Kevin Cassidy The Cassidy Chronicles

42. The Shy Rubber Duckie; and Missing The Main Event

  For a while we walked in silence, me trying to think the business through. We’d seen Gower’s workings, but where was the all the waste rock?

  Most likely it was in the mine somewhere, yet there’d been no sign of it so far. And what about the ore?

  Crushing reef quartz and separating the gold requires some rudimentary equipment at the very minimum. Pack-horsing the quartz back to the farm would have left evidence of it there, yet there was none. And it would have been impractical anyway. So where was this done?

  I pondered these matters as I walked along, my torch aimed in front of my feet. Sash was shining his farther along the tunnel. “There’s something up ahead and it’s getting wider,” he said.

  I lifted my own light. There lay the answer to my problems. It was the complementary part of Gower’s mining activities, the place he’d used as a work area.

  Stacked along one side of the gallery was the waste material from the decline, the harder lumps made into a drystone wall about eighty centimetres high, the dirt and rubble filled in behind it to create a sort-of earthen workbench – except that one end had collapsed. His equipment was set out on it: a heavy sledge hammer to break up the bigger quartz boulders, a dolly-pot and dolly, some gold pans, a number of brass-wire mesh sieves and a couple of heavy galvanised buckets. Leaning against the side of the tunnel was an old galvanized-iron bath tub.

  “Don’t tell me...” said Sash. “He liked to have a bath before he went home.”

  “That doesn’t wash, Sash. I mean where’s his rubber duckie?”

  “Erm … hiding somewhere? They can be very shy, you know.”

  “Yeah, riiight. —Look, the reason Gower used this part of the old mine was because there was plenty of room to work and plenty of room to stack all his waste rock. The dolly pot and dolly was to pulverize the quartz – you know, to free the gold. Anything too big to go in the dolly pot would’ve been broken up with the sledge hammer or the gimpy hammer. He’d then have put the dollied stuff into the coarse sieve, with anything not passing through it going back in the dolly pot for further pounding.”

  “‘Stuff’ being a technical term associated with gold mining activities, I take it.”

  I ignored the criticism. “The screened fraction would then go into the fine sieve. Most of it would be too coarse to go through, which is how Gower would separate the gold. ‘Jigging’, it’s called. It’s done with a fine sieve and a tub of water – a bit like using a gold pan ... sort-of.”

  “So … what you’re saying is, it’s the same only it’s different.”

  “Right, Sash. And anything that did go through the fine sieve would be recovered with a gold pan. But the important thing here is this: jigging and panning need water. Not a lot of water, just...”

  “Some water.”

  “Yep. Some water. That’s where the buckets and the bath tub come in, see, though once the tub was full it wouldn’t take much to keep it topped up.

  “Yeah, but shit, Casey, it’s a long way down to the river for a coupla buckets of water. He must’ve got it from somewhere closer than that.”

  “You’re right. He must have.”

  In the event Sash’s prophecy proved correct; Gower’s water supply was considerably closer – like about ten metres from where he was working.

  We shone our torches over the little pool. The water was coming from a wet patch low down on one wall of the tunnel. Below it a small reservoir had been excavated to let it accumulate, with any overflow just seeping away.

  And it was only a seepage. It would have taken a week or so to fill up again after he’d taken out a couple of bucketsful.

  Here then was the last piece of the puzzle, the reason why no trace of Gower’s activities were ever found. Certainly it answered any questions I still had. Everything connected with Gower’s gold operation had been underground and out of sight.

  “This just confirms what I’ve been saying,” I added, “and it would have been hard work. But he had to do it this way when you think about it – naturally wanting to keep the whole business absolutely secret. Even setting up a small stamp-battery somewhere would have been a bit obvious.”

  “Yeah ... to say nothin’ about the noise,” muttered Sash.

  We stood there a few moments without speaking, reflecting on the things we’d seen.

  “Well … that’s about it, I suppose,” I ventured after a while. “What do you want to do now?”

  “I dunno ... what do you want to do?”

  “Let’s see if we can get through to the shaft. We can’t be too far from it now, given the distance we’ve come. If we can get out there it’ll save us having to walk back through the mine.”

  “Hey yeah. And we’ll find where it comes out, too.”

  “Right. We can ditch the rope – or we can go back for it later.”

  “Are we gunna tell the others?”

  “About the gold? Hell no! But we can tell ‘em about the snakes an’ bats an’ crumbling tunnels an’ stuff, ay.”

  “Yeah. And the big tiger tracks!”

  “Let’s not overdo it, Sash. There’s enough people believe in the Sherbert Valley Tiger to cause a real stampede if we said anything like that.”

  Around the next corner we found a short exploratory crosscut drive which led to the shaft. About ten metres above us daylight glared through cracks in a hatch-cover.

  Gower had obviously made things safer for himself, too, by installing a sturdy steel-runged ladder. Also, nearer the top, some of the older shaft-timbers had been replaced.

  The ladder was fixed to the wall and timbering in a number of places, and rested firmly on the floor of the shaft. Because of this and its sound appearance we had no qualms about using it.

  Gower’s hatch-cover turned out to be logs lying side by side, all of them about fifteen centimetres in diameter. He’d have put them there to keep the shaft hidden and to prevent wildlife falling in. But they were wedged firmly in place and far too heavy for me to shift, so Sash climbed up alongside me to lend extra effort. The first one was a bit of a struggle, but we eventually managed to dislodge it then roll it aside.

  The next two were easier, except that each time we moved one we were showered with dirt and leaves. This we accepted stoically; it was preferable to walking back through the mine.

  After that it was up the last couple of rungs and out into the daylight.

  “Hey! We looked here,” exclaimed Sash. “I never saw it! And why did they put the shaft on top of the dump anyway?”

  “Simple, Sash. If you’re mining on a hill you just chuck the mullock over the side. Here you make your own hill. It helps with keeping water out, too.”

  We rolled the logs back into place, then headed in the direction of the camp.

  There we found a note. The mountaineers had retired to the lagoon, it informed us. We thought it only appropriate we should join them there, being liberally coated, as we were, with slime, grime, bat droppings and sweat – in exactly that order.

  Our arrival was greeted with a chorus of shouts and jeers, and our appearance likened to unwashed tramps, chimney sweeps and coal miners. A great many complaints were voiced, too, about how the presence of such working class riffraff lowered the general tone of the establishment.

  “So what happened in the pit?” asked Rocky, after the derogatory comments had run their course. “Could you get into the mine?”

  “Yeah. The roof had come down like Angus said, but there was a crawlspace at the top big enough for us to get through.”

  “You’re bloody mad, the pair of y’se,” he muttered. “So what did you find in there?”

  “You were right, Rocky,” I replied. Then, paraphrasing his earlier remarks I added: “It’s nothing but a dark, dank, slimy, snake-infested, self-collapsing rat-hole. Why we ever wanted to go blundering around in there I will never know.”

  “I bloody knew it,” Rocky pontificated knowingly. “See, yo
ur problem, Casey, is that you always get carried away with side issues and miss out on the main event. You should’ve come with us, ay. We saw a couple of cassowaries – an adult and a half grown juvenile. Peter Rabbit got some nice quartz crystals and Zack found some Aboriginal carvings in a cave near a little waterfall.

  “You see, mate? That’s what life’s all about. Adventure! Exploring! Not grubbing around in some worthless death-trap of an old mine. You should’ve come with us, ay.”

  Right again, Rock.

  Yes. Right again.