Robbery Under Arms by Rolf Boldrewood (epub read online books TXT) 📕

the bank, and in the river itself, nearly 20,000 men were at work, harder and more silently than any crowd we’d ever seen before. Most of ’em were digging, winding up greenhide buckets filled with gravel from shafts, which were sunk so thickly all over the place that you could not pass between without jostling someone. Others were driving carts heavily laden with the same stuff towards the river, in which hundreds of men were standing up to their waists washing the gold out of tin pans, iron buckets, and every kind of vessel or utensil. By far the greater number of miners used things like child’s cradles, rocking them to and fro while a constant stream of yellow water passed through. Very little talk went on; every man looked feverishly anxious to get the greatest quantity of work done by sundown.

Foot police and mounted troopers passed through the crowd every now and then, but there was apparently no use or no need for them; that time was to come. Now and then someone would come walking up, carrying a knapsack, not a swag, and showing by his round, rosy face that he hadn’t seen a summer’s sun in Australia. We saw a trooper riding towards us, and knowing it was best to take the bull by the horns, I pushed over to him, and asked if he could direct us to where Mr. Stevenson’s, the auctioneer’s, yard was.

“Whose horses are these?” he said, looking at the brands. “B. M., isn’t it?”

“Bernard Muldoon, Lower Macquarie,” I answered. “There’s a friend of his, a new chum, in charge; he’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Go on down Main Street (the first street in a diggings is always called Main Street) as you’re going,” he said carelessly, giving us all a parting look through, “and take the first lane to the right. It takes you to the yard. It’s sale-day tomorrow; you’re in luck.”

It was rather sharp work getting the colts through men, women, and children, carts, cradles, shafts, and tin dishes; but they were a trifle tired and tender-footed, so in less than twenty minutes they were all inside of a high yard, where they could scarcely see over the cap, with a row of loose boxes and stalls behind. We put ’em into Joe Stevenson’s hands to sell⁠—that was what everyone called the auctioneer⁠—and walked down the long street.

My word, we were stunned, and no mistake about it. There was nothing to see but a rocky river and a flat, deep down between hills like we’d seen scores and scores of times all our lives and thought nothing of, and here they were digging gold out of it in all directions, just like potatoes, as Maddie Barnes said. Some of the lumps we saw⁠—nuggets they called ’em⁠—was near as big as new potatoes, without a word of a lie in it. I couldn’t hardly believe it; but I saw them passing the little washleather bags of gold dust and lumps of dirty yellow gravel, but heavier, from one to the other just as if they were nothing⁠—nearly £4 an ounce they said it was all worth, or a trifle under. It licked me to think it had been hid away all the time, and not even the blacks found it out. I believe our blacks are the stupidest, laziest beggars in the whole world. That old man who lived and died in the Hollow, though⁠—he must have known about it; and the queer-looking thing with the rockers we saw near his hut, that was the first cradle ever was made in Australia.

The big man of the goldfield seemed to be the Commissioner. We saw him come riding down the street with a couple of troopers after his heels, looking as if all the place, and the gold too, belonged to him. He had to settle all the rows and disputes that came up over the gold, and the boundaries of the claims, as they called the twenty-foot paddocks they all washed in, and a nice time he must have had of it! However, he was pretty smart and quick about it. The diggers used to crowd round and kick up a bit of a row sometimes when two lots of men were fighting for the same claim and gold coming up close by; but what he said was law, and no mistake. When he gave it out they had to take it and be content. Then he used to ride away and not trouble his head any more about it; and after a bit of barneying it all seemed to come right. Men liked to be talked to straight, and no shilly-shally.

What I didn’t like so much was the hunting about of the poor devils that had not got what they called a licence⁠—a printed thing giving ’em leave for to dig gold on the Crown lands. This used to cost a pound or thirty shillings a month⁠—I forget rightly which⁠—and, of course, some of the chaps hadn’t the money to get it with⁠—spent what they had, been unlucky, or run away from somewhere, and come up as bare of everything to get it out of the ground.

You’d see the troopers asking everybody for their licences, and those that hadn’t them would be marched up to the police camp and chained to a big log, sometimes for days and days. The Government hadn’t time to get up a lockup, with cells and all the rest of it, so they had to do the chain business. Some of these men had seen better days, and felt it; the other diggers didn’t like it either, and growled a good deal among themselves. We could see it would make bad blood some day; but there was such a lot of gold being got just then that people didn’t bother their heads about anything more than they could help⁠—plenty of gold, plenty of money, people bringing up more things every day from the towns for the use