There was only one man inside the hut, and that was the proprietor, Abe Durton himself, or “Bones,” as he had been christened with the rude heraldry of the camp. He was sitting in front of the great wood fire, gazing moodily into its glowing depths, and occasionally giving a fagot a kick of remonstrance when it showed any indication of dying into a smoulder. His fair Saxon face, with its bold simple eyes and crisp yellow beard, stood out sharp and clear against the darkness as the flickering light played over it. It was a manly, resolute countenance, and yet the physiognomist might have detected something in the lines of the mouth which showed a weakness somewhere, an indecision which contrasted strangely with his herculean shoulders and massive limbs. Abe’s was one of those trusting, simple natures which are as easy to lead as they are impossible to drive; and it was this happy pliability of disposition which made him at once the butt and the favorite of the dwellers in the Sluice. Badinage in that primitive settlement was of a somewhat ponderous character, yet no amount of chaff had ever brought a dark look on Bones’s face, or an unkind thought into his honest heart. It was only when his aristocratic partner was, as he thought, being put upon, that an ominous tightness about his lower lip and an angry light in his blue eyes, caused even the most irrepressible humorist in the colony to nip his favorite joke in the bud, in order to diverge into an earnest and all-absorbing dissertation upon the state of the weather.
“The Boss is late to-night,” he muttered, as he rose from his chair, and stretched himself in a colossal yawn. “My stars, how it does rain and blow! Don’t it, Blinky?” Blinky was a demure and meditative owl, whose comfort and welfare was a chronic subject of solicitude to its master, and who at present contemplated him gravely from one of the rafters. “Pity you can’t speak, Blinky,” continued Abe, glancing up at his feathered companion. “There’s a powerful deal of sense in your face. Kinder melancholy too. Crossed in love, maybe, when you was young. Talkin’ of love,” he added, “I’ve not seen Susan to-day;” and lighting the candle which stood in a black bottle upon the table, he walked across the room and peered earnestly at one of the many pictures from stray illustrated papers, which had been cut out by the occupants and posted up upon the walls.
The particular picture which attracted him was one which represented a very tawdrily dressed actress simpering over a bouquet at an imaginary audience. This sketch had, for some inscrutable reason, made a deep impression upon the susceptible heart of the miner. He had invested the young lady with a human interest by solemnly, and without the slightest warrant, christening her as Susan Banks, and had then installed her as his standard of female beauty.
“You see my Susan,” he would say, when some wanderer from Buckhurst, or even from Melbourne, would describe some fair Circe whom he had left behind him. “There ain’t a girl like my Sue. If ever you go to the old country again, just you ask to see her. Susan Banks is her name, and I’ve got her picture up at the shanty.”
Abe was still gazing at his charmer, when the rough door was flung open, and a blinding cloud of sleet and rain came driving into the cabin, almost obscuring for the moment a young man who sprang in and proceeded to bar the entrance behind him, an operation which the force of the wind rendered no easy matter. He might have passed for the genius of the storm, with the water dripping from his long hair and running down his pale, refined face.
“Well,” he said, in a slightly peevish voice, “haven’t you got any supper?”
“Waiting and ready,” said his companion cheerily, pointing to a large pot which bubbled by the side of the fire. “You seem sort of damp.”
“Damp be hanged! I’m soaked, man, thoroughly saturated. It’s a night that I wouldn’t have a dog out, at least not a dog that I had any respect for. Hand over that dry coat from the peg.”
Jack Morgan, or Boss, as he was usually called, belonged to a type which was commoner in the mines during the flush times of the first great rush than would be supposed. He was a man of good blood, liberally educated, and a graduate of an English university. Boss should, in the natural course of things, have been an energetic curate, or struggling professional man, had not some latent traits cropped out in his character, inherited possibly from old Sir Henry Morgan, who had founded the family with Spanish pieces of eight gallantly won upon the high seas. It was this wild strain of blood no doubt which had caused him to drop from the bedroom window of the ivy-clad English parsonage, and leave home and friends behind him to try his luck with pick and shovel in the Australian fields. In spite of his effeminate face and dainty manners, the rough dwellers in Harvey’s Sluice had gradually learned that the little man was possessed of a cool courage and unflinching resolution, which won respect in a community where pluck was looked upon as the highest of human attributes. No one ever knew how it was that Bones and he had become partners; yet partners they were, and the large, simple nature of the stronger man looked with an almost superstitious reverence upon the clear, decisive mind of his companion.
“That’s better,” said the Boss, as he dropped into the vacant chair before the fire and watched Abe laying out the two metal plates, with the horn-handled knives and abnormally pronged forks. “Take your mining boots off, Bones; there’s no use filling the cabin with red clay. Come here and sit down.”