The Black Opal. Katharine Susannah Prichard
so they came to the gate of a fenced plot which was like a quiet garden on the plains. Several young coolebahs, and two or three older trees standing in it, scattered light shade; and a few head-stones and wooden crosses, painted white or bleached by the weather, showed above the waving grass and wild flowers.
Sophie held the reins when Michael got down to open the gate. Then he took his seat again and they drove in through the gateway. Other people tied their horses and buggies to the fence outside.
When all the people who had been driving, riding, or walking on the road went towards an old coolebah under which the earth had been thrown up and a grave had been dug, Michael told Sophie to go with her father and stand beside them. She did so, and dull, grieving eyes were turned to her; glances of pitiful sympathy. But Snow-Shoes came towards the little crowd beside the tree, singing.
He was the last person to come into the cemetery, and everybody stared at him. An old man in worn white moleskins and cotton shirt, an old white felt hat on his head, the wrappings of bag and leather, which gave him his name, on his feet—although snow never fell on the Ridge—he swung towards them. The flowers he had gathered as he came along, not otilypaper daisies, but the blue flowers of crowsfoot, gold buttons, and creamy and lavender, sweet-scented budda blossoms, were done up in a tight little bunch in his hand. He drew nearer still singing under his breath, and Sophie realised he was going over and over the fragment of a song that her mother had loved and used often to sing herself.
There was a curious smile in his eyes as he came to a standstill beside her. The leaves of the coolebah were bronze and gold in the sunshine, a white-tail in its branches reiterating plaintively: "Sweet pretty creature! Sweet pretty creature!" Michael, George Woods, Archie Cross, and Cash Wilson, came towards the tree, their shoulders bowed beneath the burden they were carrying; but Snow-Shoes smiled at everybody as though this were really a joyous occasion, and they did not understand. Only he understood, and smiled because of his secret knowledge.
CHAPTER II
In a week or two Mrs. Rouminof's name had dropped out of Ridge life almost as if she had never been part of it.
At first people talked of her, of Paul, of Sophie, and of Michael. They gossiped of her looks and manner, of her strange air of serenity and content, although her life on the Ridge was, they surmised, a hard one, and different from the life she had come from. But her death caused no more disturbance than a stone thrown into quiet water, falling to the bottom, does. No one was surprised, when it was known Paul and Sophie had gone to live with Michael. Everyone expected Michael would try to look after them for a while, although they could not imagine where he was going to find room for them in his small house filled with books.
It was natural enough that Michael should have taken charge of Sophie and Rouminof, and that he should have made all arrangements for Mrs. Rouminof's funeral. If it had been left to Paul to bury his wife, people agreed, she would not have been buried at all; or, at least, not until the community insisted. And Michael would have done as much for any shiftless man. He was next-of-kin to all lonely and helpless men and women on the Ridge, Michael Brady.
Every man, woman, or child on the Ridge knew Michael. His lean figure in shabby blue dungarees, faded shirt, and weathered felt hat, with no more than a few threads of its band left, was as familiar as any tree, shed, or dump on the fields. He walked with a slight stoop, a pipe in his mouth always, his head bent as though he were thinking hard; but there was no hard thought in his eyes, only meditativeness, and a faint smile if he were stopped and spoken to unexpectedly.
"You're a regular 'cyclopædia, Michael," the men said sometimes when he, had given information on a subject they were discussing.
"Not me," Michael would reply as often as not. "I just came across that in a book I was reading the other day."
Ridge folk were proud of Michael's books, and strangers who saw his miscellaneous collection—mostly of cheap editions, old school books, and shilling, sixpenny, and penny publications of literary masterpieces, poetry, and works on industrial and religious subjects—did not wonder that it impressed Ridge folk, or that Michael's knowledge of the world and affairs was what it was. He had tracts, leaflets, and small books on almost every subject under the sun. Books were regarded as his Weakness, and, remembering it, some of the men, when they had struck opal and left the town, occasionally sent a box of any old books they happened to come across to Michael, knowing that a printed page was a printed page to him in the long evenings when he lay on the sofa under his window. Michael himself had spent all the money he could, after satisfying the needs of his everyday life, on those tracts, pamphlets, and cheap books he hoarded in his hut on shelves made from wooden boxes and old fruit-cases.
But there was nothing of the schoolmaster about him. He rarely gave information unless he was asked for it. The men appreciated that, although they were proud of his erudition and books. They knew dimly but surely that Michael used his books for, not against, themselves; and he was attached to books and learning, chiefly for what they could do for them, his mates. In all community discussions his opinion carried considerable weight. A matter was often talked over with more or less heat, differences of opinion thrashed out while Michael smoked and listened, weighing the arguments. He rarely spoke until his view was asked for. Then in a couple of minutes he would straighten out the subject of controversy, show what was to be said for and against a proposition, sum up, and give his conclusions, for or against it.
Michael Brady, however, was much more the general utility man than encyclopædia of Fallen Star Ridge. If a traveller—swagman—died on the road, it was Michael who saw he got a decent burial; Michael who was sent for if a man had his head smashed in a brawl, or a wife died unexpectedly. He was the court of final appeal in quarrels and disagreements between mates; and once when Martha M'Cready was away in Sydney, he had even brought a baby into the world. He was something of a dentist, too, honorary dentist to anyone on the Ridge who wanted a tooth pulled out; and the friend of any man, woman, or child in distress.
And he did things so quietly, so much as a matter of course, that people did not notice what he did for them, or for the rest of the Ridge. They took it for granted he liked doing what he did; that he liked helping them. It was his sympathy, the sense of his oneness with all their lives, and his shy, whimsical humour and innate refusal to be anything more than they were, despite his books and the wisdom with which they were quite willing to credit him, that gained for Michael the regard of the people of the Ridge, and made him the unconscious power he was in the community.
Of about middle height, and sparely built, Michael was forty-five, or thereabouts, when Mrs. Rouminof died. He looked older, yet had the vigour and energy of a much younger man. Crowsfeet had gathered at the corners of his eyes, and there were the fines beneath them which all back-country men have from screwing their sight against the brilliant sunshine of the north-west. But the white of his eyes was as clear as the shell of a bird's egg, the irises grey, flecked with hazel and green, luminous, and ringed with fine black lines. When he pushed back his hat, half a dozen lines from frowning against the glare were on his forehead too. His thin, black hair, streaked with grey, lay flat across and close to his head. He had a well-shaped nose and the sensitive nostrils of a thoroughbred, although Michael himself said he was no breed to speak of, but plain Australian—and proud of it. His father was born in the country, and so was his mother. His father had been a teemster, and his mother a storekeeper's daughter. Michael had wandered from one mining field to another in his young days. He had worked in Bendigo and Gippsland; later in Silver Town; and from the Barrier Ranges had migrated to Chalk Cliffs, and from the Cliffs to Fallen Star Ridge. He had been one of the first comers to the Ridge when opal was discovered there.
The Rouminofs had been on Chalk Cliffs too, and had come to the Ridge in the early days of the rush. Paul had set up at the Cliffs as an opal buyer, it was said; but he knew very little about opal. Anybody could sell him a stone for twice as much as it was worth, and he could never get a price from other buyers for the stones he bought. He soon lost any money he possessed, and had drifted and swung with the careless life of the place. He