"It gets y'r wind——"
"If it's true," Watty ventured slowly.
"Seems to me it's true all right," Ted said. "Charley took him home last night. I went along with them as far as the turn-off. Paul was a bit on ... and Archie asked me to keep an eye on him.... I was a bit on meself, too ... but Charley came along with us—so I thought he'd be all right.... Charley went off by the coach this morning.... Bill Olsen told me.... And Michael was reck'ning on him goin' to Warria to-day, I know."
"That's right!"
"It'll be hard on Michael!"
Watty's gesture, upward jerk of his chin, and gusty breath, denoted his agreement on that score.
Ted went back to his own claim, and Watty slid down the rope with his next bucket to give his mates the news. It was nearly time to knock off for the midday meal, and before long men from all the claims were standing in groups hearing the story from Rouminof himself, or talking it over together.
Michael had come up from his mine soon after Paul had gone down to him. The men had seen him go off down the track to the New Town, his head bent. They thought they knew why. Michael would feel his mate's dishonour as though it were his own. He would not be able to believe that what Paul said was true. He would want to know from Peter Newton himself if it was a fact that Charley had gone out on the coach with Jun and two girls who had been at the hotel.
Women were scarce on the opal fields, and the two girls who had come a week before to help Mrs. Newton with the work of the hotel had been having the time of their lives. Charley, Jun Johnson, and two or three other men, had been shouting drinks for them from the time of their arrival, and Mrs. Newton had made up her mind to send the girls back to town by the next coach. Jun had appropriated the younger of the two, a bright-eyed girl, and the elder, a full-bosomed, florid woman with straw-coloured hair, had, as the boys said, "taken a fancy to Charley."
Paul had already told his story once or twice when Cash Wilson, George, and Watty, went across to where he was standing, with half a dozen of the men about him. They were listening gravely and smoking over Paul's recital. There had been ratting epidemics on the Ridge; but robbery of a mate by a mate had never occurred before. It struck at the fundamental principle of their life in common. There was no mistaking the grave, rather than indignant view men of the Ridge took of what Charley had done. The Ridge code affirmed simply that "a mate stands by a mate." The men say: "You can't go back on a mate." By those two recognitions they had run their settlement. Far from all the ordinary institutions of law and order, they had lived and worked together without need of them, by appreciation of their relationship to each other as mates and as a fraternity of mates. No one, who had lived under and seemed to accept the principle of mateship, had ever before done as Charley had done.