In the Roaring Fifties Part 31

'They have, Ryan. I'm a made man.' Jim meant the expression to be taken in a spiritual rather than a pecuniary sense.

It's hearin',' said Phil. 'My soul, but it's th' great land, man! I've had more gold through me hands these twelve munts than I iver dramed iv before. But it don't shtick,' he added ruefully, glancing at his h.o.r.n.y palms.

'And the others--have you heard of them?'

'We broke up into twos an' twos whin we come near Geelong, fer fear iv being nailed by th' police fer disertion. Jorgensen's made his pile over be Buniyong; an' Tommy th' t.i.t--him what seconded me in th' bit iv a contention we had aboard--have been rootin' out nuggets be th' tubful at Ballarat, an' talkin' fight and devilment t' th' min iv nights in th'

intherests iv peace an' humanity an' good gover'mint. Be th' same token, there's goin' t' be no ind iv sin an' throuble down there, an' I'd be sorry to be missin' it.'

'He's no true digger who'll stand out when the time comes, Ryan.'

'Thrue fer you, man. Och! it's a lovely land fer a gravyince, an' I'll niver lave it.' He looked Jim up and down again. 'It's put th' good heart in you, Done.' Jim nodded smilingly. 'D'ye be hearin' iv th' little lady from off the s.h.i.+p?' continued Phil, as if following a natural sequence.

'Yes,' answered Jim, his cheeks warming a little. 'She is with Mrs.

Macdougal at b.o.o.byalla, just beyond Jim Crow, and is well and cheerful.'

'Good agin!' Ryan sighed heavily as he resumed his swag. 'It's th' on'y thing I'm lamentin' here, th' mighty scarcity iv fine wimmin,' he said.

'They'll be bringing them out by the s.h.i.+p-load presently, old man.'

'Th' sooner th' quicker. Manewhoile I haven't seen th' taste iv one fer sivin munts. So long to you! We'll be meetin' on the new rush?'

'Yes. So long and good luck!'

Phil hastened on to overtake his mates, and Jim, looking after him, wondered that he had ever been anything but good friends with this man, whose lovable, ugly face radiated geniality as a diamond reflects light.

Simpson's Ranges at first sight was a repet.i.tion of the other fields Jim had seen. The scene was one of intense excitement. No experience prepared the ordinary miner to take the possibilities of a new field in a philosophical spirit. The impetuosity, the bustling hurry, and the clamour that had so impressed him at Forest Creek were repeated here.

Everywhere over a s.p.a.ce of some fifty acres tents were being unfurled and carts and waggons unloaded in the midst of chaotic disorder. The feverish eagerness of new arrivals to peg out their claims on a rich lead accounted for much of the tumult. Those already in possession of golden holes were working like fiends to exhaust their present claims, and secure others before the land was pegged out all along the lead and the whizzing of windla.s.ses and the monotonous cries of the workers added the usual character to the prevailing clamour.

Storekeepers who had dumped their stocks down in the open air were desperately busy, serving profane customers, or running up hasty structures over their goods. Newcomers were pouring in like visitors to a fair, shouting as they came, and of all the people Jim could see, Mike Burton and the Peetrees alone were prepared to take things calmly. For his own part, he had again proof of his susceptibility to the humours of the crowd; the excitement of the scene communicated itself to him; he wanted to add to the noise and the movement without acknowledging any sensible reason for doing so.

'Me an' Mike 'll get up the lead an' spike a claim while you boys rig the tent,' said Josh.

The mates had brought one tent to serve them, pending the arrival of their other belongings. It had been resolved that the five men should work on shares during their stay at Simpson's Ranges, and Mike and Peetree senior secured the land to which the party was ent.i.tled under its licenses.

'She's well in on the lead all right,' said Josh, commenting on their claim that evening after tea, 'an' if we don't hit it rich I'm a Dutchman.'

Josh's opinion proved correct in the main. Mike cut the wash-dirt on the following evening, and after sinking in it to the depth of two feet, washed a prospect that promised the party an excellent return for their labour. So far Jim Done had every reason to be grateful for his luck; and the diggers were nearly all implicit believers in luck; a faith they held to be justified by the scores of instances recited of good fortune following individuals through extraordinary conditions, when less favoured men all around them were not earning enough to satisfy the storekeepers.

Although the various Victorian rushes were much alike in general character, some peculiarity attached to each of them. Jim Crow was famous for its vigorous and varied rascality; Simpson's Ranges became notorious as the most reckless gambling-field in the country. Card-playing was the recreation the diggers most indulged in here, if we except a decided penchant for Chow-baiting. Done found that already the gambling propensity had impressed itself on the lead, and the luckiest man on Simpson's was a short, fat, complacent Yankee, who refused to handle pick or shovel because, as he said to Done, it might spoil his hand. Jim did not doubt that hands so slick in the manipulation of cards were worth all the care Mr. Levi Long devoted to them. Jim became rather interested in Long. The man was an amusing blackguard, and took the 'gruellings' that occasional manual lapses led him into with a placidity that amounted almost to quiet enjoyment, and tickled Done's sense of humour immensely.

'Man who drifts down the stream o' life in a painted barge on the broad of his back among the Persian rugs, with a fat cigar in his teeth, an'

all his favourite drinks within reach, has gotter strike a snag now 'n agin,' said Long. 'The question's just this--is it wuth it?'

'I can't understand why a tired man like you takes the trouble to shave,'

Jim said to him one night.

'Ever been tarred 'n feathered in your busy career, Mr. Done?' answered Long.

Never.'

'If you had you'd realize that the onpleasantest thing that kin happen to a man this side o' the great hot finish is to get his chin whiskers full o' tar. In my native town tarring the man you disagreed with was a favourite amus.e.m.e.nt.'

'But there is no tar here.'

'Well, no; but I guess this has become instinctive.' He pa.s.sed a hand over his fat, smooth face.

Chow-baiting was a later development. The Chinese and Mongolians came early to Victorian rushes, and remained long. They were never discoverers, never pioneers, but, following quickly upon the heels of the white prospectors, they frequently succeeded in securing the richest claims in the alluvial beds, and from the first they were hated with an instinctive racial hatred, that became inveterate when the whites found in Sin Fat a rival antagonistic in all his tastes and views, in most of his virtues, and in all his pet vices, bar one. The Chows were industrious diggers; they worked with ant-like a.s.siduity from daylight to dark, and often long after that were to be seen at their holes, toiling by the light of lanterns.

They had vices of their own, and not nice ones, but they gave way to only one of the amiable little social weaknesses in which the Europeans indulged, and displayed the overpowering pa.s.sion for gambling that has since become characteristic of the China-men in all their Australian camps. They had no other amus.e.m.e.nt, and desired no leisure; they were squalid in their habits, and herded like animals; they were barren of aspirations, and their industry was brutish (though of a kind still belauded), since it left no leisure for humanizing exercises, no room for sweetness and light. They were law-abiding, but that was not a virtue to commend itself to the Victorian diggers at this date, and they were only law-abiding because of their slavish instincts and their lack of courageous attributes. The antipathy bred then survives in the third generation of Australians, but is less demonstrative now that laws have been enacted in accordance with the racial instinct.

The Pagans had secured a big stretch of the field close to the claim pegged out by Mike and Josh Peetree, and they were thought to have possession of the most profitable part of the alluvial deposit, but worked their claims with great caution, and were as secretive as so many mopokes, so that the whites really had no idea what their ground was like, excepting such as the experienced miners could gather from the general trend of the richer wash dirt. Extraordinary stories of the success of the Chinese were in circulation, and provoked strenuous profanity and exceeding bitterness in the Europeans, Particularly in those whose luck was not good. There was already talk of a white rising to drive the heathen from the field, and Done found his mates entirely in sympathy with the common sentiment; to him; also the Celestials became exceedingly repellent as he grew more familiar with their habits and manners, although he was opposed to making differences of race an excuse for wholesale robbery.

The Chinese camp was strictly apart from that of the whites, and there was no intercourse between the two parties, Levi Long being the only man who seemed attracted to the squalid huts into which the Mongolians packed themselves by some process mysterious to the Caucasian understanding. Men in whom gambling was an absorbing pa.s.sion could never be wholly objectionable to a man of his peculiar principles; but he came back from his third visit to their camp with his hands sunk to the bottoms of his pockets and a troubled look on his smooth countenance.

'They've sprung a new game on me down there,' he said to a crowd in the shanty, nodding his head back. 'I thought I'd picked up something about it, an' it's cost me every bit o' glitter I had on me to demonstrate to my entire satisfaction that I was quite wrong. I haven't got a scale left. I'm feelin' like a little boy who's been tryin' to teach his gran'

mother all about eggs.'

'Fantan?' said Burton.

'Somethin' o' that character an' complexion. Boys, I begin to think that p'r'aps after all we're doin' wrong in submittin' to the encroachments o'

the alien.'

Hear, hear!' shouted half a dozen voices.

'It strikes me that the inferior race that can skin Levi Long to his pelt in a gamble is providin' no fit a.s.sociates for guileless an' confidin'

children o' the Occident, like yourselves, f'r instance.'

Long's professional pride was hurt; the idea of being beaten at his own business by a pack of unlettered Asiatics made him sad. 'It kinder destroys a man's faith in himself he said. As a result of his eloquence the miners knotted windla.s.s-ropes together, and stole down upon the Chinese camp in the small and early hours of morning. There were twenty men on each cable, and one lot kept to the right of the camp, the other to the left, and, going noiselessly, they dragged the ropes through the frail huts and kennels in which the Mongols were sleeping, mowing them down as if they had been houses of cards, and towing an occasional screaming Chow out of the ruins, rolled in his filthy bedding. The whole camp of huddled shanties was razed to the ground in about two minutes, and the diggers drew off, without having given any clue to the cause of the disaster, leaving the heathen raging in the darkness.

At about six o'clock Jim Done and his mates were awakened and brought pell-mell from their bunks by the sound of a great commotion coming from the direction of the Chinese camp. They saw the Chinamen gathered near the ruins of their dwellings, evidently in a state of tremendous excitement. A number of them were jumping about, gesticulating wildly, and uttering shrill cries, while half a dozen or so, armed with stout sticks, were energetically beating an object that lay upon the ground.

'By thunder! it's a man they're murdering!' cried Jim.

Mike and the Peetrees laughed aloud. 'Not a bit of it,' said Burton.

'They're only bastin' their Joss!'

'What's that?'

'They're beatin' their G.o.d. They keep a few of them little pottery or wooden G.o.ds round, an' if things don't go quite as well as they think they ought to go, they up an' take it out o' the G.o.d just then on the job, by knocking splinters off him.'

'They argue that Joss ain't been attendin' to his part o' the contract,'

said Harry Peetree, 'an' they belt him for neglectin' his business. Saw a lot o' them blow up a big Joss at Bendigo 'cause their dirt was pannin'

out badly.'

By this time the Europeans were all up and out, enjoying the spectacle, and Simpson's Ranges echoed their laughter, it being a.s.sumed that the Celestials' G.o.ds were being punished for the sins of those diggers who had wrecked the camp. Jim and Con joined a few curious men sauntering down to take a nearer view of the ceremony.

'Wha' for?' Con asked one grave Chow who was looking on.