He could never come to any clear understanding with himself as to how he had done what he did. He knew only a sick fear possessed him that Charley would wake and find him, Michael, barefooted, like a thief in his house. But he was not a thief, he assured himself. It was not thieving to take from a thief.
Charley stirred uneasily. His arm went out; in the dim light Michael saw it go over the pocket which held the packet of opal; his hand clutch at it unconsciously. Sweating with fear and the nervous tension he was under, Michael remained standing in the darkness. He waited, wondering whether he would throw off Charley's hand and snatch the opal, or whether he would stand till morning, hesitating, and wondering what to do, and Charley would wake at last and find him there. He had decided to wrench Charley's arm from the pocket, when Charley himself flung it out with a sudden restless movement.
In an instant, almost mechanically, Michael's hand went to the pocket.
He lifted the packet there and put his own in its place.
The blood was booming in his ears when he turned to the door. A sense of triumph unnerved him more than the execution of his inspiration. Charley muttered and called out in his sleep as Michael passed through the doorway.
Then the stars were over him. Michael drew a deep breath of the night air and crossed to his own hut, the package of opal under his coat. Just as he was entering he drew back, vaguely alarmed. A movement light as thistledown seemed to have caught his ear. He thought he had detected a faint shifting of the shingle nearby. He glanced about with quick apprehension, went back to Charley's hut, listened, and looked around; but Charley was still sleeping. Michael walked back to his own hut.
There was no sight or sound of a living thing in the wan, misty moonlight of the dawn, except the white-tail which was still crying from a wilga near Charley's hut.
The package under his coat felt very heavy and alive when he returned to his own hut. Michael was disturbed by that faint sound he had heard, or thought he had heard. He persuaded himself he had imagined it, that in the overwrought state of his sensibilities the sound of his own breath, and his step on the stones, had surprised and alarmed him. The tin of opals burned against his body, seeming to scar the skin where it pressed. Michael sickened at the thought of how what he had done might look to anyone who had seen him. But he put the thought from him. It was absurd. He had looked; there was no one about--nothing. He was allowing his mind to play tricks with him. The success of what he had done made him seem like a thief. But he was not a thief. The stones were Rouminof's. He had taken them from Charley for him, and he would not even look at them. He would keep them for Paul.
If Charley got away without discovering the change of the packets, as he probably would, in the early morning and in his excitement to catch the coach, he would be considered the thief. Rouminof would accuse him; Charley would know his own guilt. He would not dare to confess what he had done, even when he found that his package of opal had been changed.
He would not know when it had been changed. He would not know whether it had been changed, perhaps, before he took it from Rouminof.
Charley might recognise the stones in that packet he had done up, Michael realised; but he did not think so. Charley was not much of a judge of opal. Michael did not think he would remember the few scraps of sun-flash they had come on together, and Charley had never seen the mascot he had put into the packet, with a remnant of feeling for the memory of their working days together.
Michael did not light the candle when he went into his hut again. He threw himself down on the bed in his clothes; he knew that he would not sleep as he lay there. His brain burned and whirled, turning over the happenings of the night and their consequences, likely and unlikely. The package of opal lay heavy in his pocket. He took it out and dropped it into a box of books at the end of the room.
He did not like what he had done, and yet he was glad he had done it.
When he could see more clearly, he was glad, too, that he had grasped this opportunity to control circumstances. A reader and dreamer all his days, he had begun to be doubtful of his own capacity for action. He could think and plan, but he doubted whether he had strength of will to carry out purposes he had dreamed a long time over. He was pleased, in an odd, fierce way, that he had been able to do what he thought should be done.
"But I don't want them.... I don't want the cursed stones," he argued with himself. "I'll give them to him--to Paul, as soon as I know what ought to be done about Sophie. She's not old enough to go yet--to know her own mind--what she wants to do. When she's older she can decide for herself. That's what her mother meant. She didn't mean for always ...
only while she's a little girl. By and by, when she's a woman, Sophie can decide for herself. Now, she's got to stay here ... that's what I promised."
"And Charley," he brooded. "He deserves all that's coming to him ... but I couldn't give him away. The boys would half kill him if they got their hands on to him. When will he find out? In the train, perhaps--or not till he gets to Sydney.... He'll have my fiver, and the stones to go on with--though they won't bring much. Still, they'll do to go on with....
Paul'll be a raving lunatic when he knows ... but he can't go--he can't take Sophie away."
His brain surged over and over every phrase: his state of mind since he had seen Charley and Paul on the road together; every argument he had used with himself. He could not get away from the double sense of disquiet and satisfaction.
An hour or two later he heard Charley moving about, then rush off down the track, sending the loose stones flying under his feet as he ran to catch the coach.
CHAPTER V
Watty was winding dirt, standing by the windlass on the top of the dump over his and his mates' mine, when he saw Paul coming along the track from the New Town. Paul was breaking into a run at every few yards, and calling out. Watty threw the mullock from his hide bucket as it came up, and lowered it again. He wound up another bucket. The creak of the windlass, and the fall of the stone and earth as he threw them over the dump, drowned the sound of Rouminof's voice. As he came nearer, Watty saw that he was gibbering with rage, and crying like a child.
While he was still some distance away, Watty heard him sobbing and calling out.
He stopped work to listen as Paul came to the foot of Michael's dump.
Ted Cross, who was winding dirt on the top of Crosses' mine, stopped to listen too. Old Olsen got up from where he lay noodling on Jun's and Paul's claim, and went across to Paul. Snow-Shoes, stretched across the slope near where Watty was standing, lifted his head, his turning of earth with a little blunt stick arrested for the moment.
"They've took me stones!... Took me stones!" Watty heard Paul cry to Bill Olsen. And as he climbed the slope of Michael's dump he went on crying: "Took me stones! Took me stones! Charley and Jun! Gone by the coach! Michael!... They've gone by the coach and took me stones!"
Over and over again he said the same thing in an incoherent wail and howl. He went down the shaft of Michael's mine, and Ted Cross came across from his dump to Watty.
"Hear what he says, Watty?" he asked.
"Yes," Watty replied.
"It gets y'r wind----"
"If it's true," Watty ventured slowly.
"Seems to me it's true all right," Ted said. "Charley took him home last night. I went along with them as far as the turn-off. Paul was a bit on ... and Archie asked me to keep an eye on him.... I was a bit on meself, too ... but Charley came along with us--so I thought he'd be all right.... Charley went off by the coach this morning.... Bill Olsen told me.... And Michael was reck'ning on him goin' to Warria to-day, I know."
"That's right!"
"It'll be hard on Michael!"
Watty's gesture, upward jerk of his chin, and gusty breath, denoted his agreement on that score.
Ted went back to his own claim, and Watty slid down the rope with his next bucket to give his mates the news. It was nearly time to knock off for the midday meal, and before long men from all the claims were standing in groups hearing the story from Rouminof himself, or talking it over together.
Michael had come up from his mine soon after Paul had gone down to him.
The men had seen him go off down the track to the New Town, his head bent. They thought they knew why. Michael would feel his mate's dishonour as though it were his own. He would not be able to believe that what Paul said was true. He would want to know from Peter Newton himself if it was a fact that Charley had gone out on the coach with Jun and two girls who had been at the hotel.
Women were scarce on the opal fields, and the two girls who had come a week before to help Mrs. Newton with the work of the hotel had been having the time of their lives. Charley, Jun Johnson, and two or three other men, had been shouting drinks for them from the time of their arrival, and Mrs. Newton had made up her mind to send the girls back to town by the next coach. Jun had appropriated the younger of the two, a bright-eyed girl, and the elder, a full-bosomed, florid woman with straw-coloured hair, had, as the boys said, "taken a fancy to Charley."
Paul had already told his story once or twice when Cash Wilson, George, and Watty, went across to where he was standing, with half a dozen of the men about him. They were listening gravely and smoking over Paul's recital. There had been ratting epidemics on the Ridge; but robbery of a mate by a mate had never occurred before. It struck at the fundamental principle of their life in common. There was no mistaking the grave, rather than indignant view men of the Ridge took of what Charley had done. The Ridge code affirmed simply that "a mate stands by a mate." The men say: "You can't go back on a mate." By those two recognitions they had run their settlement. Far from all the ordinary institutions of law and order, they had lived and worked together without need of them, by appreciation of their relationship to each other as mates and as a fraternity of mates. No one, who had lived under and seemed to accept the principle of mateship, had ever before done as Charley had done.
"But Charley Heathfield was never one of us really," Ted Cross said. "He was always an outsider."
"That's right, Ted," George Woods replied. "We only stuck him on Michael's account."
Paul told George, Watty, and Cash the story he had been going over all the morning--how he had gone home with Charley, how he remembered going along the road with him, and then how he had wakened on the floor of his own hut in the morning. Sophie was there. She was singing. He had thought it was her mother. He had called her ... but Sophie had come to him. And she had abused him. She had called him "a dirty, fat pig," and told him to get out of the way because she wanted to sweep the floor.
He sobbed uncontrollably. The men sympathised with him. They knew the loss of opal came harder on Rouminof than it would have on the rest of them, because he was so mad about the stuff. They condoned the abandonment of his grief as natural enough in a foreigner, too; but after a while it irked them.
"Take a pull at y'rself, Rummy, can't you?" George Woods said irritably.
"What did Michael say?"
"Michael?" Paul looked at him, his eyes streaming.
George nodded.
"He did not say," Paul replied. "He threw down his pick. He would not work any more ... and then he went down to Newton's to ask about Charley."
Two or three of the men exchanged glances. That was the way they had expected Michael to take the news. He would not have believed Paul's story at first. They did not see Michael again that day. In the evening Peter Newton told them how Michael had come to him, asking if it was true Charley had gone on the coach with Jun Johnson and the girls. Peter told Michael, he said, that Charley had gone on the coach, and that he thought Rouminof's story looked black against Charley.
"Michael didn't say much," Peter explained, "but I don't think he could help seeing what I said was true--however much he didn't want to."
Everybody knew Michael believed in Charley Heathfield. He had thought the worst that could be said of Charley was that he was a good-natured, rather shiftless fellow. All the men had responded to an odd attractive faculty Charley exercised occasionally. He had played it like a woman for Michael, and Michael had taken him on as a mate and worked with him when no one else would. And now, the men guessed, that Michael, who had done more than any of them to make the life of the Ridge what it was, would feel more deeply and bitterly than any of them that Charley had gone back on him and on what the Ridge stood for.
All they imagined Michael was suffering in the grief and bitterness of spirit which come of misplaced faith, he was suffering. But they could not imagine the other considerations which had overshadowed grief and bitterness, the realisation that Sophie's life had been saved from what looked like early wreckage, and the consciousness that the consequences of what Charley had done, had fallen, not on Charley, but on himself.