"What have you got on the lot, Michael?" Armitage asked, picking up the stones before him and going over them absent-mindedly.
"A tenner," Michael said.
Usually a gouger asked several pounds more than he expected to get. John Armitage knew that; Michael knew he knew it. Armitage played with the stones, hesitated as though his mind were not made up. There was not much more than potch and colour in the bundle. He went over the stones with the glass again.
"Oh well, Michael," he said, "we're old friends. I won't haggle with you. Ten pounds--your own valuation."
He would get twice as much for the parcel, but the price was a good one.
Michael was surprised he had conceded it so easily.
Armitage pulled out his cheque-book and pushed a box of cigars across the table. Michael took out his pipe.
"If you don't mind, Mr. Armitage," he said, "I'm more at home with this."
"Please yourself, Michael," Armitage murmured, writing his cheque.
When Michael had put the cheque in his pocket, Armitage took a cigar, nipped and lighted it, and leaned back in his chair again.
"Not much big stuff about, Michael," he remarked, conversationally.
"George Woods had some good stones," Michael said.
Armitage was not enthusiastic. "Pretty fair. But the old man will be better pleased with the stuff I got from Jun Johnson than anything else this trip.... I'd give a good deal to get the almond-shaped stone in that other parcel."
Michael realised Mr. Armitage had said the same thing to him before. He wondered why he had said it to him--what he was driving at.
"There were several good stones in Paul's parcel," he said.
His clear, quiet eyes met John Armitage's curious, inquiring gaze. He was vaguely discomfited by Armitage's gaze, although he did not flinch from it. He wondered what Mr. Armitage knew, that he should look like that.
"It's been hard on Rouminof," Armitage murmured again.
Michael agreed.
"After the boys making Jun shell out, too! It doesn't seem to have been much use, does it?"
"No," Michael said.
"And they say he was going to take that girl of his down to Sydney to have her trained as a singer. She can sing, too. But her mother, Michael--I heard her in _Dinorah_ ... when I was a little chap."
Enthusiasm lighted John Armitage's face. "She was wonderful.... The old man says people were mad about her when she was in New York.... It was said, you know, she belonged to some aristocratic Russian family, and ran away with a rascally violinist--Rouminof. Can you believe it? ...
Went on the stage to keep him.... But she couldn't stand the life. Soon after she was lost sight of.... I've often wondered how she drifted to Fallen Star. But she liked being here, the old man says."
Michael nodded. There was silence between them a moment; then Michael rose to go. The opal-buyer got up too, and flung out his arms, stretching with relief to be done with his day's work.
"I've been cooped in here all day," he said. "I'll come along with you, Michael. I'd like to have a look at the Punti Rush. Can you walk over there with me?"
"'Course I can, Mr. Armitage," Michael said heartily.
They walked out of the hotel and through the town towards the rush, where half a dozen new claims had been pegged a few weeks before.
Snow-Shoes passed then going out of the town to his hut, swinging along the track and gazing before him with the eyes of a seer, his fine old face set in a dream, serene dignity in every line of his erect and slowly-moving figure.
Armitage looked after him.
"What a great old chap he is, Michael," he exclaimed. "You don't know anything about him ... who he is, or where he comes from, do you?"
"No," Michael said.
"How does he live?"
"Noodles."
"He's never brought me any stone."
"Trades it with the storekeepers--though the boys do say"--Michael looked with smiling eyes after Snow-Shoes--"he may be a bit of a miser, loves opal more than the money it brings."
Armitage's interest deepened. "There are chaps like that. I've heard the old man talk about a stone getting hold of a man sometimes--mesmerising him. I believe the old man's a bit like that himself, you know. There are two or three pieces of opal he's got from Fallen Star nothing on earth will induce him to part with. We wanted a stone for an Indian nabob's show tiara--something of that sort--not long ago. I fancied that big knobby we got from George Woods; do you remember? But the old man wouldn't part with it; not he! Said he'd see all the nabobs in the world in--Hades, before they got that opal out of him!"
Michael laughed. The thought of hard-shelled old Dawe Armitage hoarding opals tickled him immensely.
"Fact," Armitage continued. "He's got a couple of stones he's like a kid over--takes them out, rubs them, and plays with them. And you should hear him if I try to get them from him.... A packet of crackers isn't in it with the old man."
"The boys'd like to hear that," Michael said.
"There's no doubt about the fascination the stuff exercises," John Armitage went on. "You people say, once an opal-miner, always an opal-miner; but I say, once an opal-buyer, always an opal-buyer. I wasn't keen about this business when I came into it ... but it's got me all right. I can't see myself coming to this God-forsaken part of the world of yours for anything but black opal...."
That expression, whimsical and enigmatic, which was never very far from them, had grown in Michael's eyes. He began to sense a motive in Armitage's seemingly casual talk, and to understand why the opal-buyer was so friendly.
"The old man tells a story," Armitage continued, "of that robbery up at Blue Pigeon. You know the yarn I mean ... about sticking up a coach when there was a good parcel of opal on board. Somebody did the bush-ranging trick and got away with the opal.... The thief was caught, and the stuff put for safety in an iron safe at the post office. And sight of the opals corrupted one of the men in the post office.... He was caught ...
and then a mounted trooper took charge of them. And the stuff bewitched him, too.... He tried to get away with it...."
"That's right," Michael murmured serenely.
Armitage eyed him keenly. He could scarcely believe the story he had got from Jun, that the second parcel of stones had been exchanged after Charley got them, or that they had been changed on Paul before Charley got them from him.
Michael guessed Armitage was sounding him by talking so much of Rouminof's stones and the robbery. He wondered what Armitage knew--whether he knew anything which would attach him, Michael, to knowledge of what had become of Paul's stones. There was always the chance that Charley had recognised some of the opal in the parcel substituted for Paul's, although none of the scraps were significant enough to be remembered, Michael thought, and Charley was never keen enough to have taken any notice of the sun-flash and fragments of coloured potch they had taken out of the mine during the year. The brown knobby, which Michael had kept for something of a sentimental reason, because it was the first stone he had found on Fallen Star, Charley had never seen.
But, probably, he remarked to himself, Armitage was only trying to get information from him because he thought that Michael Brady was the most likely man on the Ridge to know what had become of the stones, or to guess what might have become of them.
As they walked and talked, these thoughts were an undercurrent in Michael's mind. And the undercurrent of John Lincoln Armitage's mind, through all his amiable and seemingly inconsequential gossip, was not whether Michael had taken the stones, but why he had, and what had become of them.
Armitage could not, at first, bring himself to credit the half-formed suspicion which that quiver of Michael's face, when he had spoken of what Jun said, had given him. Yet they were all more or less mad, people who dealt with opal, he believed. It might not be for the sake of profit Michael had taken the stones, if he had taken them--there was still a shadow of doubt in his mind. John Armitage knew that any man on the Ridge would have knocked him down for harbouring such a thought. Michael was the little father, the knight without fear and without a stain, of the Ridge. He reflected that Michael had never brought him much stone.
His father had often talked of Michael Brady and the way he had stuck to gouging opal with precious little luck for many years. The parcel he had sold that day was perhaps the best Michael had traded with Armitage and Son for a long time. John Armitage wondered if any man could work so long without having found good stuff, without having realised the hopes which had materialised for so many other men of the Ridge.
They went over the new rush, inspected "prospects," and yarned with Pony-Fence Inglewood and Bully Bryant, who had pegged out a claim there.
But as Armitage and he walked back to the town discussing the outlook of the new field and the colour and potch some of the men already had to show, Michael found himself in the undertow of an uneasy imagination. He protested to himself that he was unnecessarily apprehensive, that all Armitage was trying to get from him was any information which would throw light on the disappearance of Paul's stones. And Armitage was wondering whether Michael might not be an opal miser--whether the mysterious fires of black opal might not have eaten into his brain as they had into the brains of good men before him.
If they had, and if he had found the flaw in Michael's armour, John Armitage realised that the way to fulfilment of his schemes for buying the mines and working them on up-to-date lines, was opened up. If Michael could be proved unfaithful to the law and ideals of Ridge, John Armitage believed the men's faith in the fabric of their common life would fall to pieces. He envisaged the eating of moths of doubt and disappointment into the philosophy of the Ridge, the disintegration of ideas which had held the men together, and made them stand together in matters of common interest and service, as one man. He had almost assured himself that if Michael was not the thief and hoarder of the lost opals, he at least knew something of them, when a ripple of laughter and gust of singing were flung into the air not far from them.