East of Outback (10 page)

“It all looks alike to me,” Colin said. “How do you know whose property you’re on?”

“Mostly common sense, a good compass and a measuring tape.” Uncle Liam turned his back on the rope and the Hard Yakka and started up the drift the way they had come. When he turned right into a side tunnel Colin felt completely lost and disoriented. They came upon a little wood-and-iron rock sled. “Here’s where we’re working at the moment.” Uncle Liam hefted a pickaxe and swung it into the chunky, eroding wall ahead.

Colin stepped up for a closer look. In the light of Uncle Liam’s headlamp a few specks glinted in the rock. “That’s gold? That’s what we’re looking for?”

Gold!
He was staring at his first gold. Somehow he had imagined the gold in mines to simply lie about ready to be picked up, or the bright nuggets were chipped easily from the walls. He had forgotten that ore is solid rock, and that you must break it up to shape a tunnel and retrieve the gold peppered through it.

“About ready to blast again, soon as we can afford the gelignite. Here, you can lend a hand. Load the stone boat.”

Colin in those first hours became a true gold miner, loading the wooden sled with chunks of rock. Opening shell never looked better.

They quit only when Uncle Liam ran out of protrusions to strike with his pick axe. The wall, now flat and featureless, no longer provided an easy target for breaking chunks away. They left the stone boat where it stood and climbed through the steep and constant blackness of a side drift. Suddenly they popped out into a wider tunnel. Uncle Liam turned right and followed the new channel to a wider passage. The enlargement, ceiling-less, penetrated upward, upward, Colin wondered how far. Then Uncle Liam tugged at a rope near the wall.

Clanking and scratching far above told Colin they had returned to the main shaft. Here came the open cage. They stepped in and tugged the rope. The cage jerked roughly and they were on their way up. Ragged, rocky walls brushed past close on all sides, sometimes nudging the cage, causing it to lurch. Colin wished it had some sort of enclosing protection. Uncle Liam blew out his light and they continued the ascent in utter darkness.

Minutes later, a white blip overhead widened until it became the bright, open light of the surface. They finally reached it, and Colin rushed gratefully into open air.

He was surprised to see the sun so low. They must have been hours in that timeless gloom. Uncle Aidan was tying a harness made of rope around Colin’s bay mare.

His heart thumped. When he’d volunteered his horse for the below-ground work, he had not yet been below ground. He couldn’t have realized how penetratingly black it was down there
all
the time. Nor was he fully ready to see the horse go down.

Uncle Aidan smiled toward him. “Ah, there he is. What’s her name, lad?”

Colin shrugged. “She really belongs to the dog. We’ll call her Max’s Lady.”

“Of course.” Uncle Aidan looked at him oddly. “Liam, I’ll take care of her below. You get her headed down right and Colin here can handle the reel.” Uncle Aidan ambled over to the cage and let himself down the shaft.

Max. Come to think of it, Colin hadn’t seen Max since they arrived in town. Had the brindled dog given up on his unrequited love?

Then Dizzy was riding toward him in the fading light. He swung down, waving with a grin. He stepped in beside Colin and watched the cage rope descending, and Uncle Liam making the last knots in the mare’s makeshift harness. His grin faded.

Dizzy shook his head. “Col, you definitely don’ wanna do this.”

“Their below-ground horse died today, Diz. It’s just for a week or so until they can buy another one.”

“No, Col. You don’ realize. Once that mare goes down, she ain’ never gonna come back up.”

“Sure she is.” But a seed of doubt buried itself in Colin’s thoughts. Uncle Aidan was blood, after all, his father’s brother. Papa would never deceive or take advantage. Neither would Uncle Aidan. Would he?

Diz watched grimly, despairingly, as Uncle Liam attached the heavy reel rope to the ungainly harness. Then he tied the lead line from the mare’s halter to the rope above her head. The bell clanked. Uncle Liam nodded to Colin. “Run her clockwise.”

Colin walked out to the reel and urged the gray horse into lethargic action. The great reel wound slowly.

The bay mare’s eyes grew wide. They rolled until the whites showed as her front end rose. She pawed the air and shook her head. And now her hind legs left the ground. She pulled them up close to her belly. Suddenly she thrashed mightily, her head flaying from side to side. She swayed back and forth, hung vertically above the open shaft.

The lead line dragged at the mare’s head until her nose pointed straight up. She squealed, terrified, but the sound was choked off by the stretch in her neck.

“Uncle Liam, she’s going to kill herself!”

“S’all right, lad. No worries. Let ’er down.”

Dizzy gasped and Uncle Liam yelled as a gray mass hurtled across the open dirt between reel and shaft. Max took a lunge for Uncle Liam, slamming into him like a cannon-ball. The man staggered back and fell against a roof support. Dizzy was there in a flash, his long-barreled pistol in hand. He kicked Max two feet across the dry dirt and fired his gun in the air. The dog dropped back snarling. Dizzy fired again, and the dog ran off.

“Kill that thing! Kill it!” Uncle Liam was shrieking.

With casual composure, Dizzy helped the man to his feet. “You realize how far a stray bullet travels? Don’ dare fire into town. Too dangerous. Might hit somebody, eh?”

“That was your dog!”

“Naw, tha’s
her
dog.” Dizzy tipped his head toward the struggling mare. “That was Max.”

Uncle Liam stared at him, then Colin, then the mare. Max had ripped Liam’s white shirt sleeve, and the blood on it said he’d ripped his arm, too. “Get her down below,” he snarled.

Colin reversed the gray horse and sent it on its endless circle. Inch by inch the mare’s backside disappeared down the shaft. Colin’s heart ached. He didn’t want this. What if Dizzy was right and she was doomed to darkness forever? What if she destroyed herself on the way down? She thrashed about some more; what if in her struggle she broke her neck? Colin thought about the hundreds of hours he’d spent on her back, about her happy-go-lucky disposition she’d developed on the trail. As she continued her descent below ground level, he ran over to the deck.

Only the whites of her eyes showed in the darkness, then faded. He could hear rocks falling, jarred loose as she flung herself against the sides of the shaft. Now and then a hoof would strike a timber. The big twit was absolutely terrified, and it was Colin’s fault; he’d agreed to all this.

What seemed a long time later, the heavy rope went slack. The bell clanked. Colin stopped the gray horse. For better or worse, the deed was done.

Dizzy still stood in the same place, wagging his head. “Hope you’re right, Col.”

“Me too. How’s Lily doing?”

“Got a job already. Working in a factory that makes cordial. Used to be eight cordial factories in town, they say; now there’s only two. But it’s still the good stuff, I guess. Famous, they say.”

“And you—did you find a job?”

“Plenty of miners around. They don’ need no miners.” Dizzy grinned with twinkling eyes. “What you think, you see the old Diz in an apron?”

“An apron!?”

“Sí! The Perseverance need a cook, and I tell ‘em, ain’ no better cook than me. I made lunch to prove it and got the job.”

“If you’re such a dinkum cook, how come I had to do all the cooking on the track?”

“Me, I’m there already. You needed the practice yet. ’Sides, look how good a cook you are now, after I taught you everything I know!”

Colin punched Dizzy’s arm. All his life he’d heard about the bond of mateship in the outback. He had it now, right here. Dizzy accepted him exactly as he was, and old Diz, the only known Texan in Australia, came as near to perfect as a friend could come.

A thought suddenly robbed him of his pleasure. He sobered. “I suppose you’ll be saving up to head home one of these days.”

“Maybe.” Diz shrugged. “Who knows? Say, Saturday night, eh? Maybe you come around the Exchange, we eat supper together.”

“Sounds good. See you there, Cookie.”

Dizzy chuckled. “You know what they call cooks in the outback, eh? Baitlayers. Tha’s me! Later, Col.” And he walked off to his new job, leaving Colin to this one—a genuine Kalgoorlie miner.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

U
NDESERVING
W
ORM

Hannah gathered the little sheaf of envelopes out of the mailbox on her way in the door. She abandoned her book-bag in the hallway and went off seeking Mum. She would look first in the kitchen because that’s where she most frequently found her.

Grace the cook sat at the kitchen table peeling potatoes while Mum hovered over the oven.

She glanced up and grinned brightly. “There she is! How did school go today?”

Hannah flopped down in the other chair at the table and tossed the mail down. “Not so good.” She leafed absently through the envelopes. Business letters; nothing looked interesting or exciting.

“Oh? And what went crook on you?”

She might as well get it all told and over with. “The water pipes did it again. Mum; you know, like before? Flooded the halls and two of the rooms. We were all wading about to get from place to place. And they say I did it!”

Sam stiffened. “Is that right?”

“No, Mum! Not this time. Nor the other time, either. I would not do something that would cause so much damage. You know that.”

“No, I don’t know that. But I’ll accept your word for it. I suppose the abbess wants to see me in her office tomorrow?”

“No, Mum. I’m suspended.”

Mum stared at her in disbelief. “Isn’t that a bit drastic? What has convinced them so thoroughly that you’re responsible?”

Hannah shrugged. Her eyes burned, and if she didn’t get control of herself, she’d be blubbering in a moment. “When I pro—protested my innocence, the abbess said that if it’s true that I didn’t do this—and she thinks I did—that there are lots of other things I’ve done that I never got caught for, so the punishment is still due. Then I got lecture number three.”

“What is lecture number three?”

“The abbess has three lectures she gives us girls who end up in her office. Number one is for the first time you show up, and she tells you about the folly of sin. The second is if your transgression is more severe; it’s about the evils of a dissipated life. This one was about penance and purgatory. We all have them memorized.”

“Too bad none of them have made an actual dent in your conscience.”

“The abbess and I don’t see sin in the same light, Mum. I think sin is swearing and lying and things like that. She thinks it’s going down the up stairwell.”

Mum was silent, and Hannah turned again to the mail. The last letter on the pile was from Kalgoorlie. “Look, Mum—a letter from Uncle Aidan! We haven’t heard from him in a long time, have we? I mean, not even at Christmas!”

“That’s true. I hope it doesn’t mean bad news.” Mum peeked once more into the oven, then swung it open fully and reached for the hot pads.

“Might I open it, Mum?”

“The pie or the letter?” Mum smiled, reaching into the oven.

Hannah grinned. “Both.”

Mum carried the steaming pie to the table. “The pie waits for dinner. You may open the letter.”

“Lillipilli pie! My favorite! Ta, Mum!” Hannah ripped into the letter.

What scratchy, tortured writing! Hannah would receive a failing mark were she to write a letter like this for class. Obviously, Uncle Aidan considered punctuation an option rather than a necessity. Was she reading this right? “Mum, look!”

Mum sat down at the table. Hannah handed her the letter and peered over her shoulder.

There was a scowl on her face as she read, “Dear Cole you’ll be pleased to know your son is safe here with us however we have fallen on hard times recently with the drop in gold prices and cannot afford an extra mouth for very long we would appreciate a donation from you toward the support of your son he’s welcome of course good to see him sincerely Aidan.” It was a breathless reading without the punctuation.

Hannah looked into her mother’s smokey gray-green eyes and saw there a mix of hope and pain. “He’s safe. Your prayers are still working, right, Mum?”

Samantha gave her daughter a one-armed hug and dropped the letter on the table. “Too right. Your suspension and now this. Your father is going to be livid.”

Hannah flopped back into her chair. “Mum? Colin must be ill or hurt. If he weren’t, he’d work for his keep, surely; Uncle Aidan wouldn’t have to go begging.”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.” The glint of hope in her eyes had fled and Mum suddenly looked very weary.

Hannah studied the pie without really seeing it. She was sure much of Mum’s pain was derived from Hannah herself. Even when she was innocent, she caused Mum pain, and Papa, too. Take the mess at school, for example. If she had actually caused the pipe problem, would she have been the one to report it? Of course not! Apparently, her mistake was to tell the nearest sister the moment she discovered it—or discovering the leak at all.

And now, Papa would surely make a big scene of it. He’d go storming to the school and cause a fuss. At home he’d rant and rave again about Colin’s sneaky streak and stubbornness. That hurt worst of all, for Hannah knew the torture in her brother’s heart, and that it had driven him from home. And now that same pain of alienation was torturing her.

Colin ill? That probability stabbed at her too.

She wandered back to the hallway and hefted her book-bag. She climbed the stairs to her room. By the time she reached the landing at the top she knew what she would do.

But how to do it?

Dinner that night began predictably unpleasant and slid downhill from there. Papa fumed. Mum ate in grim silence. Mary Aileen pushed her food around on her plate as if she were responsible for all the family’s ills. From time to time she’d glance at Papa with a hangdog look of fear and worry. And Edan? Like always, he simply stepped inside himself and closed the door. He sat, he ate, he excused himself, he left. No comment, no spark of life. Papa said he was dull. Hannah knew better. Edan soared, she was quite certain, but never where anyone could see it.