“This is evidently not the Government station upon which we are fallen,” he said. “Tell me, then, is it by chance some lunatic asylum? Or has the impossible things we have encountered in that Country of the Stone Ovens made me myself insane?”
“I reckon we’ve hit on the Kilori goldfield,” I said. “That comes of having no compass and being chased all over the shop without a chance to see where you are going. We must be twenty miles further down towards the coast than I thought, and a good bit to the westward. It’s as good as the Government station, Marky. There’s a store here, and we’re in known country now all the way.”
“We are arrived somewhere, if it is store or station or asylum of lunatics—I don’t care me,” said the Marquis. His face was neither fat nor pink in these strenuous days; it was yellow with starvation and hardship, and there were lines from his ears to his neck. His clothes were a mass of rags and exceedingly dirty; his boots nearly worn out. You would never have known him for the spruce, smart gentleman of France who had lounged about the coral walks of Samarai only a week or two ago. But in that week or two we had been through adventures before which all the troubles previously brought upon us by the Sorcerer’s Stone seemed as nothing at all. 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. We had been captured by cannibals and nearly eaten by them; had been imprisoned on the edge of an apparently trackless gulf and asked for the great diamond, no less, as the price of the secret that would show us the way down; had got away and struggled through the trackless wilds below, racing desperately to find the Government station before we should succumb to hunger or exposure—and at the last had found, apparently, not the Government station, but the Kilori goldfield.
I would rather have found the station, in spite of the fact that the field was nearer to the coast and had more supplies for us to draw upon. 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 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. You can leave your claim in charge of a mate, to be worked for you, and go off to Australia for six months, confident that when you return, every weight that has been mined out of your property will be fairly handed over to you. 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 every mixed element, as is the goldfields crowd all the world over. In Papua, rich discoveries are very soon worked out, as a rule, and the riff-raff 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. But the process takes some time, and I knew that the backward stream from the Kilori field was hardly yet in flood.
It seemed to me, therefore, that we could hardly have struck upon a worse place to stay at. But stay we must, till we were fed, clothed and sufficiently recruited in strength to go on again.
I said something of this to the Marquis, and he said that there was no use crying over a bridge till you came to it, and, for his part, what he wanted was “some many tins of meat and a jeremiad of champagne.”
“Well, the sooner we get into the store, the sooner you’re likely to be gratified,” I said. 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.”
He had not long to wait. We were inside the store in a few seconds, and there before us there appeared what was surely the oddest scene that even Papua, the country of oddities, had produced for many a year.