‘That old abo, Half-Bake. He always said he’d seen the quartz as the roof collapsed on him. But I didn’t believe him. Or perhaps I was afraid to go down there. I told you, didn’t I? That mine’s got a curse on it. And now there’s two more dead.’
‘Did you know they were in the mine?’
He looked at me, frowning. ‘No, of course I didn’t. What made you say that?’
‘Golden Soak didn’t collapse of its own accord.’ The words came out before I had really thought about them. Maybe it was the whisky, or just that I was too tired to think what I was saying.
He stared at me, the room suddenly deathly silent. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, gleaming in the light. Far away I could hear the hum of the generator. He was staring at me a long time without saying a word. Finally he nodded. ‘No, you’re right. It didn’t collapse of its own accord.’ Another long silence, and then he said, ‘But you saw it, the edge of the reef just showing. How else was I to discover there was any depth to it? I took a chance.’
And he’d killed two men. No wonder he was drinking now. He pushed his hand up over his eyes, the fingers slowly clenching, the fist coming down and hitting the desk. ‘I was desperate.’ He said it slowly, tight-lipped, his eyes with that blank stare, ‘Then why didn’t you let me do a proper survey for you?’
He looked at me slowly. ‘Why should I? Why should I trust you? You may be a mining consultant, but you didn’t come to Australia because of the nickel boom. You came here to escape.’
‘I don’t deny it.’ The man was saying what he thought, and he was right. ‘How did you guess?’
‘Australia’s always been a bolt hole for men like you. You’ve no money, y’see. Hitching rides, clutching at straws …’ He nodded, his bright blue eyes staring at me, not accusingly, more in sympathy. ‘I won’t ask you what you’re escaping from. But we understand each other. Right?’
Was that a threat? I wondered.
Then he said, ‘I have to think of Jan now.’ A sudden smile illuminated his face. ‘Don’t worry, my boy. I like you. We don’t see many people here. I liked you the moment I saw you sitting there reading that old Shakespeare. Reminded me of Henry. Something of the temperament, too.’ He looked down at the plan of the mine again, then folded it carefully and put it away in a drawer. ‘Well, that’s the end of the Golden Soak. All these years and now it’s finished.’ He saw my empty glass and without a word poured me another drink and then refilled his own, the silence dragging. Finally he said, ‘How did you know Westrop was Mcllroy’s nephew?’
‘The Kalgoorlie Miner. His wife’s maiden name was given as Westrop.’
‘You read the reports. I see.’ He leaned back, sipping at his whisky, looking at me straight in the face as he said, ‘He was crooked as a rattlesnake, but my father admired him. Don’t you think that’s strange? He actually admired him. Said he had guts, coming here, brazening it out, and then going off into the desert like that, convinced he’d make a fortune. A cocky little bastard. That’s what my father called him. He wasn’t a great talker himself. But Pat McIlroy …’ He paused, staring past me at the wall, at an old sepia photograph of a man with drooping moustaches and a battered hat standing posed beside a team of horses hitched to a wagon. ‘Well, not much difference between a mountebank and a remittance man — talkers, actors both. I didn’t see much of McIlroy and I was only a kid at the time, but I can remember his voice, the extraordinary magnetism of the man. He liked people, y’see. A flash, brash, cocky, bouncy little bastard, but he rode the outback here with a golden tongue and a rainbow in his eyes and within a year that bank of Father’s was bursting at the seams with money.’
‘What happened to him at the end?’ I asked.
He stared at me blankly. ‘In the end? I thought you said you’d read the newspaper reports.’
‘They never found his body.’
‘The Gibson’s a big desert.’
‘The police had native trackers.’
‘God in heaven!’ He breathed. ‘After thirty years, still the same rumours.’ The bottle, more than half empty now, rattled against the glass. He put his head down, his hands to his face. ‘After all this time it’s like a dream. Trouble is, sometimes I don’t seem to know what’s real and what isn’t. I was down at Meekatharra that day, y’see. Drove back through the night and when I got there he was gone. Nobody’d seen him. It was dark when he arrived and still dark when he left. And he was drunk, my father said. Drunk on whisky and visions of a great copper mine that would feed British industry in the war that was coming — a fortune waiting for him in the desert. That golden tongue of his …’ He sipped at his drink, and then his mind switched to Golden Soak and he asked me what the chances were of the reef extending along the line of the gully up towards the gap.
‘A possibility, no more.’ His guess was as good as mine. ‘If you’d let me do a proper survey — ‘
‘And have you kill yourself when I didn’t even believe the poor half-wit had seen the reef. I can remember my father recruiting those out-of-work miners, driving them to blast their way into the faulted area, knowing he was taking a hell of a risk. The day it happened I was riding the fences up beyond the Robinson Gap and I came down past Golden Soak at sunset just as the first bodies were being brought up.’ He lifted his glass, his hand shaking, staring at nothing. And I could see what he was seeing, remembering that drift offshooting north from the main gallery and the atmosphere that had clung to the third level. ‘Father never went down the mine again, and when I came back after the war I’d seen too many men die to try and reopen it.’
‘You were telling me about McIlroy,’ I reminded him. I didn’t like the glazed look in his eyes, the way his hands trembled. The death of two more men seemed to be affecting him the way the death of those miners had affected his father.
He nodded slowly. ‘A pity my father didn’t go with him instead of pinning his faith to Golden Soak.’ He pushed his hand up over his eyes again. ‘Mcllroy’s Monster.’ He laughed a little unsteadily. ‘Pat McIlroy died and my father went mad. Two sides of the same coin, and a whole era went when the Garrety empire crashed.’ He looked at me then, his head lifted, pride mixed with sadness as he said quietly, ‘It was an empire, y’know, by Australian standards. Father was the North West — the biggest man of a tough hard bunch. A piece of history you might almost say, like the Duraks further north.’ He smiled, sadly and with pity. ‘But nobody was sorry for him. He wasn’t the son of man. It was McIlroy they were sorry for. Something about him, and the mystery of his death — going out like that into the desert, chasing a dream.’ He turned his head to the picture on his desk, a full-length photograph of Big Bill Garrety in knickerbockers and a stiff collar. ‘So who won in the end?’ His voice was soft and slightly slurred. ‘My father slowly dying, a drunk, and that Irishman going out with a flourish that had everybody in the Pilbara talking about him, endless speculation.’
‘And nobody knows what happened to him?’ I asked.
He looked at me, a quick twist of the head, smiling a little crookedly. ‘Can I trust you? I can’t be sure, can I?’
‘No.’ By God we were being frank, and the whisky deadening tiredness, making it easy for us.
He nodded. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter now.’ He picked up his drink again. ‘McIlroy was a sick man. He had syphilis, y’know — suffered from blackouts, hallucinations. He should never have attempted an expedition like that. He knew it, and my father knew it. But he wouldn’t go with him. He wasn’t a gambler and anyway his mind was set on Golden Soak, not some mythical copper deposit. But when McIlroy left here he had with him the best of our native boys. I know that because, when I wanted Weepy Weeli to ride with me to check the fences beyond Yandicoogina, Father told me he’d gone walkabout. That was nonsense. Weepy — we called him that because he had an eye infection — would never have gone walkabout. He’d been at the station ever since I could remember.’