Michael and Mrs. Rouminof had often been seen standing and talking together when she was going home from the New Town with stores, or when Michael was coming in from his hut. He had usually walked back along the road with her, she for the most part, if it was in the evening, with no hat on; he smoking the stubby black pipe that was rarely out of his mouth. There was something in the way Mrs. Rouminof walked beside Michael, in the way her hair blew out in tiny strands curling in the wind and taking stray glints of light, in the way she smiled with a vague underlying sweetness when she looked at Michael; there was something in the way Michael slouched and smoked beside Mrs. Rouminof, too, which made their meeting look more than any mere ordinary talking and walking home together of two people. That was what Mrs. Watty Frost said.
Mrs. Watty believed it was her duty in life to maintain the prejudices of respectable society in Fallen Star township. She had a constitutional respect for authority in whatever form it manifested itself. She stood for washing on Monday, spring-cleaning, keeping herself to herself, and uncompromising hostility to anything in the shape of a new idea which threatened the old order of domesticity on the Ridge. And she let everybody know it. She never went into the one street of the township even at night without a hat on, and wore gloves whenever she walked abroad. A little woman, with a mean, sour face, wrinkled like a walnut, and small, bead-bright eyes, Mrs. Watty was one of those women who are all energy and have no children to absorb their energies. She put all her energy into resentment of the Ridge and the conditions Watty had settled down to so comfortably and happily. She sighed for shops and a suburb of Sydney, and repeatedly told Watty how nice it would be to have a little milk shop near Sydney like her father and mother had had.
But Watty would not hear of the milk shop. He loved the Ridge, and the milk shop was an evergreen bone of contention between him and his wife. The only peace he ever got was when Mrs. Watty went away to Sydney for a holiday, or he went with her, because she would rarely go away without him. She could not be happy without Watty, people said. She had no one to growl to and let off her irritation about things in general at, if he were not there. Watty grew fat, and was always whistling cheerily, nevertheless. Mrs. Watty cooked like an archangel, he said; and, to give her her due, the men admitted that although she had never pretended to approve of the life they led, Mrs. Watty had been a good wife to Watty.
But everybody, even Mrs. Watty, was as pleased as if a little fortune had come to them, when, towards the end of their first week, Michael and his company came on a patch of good stone. Michael struck it, following the lead he had been working for some time, and, although not wonderful in colour or quality, the opal cut out at about ten ounces and brought £3 an ounce. Michael was able to wipe out some of his grocery score, so was Paul, and Potch had money to burn.
Paul was very pleased with himself about it. The men began to call him a mascot and to say he had brought Michael luck, as he had Jun Johnson. There was no saying how the fortunes of the new partnership might flourish, if he stuck to it. Paul, responding to the expressions of goodwill and the inspiration of being on opal, put all his childish and bullocky energy into working with Michael and Potch.
He still told everybody who would listen to him the story of the wonderful stones he had found when he was working with Jun, and how they had been stolen from him. They grew in number, value, and size every time he spoke of them. And he wailed over what he had been going to do, and what selling the stones would have meant to him and to Sophie. But the partnership was working better than anybody had expected, and people began to wonder whether, after all, Michael had done so badly for himself with his brace of dead-beat mates.
CHAPTER VIII
In a few weeks thought of the robbery had ceased greatly to disturb anybody. Michael settled down to working with his new mates, and the Ridge accepted the new partnership as the most natural thing in the world.
Life on the Ridge is usually as still as an inland lake. The settlement is just that, a lake of life, in the country of wide plains stretching westwards for hundreds on hundreds of miles, broken only by shingly ridges to the sea, and eastwards, through pastoral districts, to the coastal ranges, and the seaboard with its busy towns, ports, and cities.