George swept the sweat from his forehead with a broad, steady gesture.
"He was bound to do something nobody else'd 've thought of, Michael!" he said.
"That's right," Watty replied. "Pony-Fence and Bully Bryant were saying," he went on, "he's had a pretty hard time, Potch, and it was about up to somebody to give him a leg-up ... some sort of a start in life. He may be all right ... on the other hand, there may not be much to him...."
"That's right!" Cash muttered, beginning to work again.
"But I reck'n he's all right, Potch." George swung his pick again. His blows echoed in the mine as they shattered the hard stone he was working on.
Watty crawled off through a drive he was gouging in.
At midday Michael and Charley had always eaten their lunches in the shelter where George Woods, Watty, and Cash Wilson ate theirs and noodled their opal. They wondered whether Michael would join them this day. He strolled over to the shelter with Potch beside him as Watty and Cash, with a billy of steaming tea on a stick between them, came from the open fire built round with stones, a few yards from the mine.
"Potch and me's mates," Michael explained to George as he sat down and spread out his lunch, his smile whimsical and serene over the information. "But we're lookin' for a third to the company. I reck'n a lot of you chaps' luck is working on three. It's a lucky number, three, they say."
Potch sat down beside him on the outer edge of the shelter's scrap of shade.
"See you get one not afraid to do a bit of work, next time--that's all I say," Watty growled.
The blood oozed slowly over Potch's heavy, quiet face. Nothing more was said of Charley, but the men who saw his face realised that Potch was not the insensible youth they had imagined.
Michael had watched him when they were below ground, and was surprised at the way Potch set about his work. He had taken up his father's gouging pick and spider as if he had been used to take them every day, and he had set to work where Charley had left off. All the morning he hewed at a face of honeycombed sandstone, his face tense with concentration of energy, the sweat glistening on it as though it were oiled under the light of a candle in his spider, stuck in the red earth above him. Michael himself swung his pick in leisurely fashion, crumbled dirt, and knocked off for a smoke now and then.
"Easy does it, Potch," he remarked, watching the boy's steady slogging.
"We've got no reason to bust ourselves in this mine."
At four o'clock they put their tools back against the wall and went above ground. Michael fell in with the Crosses, who were noodling two or three good-looking pieces of opal Archie had taken out during the afternoon, and Potch streaked away through the scrub in the direction of the Old Town.
Michael wondered where he was going. There was a purposeful hunch about his shoulders as if he had a definite goal in view. Michael had intended asking his new mate to go down to the New Town and get the meat for their tea, but he went himself after he had yarned with Archie and Ted Cross for a while.
When he returned to the hut, Potch was not there. Michael made a fire, unwrapped his steak, hung it on a hook over the fire, and spread out the pannikins, tin plates and knives and forks for his meal, putting a plate and pannikin for Potch. He was kneeling before the fire giving the steak a turn when Potch came in. Potch stood in the doorway, looking at Michael as doubtfully as a stray kitten which did not know whether it might enter.
"That you, Potch?" Michael called.
"Yes," Potch said.
Michael got up from the fire and carried the grilled steak on a plate to the table.
"Well, you were nearly late for dinner," he remarked, as he cut the steak in half and put a piece on the other plate for Potch. "You better come along and tuck in now ... there's a great old crowd down at Nancarrow's this evening. First time for nearly a month he's killed a beast, and everybody wants a bit of steak. Sam gave me this as a sort of treat; and it smells good."
Potch came into the kitchen and sat on the box Michael had drawn up to the table for him.
"Been bringing in the goats for Sophie," he jerked out, looking at Michael as if there were some need of explanation.
"Oh, that was it, was it?" Michael replied, getting on with his meal.
"Thought you'd flitted!"
Potch met his smile with a shadowy one. A big, clumsy-looking fellow, with a dull, colourless face and dingy hair, he sat facing Michael, his eyes anxious, as though he would like to explain further, but was afraid to, or could not find words. His eyes were beautiful; but they were his father's eyes, and Michael recoiled to qualms of misgiving, a faint distrust, as he looked in them.
It was Ed. Ventry, however, who gave Potch his first claim to the respect of men of the Ridge.
"How's that boy of Charley Heathfield's?" was his first question when the coach came in from Budda, the following week.
"All right," Newton said. "Why?"
"He was near killed," Mr. Ventry replied. "Stopped us up at the Three Mile that morning I was taking Charley and Jun down. He was all for Charley stopping ... getting off the coach or something. I didn't get what it was all about--money Charley'd got from Michael, I think. That's the worst of bein' a bit hard of hearin' ... and bein' battered about by that yaller-bay horse I bought at Warria couple of months ago."
"Potch tried to stop Charley getting away, did he?" Newton asked with interest.
"He did," Ed. Ventry declared. "I pulled up, seein' something was wrong ... but what does that god-damned blighter Charley do but give a lurch and grab me reins. Scared four months' growth out of the horses--and away they went. I'd a colt I was breakin' in on the off-side--and he landed Potch one--kicked him right out, I thought. As soon as I could, I pulled up, but I see Potch making off across the plain, and he didn't look like he was much hurt.... But it was a plucky thing he did, all right ... and it's the last time I'll drive Charley Heathfield. I told him straight. I'd as soon kill a man as not for putting a hand on me reins, like he done--on me own coach, too!"
Snow-Shoes had drifted up to them as the coach stopped and Newton went out to it. He stood beside Peter Newton while Mr. Ventry talked, rolling tobacco. Snow-Shoes' eyes glimmered from one to the other of them when Ed. Ventry had given the reason for his inquiry.
"Potch!" he murmured. "A little bit of potch!" And marched off down the road, a straight, stately white figure, on the bare track under the azure of the sky.
CHAPTER VII
"Give y' three," Watty said.
"Take 'em." George Woods did not turn. He was carefully working round a brilliantly fired seam through black potch in the shin cracker he had been breaking through two or three days before.
It was about lunch time, and Watty had crawled from his drive to the centre of the mine. Cash was still at work, crouched against a corner of the alley, a hundred yards or so from George; but he laid down his pick when he heard Watty's voice, and went towards him.
"Who d'you think Michael's got as third man?"
"Snow-Shoes?"
"No."
"Old Bill Olsen?"
Watty could not contain himself to the third guess.
"Rum-Enough!" he said.
"He would." George chipped at the stone round his colour. "It was bound to be a lame dog, anyhow--and it might as well've been Rummy as anybody."
"That's right," Cash conceded.
"Bill Andrews told me," Watty said. "They've just broke through on the other side of that drive I'm in...."
"It would be all right," he went on, "if Paul'd work for Michael like he did for Jun. But is Michael the man to make him? Not by long chalks.
Potch is turning out all right, the boys say.... Michael says he works like a chow ... has to make him put in the peg ... but they'll both be havin' Rum-Enough on their hands before long--that's a sure thing."
Watty's, George's, and Cash's mine was one of the best worked and best planned on the fields.