"Noodles."
"He's never brought me any stone."
"Trades it with the storekeepers—though the boys do say"—Michael looked with smiling eyes after Snow-Shoes—"he may be a bit of a miser, loves opal more than the money it brings."
Armitage's interest deepened. "There are chaps like that. I've heard the old man talk about a stone getting hold of a man sometimes—mesmerising him. I believe the old man's a bit like that himself, you know. There are two or three pieces of opal he's got from Fallen Star nothing on earth will induce him to part with. We wanted a stone for an Indian nabob's show tiara—something of that sort—not long ago. I fancied that big knobby we got from George Woods; do you remember? But the old man wouldn't part with it; not he! Said he'd see all the nabobs in the world in—Hades, before they got that opal out of him!"
Michael laughed. The thought of hard-shelled old Dawe Armitage hoarding opals tickled him immensely.
"Fact," Armitage continued. "He's got a couple of stones he's like a kid over—takes them out, rubs them, and plays with them. And you should hear him if I try to get them from him.... A packet of crackers isn't in it with the old man."
"The boys'd like to hear that," Michael said.
"There's no doubt about the fascination the stuff exercises," John Armitage went on. "You people say, once an opal-miner, always an opal-miner; but I say, once an opal-buyer, always an opal-buyer. I wasn't keen about this business when I came into it ... but it's got me all right. I can't see myself coming to this God-forsaken part of the world of yours for anything but black opal...."
That expression, whimsical and enigmatic, which was never very far from them, had grown in Michael's eyes. He began to sense a motive in Armitage's seemingly casual talk, and to understand why the opal-buyer was so friendly.
"The old man tells a story," Armitage continued, "of that robbery up at Blue Pigeon. You know the yarn I mean ... about sticking up a coach when there was a good parcel of opal on board. Somebody did the bush-ranging trick and got away with the opal.... The thief was caught, and the stuff put for safety in an iron safe at the post office. And sight of the opals corrupted one of the men in the post office.... He was caught ... and then a mounted trooper took charge of them. And the stuff bewitched him, too.... He tried to get away with it...."