Denis Dent: A Novel. Hornung Ernest William
was divided between natural satisfaction and annoyance.
"Very well, Jimmy, and I congratulate you; but, once and for all, never another word about that unless you're asked! We're mates now, remember; I might as well brag of it myself. Besides – but it's a bargain, isn't it?"
Mr. Doherty said he supposed it must be; but for once his spirit was under a cloud, for he had appointed himself sole minstrel of his hero's praises, foreseeing both honour and profit in the employment; but on reflection the embargo only made him think the more of Denis, and his first care was to whisper it in the hawker's ear.
The hawker was waiting with his wagon outside an inn in Moorabool Street, and Denis was relieved to find the man less palpably impressed by his exploit than Jimmy had represented him. He was a little flint of a fellow, sharp but surly, who accepted an eight-penny glass of porter with a nod and drained it without removing his eyes from the sailor's face. But in a mile or so his tongue loosened, as the trio sat abreast under the wagon's hood, and the scattered buildings of the budding town melted into the unbroken timber of the bush track.
"So you're bound for the diggings, are you?" said the hawker. "And what may you think of doing when you get there?"
"Well," said Denis, to enter into the man's humour, "we did think we might dig."
"Oh, dig!" said the hawker, and relapsed at once into his former taciturnity.
"What would you do, then?" inquired Denis, nudging Doherty, who, though he had plenty to say when they were alone, was a respectful listener before a third person.
"Bake!" said the hawker, without a moment's hesitation.
"Bake?" echoed Denis in amused dismay.
"It's four-and-six the half-loaf at this moment," said the hawker. "Same price as a quarter of sheep. On the diggings, that is. Yes, sir, I'd bake, that's what I'd do, if I had my time over again, and capital enough to make a start."
"And if you hadn't enough?"
"If I hadn't enough, and if they were full-handed in all the publics, and I couldn't get a job in any o' the stores, and the Commissioner wouldn't give me one, and if I could borrow a license, beg some tools, and steal enough to eat, well, I might have another dig myself. But not till I'd tried everything else. You've heard what they got in Canadian Gully, I suppose?"
"I have," said Denis.
"So had I," said the hawker.
"And what did you get?"
"Not enough to eat bread on; not one in a thousand does. But you go and have your try. You may have a bit of luck in the end, and manage to bring your bones away with the flesh on 'em, like me. That's the most I can wish you, and it's hoping for the best. But you take my advice, and when the luck turns, never wait for it to turn again. You get rid of your claim for what it'll fetch; mine fetched what you see – a hawker's wagon, horses, and whole stock-in-trade. I just jumped in and drove away, and he jumped into my claim. And I will say I'm doing better at this game than I was at that."
"And how is he doing?"
"I don't know," said the hawker, "and I don't care."
"Prices must be good," remarked Denis.
"Among the middlings," said the hawker with a sidelong glance at Doherty, who, however, was looking the other way. "I can let you have a nice pair o' boots for a five-pound-note, and a spare shirt like what you've got on for thirty bob. But it's not what it was when I came out last year. I wouldn't come into the hawking business if I were you; you could get twenty-five bob a day as a carpenter, and three-pound-ten to four pound a week at bullock-driving. But I'd rather be a labourer on the roads, with two crown certain a day, and wood, water, and tent supplied, than peg out another claim."
Denis had heard enough. He was not easily discouraged, but he found it a relief to turn his attention to the scenery. They were intersecting a forest of rather stunted trees, all blown one way by the wind, which made music of a peculiar melancholy among their branches. Doherty said the trees were she-oaks, answering Denis's question with great zeal. Similarly Denis learned the names of the various parrots that perched by the flock amid the dull green foliage, or fled from tree to tree with a whirr and a glint of every colour in the rainbow. Then a pond must be called a water-hole, it seemed – a beck a creek, and the curly-bearded aboriginals blacks or blackfellows – but not niggers. It was the earliest and most elementary stage of Denis's colonial training, and he would have relished it if only for his mentor's intense satisfaction in his task, to say nothing of a capacity to teach not inferior to the will. But the hawker had a last word left, which he kept, as though by demoniac design, for one of their glimpses, depressing enough to Denis as it was, of the sparkling sea never many miles distant on their right.
"Ah!" said the hawker, pointing with his whip, "if I'd been one hour earlier in Geelong, I'd have sold lock, stock, barrel an' ammunition for a berth in that ship that cleared out for Old England this forenoon. Ship from Melbourne you can't get. It was a chance in a hundred, and I'd have given all I have for it, as you will for such another before you've seen half as much as me."
It was about three in the afternoon, at a place called Wyndham, that the pair took their leave of this dispassionate pessimist, with as little regret as may be supposed, and found themselves afoot for the last twenty miles. And almost from the first step Doherty was loud in his denunciation of every word the hawker had uttered, not one of which was Denis to believe for an instant. But there was no Denis left to embrace this view; the leave-taking of the morning and the hawker in the afternoon had reduced him between them to unmitigated Dent, a dogged fellow ready for the worst, though more than ever bent upon the best.
"There are two sides to everything, and give me the dark side first," said he; "besides, a lift for nothing is a lift for nothing. But what's that you've got in your pack, Jim?"
"What's what?" asked Doherty, changing colour as he trudged.
"There's a box of some sort showing through your outer blanket."
"Oh, that's my revolver."
"Your revolver! You hadn't one this morning. Who's given it to you?" demanded Denis.
"No one," the boy confessed. "I bought it from the hawker while you were on the ship."
"And how much did you give for this?" asked Denis, as they squatted by the roadside, with a neat oak case open between them, and a great five-chambered Deane and Adams twinkling in the sun.
"Ten guineas, mister."
"Ten guineas! More than half the wages you drew from the station, for a second-hand revolver? He didn't say it was first-hand, did he?"
"No, but he said it was worth more."
Denis sprang impatiently to his feet.
"Well, it may save our lives, and then it will be," said he. "But I like your notion of a lift for love!"
CHAPTER IX
THE CANVAS CITY
The travelers had been variously advised as to their best road to Melbourne from a certain point; but what they did (by pure accident) was to come out on the Williamstown promontory and get a second lift (by sheer luck) in a boat just leaving for the Sandridge side. They were even luckier than they knew. The gain in mileage was very considerable. And there was sun enough still upon the waters for them to see with their own eyes the derelict sail of all nations and of every rig, swinging forlornly with the turning tide, their blistered timbers cracking for some paint, and all hands at the diggings.
But the sun was sinking when the two friends landed at Liardet's Jetty, and came at once by the Sandridge Road to the first thin sprinkling of the tents which formed the Melbourne of those days. The track ran in ruts through sand and dust as fine as tooth-powder; they trudged beside it over scanty grass, with here and there a star-shaped flower without the slightest scent. Gum-trees of many kinds, some with the white bark peeling from their trunks, others smooth and leafless as gigantic bones, made amends with their peculiar aroma. There was a shrill twittering of the most unmusical birds, the croak of bullfrogs from a neighbouring lagoon, a more familiar buzz of flies, a tinfoil rustle of brown grass at every step. Once the grass rustled before