so long, and the strong, pure breath of
the Atlantic beating in at the window, and the blue,
blue sea above the green shadows, and the last
swinging curve of the railway round to the bridge,
and the little grey, sandy, windy town lying down
below . . . and now one ran smoothly, shutting off
speed, along the inward platform, with one's head
thrust as far out of the window as it would go — and
there, with her still, sweet face scanning the rows of
carriage doors . . .
Something choked in Scott's throat. Never, never
again! . . .
The fiery green of the forest, seen through the
open door, swam like an emerald sea before his
eyes. He set down the pen for a moment, and
looked back at sleeping Charmian, where she lay
upon her long deck-lounge, beyond all telling fair.
To pay for one's happiness with one's own pain —
GUINEA GOLD 289
that was a feather-stroke. But to pay with
Janie's. . . .
Scott took up his pen again, and with tightened
lips wrote himself down — untrue.
He did not offer to send her half his fortune,
though he would have been glad indeed to be allowed
this much relief. He knew that no power on earth
would ever make Janie take a farthing from his
hands. She would post him back his ring, and re-
turn his letters : perhaps without even a word — that
would be like Janie. She would sell the few things
she had collected to help with the furnishing of their
home. She would wear out the pretty things she
was gathering for her trousseau — another girl
might hoard them or give them away, but Janie
would wear them with her teeth set, and defy her-
self to care. She would remain in her school, and
go on teaching. There would never be anyone in
his place. He would never go home to Ireland
again: if he died, she would not hear of it, and
when the little burying-ground above the windy
White Rock Road unclosed its gates to take in the
woman who was to have slept by his side, in death
and in life — he would not know.
So — that was ended: the letter was written,
signed, and closed. To-morrow a boy would take
it away, down to the landing-place, to await the
next run of the steam-launch down the river. The
bullet would have sped on its twelve-thousand-mile
course, to find its deadly end in a woman's heart.
290 GUINEA GOLD
The letter he received was from Anderson.
Dence had brought it down with him, but no one
had heard anything about it for several days, be-
cause the messenger was lying drunk in his camp by
the river, a case of whiskey at his side. Carter had
gone away up the Iri with all the other men on the
Kikiramu; the Dragon-Fly provisions had come at
last, and not a miner would stay on the field an in-
stant after the food arrived, with such an El Dorado
as Cripps' Reef within three-days' march. Mrs.
Carter, left alone in a deserted valley with a few
house-boys, had gone down to see how Dence was
faring, found him on the verge of delirium tremens,
and had him carried up to the store, where, helped
by the natives, she tended him with the matter-of-
fact kindness of the bush. She discovered the letter
in his clothes, and sent it down to Scott. It ran as
follows : —
" Dear George, — I have been working hard at
the reef, with all the boys to help me, and Dence
until to-day, when he leaves, I do not know what for.
I am sorry to tell you it shows signs of pinching
out, but we have done well, and have not much cause
for complaint. Only I am sorry for the men who
will come up here by and by and have their trouble
for their pains. We followed down and worked out
the shoot of gold for about thirty feet, and it was
gradually getting smaller and wedge-shaped, and in
another eight feet pinched to a vein about eight
inches wide. I think there is a chance of its making
again, but it is only a chance, and we have certainly
GUINEA GOLD 291
got the best out of it. It will pay us to keep on at it
a few months longer, I daresay, but there is not
going to be much for anyone else. You might show
this to any men who come up while you are down.
It will not stop them coming, but they may as well
know what to expect. As Dence will tell you, Clay
started for the store a day before he did. There
was no need to keep him once you had got down to
file our claim. He prospected about to see if there
was anything for him to take up, but could not find a
colour, so he goes back as poor as he came. There
are eight of the men from the Kikiramu here now,
allthat could get tucker from Carter, but so far
none of them have found anything, and they are
chewing the rag about it above a bit. They brought
some news from the Kikiramu; it seems you have
ladies there now. Well, I don't want to hurry you,
but when you get back I will not be sorry, for this
reef is taking some work, and Dence might not re-
turn for some time. I suppose you will send the
tucker up in any case. Look after your swag; I don't
know that you did well in taking it down so soon. —
I remain, yours sincerely,
" John Anderson."
Scott read the letter alone in the little living-room
of the hut. Charmian had taken one of her rare
fits of housewifely energy, and was out in the kitchen
teaching the boy how to make tinned-oyster patties,
which she knew very little about herself. There
was nobody near: the waterfall rustled pleasantly in
the distance, and a wet-smelling breeze blew in at
the door.
He frowned a little over the last sentence. If
292 GUINEA GOLD
Dence had only remembered to give him the letter !
Knowing Anderson as he did, he would have been
sure that the man who wasted no words, and said
what he meant, had not put in that last sentence
merely to fill up the sheet. One would have been
on one's guard, whereas now . . .
There was another eight hundred ounces of his up
in the camp by Cripps' Reef: he was glad he had
not brought that down. The other men's shares
were there, too. Anderson meant to take down the
gold under his own supervision later on. He must
have seen or heard something that made him dis-
trust Clay's sudden departure: hence the warning.
If it had only come in time!
Well, it seemed that the gold was gone for good.
He had had a message or two from the miners be-
fore they left for the Iri, telling him of the efforts
that had been made to find the thief. Men and boys
had scoured the bush in all directions: messages had
been sent down to the landing-stage to warn the
engineer of the Dragon-Fly agairist taking Clay on
board. Nothing had been heard, seen, or guessed
of him. He seemed to have vanished off the face
of the earth.
Some of the men believed that he had had noth-
ing to do with the gold at all, and that he had simply
got bushed on the way down, and met his death
from hunger, or that he had been taken by an alli-
gator when crossing a stream. Most of the miners
swam or waded across alligator-infested rivers with
GUINEA GOLD 293
absolute callousness. They reckoned, they said,
that the brutes would not touch them : and the brutes
did not, — generally, — which was quite good enough
for a New Guinea miner. But Clay might have got
into a river in the dark, when everyone knows that
the chance of disaster is infinitely increased. Or
he might have been picked off from the bush by some
of the Kariva bowmen. Or again — the most popu-
lar theory of all — he might be sneaking down the Iri
in a native canoe with the missing carrier, camping
in quiet spots at night, and keeping a good lookout
for the Dragon-Fly in order to avoid her. That
would be easily done. He could dodge into the
bush on the banks when he heard the sound of her
engine, leaving nothing for anyone to see but an
ordinary canoe tied up to the bank, apparently in
waiting for some painted and feathered owner who
had gone off spearing pig. One might pass him a
dozen times and never know it. *
The party that believed the gold had been taken
by some shrewd Fly River native, and buried to
await the termination of the thief's indentures, grew
stronger as time went on. Clay seemed to be lost.
The Dragon-Fly engineer had seen nothing of him :
the natives had no news. Some chance there might
be of eventually getting back the gold, if the thief
tried to carry it off all in one swag, but the miners
thought that a Kiwai would have sense enough to
know that he ought to split it up. For the present,
at all events, there seemed no hope.
294 GUINEA GOLD
One afternoon, Mrs. Carter, who thought that
the honeymoon seclusion had lasted long enough,
appeared at the little brown house.
Charmian was delighted, and ran down the steps
to welcome Mrs. Carter, who looking older than
usual, and a little tired, stalked along the verandah,
with all her usual dignity, and entered the sitting-
room with that effect of a ship in full sail that always
seemed to distinguish her comings and goings. She
was rather elaborately attired, for the Kikiramu, in
a grey tea-gown, well pinned up over her stout boots,
and she wore her best hat and her best manners.
" So your husband's out," she said, scanning the
rough furniture as though she thought Scott might
be hidden under a canvas chair, or at the back of
a packing-case sideboard.
" Yes; he went to see if he couldn't shoot a young
wallaby for dinner to-morrow," answered the bride.
" And so you've cried for the moon and got it.
Well, my girl, that's more than most women do,"
observed Mrs. Carter composedly, unpinning her
dress as she sat. "Hitting it off all right?"
11 Yes," answered Charmian simply. She had the
gift, rare in a nervous century, of sitting perfectly
still. You could not have seen the light waver on
her hair as she leaned back in her deck-lounge, hands
folded and eyes looking quietly out to the leaves
and the sun.
" We'll be grass-widows together soon, you and
I," went on the other, " Scott will go back in a
GUINEA GOLD 295
few days, I suppose. Tim's gone this week and
more. I'm stopping to look after what's left of the
store: the men are just as likely as not to come back
by and by. I reckon you'd better come up to me
when he goes: I'll be glad of your company. I did
reckon to give Tim a bit of my society just now,
but "
She bit down a sigh and fanned herself rapidly.
" I'm sorry. I can't stay with you," said Char-
mian, " but I'm going with George."
" Going with George? " repeated Mrs. Carter in
strong italics. " Is George out of his mind, or are
you?"
" I suppose I am," answered Charmian coolly.
" He isn't. He doesn't know about it yet: he thinks
I'm going down to Port Moresby." '
" And you mean to go up with him? "
" Yes."
" Well! " Mrs. Carter, for once, seemed speech-
less.
" I've no doubt," said Charmian, " there are lots
of things to say against it — all about the road, and
the natives, and the gold rush, and so on. Of
course he'll say them. But I sha'n't mind. I'll just
go on saying that I mean to go, till he gets tired.
Then I will go. That's all."
" You're changed," said Mrs. Carter, after a
silence. M Time was, not so long ago, you'd do
anything anybody told you, and never raise a
cheep."
296 GUINEA GOLD
" I suppose I would still," answered the other,
uninterestedly. " It's just this one thing."
u And what's stiffened your back so about that? "
asked Mrs. Carter.
" I don't know. I don't want to be always think-
ing. There's something warns me . . . tells me
. . . Oh, I don't know. Let me make you some
tea."
"I don't mind: it's hot walking," agreed Mrs.
Carter. When Charmian came back she returned
for a moment to the charge.
" Look here, my girl, don't you think you'd bet-
ter give it best about the Iri, and stop on here with
me?"
" Yes, I'd better," replied Charmian, pouring
out the tea. She paused, with a cup in her hand.
" I'd better — but I'm going, all the same," she
said.
CHAPTER XVII
In the Iri valley the rush had come and had gone.
Three months before the little piece of flat coun-
try by the riverside had been a humming town —
here, in the unknown heart of New Guinea, days
and days up the Kikiramu in the launch, days and
days and days more up the terrible track to the Iri.
There had been hundreds of adventurers wound
about the spot where the golden reef had been
found — shopmen and lumberers, and dentists, and
horse-dealers, and West Australian miners, and
Queensland " cocky " farmers, and broken down
remittance men and A.B.'s from coasting steamers,
and actors, and labourers, and bank clerks. They
had found their way to Port Moresby, almost pen-
niless, in many cases: they had disregarded all the
warnings issued by a Government old in experience
of Papuan gold rushes, and once more, as in eighty-
nine, and ninety-five, the cruel country had taken
its deadly toll.
In the capital they had camped on the wet ground
under Government offices and hotels, slinging rough
hammocks to the supporting piles of the houses, and
living anyhow, as best they could, till the over-
crowded launches and schooners could take them
297
298 GUINEA GOLD
down the stormy coast. They had done without
mosquito nets, they had drunk to keep away malaria,
they had eaten the little township bare of food, and
had to subsist on the refuse of the sold-out stores.
They had got away at last, without carriers, with-
out proper tents or provisions, determined to show
that a white man could " hump his swag " here, as
well as in Australia. . . . And they had paid: the
golden Minotaur had had his meal of flesh. On
the long track up from the Kikiramu they had lain
down, not to rise again. They left low, stoneless
graves in the bush, by the road to the Iri. They
had turned and crept back half-way, cursing the
cruel country and the deadly lure of gold. They had
reached the field, wrecks of men, and found their,
stock of money done, fever gripping them hard, and
gold in paying quantity as unattainable as in the
deeps of the Coral Sea. There was nothing on the
Iri River for any man to find, save a poor sprinkling
of alluvial stuff scarce worth working. The three
discoverers had taken all.
Here and there the forest had been feebly cut
into, as a man might cut himself with a penknife
into a load of hay. Rough tent-flies, stretched above
platforms of sticks, rose by scores in the little clear-
ings: bush houses, made of poles and brushwood,
stood about the verges of the reward claim owned
by the discoverers. The clink of billy-cans sounded
down by the tea-green river: thin pillars of smoke
spired up out of the tops of the forest, in a hun-
GUINEA GOLD 299
dred different places. Of nights, in Carter's make-
shift store, there was drinking and card-playing,
and fighting too at times. But, for the most part,
the field kept a dispirited silence : you would never
have thought that some hundreds of adventurers
from all corners of Australia were scattered like
deep-water Crustacea here at the bottom of the forest
sea.
Fever, that the old hands knew and could fight,
attacked the defenceless newcomers without mercy.
They lay sick in their tents and huts by the score:
some rose to walk abroad again, and one or two
were carried forth, to rise no more. Then came the
inevitable scourge of a New Guinea mining rush —
dysentery — and the camp became a hospital. The
Government sent up a doctor, new-caught from Mel-
bourne schools : and, in the midst of several hundred
native carriers, and some scores of whites, down
with the disease, he did the work of ten men, helped
by the old hands among the New Guinea miners,
who had nearly all escaped. . . . There were two
hundred graves of poor black boys, and twenty or
thirty of whites, away in the green silence of the
bush, before that last worst wave of ill was spent.
Now it was over. The Iri rush, cruellest of all
the cruel rushes that have darkened the annals of
New Guinea, was done. More men had been killed
by the Yodda: the Waria had set worse difficulties
in the way of prospectors. But there had never be-
fore been such bitter and universal disappointment.
300 GUINEA GOLD
One or two of the old New Guinea hands had found
gold — mere traces: not enough to pay the expenses
of their boys. Of the shopmen and lumberers, and
dentists, and horse-dealers, and farmers, and sailors,
and labourers, and bank clerks, scarce one had
found as much as a single colour.
The old hands stayed on for a while: where so
much had been found there was always the chance —
for an experienced miner — of striking the golden
reef again. But the outsiders fled. As fast as the
few available launches and schooners could take
them down the river and the coast, they went, broken
and disappointed men, cursing the name of New
Guinea. And on the way the country took its toll
again. In the edges of the unknown forest, by the
Iri and Kikiramu tracks, there were more dark,
nameless mounds before the broken men won
home.
It was never known — it will never be known till
the day when all things are made plain — how much
the silent, hard-faced miner folk of the older fields
helped these weaker souls who had come to New
Guinea in defiance of all warning, destitute of ex-
perience or means, and cast themselves as a burden
upon the country. Carter, the store-keeper, made
little out of the rush, for his heart was too soft to
refuse a penniless creature food. But he could not
cope with the misery and destitution of an entire
township unaided. And so it was that gold, which
was never found in the valley of the Iri, made its
GUINEA GOLD 301
way into the pockets of men who could not have dis-
covered it, had it been lying in the earth within a
yard of their feet.
The discoverers themselves were nobly generous
to those who needed help; yet even so it was hard
for the unsuccessful ones to watch work going on in
the reward claim — to hear the boom of dynamite,
and the thud of picks, and the steady pounding of
sledges, as Anderson, Scott, and their boys worked
the golden reef; to guess, with bitter envy, how
much was being taken out, and to know that a for-
tune sufficient to place each one of the owners be-
yond want for the rest of his life had already been
won. In any other country than New Guinea there
might have been trouble over the matter, but the
warden, with his native police at his back, and the
Government doctor, and the officials from Port
Moresby, who came all the way up to the field to
inspect it and see that everything was being done
fairly and in order, created an impression of power
and civilisation that had its effect on the most law-
less. It was known that one of the discoverers
had been robbed of a sum that grew in value the
oftener it was talked about: and it was also known
that the thief had never been caught, though several
months had gone by. Still, everyone knew that he
had not got away with the gold, whatever had hap-
pened: and the imaginary picture of Clay, hiding
and starving among native villages somewhere down
in the Gulf, while he looked for a stray sailing ves-
302 GUINEA GOLD
sel, deprived his crime of all glory that success might
have shed upon it.
No one among the newcomers knew why the third
owner of the golden reef did not stay up on the Iri
and help in the working of his property. He was on
the Kikiramu field, living in an abandoned camp, and
drinking more than was good for him. A number
of Kikiramu miners had already returned to their
old haunts, so that he was not without companion-
ship. But the newcomers thought it strange that he
did not care to work his claim. The others, it was
understood, were getting a percentage of his gold
in return for doing his work.
There was no mystery to the old hands of the
Kikiramu in Rupert's behaviour: but they did not
think it good for outsiders ,to know more than was
necessary about the affairs of that very close cor-
poration, the miners of Papua. For themselves,
they knew quite well that the presence of Mrs. Scott
on the Iri River field was enough to keep Rupert
Dence away had the valley been paved with gold.
No one thought she ought to have been there. A
new rough goldfield is no place for a woman : more
especially for a gently bred lady. And the horrors
of the dysentery epidemic had made Cripps' Reef,
more than ever, a spot to which no bridegroom
would willingly have brought his bride. But there
had been no choice in the matter.
Charmian had refused to stay behind.
With a soft yet steady persistence that seemed
GUINEA GOLD 303
utterly alien to her character, she had not combated
but slipped away from all Scott's reasons, entreaties,
commands. She must go, she said. Yes, it was true
that the track was a terrible one — but she had come
up the Kikiramu track already, and that was almost
as bad. Yes, the field would be a very rough place :
yes, it would be exceedingly remote from civilisa-
tion — food, lodging, surroundings would be worse
than at the Kikiramu, and Mrs. Carter would not
be there to keep her company. Yes, she quite under-
stood all Mr. Anderson said (for Anderson, too,
had joined in the chorus of disapproval, and tried
to shake her resolution), and she was sure Mr.
Anderson knew more about New Guinea fields than
even her husband. They were all very good to
trouble so much about her, and she knew all they
said was true. But . . .
M Charmian, I won't take you — it comes to that,"
declared Scott at last.
The woman set her small hands very tightly to-
gether and drew a long breath. They were all
against her, these men. Always men were against
women, when it came to the things that mattered.
And behind the men was something greater than
they — the darkling, cruel spirit of Papua.
. . . "A queen, with ruddy lips and large black eyes,
Brow-bound with burning gold."
They should not win. Papua should not win.
The lure of the gold should not win. Nothing
304 GUINEA GOLD
should take him from her. He did not know what
she knew, and would not tell him. But . . . there
should be no parting now.
u I'm sorry," she replied breathlessly, to Scott's
last words. " I'm sorry." She panted a little as she
spoke, as if she had been running. " Because it
would be so dreadful — and I should be so fright-
ened — going up alone."
There was a silence, and then —
" Oh, Charmian! " from Scott. His voice had a
hidden laugh in it somewhere: there was reproof,
and there was surrender. Anderson (he had come
down to the Kikiramu with a load of gold, leaving
his claim with a friend) passed his hand over his
long beard and turned away to hide a smile.
" You naughty, naughty girl ! " said Mrs. Carter.
But among them all they let her go.
Scott built the best house for her that had ever
been seen on a New Guinea goldfield. It had two
rooms, and a verandah all round, and the stick walls
were lined with costly unbleached calico, so that they
were quite untransparent. It had chairs, wonder-
fully made of split bamboo from a huge feathery
grove that stood just behind the house: it had a
table, put together from inestimable pieces of flat
packing-case — the only sawn boards within three-
weeks' journey. Rustic baskets of the forest ferns
(unknown and unnamed, some of them, and worth
their weight in gold to a collector), and of pink and
yellow and ice-white orchids, were hung from the
GUINEA GOLD 305
low roof of the verandah. The house was half a
mile removed from the camp : it stood high above
the green-glass reaches of the river, and behind it
and about it was the bush. If you went for a walk,
you came at once into the unbroken forest, where
you might creep a mile an hour: see the light from
above fall white on the unmoving leaves : smell the
rotting red and blue forest fruits that no one ate,
and hear, far away, through the stillness, the horse-
like tramp-tramp of a cassowary's running feet.
Scott forbade her, with some sternness, to go near
the camp, and she obeyed. She obeyed him in every-
thing now. When the dysentery epidemic broke out,
and she was preparing herself to go to the field
hospital, as a matter of course, and help the doctor,
Scott told her to remain at home, and she remained,
without a word. When he stopped her from going
to the edge of the river for flowers, lest an alligator
might stray out on the bank, she went no more, and
did without her little bouquet for the table. She lived
in the house that he had built for her, and never
seemed to know what went on beyond it, save for the
talk of Scott's own friends, Anderson, Brabant, the
Government doctor, and some of the old Papuan
miners whom he used to bring in of an evening.
When the men from Australia were all gone away,
and the camp was left to the miners who had come
from the Yodda and Kikiramu, Scott relaxed some-
what his rule, and told her she might walk about in
the neighbourhood of the reef if she cared and see
306 GUINEA GOLD
them at work. But she seemed, now, to have little
liking for anything beyond her house. There she
occupied herself, while her husband was away, in
making her own clothes and mending his : contriving
pretty decorations from the ferns and creepers from
the bush, brought in by the native labourers : singing
a little, reading a little, dreaming alone, by the
verandah-rail overlooking the glass-green river, for
long, long hours.
Scott was happy. In spite of the bitter smart
waked by the thought of Janie (she had taken his
letter in utter silence, though there was now more
than time for a reply) , in spite of the wretchedness
and disappointment that overshadowed the Iri field,
in spite of the fact that Dence, the man he had made
his friend, was loafing aimlessly about the Kikiramu,
hopeless and helpless — the world was good. He
did not look before or after. Charmian was his;
she loved him, and he loved her. They had their
little home above the still Iri River, with the silent
forests all about. He had work to occupy mind and
body all day: he was adding to his hoard of yellow
flaky gold, hidden safely away in a nook of the house
specially built to conceal it, and the loss of that eight
hundred ounces was being steadily made up. It
was true, as Anderson had predicted, that the reef
was " pinching out " : true that the yield was, almost
daily, less and less. But there was still enough to
keep them at work for some months : and when all
that could be won was won, they could sell the reef
GUINEA GOLD 307
for a good sum down in Samarai, or Port Moresby,
or Sydney, to anyone who would care to take the
risk of bringing up machinery. A company could,
doubtless, squeeze something more out of the fruit
when they, by their primitive methods, should have
sucked it and flung it away.
In the evening hours of this strange isolated place,
that felt as far away from cities and from civilisa-
tion as Uranus or Neptune, the house above the river
became a magnet to all Scott's friends. Charmian
rose in the wilderness, was the only reminder to
these lonely men that such things as wives and homes
existed, in countries far away — that beautiful women
still lived and laughed and wiled men's hearts away,
somewhere beyond the gloomy forest lands. Just to
hear her soft woman's voice — just to see her brown-
gold head bent over a piece of sewing, under the
light of the hurricane lamp, with the circle of her
light-coloured skirt flowing out on the floor — sent a
man back to his mildewed, damp-smelling tent with
a heart that sank less low than usual when the night
pressed down upon the forest and the rain began to
thunder in the dark. . . *
Camp is well enough in the daytime: the green
things are friendly, round about your open door:
the birds flirt and flutter sociably: the river talks to
you. But with the going of the sun your friends go
too. Out of the darks of the forest creeps your
nightside mind, to keep you company, as the drowned
wife of the legend crept forth from the depths of
308 GUINEA GOLD
the sea to clasp her dank, cold arms about her liv-
ing lord. . . . Your fire is out, your boys are sleep-
ing. You lie among the shadows, as you will lie
among the endless shadows some day soon : the an-
chor chain of your tenuous life drags, frail as a
spider's thread, upon the feeble holding-ground that
skirts the Unknown Sea. So, looking into the heart
of life and death, you learn why men of the wilder-
ness know no fear. By one wind or another the
ship will take the deep. What does it matter
whether to-morrow or to-day?
Brabant, the doctor, could not understand why
Mrs. Scott disliked him.
He was a little in love with her: not very much,
for he had a girl-wife and two babies down in Mel-
bourne, and was just as fond of them as an honest
young Australian can be — but he was assuredly in-
terested in the beautitful, rather silent girl that
George Scott had married: and he did not like being
neglected by her.
She certainly did neglect him. His camp was
farther away than Anderson's : Anderson often came
in to spend the evening with the Scotts, and when
Brabant arrived he was sure to find all three laugh-
ing and talking sociably on the verandah. . . .
Then, with his own coming, something like a shadow
would fall upon the party. Mrs. Scott would drop
silent, produce cards for the men, and slip away to
a quiet corner with her sewing, watching them while
GUINEA GOLD 309
they played, but speaking scarce at all. Before long
she would have vanished indoors: the boy would
bring out supper, and no one would see any more of
the lady of the house. Scott was always ready to
" yarn " with him, and Anderson was sociably dis-
posed, for the most part: neither, he thought, had
observed Mrs. Scott's apparent dislike of himself.
Sometimes, if he spoke to her, she would start as
though she were frightened, and look up at him
with large eyes, dark in the dusk of the verandah,
and half-parted lips. . . . What was it that made
her avoid and fear him? Brabant, young, pleasant,
and popular with women, could not guess.
He had not been long in New Guinea, and was
one of those unfortunates who are especially sus-
ceptible to the poison of malaria. In his riverside
camp the deadly anopheles mosquitoes held high
revel at nights : and Brabant, with his fresh Southern
blood, was a tempting victim. He had fever again
and again: pulled himself through, with the aid of
Anderson, and got about his work among the sick
native carriers almost sooner than was prudent. He
found, with a little flutter of gratified vanity, that
Mrs. Scott was really troubled about his health,
whether she liked himself or not: she used to ask
most kindly after his condition, when he came to
the house, and even begged him not to overwork.
One day she brought out a small case of meat-juice,
and pressed it on his acceptance, with polite and
310 GUINEA GOLD
kindly words. Brabant was glad of it. There were
few luxuries in the camp, and he knew that Scott
had no particular use for the meat-juice — but could
not for the life of him understand why Mrs. Scott,
who always seemed to shrink away from him, should
give him that, or anything else.
" She's got some feminine dislike or other to me,"
he agreed with himself. " There's no accounting
for the whimsies of their nervous systems. And
she's naturally kind-hearted, and tries to overcome
it. Well, I'm the better by a case of Oxil, anyhow.
\ That is something,' as Hans Andersen would
say.
" But I wonder," he said to himself. " I wonder
why . . ."
One morning he met Mrs. Scott alone beyond the
house, taking a short walk on the top of the river
cliff. And suddenly he knew.
She knew that he knew. She came towards him
with hands stretched out and honey-brown eyes
opened wide.
" Oh, don't — don't tell!" she exclaimed — and
burst into tears.
Brabant found himself holding her little hands,
grown suddenly cold, and comforting her like a cry-
ing child.
" No, no," he said soothingly, the physician all
awake. " Of course not: but you mustn't cry. And
why "
" Oh," cried Charmian, " I was so afraid — I
GUINEA GOLD 311
thought you would make him send me away. And
I can't leave him."
u Why? " asked Brabant, feeling for the moment
that he was wading in deep waters. Little Mrs.
Brabant had not taken the idea of his going up to
Papua in such high-tragedy fashion. But she was a
sensible small body, whereas this passion-flower of
womanhood
Charmian was not crying now. She was looking
out over the tops of the forest sea, on the other side
of the river — away to the blue mysterious domes of
the far main range, where no man's foot had trod.
" I'm not good — at talking," she said slowly. " I
feel things — I can't say them very well. It's just —
that — something tells me. I don't know what it is,
but it's stronger than I am."
Brabant, with his physician instinct, kept silent,
to let her have her say out.
" It's been all — like a dream," she went on. " It's
like a dream still. The strange, wild country —
and the storms — and the sunsets like the Judgment
Day — and the sweet, sweet scents that get into your
brain — and those dark shadowy faces of the natives,
flitting — and the far-awayness. I'm afraid all the
time — of waking up. It makes one . . . cling."
" But, my dear lady " began Brabant.
" Yes, I know," interrupted Charmian. " You'd
all have talked and worried till Now you can't.
I can stay with him."
" Well," said Brabant, dropping down to earth
3tt GUINEA GOLD
determinedly, " it's a jolly good thing for you that
the Government didn't take me away. And now
you'll have to be sensible. Let your husband know
at once — take care of yourself — and take all the
advice I give you. You'll be all right, never fear."
" I don't. I only care ... to stay," said Char-
mian.
Brabant saw her back to the house above the
river.
There were no visitors that evening. The hus-
band and wife sat alone. They had much to say.
Yet, in all that they said, the future held small part.
It was as though the wilderness had enmeshed them
body and soul, shutting away even their thoughts
from the outer world, as the rivers, and the forests,
and the ranges, and the stormy coral seas shut the
common lot and life of common man away from
Papua.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Kikiramu was awake again. Brown, naked
carriers, bearing fifty and sixty pound loads on their
backs, tripped lightly up and down the great log
stairway. Smoke rose among the treetops. The
distant hack-hack of clearing-knives and axes came
up from the valley to the store in the still blue hours
of noon. The store was going again : its outhouses
were taxed to put up the crowd of carriers needed
for the work of supplying the camp, and its veran-
dah and bar were never empty of buying, lounging,
smoking men. Claims had changed hands on the
Kikiramu, as they generally do when a big rush car-
ries away the miners in a body, leaving a whole
camp to the deliberate choosing of those who re-
main behind or return early. But the personnel of
the field was the same, save for the addition of one
or two outsiders who had stayed over the rush, and
the absence of a well-known face here and there.
One had gone down to Melbourne with a " good
shammy " of gold to have a spree : one had given
up digging and taken to plantation managing, away
East: Anderson was still at the all but deserted Iri
field, working out the last of Cripps' Reef with Scott.
The old hands mostly lived as they had lived before
313
3 H GUINEA GOLD
the delusive rainbow of Cripps' gold rose on the
horizon — making enough for comfort and content,
with no dazzling views of fortune.
Mrs. Carter was still at the store. She had
stayed a good while this time, and people were be-
ginning to wonder how North-West Island was get-
ting on without its sovereign. But the Queen
remained where she was. She meant to go up to
Cripps' Reef before very long: by and by would be
time enough to talk of returning to her kingdom.
News, as usual, circulated from the store round
about the camps in the bush whenever the lazy
Dragon-Fly crawled up the river and lay a day or
two before coming back — rumours from Port
Moresby, scandal from Samarai, strange happen-
ings from the D'Entrecasteaux and Louisiades. A
tale of a traveller came, one voyage, to cause delight
and amusement among those who could cross the
t's and dot the i's. The traveller's name was Du-
cane, and he had turned up by the Matting a (some
weeks later than he was expected) to look for the
lady once known as Mrs. Ducane. No one had been
able to tell him where she was gone: there was a
general impression to the effect. that she had got
away on the Norddeutscher Lloyd steamer, but
some supposed she might be in North-West Island
since Mrs. Carter's schooner had sailed back thither
on the day when Charmian was last seen in Samarai.
Ducane, who had succeeded in making himself thor-
oughly unpopular during the few days of his stay
GUINEA GOLD 315
in the island town, found little help or encourage-
ment in his search : but he had plenty of money, and
spent it liberally, so that a pearling Greek from the
Trobriands was moved to offer him his cutter and
his services in looking for the missing lady. They
went and looked in North-West Island, about the
Calvados Chain, in Misima and Woodlark and Ros-
sel, and might have been looking yet (since the
Greek was paid by the day) had not news come
down at last by the Cora Lynn to tell of the wedding
up on the Kikiramu field. At this, it seemed, Du-
cane was like a madman, and wanted to go up to the
Kikiramu himself, being sure that the story was a
lie: only, by and by, when the leisurely mails had
been sorted and delivered, the resident magistrate
of Samarai produced a certificate of marriage, made
out by the resident and warden of the Kikiramu
field, and directed to " Grant Ducane," under care
of the Samarai official. Whereupon Ducane, look-
ing white and beaten, and ten years older, had
secured a launch, gone down the coast to Port
Moresby, and steamed away out of sight and re-
membrance, on the Dutch company's liner Van
Linschoten.
Then there were rumours about Clay — how some-
body had seen him down in Brisbane cleaning boots
in a back-street hotel: how others declared he had
never got down the Kikiramu River, but had been
caught by the natives : how others yet were sure that
he had been seen on the P. & O. Macedonia, as she
316 GUINEA GOLD
was leaving Sydney, gorgeously clad, and rejoicing
in the possession of a royal suite of cabins. . . .
And there was talk about Scott and Anderson, how
much they had gained, how soon they would come
down — and about Brabant, who had apparently been
forgotten by the Government, now that the rush was
over, and was occupying himself making a collec-
tion of leaf-insects and butterflies, likely to be
worth some hundreds of pounds when he had com-
pleted it.
Rupert Dence, wandering about the bush, smok-
ing, talking, and generally idling, seemed to have
got over the effects of his late violent bout of drink,
and returned to something very like his former self.
He was exceedingly restless, however; he would not
go down to Port Moresby, or up to Cripps' Reef:
he could not work his old claim, as it had lapsed
when he left it : he could not take up a new one, as
he held all that the law allowed him, up at the Iri.
Much of his time, therefore, was spent in a sort of
aimless prospecting about the neighbourhood of the
camps : he did not seem to care for distant journeys.
Often he came up to the store, lingered long over
the few purchases he had to make, and looked at
Mrs. Carter with eyes that spoke things unintel-
ligible to the heavy mind of her husband, though
clear enough to her. She always managed, on such
occasions, to mention the arrival of any carriers
from any outside place, and the news they might
have brought, or failed to bring.
GUINEA GOLD 317
At last, one day, when Rupert called at the store,
he saw the capable mistress of the place making
preparations for departure. Swags were being
taken out and packed: tins and bags selected from
the store. Mrs. Carter stood on the verandah, di-
recting and commanding. Carter skulked in the
shadows, feeling his beard. He had a vaguely
regretful look.
"Off to port?" asked Dence carelessly, leaning
an arm on the rail.
" Bless you, no," said Mrs. Carter. " I'm off to
Cripps' Reef to-morrow at daylight. It's full time
I was there now: I'd have started a fortnight ago,
only that I got a leechbite on my foot that inflamed
and knocked me up for bush walking. You, Gibi!
look out with that tin of flour: don't put it on top of
the wine-bottles. Get a pull on the cord: haul him
tight — lively! That one finish: you put him long
verandah."
" Who's taking you up? "asked Dence.
" Well, that's the question just now," replied Mrs.
Carter, making a hawk-like dart into the pile of
goods on the floor. " Where 'nother fellow bottle
kerosine he stop? You no gammon me! Go catch
him, quick, that bottle ! My word, by and by I cut
the hide off of you !
" You see," she went on, " German Harry's got
fever — he was going — and I can't leave the store
without anyone, so Tim's got to stay. I think I'll
ask Mike. He's not doing much on his claim."
318 GUINEA GOLD
"What about me?" demanded Dence, looking
at her with a face devoid of all expression.
" You? " Mrs. Carter turned, her hands on her
hips, her Elizabethan eye fixed hard and keen. " I
thought you wasn't set on going up to the Iri, any-
how."
" Don't know that it matters what you've been
thinkin'. I'll go. I know every inch of the way.
I'd— rather."
" Very well." Mrs. Carter turned back to her
pile of goods. " You be here at half-past five to-
morrow, sharp. Don't fool. And — I'm obliged to
you, Mr. Dence."
Much had been done to improve the way to the
Iri field since first the discoverers tracked it out.
Rivers had been spanned by logs or by liana sus-
pension bridges. Swamps had been " corduroyed "
in the worst places. Bush huts had been put up at
the usual camping-grounds. Nevertheless, it was a
terrible road, and Mrs. Carter, not so young as she
had been, was fain to cut some of the longer marches
in two. It happened that she did this just before
reaching the alligator swamp: and, the latter part
of the way proving easy, they found themselves
arrived at the height above the swamp as early as
four in the afternoon.
Dence opined that it was too late to begin the
crossing now : they might be caught by the dusk. In
daylight, experience had proved that there was little
GUINEA GOLD 319
or no danger in crossing the swamp. True, a car-
rier or so had been taken by the alligators during
the time of the rush, but these had simply courted
disaster by leaving the corduroy path and going off
into the swamp after crabs. Since the frequent
coming and going across had ceased, these last few
months, the alligators had evidently increased in
numbers: men camping on either side at night had
been kept awake by the bellowing of the brutes down
in the mud and slime below. Still, in daylight, and
with common care, there was no risk to speak of.
So Dence explained to Mrs. Carter as that deter-
mined lady was stirring up the carriers to unpack
the swags needed for the night. Mrs. Carter did
not pay much attention to him. She seemed to have
something on her mind.
" I wish," she said, when the dusk had come and
the fire was lit and they were sitting on a log to
sup, with the warm, wet-scented forest close about
them, and the bell-birds tank-tanking under the stars
— " I wish I could have made better time of it. I
reckoned on being there before now."
She tilted her tin pannikin of tea and drained it:
she was not tired, after the short day's walk, but she
was thirsty, for the night promised to be sultry and
still.
Dence made no reply: he was sitting huddled up
on the log, chewing his moustache. He had been
very silent all day.
The boys took the plates away, unfastened the
320 GUINEA GOLD
sacks of bedding, and slung the mosquito nets under
the roof of the open bush-house. It grew darker:
the stars were hidden behind purple clouds.
" Where 'nother lantern stop? " called Mrs. Car-
ter impatiently. It seemed as though " bush
nerves " were abroad that night.
" Sinuabada (lady), altogether he pinish,"
quavered the boy she addressed.
" Finished? What d'ye mean? "
" He pall down along big river."
" Fell in the river? Fell in the river? You
wait till we get in to-morrow, and I'll talk to you,
you black bushman! Fell in the river? "
The native fled, trembling lest the promised
" talk " should take place there and then. Mrs.
Carter, slapping at the mosquitoes, remarked, in an
aggravated voice, that it seemed likely to rain:
Dence said nothing. He sat looking out into the
illimitable bush, silent, chewing his moustache. His
face seemed white in the dim light of the single hur-
ricane lantern.
" There! " said Mrs. Carter at last, killing a mos-
quito with a smack that almost overbalanced her.
" I'm full up with this. Dence, you may think to
hide your head under a bushel" (Mrs. Carter's
Biblical knowledge was growing rusty), " but you
don't take me in. Good God, man, why are you
spoiling your life over another man's wife like this?
How many lives do you reckon you've got to throw
away? "
GUINEA GOLD 321
" She's not spoilin' it," answered Dence, in a
monotonous tone. " That's a job I did myself, and
did thoroughly, fifteen years ago."
" You can keep your own secrets, I reckon," said
Mrs. Carter keenly. " There's not a man in the
Territory knows anything about you, except what
they've seen."
" And not a man will," came the answer. Rough,
degraded, broken as he was, there seemed a certain
dignity about Dence to-night. He was no favourite
of Mrs. Carter's, but for the moment she could see
what it was in him that had made Anderson, the
strongest character on the goldfields, choose him for
his " mate," and had won the affection of the cool,
fastidious Scott.
" Well, however that may be, I say you're a fool
to go on caring for Charmian Scott. Forget her,
man! The world's full of women; and if you
only knew it, one of us is pretty much as good as
another."
Rupert Dence made no reply: he was saying some-
thing to himself that sounded like poetry:
"Dark grows the valley, more and more forgetting,
So were it with me, could forgetfulness be willed.
Tell the running river that feeds the bubbling well-head,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled."
11 Oh, poetry ! " said Mrs. Carter contemptu-
ously. " The world isn't poetry."
" Not for you," answered Dence, looking at her
322 GUINEA GOLD
with the mocking expression that always irritated
her. It made her feel that, after all, she didn't mat-
ter very much : worse, that she was a woman. . . .
Mrs. Carter did not like to be made to feel that she
was a woman.
She drove home a stab of plain truth, as hard as
she could, in return.
" Mrs. Scott never cared a brass pin about you.
She'll care less when she's got her baby."
Rupert was not listening to her. He was sitting
with his elbows on his knees, and his chin in his
hands, looking into the black-blue gloom beyond the
circle of the lamp. A night-moth, big as a bird,
swept into the light and out again, like a human soul
flitting from dark to dark.
" Buck up, and look cheerful, if you can," com-
manded Mrs. Carter irritably. " You're not much
of a mate to go through the bush with, I don't
think."
She fanned herself jerkily with her handkerchief:
the night was breathlessly warm. Rain could not be
far away: the stars were surely fainter. . . . Why
could she not walk as she had walked ten years ago?
She could have kept pace with almost any man in
Papua — then. Why could she not have got farther
on her way? There was no knowing whether . . .
" Oh, talk, can't you ! " she snapped. The boys
were feeding round about their fly: one heard the
clink of their spoons on the tin plates, and the low
babble of a dozen different languages. Someone
GUINEA GOLD 323
was relating something exciting: the others jerked
interested comment.
" I don't feel like talking," answered Rupert,
without taking his head out of his hands. " I'll
recite to keep the blue devils off, for both of us."
" Recite away," agreed Mrs. Carter. Rupert's
recitations were famous all over the Territory, but
it was seldom indeed that anyone could prevail on
him to give one, unless he happened to be in the
mood. The Queen, in her heart, hated poetry: but
she hoped his choice might be prose.
It was not. It was Lindsay Gordon's " Sick
Stockrider." He began sitting, his head half bent
down: but before long the poem gripped him, and
he rose to his feet, and recited as he had never in
his life recited before. The boys, frightened at first,
became fascinated, and crowded round him, leaving
the remains of their supper to the ants and iguanas.
Mrs. Carter sat breathless, looking at his lit-up face,
and feeling, without quite understanding, the swing
of the lines. Rupert had a wonderful singing voice:
and he used it almost to equal effect in speaking
when he chose. The Queen was wiping her eyes
and catching her breath before long: poetry was
rubbish, but it did sound heart-breaking! . . .
Rupert was nearing the end: his voice, clear as
silver, sank like a fountain falling slowly back to its
source. The lean, shabby figure in the worn khaki
clothes, the hawk-like, high-bred face stood out in
the circle of lamplight: behind was the dark.
324 GUINEA GOLD
"I've had my share of pastime, and I've done my share of toil,
And life is short — the longest life a span,
I care not now to tarry for the corn or for the oil,
Or the wine that maketh glad the heart of man;
For good undone, and gifts misspent, and resolutions vain,
'Tis somewhat late to trouble— this I know,
I should live the same life over if I had to live again,
And the chances are — I go where most men go!"
" Taubada ! " said an excited voice among the
boys. Someone came forward, apparently pushed
from behind.
Rupert stopped: the flame in his blue eyes went
out. He unclenched his hands and looked at
them oddly, as though they belonged to someone
else.
" How I have been gassin' ! " he said. He ad-
dressed the boy like one waking up from a dream.
■■' Well, what do you want? "
" Me boy belong Missi Kotti."
" One of Scott's boys, are you, by Jove! When
did you come, and what do you want? "
" Me been come close-up sun he pinish (near sun-
set). Me gottum letter."
" Letter? " Dence's face changed. " Why didn't
you give it before? "
" Me talk alonga boy."
" Confound you! Give it here! What do you
mean by Mrs. Carter, it's for you ! "
Mrs. Carter had sprung to her feet and snatched
it out of his hand almost before he spoke. Bending
over to catch the light of the lantern she read it, and
GUINEA GOLD 325
passed it to Dence. Then she sat down on the log
and burst into tears.
" Oh, my God, why aren't I ten years younger! "
she said, rocking on her seat. " Why wasn't I here
day before yesterday! "
Rupert had read the note in a flash. It was from
Scott — a blot-spattered scrawl, scarce legible:
" For God's sake come on as quick as you can,
wherever this meets you. Brabant is down with
black-water fever, delirious. I think Charmian is
ill. For God's sake come. I have sent a carrying-
chair with the boys. Drive them all you can. An-
derson can't leave Brabant — he is very bad. Make
haste, for God's sake.
" George Scott."
Dence dropped the letter on the ground and
pulled Mrs. Carter to her feet with a jerk.
" Are you game to cross to-night? " he said, his
breath coming quick.
" Game? What do you take me for? Do you
think all the gold in the country would keep me
here?" demanded Mrs. Carter, sobbing loudly.
" Cross? I should think so! "
" Do you know the risk? " asked Rupert gently.
"There's alligators, ain't there?"
As if in reply to the question a long, moaning
bellow came from below, answered by another. It
was a grisly sound — here in the forest, in the night.
Mrs. Carter listened to it, her face setting hard.
She stopped crying, and wiped her eyes dry.
326 GUINEA GOLD
" Where's those boys of Scott's? " she demanded.
" Sinuabada (lady) — he stop along 'nother side."
" Other side — and, anyhow, not one of them
would cross in the dark, if you drove them with
bayonets. I reckon ours won't either."
" Suppose you come alonga we-fellow, I give you
plenty kuku (tobacco)," suggested Dence to the
head boy.
"Where me go?"
" Alonga 'nother side."
The boy's eyes dilated till they showed a white
ring all round the dark-brown iris.
" You gammon, Taubada ! " he panted.
" No gammon. Suppose some boy he come, to-
night, I give him five pounds money."
The carriers drew back and huddled together,
their faces showing mortal fear. Another snarling
moan came up from the swamp.
" Hear him, Taubada ! " trembled the carrier.
" Me too much dam fright. Me no go."
" Dence, leave them alone," came from Mrs.
Carter. She had just finished pinning up her dress,
and was rapidly snicking cartridge after cartridge
into the 45 Colt she had taken from one of the
swags. " They won't go, and I don't know as it's
a square deal to try and make them."
" The risk is worse for you," said Dence.
" It's got to be taken. They haven't any call to
throw away their lives, and I reckon they won't,
anyhow. We'll have a lantern apiece "
GUINEA GOLD 327
She broke off.
" That fool of a boy — there's only one! "
It was beginning to rain, a fitful dropping that
promised the usual nightly downpour before long.
Dence pulled a couple of brands from the fire and
tried to make them burn. But they hissed and went
out as the fall grew heavier.
" You'll have to go first," said Dence, turning
away from the useless fire, " and carry the lantern.
They're more or less afraid of light."
" I reckon I know about as much of them as you
do. And what's to become of yourself?" asked
Mrs. Carter. She had girded up her dress now, and
stuck the revolver in her loosened belt: her keen,
handsome face looked much as usual, save for a
slight paleness under the tan, scarcely perceptible in
the lamplight.
" I'll keep as close as I can. And look here "
"Well?"
" If anything should happen to me — don't you
fool trying to do anything. Go on. You must get
through."
Mrs. Carter looked at him. There was nothing
that she could say.
For some unexplained reason they turned and
gripped one another's hands before starting down
the slope to the marsh, whither they were followed
by the loud howlings of their boys. A peculiar,
booming cry rose up as they went, dominating all
the other shrieks — the Orokiva death-song.
328 GUINEA GOLD
" For delicate tact and consideration of your feel-
in's the Papuan takes some beatin'," observed Ru-
pert dryly.
They were at the borders of the swamp now: the
huge marsh-ferns rose up and brushed their faces as
they passed : and the stiff spikes of the water-loving
sago-palm swung low above them. It was raining
hard and very dark: the hurricane lantern showed
only a low circle of muddy track and rank lush
grasses, poisonously green.
And suddenly, as though a tap had been turned
on, a flood of sickening scent filled the air. It was
warm and animal: it smelt of musk and of decay.
It was so thick that you felt you could beat it apart
with your hands. There was no sound now at all.
The bellowing had ceased.
The track went down into the marsh here: there
was no more solid ground in front, only a glimmer
of mud and water, with scaly sago trunks and clumps
of giant spear-grass looming dimly in the dark.
Underfoot a narrow path of felled trees, laid length-
wise for economy's sake, stretched out into the
gloom.
The man and the woman stood for a moment on
the brink of the swamp, while the rain pattered in
the pools and hissed on the lantern. There was still
no sound. The darkness was thick as a wall. Only
the stifling musky scent, with its hideous suggestion
of a perfumed corpse, grew denser, in waves that
could be perceived.
GUINEA GOLD 329
11 God defend us, Mr. Dence," said Mrs. Carter,
in a low voice, " but I think they're all around."
Her hand on his arm gripped him so tight as to
bruise.
"Will you go back and wait till to-morrow?"
asked Rupert, in the same low tone. His eyes, blue
fire in the lantern-light, pleading, commanding, gave
the lie to his tongue.
Mrs. Carter loosened the pistol in her belt.
44 No," she said. Rupert could see that her nos-
trils were beating like a heart. She took the lan-
tern from him and stepped out on the felled-log
track.
Just for an instant Rupert paused behind her. In
the dank heat of the night something like a wave of
cold air, a waft from an unseen wing, seemed to pass
over his face.
" Purely subjective," he said to himself. But as
he set foot on the logs, taking what they both well
knew to be the post of danger in the rear, his hand
fluttered for a moment in the darkness, making, on
brow and breast, a sign that had not rested there for
many a year . . . the sign of the Cross.
It was almost an hour's journey across the swamp,
in the night and the rain, with the uncertain footing
given by the slippery logs. The circle of lantern-
light showed only the perilous track and the oily
glitter of mud and water close beside it. Twice a
droning call came from far away: once the sound
rose suddenly at their feet, and seemed to shake the
330 GUINEA GOLD
logs on which they stood, while the musky smell beat
up in a warm wave into their very nostrils. Rupert
fired his revolver at the sound, but there was no
splash or movement, and nothing to be seen. They
went on. Neither spoke. The logs tilted and
creaked beneath them as they crept along, and their
feet sucked loud in the gaps between : the lantern
clinked as it swung: their breathing sounded.
They were near the other side.
" O God in heaven! " cried Mrs. Carter.
The roughly laid logs swayed down and tilted:
mud and water flowed over one side of the track.
A huge grey head, with cold impassive eyes, had
risen like a phantom of death from the slime, open-
ing a gulf of white-toothed jaw. The body of the
creature, invisible under mud, bore down the logs
as though a dray-horse had rested its weight on
them.
Mrs. Carter, shrieking, dashed her lantern at the
horrible head: she had not time to reach for her
pistol. Somehow, in the momentary withdrawal of
the creature, she got past, on the sound half of the
track. Then, behind her, came a shot, a struggle,
and a splash — no cry.
She flung round again, rushed back, pulling out
her revolver, and fired shot after shot into the dark-
ness. . . . Rupert Dence was gone. Sobbing with
horror, she saw the mud and water heaving under
the lantern-light: saw a deep pool near at hand send
out dark waves. The track was empty.
GUINEA GOLD 33 1
"If anything should happen to me, don't try to
do anything. You must get through/'
She remembered.
" No use," she panted, reloading her revolver,
while sobs shook her from head to foot. " A regi-
ment couldn't save him now — but if he'd only called
out in time. . . . He's given his life, as sure as
ever Oh, how am I to Mary Ann Carter,
don't lose your head. Don't dare. You get
through, I tell you. . . . Confound the lock — that's
it."
Panting, shaking, beating back her tears, she made
the last piece of the track, and climbed up on the
other side. Safe. But what of him?
" He gave his life," she said, letting the tears go
at last. " If he'd called out I might have hit the
brute — but he wanted me to get clear . . . for
her . . ."
The rain had passed: the stars shone out. The
night was very still.
Mrs. Carter looked up to the arch of eternal
splendour, high above the spiring palms.
" If ever a man went straight to heaven, what-
ever he's been or done, it's Rupert Dence," she said.
She ceased her tears. She gathered herself to-
gether. She went up the slope. The boys and the
carrying-chair were waiting on the top.
Mrs. Carter was widely known in Papua as a
nigger-driver. She had never earned the title so
fully as she earned it that night.
CHAPTER XIX
It was one of New Guinea's diamond days. The
river dazzled unbearably down at the foot of the
cliff : light shot in spangles from the points of forest
leaves that stood up as stark as foliage of cast metal.
It seemed as though no roof, no shade, were dark
enough to shut away the sun. Under the deep-hung
palm leaves that thatched the house above the river
it came this burning noon, dropping white-hot pen-
cils on the empty lounge and deserted work-table
in the outer room, weaving lattice work- of molten
silver in the inner chamber round the borders of the
carefully guarded shadow that lay, all day and all
night, about Charmian's bed.
Charmian was lying in the heart of the shadow
asleep. Her little son slept in a white-hung basket
at her side. Mrs. Carter, her back turned to the
bed, was busying herself, somewhat unnecessarily, it
seemed, about the tidying of the dresses that hung
on the wall. Beside the bed, his strong brown hand
laid very lightly on the flower-pale fingers that
drooped over the edge of the sheet, sat Scott. He
had been there since early morning: it was now near
noon.
" George, leave her, and let me stop : you've never
332
GUINEA GOLD 333
had a bite to eat to-day," said the figure at the wall,
somewhat thickly, without turning round.
11 I won't leave," answered Scott. His face in
the last two days had grown a span smaller: his
eyes looked out of dark caves. " There'll be time
for everything when ..." He stopped.
Mrs. Carter, her face curiously wrinkled, but her
eyes dry, turned round from the wall.
" George — don't you eat your heart out," she
said. " We did what could be done. If all the doc-
tors in Sydney had been here it would have been the
same."
" Brabant's still delirious. He was a hundred and
six yesterday," was Scott's only answer.
" Six, or six hundred, it don't matter," declared
the Queen. She crossed the room and looked at the
sleeping face. The eyes were ringed with violet:
the delicate nose stood sharp and high. " Nothing
matters," said the Queen.
There was a pause : the short, quick breathing of
the child sounded in the quiet room. Charmian's
breast heaved slowly, silently.
"Will she not wake up?" asked Scott, keeping
his hungry eyes fixed on her face. The minutes for
looking on that face were numbered now.
" No telling. She might."
They sat there silently: Mrs. Carter's fan swept
back and forward over the brown-curling head on
the pillow. A minute — or an hour? — went by.
" She wasn't made for long life — anyhow," said
334 GUINEA GOLD
Mrs. Carter, her hand laid on Scott's head as on a
child's.
" She had her day." Another pause.
" She said to me, just after I don't know as
I ought to tell you."
" Tell me," said Scott, both hands now clasped
about the drooping fingers on the bed.
" She said — ' I've had his son — she can't do
more.' "
11 1 never knew she knew," said Scott, looking
up, startled. " I never told her."
The room was still again, the sun-rays sank —
sank down. The day was waning. No need to
guard the shadow round the bed: it deepened as
they watched. And now on Charmian's face the
shadow deepened too. The quiet breathing flut-
tered: the lips dropped apart. Scott saw her eyes
were open.
" My love ! " he said, his face close to hers.
" Charmian — are you awake? "
There was a slight struggle, and then —
" I'm waking." And, very faint, " Good-bye."
They sat beside her, afterwards, for almost an-
other hour: and, in the gathering shadows, neither
knew when Charmian woke at last.
CHAPTER XX
Anderson handed the glass to his friend.
" It's Colombo all right," he said.
" Colombo," agreed Scott, looking out to the blue
horizon. The Macedonia ploughed steadily across
the quiet sea. A dark line was steadily growing out
on the edge of the world. Some of the passengers,
collected on the promenade deck, were quoting
Kipling :
"The Indian Ocean sets and smiles
So sof, so bright, so bloomin' blue,
There ain't a wave for miles and miles,
Except the jiggle of the screw."
Others were murmuring the far too well-known
hymn that celebrates the " spicy breezes " alleged to
11 roll " from cinnamon gardens that used to be, and
are not. The deck stewards, hurrying round with
trays of tinkling glasses, assumed a look of patient
endurance. Only the P. & O. deck stewards them-
selves can tell what they are made to suffer, through
that hymn — and telling is naturally impossible, with
the fees of half a voyage yet ahead.
Scott felt curiously moved at the sight of the
growing land. It was the Old World's first out-
post — the first returning glimpse of the lands above
335
336 GUINEA GOLD
the Line that he had left two years — could it only
be two years? — before. Now the last link with the
new, unbroken countries was left behind: he had
parted from Australasia. ... As for the Red Sea
and the Mediterranean, and Marseilles- and " Gib,"
they were next thing to home.
Much interest had been aroused on the Macedonia
by these two passengers, about whom no one, early
in the voyage, could obtain any information. It
was generally supposed, up to Perth, that they were
important Colonial dignitaries travelling incognito':
afterwards a report went round to the effect that
they were two Russian princes in disguise. Their
lack of interest in deck sports, and their total indif-
ference to the still more popular sports of toad-eat-
ing and tuft-hunting, encouraged these two supposi-
tions, and laid upon them the necessity of repulsing a
good many unwelcome acquaintances. When it leaked
out, through the industrious " little bird " inhabiting
the Marconi mast of the P. & O. liner, that Ander-
son and Scott were two miners from New Guinea,
who had found a fabulously rich gold mine, and
were off to spend the proceeds, public opinion wav-
ered. Had they enough gold to gild the undoubted
squalor of their occupation? Public opinion, helped
by the little bird, decided that they had. The ro-
mantic possession of a motherless baby, by one of
the mysterious passengers, turned the scale still fur-
ther. The stewardess in charge of little Rupert was
interviewed, coaxed, and bribed to tell all she knew,
GUINEA GOLD 337
and a great deal she did not. In the end, by dint
of much detective work, the following story was
unearthed and passed about the ship : —
Anderson and Scott had really found a gold mine,
and made a fortune out of it. Scott was going home
to see his old friends in Belfast, and live there. The
baby belonged to him: his wife had died in New
Guinea. Anderson (of whose iron self-possession
and cool dry humour nobody could make anything
at all — except that he really " must be somebody ")
— Anderson was going for a tour round the world.
The two had had the wildest adventures : you could-
n't fancy (which was quite true). Some of their
gold — ten thousand pounds, it was said — had been
stolen from them, and the man who stole it had
never been found till ages and ages after. The little
bird, at the last Australian port, was able to supple-
ment its chirpings on this subject by the plain narra-
tive of a local newspaper, which gave a vivid ac-
count of the finding of the gold: —
11 EXCITING INCIDENT IN PAPUA.
miner's lost gold recovered,
how the thief met his doom.
11 Our Port Moresby correspondent, by the last
mail, sends an interesting and exciting account of a
strange adventure in the unexplored wilds of Papua.
Some weeks ago, a party of miners, prospecting in
unknown country about the Kikiramu field, came
unexpectedly upon a village of the Kariva tribe,
which was evidently inhabited, but which had been
338 GUINEA GOLD
deserted on the arrival of the party. Fires were
still burning in the houses, and freshly chewed betel-
nut had been expectorated about the track, showing
that the Karivas were, in all probability, concealed
close at hand. The miners explored the village, and
found among other trophies, in the usual cannibal
temple, the unmistakable skull of a white man. It
had been broken in at the top, the Kariva tribe being
in the habit of extracting the brains and eating
them fried in the top of the skull. The teeth were
stopped with gold; this, together with the general
shape of the skull, serving to identify it as that of
a prospector named Clay, who had been missing for
the better part of a year.
" In the bush close to the village the miners found
a heavy parcel of canvas, part rotted away, and con-
taining over eight hundred ounces of gold. It ap-
peared that the Karivas had opened the parcel, and
finding in it no knives, tomahawks, or other article
of any value to them, had thrown it away in the bush,
where it lay untouched until found.
" This gold had been stolen from one of the dis-
coverers of the notorious Iri field, many months be-
fore. It was at once restored to its rightful owner,
and the skull buried in the Kikiramu camp. So
ends one of New Guinea's many mysteries."
Anderson and Scott themselves had seen the paper
at Perth, and were looking over it again as the
Macedonia made her way towards Point de Galle.
" Substantially correct," said Scott, folding up the
scrap and putting it in his pocket. " Joe, I can't
believe it all happened now. It seems like a yarn
that someone else has told me. Only for "
GUINEA GOLD 339
He broke off and looked out across the sea.
Anderson knew how to read the look. In the last
six months the boyishness had disappeared from his
comrade's face for good: and a certain shadow, dat-
ing from the days on the Iri River, had made its
home in his eyes. Scott was " still young," but he
was no longer a " young man."
" I don't believe much of it myself," agreed An-
derson thoughtfully.
They were left to themselves now: the passengers
had gone away in a crowd to watch the Bishop
of Negropolis hopping on one leg along the
deck, and endeavouring to pick up more potatoes
with a spoon than the wife of the Governor of
British Chili had already been happy enough to
secure.
44 I shall be home in three weeks," said Scott.
" Joe — you remember "
"What?"
"What I told you, that night we left Port
Moresby."
14 Yes, I remember," said the big miner, standing
up against the rail, his hands hanging down at his
sides. Anderson had no nervous tricks — Scott used
often to wonder how he could keep so still for so
long.
44 I've been thinking it all over, again and again.
You know, my letter missed her — I've found that
out since — and she never really knew anything ex-
cept that I'd been up country for a long while, and
340 GUINEA GOLD
got out of reach of mails: she thought me dead, I
believe. "
" Yes."
" I am going to see her the minute I get to Ire-
land. I mean to tell her everything."
" And then what will you do? "
" I don't know."
But some years after, when his little daughter was
first laid in his arms, he remembered the all but last
words spoken to Mrs. Carter by Charmian, and
knew that she, at least, had known.
The Scotts have a beautiful country house, not
very far from Balmoral, on the Lisburn Road.
There are leather chairs in the dining-room, and
velvet chairs in the drawing-room, and there are con-
servatories, and a motor garage, and a stable, with
one or two good saddle horses. Scott has a small
yacht with a motor, and uses it in the summer-time.
Janie has carriages and furs, and more than one
solid silver tea-set. They agree excellently well;
Scott is growing a little stout, and thinks of standing
for Parliament one of these days.
Janie is a just and kindly stepmother. The toys
of her little girls are never better than Rupert's,
and she always remembers to kiss him every night,
and to call him dear. Sometimes, when she sees his
father holding him nursed in his arms of an evening,
looking at the honey-brown eyes and scarlet lips of
the child as a man may look at the picture of some-
GUINEA GOLD 341
thing loved and lost, she goes away to her own
room and sorts linen determinedly, with a hard-set
lip. She does not believe in crying. Sometimes, too,
when Scott takes one of his rare fits of restlessness,
and disappears for a week at a time, flying down
the Channel on his yacht — southward, always to-
wards the sun — she feels a strange fear creep about
her heart. But she does not believe in worrying:
there are the children, and there is Duty.
By the Iri River the grass grows over Charmian.
THE END
Vts
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