He knew that she would not follow him into the darkness: she did not, but he heard her break into a wild crying of tears and lamentation. The last that he saw of her was the grey of her sacking and the pallor of her face, standing looking after him while she lifted up her voice and wept.
Perhaps three-quarters of an hour after leaving Rose of the South, when it was (as he judged) a little after two in the morning, Sard saw in front of him the sheds of “the siding beside the jetty.” Sard could see no horses, but there was an engine on the line with steam up; a glow was on the smoke coming from its funnel; a glare from its fire made the stoker and driver ruddy with light. The engine was headed inland with a load of trucks coupled to it. Men were moving about between the quay and the trucks, either loading or unloading something heavy.
At any other time he might have wondered why men were shipping copper-ore at midnight during a norther, though indeed the jetty was screened from the wind by the high land beyond it. He had no suspicion of these men. He was perhaps stupid from poison and fatigue; he thought that he had reached his rest.
One of the workers came away from the trucks to get a drink at a scuttle-butt. Sard heard the chain of the dipper clink, and the water splash. Then the man spat and went slowly back to work, singing in a little low clear voice the song about the rattlesnake.
“There was a nice young man,
He lived upon a hill;
A very nice young man,
I knew him we-e-ell.
To-me-rattle-to-me-roo-rah-ree.”
Sard drew nearer, to look for Miguel and the horses. He came down on to a loop-line, crossed it, and passed between sheds and shacks, some piles of pit props, fuel blocks and drums of wire rope, on to the pier-head. A naphtha-flare was burning there to give light to a gang of men who were handing cases from a launch, which lay below the level of the jetty, to the trucks coupled up to the engine. Even then, Sard did not see at once what company he had come among. One of the men, who had been watching his advance, whistled. A man, who seemed to be in authority, moved up swiftly and rather threateningly on the right: two other men came up from the left: the work of the gang stopped. The men put down the cases which they were carrying and faced Sard in a pointed manner. Most of them had been humming or singing to themselves as they worked, but their singing stopped on the instant. More than this, a voice in the launch asked: