Luck by J Read online

  All-Story Weekly, March 3, 1917

  UCK’S everything.

  bare feet were bleeding. I knew at once that Sometimes it chases a man, he’d been doing a perish, so without asking L sometimes he trips over it, sometimes questions I poured some hot tea down his it buries him.

  throat, and gave him a bit of damper.

  The queerest case of all round good

  He came to pretty quickly and wanted

  and bad luck I ever knew of happened to a to explain. I saw he was a new chum and told fellow I met in Western Australia just after him to shut up. You don’t have to apologize Bailey’s reward started the big rush.

  for what the bush has done to you when

  I had been prospecting some gullies

  you’ve lost your bearings and your water bag.

  about sixty miles southeast of Hannan’s that Then I threw a couple of flour bags over him, summer, just making tucker and tobacco out put a log under his head and let him sleep.

  of a few fly specks and an occasional ounce He was a little pasty-faced chap, one

  slug. I had a pack-horse, plenty of rice and of the thousands Bailey’s find had brought dried apples, a few tins of meat, with enough over from the East. Poor devils accustomed to salt water two feet down in the clay pan to streets and policemen, trying where men like keep my condenser going.

  me had failed for twenty years. A bushy

  I didn’t feel settled enough to hoist my

  would have wanted a smoke first, no matter fly, so slept in the open by the fire. I was a how parched he was. I know I always did.

  hatter, didn’t care for mates as a rule, and Next morning he was still weak, but

  hadn’t met any other prospectors on foot, got up and helped me to blow up the ashes.

  horse, or camel since I had been out. Nobody His name was David Baird, and he had been seemed to want that bit of Australia.

  dry-blowing at the Six Mile, near Hannan’s.

  One evening at tea a man came out of

  He had tented with some mates who were

  the scrub with nothing on but ragged trousers working for wages on the Perseverance, and and fell down flat by the fire. His back was walked to and fro every day between there and burned and blistered, his tongue thick, and his his claim—which was a duffer.

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  At first I couldn’t make out how long

  lost every drop. Of course, I had nothing to eat he had been lost, he didn’t seem to know

  and had been hungry when I left the claim. I himself, but afterward I reckoned he did a thought p’r’aps I was walking in a circle and three days. Three days without water is going round and round that battery which kept enough for an old chunk of diorite like me, but up its ’tum-te-te-tum, tum-te-te-tum’ all night.

  to Baird who had never before in his life been So I stopped and made up my mind for a night a hundred yards away from a bar or a water in the bush. I couldn’t light a fire as I hadn’t tap it was hell— no, it was Westralia, which is any matches.”

  worse than hell.

  The new chum again. A bushman

  Coming home to camp he had gone

  wouldn’t stir a yard from camp or mate

  astray and didn’t meet sign or sight of without feeling his pockets.

  anything living till he fell by my fire.

  “Next morning I couldn’t hear the

  “Wasn’t there a track?” I asked.

  battery at all at first. I started blazing a trail on

  “Yes, but I missed it somehow,” he

  the trunks with my shovel. The country was said. “I had been used to guide myself by the different, so I knew I had wandered. It wasn’t sound of the Boulder battery.”

  the flat patches of red soil and quartz gravel I I knew the Boulder battery. It was the

  was used to, but low hills of ironstone and first bit of mining machinery on that field. It thick scrub. I climbed the highest I could was not a real battery, with stampers and see—and then I heard the battery again, just as mercury box and blankets—there wasn’t if it was near by, it was so loud.

  enough water to run one of that kind—but a

  “But I couldn’t see any tents or

  sort of dry mill that ground up the quartz in a smoke—nothing but bush and sky, bush and

  round hopper. The row it made used to scare sky.”

  the black fellows, it spoiled the bush I

  I never saw a chap who could talk so

  thought, as it interfered with your thinking.

  much and drink so little. He said all that on But Baird, used to the noise and the clatter of one cup of tea, but then he had to stop. The a city, liked it, and took it as a compass to bush and the sky make a man hold his tongue.

  steer him home to camp.

  All you can do is bite on your pipe and go He didn’t seem able to explain why it

  through with it, and if you say anything, make failed him that night, as he said he heard it it a prayer and it’s best to think that.

  quite plainly. He thought he must have

  I got his tale straight when he told it

  mistaken the direction of the sound, but why later, as he did many times. At first he used to he couldn’t tell. The country was flat with low mix up the middle and the end—-what he did scrub and nothing to cause an echo, and with what he dreamed—and always talked besides he had been going by that battery for most of the things that hurt him most. Of weeks.

  course, he’d been out of his mind a bit, as a

  “Anything wrong with your ears?” I

  man will when he does a perish, but I don’t asked.

  think Baird ever quite came back for some

  “No, I heard it all the time nearly, but

  time.

  somehow I couldn’t come up to it—it never

  “I tried to steer by my shadow, but I

  got any nearer. Then the night came—and I couldn’t always watch it, it made my neck was frightened—and began to run about in the stiff, and I bumped into rocks and tripped over dark and call out—you know how it is.”

  roots. I remember once stopping and laughing, I

  did.

  thinking how funny it would be if I found

  “My water bag tore on a branch, so I

  gold—and I jumped once, and the battery

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  3

  went harder than ever, when I picked up a hadn’t, the crows would have got him by this, piece of quartz with specks on it.

  so I told him we could be mates till I had to go

  “But it wasn’t gold, it was blood, and I

  in for more tucker.

  saw I had lost my boots and my feet were

  When I knew him better I found out

  bleeding. I heard voices besides the battery, that if city fellows know nothing they can Mary’s and the girls’ at home. That was in the learn quickly. He had picked up how to handle night, and I ran toward them, and that’s when the dry-blowers’ dishes and occasionally came I fell and knocked my head against a tree in back with a pennyweight or so, and always the dark—”

  had tea ready when I got home and bush tea at So he rambled on, telling his story in

  that, not ladies’ stuff.

  bits. I felt sorry for him, but he didn’t have to He had grit, too, and actually

  tell me. I had done it all myself, all except the persuaded me not to shift camp. Me, a battler battery. I never heard of that before.

  of twenty years’ experience, bred to the game I made him rest for a day or two while

  and bound to die of it. He said if one bit of the I went fossicking, and gave him some flour country is as good as another as it is in the bags to make a shirt and a hat
and boots for West where the rotten volcanic gold comes himself. He was a willing little chap, got to anyhow without run or lead, we’d stand a

  cleaning up the camp, boiling the billy, and he better chance if we worked out one claim to knew how to bake johnny-cake that didn’t

  bed-rock before shifting to another.

  taste of the ashes.

  P’r’aps I wasn’t used to being talked to

  I liked him as much as I could like any

  so much, p’r’aps I’d got some superstitions of man living in my camp, except that he took my own in my build that I didn’t know of, too much sugar in his tea and talked too much.

  anyhow we hung on.

  He told me all about his wife and children, One evening as I turned to the clearing

  way back across the Bight waiting for him to I heard his ax going. He used it still like a new find their fortunes—how he had borrowed chum, letting the handle slip through his money and the money-lender made him take

  fingers till his palms blistered, I saw him stop out a life policy. “That nearly stopped me,” he dead still and lift his head in the air.

  said, “for the doctor who examined me said I

  “What is it, Dave?” I said.

  had a nervous heart, and Mary was afraid, but

  “I thought I heard the battery again,”

  he said the open-air life would do me good.”

  he said.

  Of course, like the rest, he thought it

  I had a bad streak that day, the gold

  was a picnic. I advised him to get a had been so fine the wind blew it away, so I storekeeper’s job in Coolgardie, and offered to was irritable.

  give him tucker and water to go in—and a

  “Drop that, Dave, there’s no battery

  compass. I don’t think he was afraid of the this side of Hannan’s, and never will be.

  bush, even after what he had been through.

  There’s not enough gold round here to stop a But he wouldn’t hear of taking a job. He had tooth.”

  come to find gold, and find it he would.

  He didn’t answer me. The bush and me

  That’s where the luck comes in. I had

  were teaching him to be quiet, but all through seen a new chum fall down a hole an old-timer tea I could see he was listening, and it

  had given up as a duffer, and strike it rich with annoyed me, as there was nothing to listen to.

  his first shovelful. So I didn’t argue with him.

  I thought he had forgotten that battery dream Maybe I thought he would bring me luck. He of his, and I didn’t like it coming back.

  was lucky in a way to tumble on me. If he I didn’t want a crazy man for a mate.

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  It’s hard enough to keep sane oneself, without for a living and calling it business would have company. Stronger men than this little home-thought of it. Didn’t I give him my tucker?

  bred clerk have thrown up their hands to the Didn’t I call him my mate? Wasn’t that

  bush. Back East where there’s water—

  enough?

  sometimes—and the trees are big and friendly, I believe I’d ha’ hit him if he was big

  and there’s life in the scrub, I’ve seen men enough, but I talked more than I had in a year jump up from a camp-fire raving, just because till we shook hands again. Then we pegged they couldn’t stand it.

  out our acres, and Davie made our Sunday

  But in the West here where everything

  duff that night for tea.

  is dead, dry, and thirsty with stunted scrub, hot Well, that’s how we found the Last

  sand, and bald rock, with dry lakes and salt Look Mine.

  water you have to dig for. with never a beast We got our reward claim, of course, in

  or insect and the only birds crows waiting for addition to the one we pegged out, and in a you to die, it’s harder still—and I was afraid week ten thousand men were on the ground.

  for Davie.

  Creswick and Baird were registered partners But he said nothing, and we rolled

  in the warden’s office, Creswick on the

  over in our blankets with our feet to the fire as ground in charge as resident manager with a usual and slept. Next day I made my find. I full crew to hold it under the regulations, and knew it before I saw it. Something tingled Baird on his way to Adelaide to float the along my pick handle the moment the point company, get capital, and buy machinery.

  struck the quartz. Gold and I ought to know When he came back three months later

  each other. For twenty years through New

  with five teams tugging through the sand he Guinea chills, Queensland blacks, and waved his new straw hat at me and pointing to Westralian thirsts I had been looking for it—

  the wagons, yelled “The battery, Creswick, and we knew each other.

  old man.”

  I wasn’t at all excited, but just stood

  We soon had the machinery up, and as

  looking at that opened outcrop of quartz—and we had dug out piles of yellow-streaked quartz the jeweler’s shop inside. I didn’t even rush by this time, very soon the first “tum-te-te-round and pick up sticks to peg out my claim.

  tum, tum-te-te-tum” of the Last Look battery There was no need for that anyway as I don’t was startling the crows from the trees.

  believe there was another prospector between

  “I told Mary about my perish,” said

  us and the southern ocean.

  Davie, “and she was feeling very blue about

  “There will be batteries here all right,

  that time and praying a lot, but I suppose you Creswick, old man,” was what woke me.

  don’t believe that had anything to do with it.”

  It was Baird at my elbow. He never

  “I’ll believe anything,” I said, “now.”

  could get over the town habit of calling me by For it was Baird’s luck that made him

  my last name, and he was shaking my hand.

  do that perish, Baird’s crazy dream about his

  “I’m glad of your luck,” said he.

  battery that brought him to me, and something I think I was glad to get angry on

  p’r’aps as crazy in myself that made me agree purpose for a relief.

  to stick on to that barren flat when all my

  “‘Your luck’?” I said. “Our luck, our

  prospecting sense of twenty years said

  luck.”

  “You’re a damn’fool, get on.”

  Then I cursed him from there to

  Baird, in his Assam silk suit the boys

  Sydney for thinking I would leave him out of used to guy, pottered round the machinery it. Only a town chap used to robbing his mates shed day and night. He knew no more about

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  5

  mechanics than a kitten does of geology, but

  “It’s the one I heard before, not ours.”

  in a week he had pumped Dan, the engineer, I didn’t get angry. I had learned to

  learned to run it himself, and knew every respect David Baird. He was a man, and I

  crank, valve, screw, and nut.

  didn’t know everything. But I was certain our He did all the business, while I battery had not been started, and there could directed the shifts. His interest in mining be no other.

  stopped at the battery and what the battery

  “Ca’n’t you hear it—can’t you hear

  crushed out. He worried if the returns dropped it?” said Davie.

  a pennyweight, and when the machinery was There was only one thing to hear

  stopped to clean up—and the real old quiet besides Davie’s voice—the dead, thick silence came over the bush—he looked unhappy.

  of the bush—that silence that is so heavy that But the Last Look was like so many

  sometimes it seems to shriek. We both stood Westrali
an leads, and soon began to peter out.

  as still as the rocks, Davie listening and me The jeweler’s shop of the first few feet watching him.

  dwindled down to little threads dying out in

  “It’s stopped now. I heard it, though. I

  the quartz, looking mighty sick to an old heard it.”

  miner.

  The way he said it made me feel queer.

  The reports home began to cause

  We walked back, to camp, and I

  trouble, shares dropped, we needed capital for questioned Dan. The engine fires had been out development, and it didn’t come, and Davie and not even a hammer raised in the shed.

  began to worry, just like a town chap.

  When the men knocked off and tumbled up

  But I didn’t. I knew those reefs, and

  from the shaft, the foreman told us the quartz had done fairly well out of this one, and if I had died out of the diorite. We didn’t even lost, some storekeeper would go dividing have a reef now.

  mates with me and start me off again.

  Davie looked very white and troubled.

  But Davie had never been broken in,

  I gave orders to start a drive next day to try he never had a knock-out, besides I suppose and catch the underlay, and maybe the reef having a wife and girls does make a would make again. We sat down to tea. Davie difference.

  had drunk one cup, when he rose to his feet.

  One day I dragged him off from where

  “There it is again—can’t you hear it,

  he was moping around the shaft and took him can’t you?”

  off for a prospect, like old times. We walked He was all wrought up, with his face flushed, about six miles far away from the tents, and he caught hold of me and shook me as neither saying a word, with our eyes on the though to make me hear it. I tried to, but heard ground as usual, sometimes stopping to feel nothing. He wanted to go out, but I held him. I the weight of a pebble with our toes, when he didn’t want the men to see our manager like stopped with his old, listening look.