‘You all right?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Tired, that’s all. Very tired. Think I’ll get some sleep.’ His eyes opened, staring at the cluttered desk. I’ll clear this up — tomorrow, before I leave. I didn’t realize there was so much.’
I asked him where he was going, but he didn’t seem to hear, his eyes closed again and his breathing quick and shallow. I called Janet then and she came immediately as though waiting upon my call. It was more than tiredness, and when we had got him to bed, she said, ‘I don’t know what to do. He’s exhausted. He can’t take any more. And these filthy, vicious rumours. Do you know what they’re saying? — that he deliberately killed those men, that he destroyed the mine to safeguard …’ She stopped then, staring at me, her large eyes wide. ‘How can people do that to a man when he’s down? How can they?’
‘I think you’d better get a doctor,’ I said.
But she shook her head. ‘I daren’t. He’d never forgive me, calling the Flying Doctor Service, the chance of others listening, tongues wagging. They’d say it was true, that he’d packed it in. No, I can’t, it’s no use. I know what the doctor would say — keep him in bed, sedatives, give him a chance to recover his energies. What else? He’s worn himself out — mentally as well as physically.’
She was right, of course. The cure was rest and peace of mind. I stayed the night and in the morning he was running a temperature. I saw him briefly and he told me once again that as far as Golden Soak was concerned I had a free hand to do what I thought best. And he thanked me, his face flushed and a dullness in his eyes as though he’d given up hope.
I left shortly afterwards. The Land-Rover, still fully loaded, had been parked in the big shed that served as a garage. Tom and the boys were mooching around, doing odd jobs without any sense of purpose, the two dogs wandering aimlessly in the heat. Even Janet seemed affected the same way. She came out to see me off, her face strained and her eyes reflecting the same hopelessness. She thanked me for coming, but she didn’t refer to what I was doing or wish me luck. She just stood there, brushing at the flies, her mind on her own problems. ‘Did he tell you why he had Tom load the Land-Rover?’ Her voice was barely audible above the sound of the engine.
‘No. He didn’t mention it and I didn’t ask him.’
She nodded, and I knew she was thinking what I was thinking — that it had been done without purpose, a form of escapism. The man was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
I backed and turned, thinking it over. Then I called to her. ‘I suggest you tell Tom to unload the Land-Rover and to come to you before carrying out any order given him by your father.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, I’ll do that.’ And she raised her hand, a tired gesture of farewell — or perhaps she was just brushing at the flies. I drove down the dusty track between the buildings, out into the sered brown of the paddock, thinking how forlorn she looked, standing there alone, the world she loved in ruins about her. By Christ! I thought, it was up to me now — that single drill hole just had to intersect the reef. Nothing else could save the place, or Ed Garrety from going the way his father had gone.
I drove hard, thinking of what I would find on the spur of Coondewanna, hoping to God we were through the hard rock now, drilling down to the point where the dust piles would show quartz, willing with a gambler’s concentration that we’d strike the reef and strike it rich.
It was almost eleven-thirty when I turned up into the gully, driving round the collapsed costeans, the dust of the cave-in lying in smooth long slopes descending to the black shadow of moisture, and above me great boulders and outcrops of rock. I was remembering the rock drawings he’d talked about, wondering whether it was true that the aborigines had put a curse on the mine. In the shadow there, with the smooth outlines of giant rock shapes hanging over me, anything seemed possible.
Then I was out in die sunshine again and the blinding heat of the mountain’s shoulder made nonsense of such superstitious fears. Ten minutes later I drove into camp and stopped on the edge of the hollow. Kennie coming towards me, moving slowly so that even before I saw his face I knew he had nothing good to report. The rig shimmered in the heat, the only sound in the hot oven of that hollow, and Kennie walking as though every step was an effort. ‘Well?’ I called as he came within earshot. ‘What’s the news?’
He didn’t answer, and when he reached me he simply climbed in and told me to drive on. ‘Something I got to show you,’ he said, and his sun-cracked lips were tight behind the beard. He directed me along the rim of the hollow to an area of wattle dominated by a skeletal mulga deformed by heat and wind. And then we got out and walked a few yards to where a brand new stake had been set upright in the ground. It was about 4 feet high, the wood of it gleaming brightly yellow in the sun, and from the base two trenches had been dug forming a right-angle.
‘What is it?’ I asked, bending to examine a piece of paper in a plastic envelope nailed to the post.
‘Pa must have come back and done it during the night. He’s pegged the usual rectangle — four corner posts covering three hundred acres. This one’s the datum post.’
So that was it, and he hadn’t heard a thing. ‘Couldn’t be expected to with the noise of the drill going all night.’ And he added. ‘I’d have gone after him, but you’d got the Landy — I’d no means of catching up with him.’
‘It wouldn’t have done any good,’ I said. It wasn’t his fault. It was mine for not realizing that this was Crown land and that Chris Culpin had come prepared to stake a claim. ‘What happens now?’
Kennie shrugged. ‘The usual routine. That’s a copy of his Form 22. He’ll take the original to the Mining Registrar at Marble Bar and he’ll make formal application for registration of the necessary fee and then advertise details of the claim in the local paper. After that it’s up to the Registrar. If you can show he’s jumped a claim then the case goes before a Warden’s Court, but when Christ only knows. Did Ed Garrety ever register a claim?’
‘No.’
‘And it’s Crown land.’
The paper nailed to the post gave his name, C. Culpin, and his address in Great Boulder, the hour he had marked off the land, 6 o ‘clock a.m., and the date, January 22, 1970. He described it as a Mineral claim for gold, antimony, silver, nickel, iron, lead, zinc, chromium and copper, and the dimensions of the ground as 60 chains x 50 chains. The boundaries of the claim were also given in chains from the datum peg, which was described as: 1.8 miles 28° North of Golden Soak Mine buildings. And right at the bottom of it he gave the number of his Miner’s right.