Ailleen, meaning only to sign to Tony not to speak again, waved her hand towards him as she bent over Mrs. Dickson. He, hearing the blind woman's words, accepted the sign as a request to go, and, with anger again rising in his breast, he turned away, caught and mounted his horse, and, without a word or a glance, galloped from the station.
CHAPTER X.
THE RACE FOR GOLD.
A land may be bare and barren, uninhabitable and desolate; the cold winds of the snow-borne North may blow across it, and freeze it into ice-bound sterility; or the blazing fury of the tropic sun may pour down upon it, and scorch it into a dreary waste of glaring, burning sand; but if there is gold in it, and if man comes to know that the gold is in it, desolation, frozen sterility, or scorching waste, are alike doomed for conquest. The gold may lie in the sand; the gold may be held under the ice, or be hidden away in massive tiers of rock hard enough and big enough to defy the wear and tear of time through countless ages; but when man comes—man who knows and understands the needs and uses of humanity—the gold will be wrested from whatever holds it, and carried away in pride and glory to the greatest centres of population to grace still further the triumphs of mankind over the grim tyrannies of Nature.
A good many men may suffer in the process. The cold, or the heat, or the lurking fever germ, will own many a victim before they own defeat, and even amongst the men themselves—the men who should be united as in the face of a common enemy—there will be the wherewithal and the impulse to swell the price paid for the hard-won fruits of victory. And so it was at Birralong.
The find of gold on Ripple Creek (as the stream was named where Gleeson unconsciously led the Boulder Creekers to wealth) brought many a change among the men who found it.
For the first few weeks after the discovery each man was too busy winning as much as he could in the least possible time to notice very much what was going on around him. The banks of the creek were pretty well lined with men, and all the men were working wherever the layer of sandy gravel was found under the scanty topping of turf. Higher up the stream the turf lay upon rock, and lower down the stream there was no gravel at all to be found. Only was there the one area, fortunately large enough to give all the men from Boulder Creek working room, over which the sandy gravel occurred, as though at some time in the remote, bygone days a small lake had been formed in the course of the stream, into which the water from higher up had carried down and spread out the gold-bearing drift, until the basin was filled up, and the lake disappeared, as the stream flowed on its way uninterrupted and undetained. As it was, the drift was very evenly enriched by the gold, and each man, as he worked, was happy in his own surroundings, and so did not bother about those of his neighbours. Only when each one began to reach the limits of his claim, and away down the creek the water was re-depositing the rejected sand and gravel from which the gold had been washed, did any one have time to look around him. Then it was seen that the population along the creek was the population of the dirt-holes of Boulder Creek—the teeming thousands whom each one expected had arrived long since, as foretold by Gleeson, were not to be seen. It was curious, for every one had gold enough to keep them for a year with care, and they had no doubt that the drift they had been working in, and had worked out, was to be found anywhere for the looking. But they did not look. Each man had his own fancy to follow, and with money, or its equivalent, the following was easy.