Sand on the Gumshoe: a century of Australian crime writing

Billy Pagan’s whisper came to me, ‘Talk – laugh – so they can go away again.’

I took the cue.

‘Hang this pipe… It’s foul. Got your knife, Billy?’

‘No,’ replied he as loudly. ‘There’s saltbush growing near you – get a twig.’

He continued talking advice as to pipe cleaning while I turned over to pluck the saltbush, and I heard the quartz splinter crepitate as if its broken edges were relieved of weight. I looked up and the two shadows had vanished.

The midnight winds sprang up and ruffled the plain; the night showed fever stars and darker than usual.

‘What’s their game, Billy?’

‘S-s-sh – no more talking tonight… It’s risky.’

There were sounds as of shovels being moved from the ground behind the camp. Then the noise of retreating footsteps.

‘But what are they doing?’

‘They’re going to the shaft. It’s none of our business, though.’

‘What shall we do then?’

‘S-s-sh. When in doubt, keep quiet – go to sleep.’

He rolled over, his face set from the dawn. In a few minutes his deep and regular breathing told me that he had followed his own advice. For myself, I was too excited by the mystery I felt afoot, and by turns dozed and awakened to every sound from the camp, the shaft and the plain.

Morning showed us the great outcrop of quartz that had been grey mystery in the starlight, a white crystalline mountain glaring and eye-wearing in the sun. In the centre it had weathered to fragments that strewed the plain – rising again in towers and pi

‘H’m,’ said Billy Pagan, chipping a boulder as if with his prospecting hammer – hungry as a swamper.’

Swainger interpolated hastily, ‘She’s not all brick quartz like this. She’s better below – and she’ll get richer with depth.’

‘H’m,’ said Billy, as Swainger and the sullen Hercules walked before us to the shaft. ‘Same old lie, Harry – the stone will get richer with depth. Will it? I’ve never known a reef that did – it’s always the other way.’ We reached the shaft, and the engineer, addressing Swainger, said, ‘What’s the depth?’

‘Two hundred and twenty; we’ve opened out and driven at the hundred and the two hundred. I suppose you like to do the sampling alone?’

‘Yes, my friend and myself will go.’

‘Right you are – we’ll lower you then’. As he spoke he looped and knotted the end of the windlass rope as a foothole.

‘No thanks. We’ll go down the ladders. Will you lower the sample bags, Harry, after I’ve got down? There’s a co

‘Yes, there’s a winze through and ladders in it.’

‘Right. Is your friend here’ – he indicated the sullen Hercules – ‘the leaseholder?’

‘I’m one of ‘em, mister,’ replied Hercules, answering for himself, and truculently, as if he expected opposition and wanted to anticipate it.

Swainger silenced him with a look.

‘And you, Mr Swainger?’ pursued Pagan imperturbably, as if he had neither heard nor seen the truculence nor its correction.

‘I’ve got the option,’ replied Swainger, flushing uneasily.

‘And who has given the option to my people?’

‘Coakley -’

‘He’s in London, I think?’

‘Ye-e-es – he’s in London.’

‘H’m… Lower away when I call, Harry.’

I sat in the hundred foot level, looking at a glistening mass of quartz. Billy Pagan’s candle burned steadily in its spider-socket driven into the soft slate of the reef-enclosing rock. I held my candle in my hand and the tallow guttered to my fingers.

He had spread a long sampling sheet of canvas on the floor of the drive and drove the pick at random into the quartz that stood up well, although it was shattered in all directions.

We had sampled the drive in sections of ten feet, had then roughly quartered each sample, packed it in its bag – numbered for identification – and sealed it.

When he had finished every section of the level Billy walked back into one of the crosscuts and measured the width of the lode.

'She's a beauty for size,' he said. 'Thirty feet if it's an inch… Let's go down the winze… Wait a minute. What about a sample from the floor?'

'But you didn't knock it down. All you knocked down fell on the sapling sheet.'

'Never mind that. We'll see what it's worth.' He scraped away half an inch of the surface and smiled as he saw moisture in the debris below.

‘Who would have expected water? Eh! hold the bag, Harry. That’ll do… Now to No. 2.’

I climbed down the hundred feet of crazy Jacob’s ladder and Billy Pagan lowered the tools and sample bags, threw down the sampling sheet, and followed slowly – holding the candle to the white walls around him, sca

‘Won’t you sample the winze?’

‘Yes,’ he said loudly – and then whispered, ‘S-s-sh, this place carries sound like a railway tu

‘But it’s the same stone as in the level.’

‘S-s-sh – what if it is? We’ll sample number two now, and then we’ll get away.’

The reef at the lower level showed the same characteristics as the upper stone, but with fewer of the laminated veinings that had distinguished the reef at shallower depths. He sampled it quickly, and then he took a sample of the floor, which the sampling sheet had hidden, bagged it and sealed the bag, enclosed the samples in two gu

‘I’ll climb quickly and lower the rope for the samples. Don’t take your eyes off the bags, Harry – not for a moment.’

‘Why – there’s no one here?’

‘There’s always somebody everywhere… keep one eye on each bag. I won’t be long.’

He climbed out of the circle of candlelight and into the half gloom of the shaft.

I looked at the bags as he had bidden, but the eye wearied of them, and I must have been looking at the candleflame for some minutes when I was conscious of the nearness of a man. There is a sensation something approaching horror at the sudden consciousness of the espionage of an enemy; and at the moment I must confess I was at least disagreeably startled.

I turned swiftly, and there, in the entrance to the drive, stood the sullen Hercules – his black beard and piercing eyes more commandingly sinister than usual, his left foot arrested suddenly in the act of taking another step towards me.

‘Hallo!’ said I, astounded at finding him behind me. ‘How did you get here?’

‘Same way as you. Down the ladders to the hundred foot and then down the winze, and along this level.’

‘But in the dark?’ For I saw he had no candle.

‘Yes. I know every stone in this show… You finished sampling pretty slick.’

I did not immediately reply – I felt a new dislike to him. This man who went wandering through a mine and down crazy Jacob’s ladders in the dark and then showed that he wished me to believe that he had taken the risks carelessly, motivelessly and merely to pass the time, was not at all to my taste or understanding.

‘You got through the sampling in quick time,’ he said again.

‘Yes,’ I replied, then, ‘Mr Pagan is a quick worker.’

‘It isn’t fair to a mine to jump through it like that,’ he replied, plainly showing that the rapid sampling had not been anticipated by him and had disarranged his plans.

‘Mr Pagan doesn’t scamp his work,’ I replied with some warmth.

‘More haste – less speed, I think,’ he said doggedly, and then his eye suddenly flamed as he saw the sampling sheet folded up, with all Billy Pagan’s fi