"But I reck'n he's all right, Potch." George swung his pick again. His blows echoed in the mine as they shattered the hard stone he was working on.
Watty crawled off through a drive he was gouging in.
At midday Michael and Charley had always eaten their lunches in the shelter where George Woods, Watty, and Cash Wilson ate theirs and noodled their opal. They wondered whether Michael would join them this day. He strolled over to the shelter with Potch beside him as Watty and Cash, with a billy of steaming tea on a stick between them, came from the open fire built round with stones, a few yards from the mine.
"Potch and me's mates," Michael explained to George as he sat down and spread out his lunch, his smile whimsical and serene over the information. "But we're lookin' for a third to the company. I reck'n a lot of you chaps' luck is working on three. It's a lucky number, three, they say."
Potch sat down beside him on the outer edge of the shelter's scrap of shade.
"See you get one not afraid to do a bit of work, next time—that's all I say," Watty growled.
The blood oozed slowly over Potch's heavy, quiet face. Nothing more was said of Charley, but the men who saw his face realised that Potch was not the insensible youth they had imagined.
Michael had watched him when they were below ground, and was surprised at the way Potch set about his work. He had taken up his father's gouging pick and spider as if he had been used to take them every day, and he had set to work where Charley had left off. All the morning he hewed at a face of honeycombed sandstone, his face tense with concentration of energy, the sweat glistening on it as though it were oiled under the light of a candle in his spider, stuck in the red earth above him. Michael himself swung his pick in leisurely fashion, crumbled dirt, and knocked off for a smoke now and then.
"Easy does it, Potch," he remarked, watching the boy's steady slogging. "We've got no reason to bust ourselves in this mine."
At four o'clock they put their tools back against the wall and went above ground. Michael fell in with the Crosses, who were noodling two or three good-looking pieces of opal Archie had taken out during the afternoon, and Potch streaked away through the scrub in the direction of the Old Town.