The Black Opal

by Katharine Susannah Prichard

"That's right," Michael murmured serenely.

Armitage eyed him keenly. He could scarcely believe the story he had got from Jun, that the second parcel of stones had been exchanged after Charley got them, or that they had been changed on Paul before Charley got them from him.

Michael guessed Armitage was sounding him by talking so much of Rouminof's stones and the robbery. He wondered what Armitage knew—whether he knew anything which would attach him, Michael, to knowledge of what had become of Paul's stones. There was always the chance that Charley had recognised some of the opal in the parcel substituted for Paul's, although none of the scraps were significant enough to be remembered, Michael thought, and Charley was never keen enough to have taken any notice of the sun-flash and fragments of coloured potch they had taken out of the mine during the year. The brown knobby, which Michael had kept for something of a sentimental reason, because it was the first stone he had found on Fallen Star, Charley had never seen.

But, probably, he remarked to himself, Armitage was only trying to get information from him because he thought that Michael Brady was the most likely man on the Ridge to know what had become of the stones, or to guess what might have become of them.

As they walked and talked, these thoughts were an undercurrent in Michael's mind. And the undercurrent of John Lincoln Armitage's mind, through all his amiable and seemingly inconsequential gossip, was not whether Michael had taken the stones, but why he had, and what had become of them.

Armitage could not, at first, bring himself to credit the half-formed suspicion which that quiver of Michael's face, when he had spoken of what Jun said, had given him. Yet they were all more or less mad, people who dealt with opal, he believed. It might not be for the sake of profit Michael had taken the stones, if he had taken them—there was still a shadow of doubt in his mind. John Armitage knew that any man on the Ridge would have knocked him down for harbouring such a thought. Michael was the little father, the knight without fear and without a stain, of the Ridge. He reflected that Michael had never brought him much stone. His father had often talked of Michael Brady and the way he had stuck to gouging opal with precious little luck for many years. The parcel he had sold that day was perhaps the best Michael had traded with Armitage and Son for a long time. John Armitage wondered if any man could work so long without having found good stuff, without having realised the hopes which had materialised for so many other men of the Ridge.

They went over the new rush, inspected "prospects," and yarned with Pony-Fence Inglewood and Bully Bryant, who had pegged out a claim there. But as Armitage and he walked back to the town discussing the outlook of the new field and the colour and potch some of the men already had to show, Michael found himself in the undertow of an uneasy imagination. He protested to himself that he was unnecessarily apprehensive, that all Armitage was trying to get from him was any information which would throw light on the disappearance of Paul's stones. And Armitage was wondering whether Michael might not be an opal miser—whether the mysterious fires of black opal might not have eaten into his brain as they had into the brains of good men before him.

If they had, and if he had found the flaw in Michael's armour, John Armitage realised that the way to fulfilment of his schemes for buying the mines and working them on up-to-date lines, was opened up. If Michael could be proved unfaithful to the law and ideals of Ridge, John Armitage believed the men's faith in the fabric of their common life would fall to pieces. He envisaged the eating of moths of doubt and disappointment into the philosophy of the Ridge, the disintegration of ideas which had held the men together, and made them stand together in matters of common interest and service, as one man. He had almost assured himself that if Michael was not the thief and hoarder of the lost opals, he at least knew something of them, when a ripple of laughter and gust of singing were flung into the air not far from them.

To Armitage it was as though some blithe spirit was mocking the discovery he thought he had made, and the fruition it promised those secret hopes of his.

"It's Sophie," Michael said.