"Perhaps not. But you'd be able to see whether he made his!"
That was all Jewson said; that was all Devenish heard. But the words were spoken with so subtle an intonation that the tantalizing prospect held out sounded the most solid satisfaction in the world; and they turned the scale. Captain Devenish's portmanteaux were not even unstrapped; within a few hours he had bag and baggage aboard the pilot's cutter, with Nan's last ironic wishes ringing unkindly in his ears, and the chief steward of the North Foreland, whom the second mate had been instrumental in disrating, at his elbow. The next day but one they passed Denis and his companions on the Ballarat Road, and had pegged out a claim in the palpitating heart of the Gravel Pits before the week was out.
The encounter in the crowded tent was not a solitary experience of the kind in Ralph's case; being a public-school boy, he had not been an hour on the diggings before he recognized an old schoolfellow. It was, indeed, the old schoolfellow who first recognized Ralph Devenish; but that was not Ralph's fault. Nigger Rackham was the very fellow whom his old friends would have expected to find up to the bare neck in wash-dirt, but perhaps the last whom they would have looked for in spruce uniform at the head of a jingling mob of mounted troopers. He came of an old West Indian stock, thickly tinctured with native blood, and had been expelled from school for a hearty, natural blackguard who was only good at games. His present employment suggested extensive reformation, but that impression was soon removed over a bottle of brandy in Rackham's tent, and the pair cracked another in Ralph's on the Saturday night.
"You ought to join us," says Rackham. "Talk of me being out of my element! I'm more in mine than ever you'll be in yours as a licensed miner. You've neither the turn nor the patience, as I remember you; and what do you want with a few extra thousand, which is all you'll make with the luck of the devil?"
"They will come in very useful when I get back to town. You breathe money in the Guards, Nigger."
"But you won't make enough to feel the difference. I know you won't. You're not the sort. Whereas, if you were to join us, I could promise you the best sport on earth, better than fox-hunting, and plenty of it."
"What's that, Nigger?"
"Digger-hunting!" says Rackham, his white teeth gleaming in a grin, his bright eyes brighter than ever in his cups. "You look upset: we won't hunt you; but you want to be one of them, and I want you to be one of us."
"But how and why do you hunt them, Nigger?"
"To see their licenses; half of them don't take a license out; you did, because your man knows the ropes. But of course I wouldn't have let an old chum get into trouble."