Beatrice Grimshaw

“ I broke through the last of the bush—there was no doubt a track somewhere in the neighborhood, but in the growing dark we had somehow or other missed it—and led the way across the clearing. Meantime, inside the store, the ribald song went on, and the miners, seated round with solemn faces, listened as if at church.
“I am intrigued to find out the meaning of this, my Flint,” breathed the Marquis down the back of my neck. “It is so blessed queer.” ”

“ You can leave your “chamois” of gold knocking about the store for a week, if you choose to be so careless, and know that not a grain of its contents will be missing when you wake up to its existence again. The men who have stood the brunt of the fearful hardships and taken the atrocious risks that were, and are, the price of finding gold in New Guinea, are not the kind to play a fellow miner dishonest tricks. ”

“ But the Kilori was another affair. It was a field that had never produced very much until a rich find was made, a few months before our arrival. The find, of course, attracted the usual “rush” from Australia, a crowd made up of very mixed elements, as is the goldfields crowd all the world over. In Papua rich discoveries are very soon worked out, as a rule, and the riffraff attracted by the gold—larrikins and sharps, parasites and wasters of every kind—sorts itself out from the men who are of any use, and drifts back to the continent of Australia, where there is more room for its kind. ”

“ We had been shipwrecked, and marooned on a foodless, uninhabited shore, a hundred miles from anywhere, along an inaccessible coast. We had wandered starving, houseless, and guideless, about an unexplored tract of country only fit for birds or monkeys to travel. ”

“ Meantime, the hairy man was handling the diamond, weighing, turning, and squinting at it. He abandoned it in a minute or two, at the request of another tough-looking customer at the other end of the bar, who called out, “Throw it over!” and the hairy man threw. After that, it was chucked about from hand to hand like a cricket-ball among the men, most of whom were half or more than half drunk by this time—pausing occasionally in its wild flight, as one or another kept it to take another look.... ”

“ In an ordinary way, I would sooner have trusted myself on a New Guinea goldfield with a priceless diamond on my person, than in a civilized city. The old hands among the miners of Papua are, I suppose, about the most honest people in the world. ”

“ You have the ingenious soul, the spiritual mind—you are what they call a bully-boy! Look, if that heap of misfortunates had found out, we would have had a sudden death hanging on the end of every minute till we get back!”
“Not so bad as that, perhaps,” I said. “Still, we're well out of it. I wasn't afraid of the old New Guinea lot: in the first place, they mostly wouldn't know a double brilliant-cut Cullinan if they found it in their soup—they're gold-diggers, and no more—and in the second place, they wouldn't have turned dog on us, at least none of them that I know. ”

“ The Marquis looked all round, and then replied, in a cautious half-whisper: “Flint, God-of-my-Gods, he has engraved all the glass!”
“Who has engraved what glass? Are you crazy?” I asked. “Did you get that soda-water? This place is fairly soaking in whisky—seems it's you now.”
“You mistake yourself—I am not drunk. It is that red-eyed man I talk of. Last night, when he walk about behind the bar with that stone, he has cut all the glass with it.”
“Burchell says he never remembers anything next day,” I said, not seeing the full force of what had happened. ”

“ There were many more men about the store to-day, a much rougher-looking lot than the friends of the late Bobby-the-Clock. A dozen or so of them—bad lots from odd corners of the commonwealth, who had failed in finding pay gold—seemed to be merely loafing about, living on the storekeeper, and waiting until the long-suffering government of Papua should be driven into conveying them back to Australia at its own cost. ”

“ He seized a bottle of whisky in each hand, and slung the two half across the clearing.
“Oh, my Lord! Oh, my Lord!” the storekeeper kept saying. “Who's to pay for this?”
“Stop him!” yelled the miners, as they saw the whisky begin to go.
The Marquis shot me a glance as he swung his pick above a cask of beer, and I will swear there was a wink in it. By this time, all the incriminating glass was gone.
The murder of a man, I think, would have been looked upon more calmly than the murder of a cask of beer, up here on the Kilori goldfield, a long week from the coast. ”

“ Then the storekeeper, an elderly man will a wooden face, who looked as if he had seen so many surprising things that nothing on earth could by any possibility surprise him again, took the black cloth off the gramophone, removed the flowers, and lifted the instrument to put it away on a shelf.
“Hold on!” said one of the miners, stretching out his glass of beer. “We'll give the poor beggar a last drink.” He poured his beer into the gramophone, the others looking on quite seriously. ”

“ The store, rough as it was, provided sufficient for our needs; we took the plain shirts and trousers over to the men's sleeping-place, washed, dressed, and made ourselves decent again.
“Marky, you look like a miner now,” I said.
“A cat may look like a king,” said the Marquis, “but a king in gloves catches no mice. I fear I should not make myself much wealth, even in these uniforms of the field, with the pick and plate of Mr. Bobby-the-Clock. And, by the road, Flint, what is the signifying of that singular name?” ”

“ I said. “Which of us is going to do it?”
“My friend, it is I who make this sacrifice,” said the Marquis solemnly. “1 haven't no doubt that you could get intoxicated if I asked you in the name of friendship——”
“Oh, yes, I think I could manage that much,” I said. “Though I'm not a drinking man. Marky, and never have been.”
“But I do not ask. Because, you see, Flint, you are brave, but you are not artist. Now me, I am both the two. I can act—name of a little good man, but I can act! You have seen me, in the dance—if I had not been noble, I had been the most celebrate actor in Europe.” ”

“ And see, if you were to do this thing, you would not do it as an artist: you would quite simply get drunk, and perhaps, in the strong man's rage, you should kill some one, but you should not keep the head cool to destroy this evidence here. ”