The Palace was half wood, half brick, and extended through several buildings of different vintage. The main entrance was in Hannan Street, in the wooden section, the door to the bar on the left and Reception a dark cubby-hole of a room below the staircase with its balustrade ending in a poor digger’s version of the Statue of Liberty. A tired girl stood at the phone, fanning herself against the overpowering stuffiness, and when at last I managed to catch her eye she shrugged her shoulders helplessly at my request for a bed. The hotel was full. They had men sleeping two and three to a room and it was the same all over town. I left my suitcase with her and fought my way into the bar. Ceiling fans stirred the turgid air without cooling it.
I was tired and hot and dusty. But at least the beer when I got it was cold. I drank it watching the hot animated faces reflected in the mirrors behind the bar. ‘The London price closed at 1061/2.’ Two men talking about Poseidon close beside me, one of them a youngster in a starched white shirt, the other in bush khaki. Between the mirrors were faded prints of old-timers and wagons and camel trains, a pictorial record of the first rush, when it had been gold, not nickel. ‘Newmetals is a better bet — or Tasminex. What about Tasminex?’ The beer had disappeared into me like water into parched earth. I ordered another and asked the barmaid if she knew Chris Culpin. Her tired eyes ranged the smoke-filled bar as she filled my glass again. ‘Chris is over there talking to Smithie.’ She indicated a heavy-built man in a faded shirt with a sweat-grimed hat thrust on the back of his head.
They were at the far end of the bar and when I reached them they were in the middle of an argument. ‘They’ve no business fossicking around the Blackridge.’ Culpin’s voice sounded belligerent. ‘Who told them?’
‘You don’t have to tell those blokes.’ The other was a thin man with a long leathery face and very pale blue eyes. He was swaying slightly, his voice slurred, his long face glistening with sweat. ‘Christ! It was all round the bar here last night.’
‘That bloody Swede — I’ll murder him.’
‘It ain’t all Peterson’s fault, Chris. You send samples to the lab for analysis …’ He stopped there and Culpin turned, both of them suddenly aware of my presence.
‘You want something?’ Small eyes stared at me out of a brick red face, his belly sagging over the broad leather belt that supported his trousers. He hadn’t shaved and the collar of his shirt showed an unwashed line of red dust.
I told him who I was was and he nodded. ‘So you made it.’ There was no welcome in the way he said it.
‘Where’s Kadek?’ I asked.
‘Ferdie’s in Perth.’
The thin man leaned towards me, the pale eyes staring. ‘You from the Old Country?’
I nodded.
‘Geologist?’
‘Mining Consultant.’
‘Consultant, eh?’ He was suddenly angry. ‘You Brits. You’re all over us, and we got Swedes, Wops, Kiwis, even Yugos. Wot the hell they teaching them at the School of Mines? Don’t reckon there’s a real Aussie geologist between here and Dampier.
‘You must be joking, Smithie. There’s my boy Kennie for one. He’s out with a survey party — ’
‘Pegging for himself, I’ll bet. Claim crazy that’s wot they are, the whole lot of ‘em. I seen ‘em come into my office registering claims before they even passed out of the School.’
‘Kennie’s not like that.’
‘No?’ The long sweaty face leaned down, the pale eyes peering under Culpin’s hat. ‘Think you know your own son, eh? I betyer, when he gets back, he’ll throw up his job and be off up there again inside of a week pegging his own claims.’ The thin lips opened, a cackling laugh. ‘Wot d’you expect when he sees his old man flogging a bloody mine that’s bin dead for years — ’
Culpin grabbed his arm. ‘You shut your mouth, Smithie — or by Christ I’ll shut it for you.’
The other man stood there swaying slightly as the threat sank into his fuddled brain. ‘Mum’s the word, eh?’ He smiled thinly.
‘Okay, Chris. But wotchit, feller.’ He leaned forward, a confidential whisper, ‘There’s talk already, an’ if those boys find …’
‘Shut your bloody mouth I said.’ Culpin turned abruptly, jerked his head at me and moved into the crowd, heading for the street. ‘Silly bastard,’ he said as we reached the doorway. ‘He’s drunk, an’ when he’s drunk he’s full of gossip as an ol’ woman.’ Outside the reflection of sun on the white wood buildings was blinding.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘My place. You won’t get a bed anywhere else.’ His voice was sullen, a brooding anger in him. I got my suitcase and followed him across the wide expanse of Hannan Street. He had a battered ute parked in Maritana, and as we drove off, he said, ‘First time I met Smithie he was a mining registrar up north of here. Know how much he’s worth now? Half a million at least. That’s what Poseidon’s done for him. Bought ‘em for under a dollar and now he’s hardly ever sober. Spends most of his time in the bar there.’
We were headed towards Boulder with the tall stacks and workings of the Golden Mile on our left. ‘You don’t want to take any notice of that stupid bastard,’ he went on. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t me who sent those samples in for analyis. It was Rip Fender, one of Pete’s boys, acting for Lone Minerals.’ He gave me a quick sidelong glance. Ferdie says you got a degree.’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay. But you try and muscle in on this deal …’ He was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘I ain’t got no degree, but I know a lot you don’t — I was born out here, see. At Coolgardie.’ He nodded at the wasteland to our left. ‘That’s what killed Coolgardie — they all decamped to the Golden Mile. But my Dad, he stayed on, the bloody old fool. You’d think living in a ghost town would have taught me to keep clear of prospecting. But I got it in the blood, see.’ Again that sideways glance. ‘You known Ferdie long?’
‘I met him four years ago in Spain.’
‘We was kids together.’
He was silent after that. But as we ran into the sprawling town of Boulder he said, ‘I used to stay with an aunt of mine here. There was nine of us and my mother died. That’s how I come to be at the same school as Ferdie. Undersized little runt, but clever as a dingo. He-did the thinking, I did the fighting. In the end he ran his own gang and we found an adit leading into the old abandoned workings of the Perseverance, going down ricketty ladders and crawling through winzes you wouldn’t think a grown miner could cut ore outa. That’s how Ferdie got his first break.’ And he went on to tell me how they’d found a rich pocket of ore, half concealed by the wooden shoring of a slope. They hadn’t dared knock the timbers away, but Kadek had gone down on his own night after night and cleared the pocket out with his father’s mining tools, humping the pay dirt up through the mine in sacks and selling it to the government stamping mill at Ora Banda. ‘The dirty crooked little bastard!’ It was said without rancour, almost affectionately. ‘Never let on to us. Just took off for Sydney and I didn’t hear of him again till he came to Kal ‘bout a year ago looking for nickel prospects for some piddling little company he’d formed.’ He eased his crutch, then leaned forward and squashed a fly on the windscreen with his thumb. ‘So you got a degree.’ It seemed to rankle. ‘Well, you just remember this, Alec — but for me there wouldn’t be any Blackridge prospect.’ The small eyes stared at me from under the battered hat. ‘I found it, see.’
We were into the centre of Boulder now and he turned left, following the Kambalda signs. ‘What about that mine you were enquiring about — Golden Soak? A washout, eh?’ I didn’t say anything and he laughed. ‘Gold. I’m not interested in gold. Nor’s Ferdie. But copper now …’ He braked sharply, turning into a side road on the outskirts that was sparsely flanked with corrugated iron houses, some of them little bigger than shacks. ‘Did you get up to Nullagine?’