Robbery Under Arms, Rolf Boldrewood [early readers .TXT] 📗

down to and some cousins of theirs that lived close by. We were merry enough before the evening was out. Bella Barnes played the piano middling, and Maddie could sing first-rate, and all of them could dance. The last thing I recollect was Starlight showing Maddie what he called a minuet step, and Jonathan and the old woman sitting on the sofa as grave as owls.

Anyhow, we all enjoyed ourselves. It was a grand change after being so long alone. The girls romped and laughed and pretended to be offended every now and then, but we had a regular good lark of it, and didn't feel any the worse at daylight next morning.

Jim and I were away before sunrise, and after we'd once got on the road that Jonathan showed us we got on well enough. We were dressed just like common bushmen. There were plenty on the road just then bringing cattle and horses to the diggings. It was well known that high prices were going there and that everybody paid in cash. No credit was given, of course.

We had on blue serge shirts, moleskin trousers, and roughish leather gaiters that came up to the knee, with ponchos strapped on in front; inside them was a spare shirt or two; we had oldish felt hats, as if we'd come a good way. Our saddles and bridles were rusty-looking and worn; the horses were the only things that were a little too good, and might bring the police to suspect us. We had to think of a yarn about them. We looked just the same as a hundred other long-legged six-foot natives with our beards and hair pretty wild—neither better nor worse.

As soon as Starlight came on to the Turon he was to rig himself out as a regular swell, and gammon he'd just come out from England to look at the goldfields. He could do that part wonderfully well. We would have backed him to take in the devil himself, if he saw him, let alone goldfields police, if Sergeant Goring wasn't about.

The second day Jim and I were driving quietly and easy on the road, the colts trotting along as steady as old stock horses, and feeding a bit every now and then. We knew we were getting near the Turon, so many tracks came in from all parts, and all went one way. All of a sudden we heard a low rumbling, roaring noise, something like the tide coming in on the seashore.

'I say, Jim, old man, we haven't made any mistake—crossed over the main range and got back to the coast, have we?'

'Not likely,' he said; 'but what the deuce is that row? I can't reckon it up for the life of me.'

I studied and studied. On it went grinding and rattling like all the round pebbles in the world rolling on a beach with a tidy surf on. I tumbled at last.

'Remember that thing with the two rockers we saw at the Hermit's Hut in the Hollow?' I said to Jim. 'We couldn't make out what it was. I know now; it was a gold cradle, and there's hundreds and thousands rocking there at the Turon. That's what's the matter.'

'We're going to see some life, it strikes me,' says he. 'We'll know it all directly. But the first thing we've got to do is to shut these young 'uns up safe in the sale-yard. Then we can knock round this town in comfort.'

We went outside of a rocky point, and sure enough here was the first Australian gold-diggings in full blast. What a sight it was, to be sure! Jim and I sat in our saddles while the horses went to work on the green grass of the flat, and stared as if we'd seen a bit of another world. So it was another world to us, straight away from the sad-voiced solitudes of the bush.

Barring Sydney or Melbourne, we'd never seen so many men in a crowd before; and how different they looked from the crawling people of a town! A green-banked rapid river ran before us, through a deep narrow valley. The bright green flats looked so strange with the yellow water rippling and rushing between them. Upon that small flat, and by the bank, and in the river itself, nearly 20,000 men were at work, harder and more silently than any crowd we'd ever seen before. Most of 'em were digging, winding up greenhide buckets filled with gravel from shafts, which were sunk so thickly all over the place that you could not pass between without jostling some one. Others were driving carts heavily laden with the same stuff towards the river, in which hundreds of men were standing up to their waists washing the gold out of tin pans, iron buckets, and every kind of vessel or utensil. By far the greater number of miners used things like child's cradles, rocking them to and fro while a constant stream of yellow water passed through. Very little talk went on; every man looked feverishly anxious to get the greatest quantity of work done by sundown.

Foot police and mounted troopers passed through the crowd every now and then, but there was apparently no use or no need for them; that time was to come. Now and then some one would come walking up, carrying a knapsack, not a swag, and showing by his round, rosy face that he hadn't seen a summer's sun in Australia. We saw a trooper riding towards us, and knowing it was best to take the bull by the horns, I pushed over to him, and asked if he could direct us to where Mr. Stevenson's, the auctioneer's, yard was.

'Whose horses are these?' he said, looking at the brands. 'B.M., isn't it?'

'Bernard Muldoon, Lower Macquarie,' I answered. 'There's a friend of his, a new chum, in charge; he'll be here to-morrow.'

'Go on down Main Street [the first street in a diggings is always called Main Street] as you're going,' he said carelessly, giving us all a parting look through, 'and take the first lane to the right. It takes you to the yard. It's sale-day to-morrow; you're in luck.'

It was rather sharp work getting the colts through men, women, and children, carts, cradles, shafts, and tin dishes; but they were a trifle tired and tender-footed, so in less than twenty minutes they were all inside of a high yard, where they could scarcely see over the cap, with a row of loose boxes and stalls behind. We put 'em into Joe Stevenson's hands to sell—that was what every one called the auctioneer—and walked down the long street.

My word, we were stunned, and no mistake about it. There was nothing to see but a rocky river and a flat, deep down between hills like we'd seen scores and scores of times all our lives and thought nothing of, and here they were digging gold out of it in all directions, just like potatoes, as Maddie Barnes said. Some of the lumps we saw—nuggets they called 'em—was near as big as new potatoes, without a word of a lie in it. I couldn't hardly believe it; but I saw them passing the little washleather bags of gold dust and lumps of dirty yellow gravel, but heavier, from one to the other just as if they were nothing—nearly 4 Pounds an ounce they said it was all worth, or a trifle under. It licked me to think it had been hid away all the time, and not even the blacks found it out. I believe our blacks are the stupidest, laziest beggars in the whole world. That old man who lived and died in the Hollow, though—HE must have known about it; and the queer-looking thing with the rockers we saw near his hut, that was the first cradle ever was made in Australia.

The big man of the goldfield seemed to be the Commissioner. We saw him come riding down the street with a couple of troopers after his heels, looking as if all the place, and the gold too, belonged to him. He had to settle all the rows and disputes that came up over the gold, and the boundaries of the claims, as they called the twenty-foot paddocks they all washed in, and a nice time he must have had of it! However, he was pretty smart and quick about it. The diggers used to crowd round and kick up a bit of a row sometimes when two lots of men were fighting for the same claim and gold coming up close by; but what he said was law, and no mistake. When he gave it out they had to take it and be content. Then he used to ride away and not trouble his head any more about it; and after a bit of barneying it all seemed to come right. Men liked to be talked to straight, and no shilly-shally.

What I didn't like so much was the hunting about of the poor devils that had not got what they called a licence—a printed thing giving 'em leave for to dig gold on the Crown lands. This used to cost a pound or thirty shillings a month—I forget rightly which—and, of course, some of the chaps hadn't the money to get it with—spent what they had, been unlucky, or run away from somewhere, and come up as bare of everything to get it out of the ground.

You'd see the troopers asking everybody for their licences, and those that hadn't them would be marched up to the police camp and chained to a big log, sometimes for days and days. The Government hadn't time to get up a lock-up, with cells and all the rest of it, so they had to do the chain business. Some of these men had seen better days, and felt it; the other diggers didn't like it either, and growled a good deal among themselves. We could see it would make bad blood some day; but there was such a lot of gold being got just then that people didn't bother their heads about anything more than they could help—plenty of gold, plenty of money, people bringing up more things every day from the towns for the use of the diggers. You could get pretty near anything you wanted by paying for it. Hard work from daylight to dark, with every now and then a big find to sweeten it, when a man could see as much money lying at his foot, or in his hand, as a year's work—no, nor five—hadn't made for him before. No wonder people were not in a hurry to call out for change in a place like the Turon in the year 1850!

The first night put the stuns on us. Long rows of tents, with big roaring log fires in front hot enough to roast you if you went too near; mobs of men talking, singing, chaffing, dealing—all as jolly as a lot of schoolboys. There was grog, too, going, as there is everywhere. No publics were allowed at first, so, of course, it was sold on the sly.

It's no use trying to make men do without grog, or the means of getting it; it never works. I don't hold with every shanty being licensed and its being under a man's nose all day long; but if he has the money to pay for it, and wants to have an extra glass of grog or two with his friends, or because he has other reasons, he ought to be able to get it without hardships being put in his way.

The Government was afraid of there being tremendous fights and riots at the diggings, because there was all sorts of people there, English and French, Spaniards and Italians, natives and Americans, Greeks and Germans, Swedes and negroes, every sort and kind of man from every country in the world seemed to come after a bit. But they needn't have been