"You've struck it this time, Potch!" Roy O'Mara said.
Potch flushed, rubbed the stone on his trousers, licked the chipped surface, and held it to the sun again.
"It's the biggest knobby--ever I see," Archie Cross said.
"Same here," Bill Grant muttered.
"Wants polishin' up a bit," Michael said, "and then she'll show better."
As soon as he got home, Potch went into Paul's hut and faced the stone on Sophie's wheel. Paul and Michael hung over him as he worked; and when he had cleaned it up and put it on the rouge buffer, they were satisfied that it fulfilled the promise of its chipped side. Nearly as big as a hen's egg, clean, hard opal of prismatic fires in sparkling jet, they agreed that it as the biggest and finest knobby either of them had ever seen.
Potch took his luck quietly, although there were repressed emotion and excitement in his voice as he talked.
Michael marvelled at the way he went about doing his ordinary little odd jobs of the evening, when they returned to their own hut. Potch brought in and milked the goats, set out the pannikins and damper, and made tea.
When Michael and Potch had finished their meal and put away their plates, food, and pannikins, Michael picked up the stone from the shelf where Potch had put it, wrapped in the soft rag of an oatmeal bag. He threw himself on the sofa under the window and held the opal to the light, turning it and watching the stars spawn in its firmament of crystal ebony. Potch pulled a book from his pocket and sprawled across the table to read.
Michael regarded him wonderingly. Had the boy no imagination? Did the magic and mystery of the opal make so little appeal to him? Michael's eyes went from their reverent and adoring observation of the stone in his hands, to Potch as he sat stooping over the book on the table before him. He could not understand why Potch was not fired by the beauty of the thing he had won, or with pride at having found the biggest knobby ever taken out of the fields.
Any other young man would have been beside himself with excitement and rejoicing. But here was Potch slouched over a dog-eared, paper-covered book.
As he gazed at the big opal, a vision of Paul's opals flashed before him. The consternation and dismay that had made him scarcely conscious of what he was doing the night Potch found him with them, and Maud Johnson had come for Potch to go to see her sick goat, overwhelmed him again. He had not yet given the opals to Paul, he remembered, or explained to Potch and the rest of the men how he came to have them.
Any other mate than Potch would have resented his holding opals like that and saying nothing of them. But there was no resentment in Potch's bearing to him, Michael had convinced himself. Yet Potch must know about the stones; he must have seen them. Michael could find no reason for his silence and the unaltered serenity of the affection in his eyes, except that Potch had that absolute belief in him which rejects any suggestion of unworthiness in the object of its belief.
But since--since he had made up his mind to give the opals to Paul--since Sophie had gone, and there was no chance of their doing her any harm; since that night Potch and Maud had seen him, why had he not given them to Paul? Why had he not told Potch how the opals Potch had seen him with had come into his possession? Michael put the questions to himself, hardly daring, and yet knowing, he must search for the answer in the mysterious no-man's land of his subconsciousness.
Paul's slow recovery from sun-stroke was a reason for deferring explanation about the stones and for not giving them back to him, in the first instance. After Potch and Maud had seen him with the opals, Michael had intended to go at once to George and Watty and tell them his story. But the more he had thought of what he had to do, the more difficult it seemed. He had found himself shrinking from fulfilment of his intention. Interest in the new claim and the excitement of bottoming on opal had for a time almost obliterated memory of Paul's opals.
But he had only put off telling Potch, Michael assured himself; he had only put off giving the stones back to Paul. There was no motive in this putting off. It was mental indolence, procrastination, reluctance to face a difficult and delicate situation: that was all. Having the opals had worried him to death. It had preyed on his mind so that he was ready to imagine himself capable of any folly or crime in connection with them.... He mocked his fears of himself.
Michael went over all he had done, all that had happened in connection with the opals, seeking out motives, endeavouring to fathom his own consciousness and to be honest with himself.
As if answering an evocation, the opals passed before him in a vision.
He followed their sprayed fires reverently. Then, as if one starry ray had shed illumination in its passing, a daze of horror and amazement seized him. He had taken his own rectitude so for granted that he could not believe he might be guilty of what the light had shown lurking in a dark corner of his mind.
Had Paul's stones done that to him? Michael asked himself. Had their witch fires eaten into his brain? He had heard it said men who were misers, who hoarded opal, were mesmerised by the lights and colour of the stuff; they did not want to part with it. Was that what Paul's stones had done to him? Had they mesmerised him, so that he did not want to part with them? Michael was aghast at the idea. He could not believe he had become so besotted in his admiration of black opal that he was ready to steal--steal from a mate. The opal had never been found, he assured himself, which could put a spell over his brain to make him do that. And yet, he realised, the stones themselves had had something to do with his reluctance to talk of them to Potch, and with the deferring of his resolution to give them to Paul and let the men know what he had done. Whenever he had attempted to bring his resolution to talk of them to the striking-point, he remembered, the opals had swarmed before his dreaming eyes; his will had weakened as he gazed on them, and he had put off going to Paul and to Watty and George.
Stung to action by realisation of what he had been on the brink of, Michael went to the box of books in his room. He determined to take the packet of opals to Paul immediately, and go on to tell George and Watty its history. As he plunged an arm down among the books for the cigarette tin the opals were packed in, he made up his mind not to look at them for fear some reason or excuse might hinder the carrying out of his project. His fingers groped eagerly for the package; he threw out a few books.
He had put the tin in a corner of the box, under an old Statesman's year-book and a couple of paper-covered novels. But it was not there; it must have slipped, or he had piled books over it, at some time or another, he thought. He threw out all the books in the box and raked them over--but he could not find the tin with Paul's opals in.
He sat back on his haunches, his face lean and ghastly by the candle-fight.
"They're gone," he told himself.
He wondered whether he could have imagined replacing the package in the box--if there was anywhere else he could have put it, absent-mindedly; but his eyes returned to the box. He knew he had put the opals there.
Who could have found them? Potch? His mind turned from the idea.
Nobody had known of them. Nobody knew just where to put a hand on them--not even Potch. Who else could have come into the hut, or suspected the opals were in that box. Paul? He would not have been able to contain his joy if he had come into possession of any opal worth speaking of. Who else might suspect him of hoarding opal of any value.
His mind hovered indecisively. Maud?
Michael remembered the night she had come for Potch and had seen that gold-and-red-fired stone on the table. His imagination attached itself to the idea. The more he thought of it, the surer he felt that Maud had come for the stone she had offered to buy from him. There was nothing to prevent her walking into the hut and looking for it, any time during the day when he and Potch were away at the mine. And if she would rat, Michael thought she would not object to taking stones from a man's hut either. Of course, it might not be Maud; but he could think of no one else who knew he had any stone worth having.
If Maud had taken the stones, Jun would recognise them, Michael knew. By and by the story would get round, Jun would see to that. And when Jun told where those opals of Paul's had been found, as he would some day--Michael could not contemplate the prospect.
He might tell men of the Ridge his story now and forestall Jun; but it would sound thin without the opals to verify it, and the opportunity to restore them to Paul. Michael thought he had sufficient weight with men of the Ridge to impress them with the truth of what he said; but knowledge of a subtle undermining of his character, for which possession of the opals was responsible, gave him such a consciousness of guilt that he could not face the men without being able to give Paul the stones and prove he was not as guilty as he felt.
Overwhelmed and unable to throw off a sense of shame and defeat, Michael sat on the floor of his room, books thrown out of the box all round him.
He could not understand even now how those stones of Paul's had worked him to the state of mind they had. He did not even know they had brought him to the state of mind he imagined they had, or whether his fear of that state of mind had precipitated it. He realised the effect of the loss more than the thing itself, as he crouched beside the empty book-box, foreseeing the consequences to his work and to the Ridge, of the story Jun would tell--that he, Michael Brady, who had held such high faiths, and whose allegiance to them had been taken as a matter of course, was going to be known as a filcher of other men's stones, and that he who had formulated and inspired the Ridge doctrine was going to be judged by it.
CHAPTER IV
Michael and Potch were finishing their tea when Watty burst in on them.
His colour was up, his small, blue eyes winking and flashing over his fat, pink cheeks.
"Who d'y' think's come be motor to-day, Michael?" he gasped.
Michael's movement and the shade of apprehension which crossed his face were a question.
"Old man Armitage!" Watty said. "And he's come all the way from New York to see the big opal, he says."
There was a rumble of cart wheels, an exclamation and the reverberation of a broad, slow voice out-of-doors. Watty looked through Michael's window.
"Here he is, Michael," he said. "George and Peter are helping him out of Newton's dog-cart. And Archie Cross and Bill Grant are coming along the road a bit behind."
Michael pushed back his seat and pulled the fastenings from his front door. The front door was more of a decoration and matter of form in the face of the hut than intended to serve any useful purpose, and the fastening had never been moved before.
Potch cleared away the litter of the meal while Michael went out to meet the old man. He was walking with the help of a stick, his heavy, colourless face screwed with pain.
"Grr-rr!" he grunted. "What a fool I was to come to this God-damn place of yours, George! What? No fool like an old one? Don't know so much about that.... What else was I to do? Brrr! Oh, there you are, Michael!
Came to see you. Came right away because, from what the boys tell me, you weren't likely to slip down and call on me."
"I'd 've come all right if I'd known you wanted to see me, Mr.
Armitage," Michael said.
The old man went into the hut and, creaking and groaning as though all his springs needed oiling, seated himself on the sofa, whipped out a silk handkerchief and wiped his face and head with it.
"Oh, well," he said, "here I am at last--and mighty glad to get here.
The journey from New York City, where I reside, to this spot on the globe, don't get any nearer as I grow older. No, sir! Who's that young man?"
Mr. Armitage had fixed his eyes on Potch from the moment he came into the hut. Potch stood to his gaze.