They had come across the Ridge to the back of the huts. The light was failing; the sky, from the earth upwards where the sunset had been, the frail, limpid green of a shallow lagoon, deepening to blue, darker than indigo. The crescent of a moon, faintly gilded, swung in the sky above the dark shapes of the huts which stood by the track to the old Flash-in-the-pan rush. The smoke of sandal-wood fires burning in the huts was in the air. A goat bell tinkled....
Potch and Sophie were talking behind the hut somewhere; their exclamations, laughter, a phrase or two of the song Sophie was singing went through the quietness.
And it was all this he wanted to change! John Armitage caught the revelation of the moment as he stood to listen to Sophie singing. He understood as he had never done what the Ridge stood for—association of people with the earth, their attachment to the primary needs of life, the joyous flight of youthful spirits, this quiet happiness and peace at evening when the work of the day was done.
As he came from the dumps, having said good-night to Michael, he saw Sophie, a slight, girlish figure, on the track ahead of him. Her dress flickered and flashed through the trees beside the track; it was a wraithlike streak in the twilight. She was taking the milk down to Newton's, and singing to herself as she walked. John Armitage quickened his steps to overtake her.
CHAPTER XII
The visit of an opal-buyer ruffled ever so slightly the still surface of life on the Ridge. When Armitage had gone, he was talked of for a few days; the stones he had bought, the prices he had given for them, were discussed. Some of his sayings, and the stories he had told, were laughed over. Tricks of speech he had used, tried at first half in fun, were adopted and dropped into the vernacular of the mines.
"Sure!" the men said as easily as an American; and sometimes, talking with each other: "You've got another think coming to you"; or, "See, you've got your nerve with you!"
For a night or two Michael went over the books and papers John Armitage had brought him. At first he just glanced here and there through them, and then he began to read systematically, and light glimmered in his windows far into the night. He soaked the contents of two or three reviews and several newspapers before giving himself to a book on international finance in which old Armitage had written his name.
Michael thrilled to the stimulus of the book, the intellectual excitement of the ideas it brought forth. He lived tumultuously within the four bare walls of his room, arguing with himself, the author, the world at large. Wrong and injustice enthroned, he saw in this book describing the complexities of national and international systems of finance, the subtle weaving and interweaving of webs of the money-makers.