Denis Dent: A Novel

by E. W. Hornung

It must be a nugget—it must—it must—and if a nugget then the largest found on Ballarat for a twelvemonth.

It might even rival the two giant nuggets, worth thousands apiece, got from Canadian Gully at the beginning of the previous year; the nuggets of which Doherty had spoken after the wreck; the nuggets which first inflamed them both!

With fingers and knife he scraped down to it, then felt it with his fingers, then scraped it with his knife; and the point of the knife, held close to the candle, showed a filament of virgin gold upon the steel.

Denis closed his eyes and breathed thanksgiving; then to the handle of the pick once more, to prize the great mass loose in its gravelly bed. A shower from the roof at once deterred him. There was no guessing the size of a nugget like this. Its incontinent removal might cause such a subsidence as to bury him alive in the moment of his triumph; cautious even then, Denis blew out the light, screwed himself round on his own acrobatic principle, and began a trip to the top for props.

What time was it? Had Doherty returned? Could he trust Jewson to raise him in the bucket? He was looking pathetically far ahead; but there was the mouth of the drive glimmering within a few feet of him, and as yet Denis had not noticed any novelty in the intervening ground.

Now he noticed it; there was a lump of something, and the lump was moving. Then it lay still, but strangely extended. And two glittering little eyes were gazing into his at not more than eighteen inches' range.

Denis knew them on the instant for the eyes of an enormous snake. The tapering tail ran back into the light at the tunnel's mouth, as a river reappears beyond its woods; it was beautifully marked to its gracefully writhing tip; its glossy scales, where the daylight caught them, were as a suit of silver mail. All this Denis noted without taking his eyes from the small malignant pair in the zone of darkness between him and the light. And he thought of everything; that he was stripped to the waist, and utterly unarmed; that he had left his very knife behind him, and why he had taken it out, and what else he was leaving for men to find beyond his body. What a death to die! What an inglorious end! Its bitter and gratuitous irony was a redeeming point rather than an aggravation to a mind already distorted by such a strain in such an hour.

His eyes still gazing into the eyes of death, he thought of the two pioneer prospectors of California who wandered finding nothing until one died by the way; the other had just strength to dig his grave; and in so doing his pick stuck into such a nugget as Denis himself had found, only to lose it with his life. He was not a very egotistical man. Yet it was a certain satisfaction to him to feel that he would pass into history with the other poor devil who changed places with the other nugget.

Whether minutes or only moments flew in such thoughts, Denis never knew; but at last the other eyes rose suddenly, as the serpent arched its neck to spring. Instinctively Denis followed suit, was felled to his face by the roof of the tunnel, and lay stunned as mercifully as beast for slaughter.

Much more mercifully; for the snake recoiled, first in fright, finally in disgust. The snake must kill its own. Denis owed his respite to that law of reptile nature; he seemed dead enough already.