“Oh, that,” I said, laughing, as I struggled into my own new clothes—“that was only something Bobby did up on the Yodda, years and years ago. He was always a bit of a crank, and he got it into his head that the storekeeper had cheated him out of seven-and-sixpence over a bag of rice—I don’t believe poor old Whitworth ever thought of such a thing. But, anyhow, Bobby believed he had; and it became what I suppose you’d call an ‘obsession’ with him, to try and get it out of Whitworth somehow or other. And one day, when he was alone in the store, he nipped up a seven-and-sixpenny little alarm clock—Bobby wouldn’t have stolen to save his life, but he reckoned that Whitworth owed him that—and put it away in his clothes. And just then a missionary turned up, visiting the goldfields, and nothing would do him—being Sunday—but he must hold a service and pray for those terrible villains, the miners of the Yodda. Well, they started the service right away, in Whitworth’s store, and poor old Bobby was let in for it and couldn’t get out. And they all heard the clock ticking, but they couldn’t make out where it was, till right in the middle of the missionary’s longest prayer, off with a buzz and a rattle went the clock, from somewhere about Bobby’s left trousers-leg. The missionary reckoned they’d done it on purpose, and he just shut up his book with a bang and walked out, and Bobby, who was terribly distressed, ran after him, shouting, ‘Mr. Parson—Mr. Parson—I beg your pardon! I beg your pardon!’ and all the time the clock yelling away down his leg. The miners were yelling too; some of them were almost rolling on the floor. We none of us meant to be rude to the missionary, but it broke him up altogether; he went right off that night, and we never had the finish of the meeting. Bobby-the-Clock kept the clock, and used it to waken himself in the mornings; he was always a sleepy beggar. And now he’s gone where he won’t want clocks to waken him any more.”
I fastened my last button and buckled my belt. It was not supper-time yet, and we had already fed, so we were not impatient. We sat down on the canvas beds that had been allotted to us and looked about. The “dormitory” was a rudely built shed, used for storing goods, and open on one side; among the bags and boxes were scattered bush-made stretchers, covered with sacks. All around the little clearing on the flat, the great, menacing, unknown forest stretched its hands; it made me think of people crowding and shouldering round about an accident. And to complete the parallel, the atmosphere was so still and confined that one longed to cry out, “Back—stand back and give us air!”
The stars that had been above our heads so many nights were before us now all down the open side of the shed—the unforgettable stars of Papua glowing like tiny moons in the velvet-violet dark. I sat and looked and smoked and thought the “long, long thoughts” of the man who lives in lonely places.... Many and many a year they had been my roof, those holding, haunting stars; they had me fast; they would not let me go. They were more faithful to me than wife or child could be; they had been my friends when friends had failed; they had told me things beyond the tongue of men and angels. Tonight, they looked down upon the grave of poor, harmless, mind-bewildered Bobby-the-Clock; how soon, I wondered, and where, would they look down upon mine....
Diamond or no diamond, it came to me then that the stars and the bush and cruel, beautiful Papua, had got me for good. A man may make a fortune ten times over; but if he is not made of the clay that sticks to gold when it touches it, he will come back where he belongs in the end.
We slept that night as sound as Bobby-the-Clock himself, in his forest bed a dozen yards away. With the morning came reaction from our excitement of arriving; we were both dead tired and could do nothing but saunter and lie about. It was a hard week’s tramp to the coast, over ugly country; I foresaw that we should have to put in some days of resting before we could face it. Carriers, too, would have to be found somehow or other—if necessary, borrowed from among the boys employed by the various miners. The delay was unpleasant to me, knowing what risks we ran, but I did not see what else we could do.
There were many more men about the store today; 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 payable 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. They and another score or two who had found a little gold, were drunk together as long and as often as Burchell would let them; they hung about other men’s camps after dark; they had been accused of shooting natives who were friendly to us and thereby laying up trouble for the whole camp—they were, in fine, a danger and a nuisance to the field and every one of the decent, quiet old hands would have been exceedingly glad to see them cleared out.
Neither the Marquis nor myself liked this company, so we kept away from the neighborhood of the store and spent the greater part of the morning bathing with my old mate Hubbard in a safe, shallow part of the Kiloki River. At least, the place was safe if you didn’t go into it one by one, and if you kept a good lookout for alligators while you were in. That was as much as we wanted. You would not have thought that such a simple matter as a bath in the Kiloki River could seriously affect any one’s fortunes. But—as events afterwards turned out—the Sorcerer’s Stone was never put into quite so much danger as it was by our lazy hour or two in the water that morning.
What brought us out at last was an incident not at all uncommon in the interior of Papua, but none the less unpleasant—the sudden plunging of a long blackwood spear, liberally barbed, into the sand right among us. We had none of us seen it coming, but there it was, quivering with the impetus of its flight, and showing plainly, by the depth to which it had buried itself, that it had been thrown with force sufficient to drive it right through any one it might have hit. And as the opposite bank was not at all far away, and as none of us had brought a gun, we thought it best to clear out for the store as rapidly as we could. There was a regular scramble after our clothes, which had all fallen in a heap; but we were dressed before you could say “one, two, three, go!” and away after our arms in about two seconds more.
Of course, nothing showed up when we fired into the bush; but we sent a few bullets smashing into the close-knit lianas and orchids, just as an expression of opinion. Hubbard wanted to go back and finish our bath then, and I would not have cared; the Marquis, however, told us we were “ostentatious brigands,” and that, for his faith, he had had enough. So we returned to the store.