The Great Crushing at Mount Sugar-Bag | Page 2

you think the old beast did?"
"Sold 'em," said Buller.
"No, he'd hardly be game to do that. But instead of sending them to Dotswood, he's got the two packhorses running the mail coach between the Broughton and Charters Towers, and the three saddle-horses are getting their hides ridden off them carrying the mail between Cleveland Bay (Townsville) and Bowen."
"The infernal old sweep!" said Durham, springing up from his bunk. "Who told you this, Rody? Greasy-face?"
"My informant, Mr. Durham, was Mrs. Isaac Cohen, or, as you so vulgarly but truly call her, 'Greasy-face.'"
Presently, after taking due notice of his mates' wrathful visages, Rody began again--
"So this is how the matter stands. We three fellows, who are working like thundering idiots to pay off old Ikey's store account, are actually running a coach for him, and conveying her majesty's mails for him, and he gets the money! Now, I don't want to do anything wrong, but I'm hanged if I'm going to let him bilk us, and if you two will do what I want we will get even with him. But you'll have to promise me to do just exactly what I tell you. Are you willing?"
"Right you are, Rody. Go ahead."
"I'm not going into details just at present, but I can promise you that we'll leave Sugar-bag in a month, or less, from to-night, with ￡50 each. And old Ikey is going to give it to us; and what is more, he won't dare to ask us to give it back again."
"How are you going to do it?"
"You'll know when the proper time comes. But from to-morrow fortnight we don't raise a bit more stone from our duffing old claim. We're going to start on those big mullocky leaders in Mason's and Crow's old shafts, and raise about ten tons before we crush the stone. We must have it ready at the battery as soon as the stone is through. Now, there you are again, making objections. I know that it didn't go six pennyweights, but it's going to be powerful rich this time."
Mr. Isaac Cohen was the sole business man at Mount Sugar-bag, and although the majority of the miners working the claims on the field were not doing well, Mr. Cohen was. In addition to being the only storekeeper and publican within a radius of fity miles, he was also the butcher, baker, and saddler, this last vocation having been his original means of livelihood for many years in Sydney. A small investment, however, in some Northern Queensland mining shares led him on the road to fortune, and although never entirely forsaking his old trade, by steady industry and a rigid avoidance of such luxuries as soap and a change of clothing, he gradually accumulated enough money to add several other businesses to that of saddlery. He had arrived at Sugar-bag when that ephemeral township was in the zenith of its glory, and now, although it was on the eve of the days that lead to abandoned shafts and grass-grown, silent crushing mills, wherein wandering goats camp on the water tables, and death adders and carpet snakes crawl up the nozzle of the bellows in the blacksmith's forge to hibernate, he still remained. No doubt he would have left long before had it not been for the fact that the remaining ninety or a hundred miners in the place were all in his debt. Then, besides this, he had bought a mob of travelling cattle and stocked a block of country with them. The drover in charge, a fatuous young Scotchman, with large, watery-blue eyes and red hair, had succumbed to Ikey's alleged whiskey and the news that there was no water ahead of him for another sixty miles. Ikey buried him decently (sending the bill home to the young man's relations, including the cost of the liquor so freely consumed on the mournful occasion) and took charge of the cattle, at the same time writing to the owners and informing them that their cattle were dying by hundreds, and advising them to place them in the hands of an agent for sale. And to show Mr. Cohen's intergrity, it may be mentioned that he named Mr. Andrew M'Tavish, the local auctioneer, as a suitable person, but neglected to state that Mr. M'Tavish had died in Bown hospital a month previously, and that Ikey Cohen had bought his business. Consequently the catlle went cheap, and Ikey bought them himself. Thus by honest industry he prospered, while every one else in Sugar-bag went to the wall i.e. the bar of Ikey Cohen's Royal Hotel. And at the bar they were always welcome, for even if--as sometimes did occur--a disheartened, stone-broke customer drank too much of Mr. Cohen's irregular whisky and died in his back yard, leaving a few shillings recorded