30

Disaster

THE SUN CLIMBED over the hills to the north-east and lit the tops of the trees. The leaves that had been grey were green once more. The camp fire, fed with the unburnt ends of the sticks that had been used for charcoal-making, no longer threw wild shadows of the prospectors as they moved about their work. They looked a wild lot, with eyes sore from smoke and want of sleep, and faces smudged with charcoal.

For a long time now there had been no talking. The only noise was the steady murmur of the furnace and the regular snore and creak of the bellows, stopping only for a moment now and then when one tired pair of hands gave up the bellows to another.

‘How much longer?’ said Susan at last.

‘As long as ever we can,’ said Dick.

‘It was pretty well evening when we st … arted,’ said Nancy, using a black hand to cover a pink yawn in a piebald face. ‘We’ll have burnt all our charcoal by tonight. … Ow. … I’m not sleepy, really.’

So they were to go on all day. Well, why not? They had got beyond being tired. They had kept up the pumping so long that it was as if they had been working those bellows for weeks and were to go on working them until the end of time. Another eight hours to go. Roger was at the bellows at the moment. Dick had just filled up the furnace with fresh charcoal. Dorothea and Titty were stumbling about, gathering a fresh supply of good bits. John was stretching his arms after a long go of pumping. Peggy was stoking up the camp fire.

‘I’m not sleepy either,’ said Roger stoutly. ‘Let’s go on till the day after tomorrow to make sure of it.’ And he put a little extra beef into his working of the bellows.

‘Wough. … Wough. … Wough. …’

The bellows had been steadily at work for a dozen hours.

‘Wough. … Wough. … Wough. …’

‘Stick to it,’ said Roger to himself.

And then, suddenly, the noise changed, and the bellows needed no strength at all to work them. It was as if he had been pushing at a closed door and the bolt had slipped out without his knowing it. There was a thin wheeze from the bellows, no more. He could open and shut them a hundred times in a minute if he wanted. No air at all was being driven into the furnace.

‘Oh, Roger!’ said Titty.

‘What’s gone with the bellows?’ said Nancy.

‘Bust,’ said Roger. ‘I don’t know how they did it. There’s the place.’

Anybody could see the place. Hour after hour of steady work had worn the leather through.

‘It’s gone all along the join,’ said Nancy, poking her finger through it. ‘Oh well, that settles it, anyhow.’

‘What’ll Mrs Blackett say?’ said Susan.

‘We’ll put a patch in,’ said Nancy. ‘I’ve got an old purse. We’ll get it when we take the ingot home. But I say, Dick, will it matter not going on all day?’

Dick was fumbling with the red book. ‘It doesn’t say how long the smelting ought to take.’

‘It isn’t as if there was a tremendous lot of gold,’ said Nancy.

‘Won’t it go on for a bit by itself?’ said John.

‘Not hot enough,’ said Dick.

Already the murmur of the furnace was dying away.

‘It’s been at full blaze a very long time,’ said Susan.

‘It’s probably done,’ said Nancy.

‘Let’s open it and see the ingot,’ said Roger.

‘Just you try,’ said Nancy, waving up and down a hand that had gone too near.

‘We’ve got to let it cool,’ said Dick. ‘The gold’ll all be melted. And we’ll have to let it get solid again before we try turning it out.’ He tried to look in at the top of the furnace to see if the last lot of charcoal had got red hot to the top before the busting of the bellows. He listened. The fire was quieting down.

The miners looked at each other and at the stone furnace that was far too hot to touch. They were suddenly tired. It was as if the string of a necklace had snapped and the beads were rolling all ways on the floor. The work that had kept them all awake was at an end. With no bellows to work or furnace to feed they were no longer a team, and each one separately was wondering how it had been possible to keep awake so long.

Susan, finding her eyes closing, pulled herself together.

‘Will they have done the milking yet?’ she said, and then, remembering Mrs Tyson, ‘But perhaps she won’t give us any milk.’

‘I’ll go,’ said Nancy.

‘Don’t have a row,’ said John.

Peggy took the milk-can and, without meaning to, put a new smudge of black across her sleepy eyes.

‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘It’s Nancy she feels like eating, not me.’

Everybody knew that she was right, and Peggy, swinging the milk-can rather harder than she need, left the camp and set off down the path through the wood.

No one meant to go to sleep. Roger, squatting beside the furnace, fell over sideways and, somehow, did not feel like getting up again. John lugged him up and plumped him down at the doorway of his tent. Roger crawled half-way inside and dozed again, still hearing the ‘wough, wough’ of the bellows that had long since come to an end. Titty, as if in a dream, saw Nancy stagger across the camp. Her own eyes kept closing.

‘Go and lie down for a bit,’ said Susan. ‘You, too, Dot. No need to keep awake while the thing’s getting cool. …’ She went off to the well, refilled the kettle and put it on the fire. John was in his tent already. Dorothea crawled into hers. Titty wriggled feet first into hers, and lay with her head in the doorway, and her chin in her hands, watching the camp fire and the thin wisps of smoke that still rose from the embers of the charcoal mound. Susan was staring at the kettle. She leant sideways. She rested on an elbow. Only Dick seemed to be properly awake, looking up melting points of metals in the mineralogy book. But presently Titty opened her eyes again, a little surprised to find that she had closed them, and saw Dick’s head drop on his book and stay there. ‘Oh well,’ she thought. ‘Why not? …’ This time she closed her eyes on purpose, but kept seeing the throbbing glow of red-hot charcoal in the furnace. The blisters on her hands made her feel she was still working the bellows. She was not awake, but you could hardly say she was properly asleep.

This dozing of the tired and charcoal-smeared prospectors was brought to an end by a loud ‘Hullo!’ and the return of Peggy with the morning milk. Everybody started up. Even Roger was out of his tent in a moment. And then, as they looked at Peggy and at each other, they laughed, and Peggy laughed, too. For Peggy’s hair was wet, and her face was scrubbed and shining. They saw each other’s faces as if for the first time that day. It was as if Peggy were the only white in a crowded camp of Hottentots.

‘Head under the pump,’ said Peggy. ‘Mrs Tyson made me look in a looking glass.’

‘Has she calmed down?’ said Susan.

‘She gave me the milk all right. But she’s still going to tell Mother she can’t do with us any more.’

‘Oh well,’ said Nancy, ‘we’ve done the work now. We’ve made the ingot. And Captain Flint’ll be back any minute. He’ll manage her.’

Breakfast was over. It was Dick’s moment. When it came to science, whether it was stars or stones, even John and Nancy, captains of their ships, were ready enough to leave everything to the professor. It was his job and the others had not even troubled to look into the red book except just to see a sentence or a diagram that Dick had wanted to show them. Even the furnace, slowly cooling in the middle of the camp, had been built from the drawing he had made. And now, minute by minute, the time was coming nearer when he would lift the little earthen lid from the crucible that he had put in there so many hours ago. Bother those bellows busting. With twenty-four hours of smelting he would have felt a good deal happier. But twelve was a good long time. Why couldn’t the man who wrote that book have said how many hours of smelting ought to be given to how many pounds or ounces of the raw stuff?

‘What about it now, Dick?’ said Nancy at last. ‘It’s still pretty hot.’

‘If it’s under two thousand and sixty degrees,’ said Dick, ‘the gold won’t be liquid any more.’

‘It must be less than that by now,’ said John.

‘Better unbuild it from the top,’ said Nancy.

‘So long as none of the stones fall down inside,’ said Dick, who would have been ready to wait till everything was cold.

Roger, gingerly, pushed a stone sideways off the top of the furnace. John pushed one off. So did Nancy. So did Titty.

Dick stood watching them. Two thousand and sixty degrees. It seemed a tremendous lot. What if after all they had not got it hot enough even with the bellows? No. It must have been hot enough. Whose knife had a file on it? John’s. They would want that to clean the scum off the ingot, to turn it into a shining lump of pure gold. Pure? Carats. How did people measure carats? Captain Flint would do that.

‘Don’t all try to help at once,’ said Nancy.

One at a time the stones were pushed off. People pushed them off with lumps of earth or other stones, to save the burning of their fingers.

‘They do keep hot a long time,’ said Nancy.

‘Poor conductors,’ said Dick. ‘If they were iron they’d be cold again by now.’

The furnace was growing lower and lower while a ring of stones grew wider round it.

‘Can you see the top of the crucible?’ asked Titty.

‘Not yet.’

‘We’d better open the side now,’ said Dick, ‘or that big stone’ll fall in.’

Everybody pressed round. John and Nancy were pulling out the stones with which the opening at the side of the furnace had been closed after the crucible had been put in.

‘Steady!’ said Nancy.

Dick, as in all moments of great excitement, took off and wiped his spectacles.

John suddenly gasped.

‘There’s no crucible,’ he said.

‘Oh rot,’ said Nancy.

‘Well, here’s where it was,’ said John. ‘And there’s nothing but white ash.’

‘It’s slipped through the bars,’ said Nancy.

‘It couldn’t,’ said Dick.

‘Oh hurry up,’ said Nancy.

Stones flew from the furnace, pulled aside by tingling fingers. The furnace grew lower and lower. They had come to the four bent rusty bars on which the crucible had rested. It was not there. More stones were pulled aside.

‘There’s a bit of it,’ said John grimly.

‘Bust,’ said Nancy.

With two sticks, John pulled a bit of blackened pottery from the ashes. Everybody knew what it was.

‘Well, he’s got lots of crucibles,’ said Peggy.

‘The gold can’t have got away,’ said Dick. ‘It’ll be in a lump at the bottom.’

‘He won’t mind what shape it is,’ said Nancy. ‘Come on, let’s get at it.’

The last stones were pulled aside, and they began raking apart the heap of hot ash that was left. It rose in clouds into their faces.

‘It’ll be right underneath,’ said Dick.

They found other bits of the crucible, the lid in two pieces, the bottom all in one, and curved fragments of the sides. But there was never a sign of an ingot. Worse. The gold dust had disappeared. There was nothing left but pale ash and a few small lumps of slag.

‘But there must be something,’ said Nancy, scraping frantically among the stones.

‘There isn’t,’ said John.

Dick, with trembling fingers, fitted together two bits of the broken crucible.

‘It can’t just have gone,’ he said.

‘But it has,’ said Nancy.

They looked at each other with despair. Two whole weeks had gone with the gold dust, and if Captain Flint were to come home now, they had nothing to show him. Crushing, panning, charcoal-burning and smelting … the result of all their labours was a little heap of hot stones and smoking ash.

‘Oh, Dick!’ said Dorothea, and in spite of all she could do tears trickled slowly down and made white channels on her still charcoaled face.

‘We ought to have had a snake for luck,’ said Titty. ‘Like the real charcoal-burners.’

‘We ought to have asked Slater Bob how to do it,’ said Susan.

‘We couldn’t,’ said Nancy, almost crossly. ‘Do be sensible. Nice and useful it would have been … giving away secrets when he and Squashy were seeing each other almost every day.’

Dick, wiping his spectacles, blinked as he looked from face to face. He looked at them but hardly saw them. He knew mistily that they were all miserable. He was miserable himself. They had counted on him and everything had gone wrong, but his mind was not on their misery nor on his own. Everything had gone wrong. But why? How had it gone wrong?

‘I must have made a mistake somewhere,’ he said slowly. ‘The same thing’s happened that happened when I tried a little with the blowpipe.’ He took a half-burnt stick and raked among the ashes. ‘It’s my fault,’ he said. ‘I can’t have read the book right. But if it wasn’t hot enough nothing would have happened, and I don’t believe we could have got it too hot.’

‘I wonder why the crucible broke,’ said John. ‘We couldn’t have done it dropping in the charcoal. …’

‘Hotter in one place than another,’ said Dick. ‘But it’s the gold going I can’t understand. …’

‘It probably wasn’t gold at all,’ said Susan. ‘We ought to have made sure.’

Dick looked up suddenly.

‘There is one way we could,’ he said. ‘Did we put all the gold dust in the crucible?’

‘All but that pinch we got first,’ said Nancy.

‘But I put that in with the rest,’ said Peggy. ‘I thought it was being forgotten.’

‘Then the whole lot’s gone,’ said Nancy.

‘We could try it with aqua regia,’ said Dick. ‘You know, a chemical test. The book says gold dissolves in aqua regia. If it does, we’d know for certain. Captain Flint’s got the acids and test-tubes. They’re in the glass cupboard.’

Nancy suddenly thumped the breath out of him.

‘Good for you, Dick,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you can do it?’

‘He’s got both the right acids,’ said Dick.

‘But there’s no time,’ said Susan. ‘If Mrs Tyson’s going to say we’ve got to leave.’

‘Come on,’ said Nancy. ‘We’ll get some more right away. Even if we don’t have time to smelt an ingot, the main thing is to prove the stuff is gold.’

But Susan put her foot down.

‘Not the able-seamen,’ she said. ‘If they don’t have some proper sleep they’ll all be dead.’ And Nancy, looking round at their tired faces, agreed that she was right.

‘Well, I’ll go anyway,’ she said.

‘Come on,’ said John.

‘We’ll all four go,’ said Susan. ‘But not the able-seamen. They ought to get to bed and sleep till tea-time.’

‘Dinner-time,’ said Roger.

‘But what about Dick?’ said Nancy.

Dick stared at her. ‘I’ll sleep when I come back,’ he said. ‘It’s no good trying till I’ve made sure.’

Susan looked not at him but at Dorothea. Dot was Dick’s sister and ought to know. Dorothea remembered her father sitting up all night over a scrap of papyrus covered with Egyptian hieroglyphics, and her mother making hot coffee for him but not even trying to get him to go to bed. What was the good of going to bed if people could not sleep for thinking?

‘He’ll be all right,’ said Dorothea.

‘And the sooner he goes the better,’ said Nancy. ‘Where’s that frying-pan? And we’d better take the bucket. The crushing mill’s in the mine. We’ll get a pinch of gold panned for him to take, and then get as much as we can done before he comes back. There’s charcoal left, and we’ll mend the bellows, and have another go at an ingot.’

‘But Mrs Tyson …’ began Susan.

‘She isn’t going all the way down to Beckfoot just to tell Mother we’ve got to clear out,’ said Nancy. ‘We’ve got one more day, anyhow. Come on.’

‘What about the pigeons?’ said Peggy. ‘We’ve only got Sappho here.’

Dick heard her. … Pigeons? … Bring back pigeons? … What had happened to everybody? Why was it that Peggy sounded almost cheerful? He never guessed for a moment that he himself had given them a new hope and plucked them out of their despair. What was that? Peggy was talking again to him. …

‘The basket goes on the handlebars all right. We must have Homer and Sophocles back. Sappho’s no good. Whatever happens we mustn’t have Mother not getting a letter at the proper time and coming up here before Mrs Tyson’s calmed down.’

‘And we want a bit of leather for the bellows,’ said Nancy. ‘My old purse. Mother’ll give it you. And good strong needles. And a box of tacks to nail the leather down when it’s mended. Right-hand drawer in the table in the hall. Come on, John. And what about you, Susan? The sooner we get the stuff for him, the sooner he can start.’

‘I’m coming. Go to bed, you three.’

Even Susan sounded hopeful. Dick gave up trying to understand.

Ten minutes later the camp was silent.

Roger, Titty and Dorothea slept in their tents, tired out.

Nancy, John, Susan and Peggy were hurrying across the Topps to Golden Gulch.

Dick strapped the pigeon-basket on the handlebars of Peggy’s bicycle, tucked his blowpipe into the handkerchief pocket of his shirt, put the red mineralogy book into his knapsack, pulled it out again, just to have another look at ‘Tests for gold’, left the dromedary to lean against a tree, and hurried off after the others.

It was the hottest of a whole fortnight of hot days. The hot air over the Topps made everything seem to quiver in a haze. Away in the valley a motor car was hooting through the woods. It roared up and along the Dundale road. Its noise stopped. Another of these picnic parties, Dick supposed. How awfully hot it was. Hullo. There was Squashy out on the Topps. On the far side of Golden Gulch. Very near it, too? And Dick thought of that other blowpipe, and wondered whether Squashy had been more successful than himself. And with that he was thinking again of the opening of their own furnace. What really had happened? What had he done wrong? Had the gold just trickled away into the earth? Or had there been no gold? He would find out now, for certain.

He came to the gulch, and at the opening to the mine heard the thud, thud of the crushing mill inside.

‘You don’t want much panned, do you?’ said Nancy, as he came in. ‘We’ve got a bit nearly all gold.’

John had quarried out some splendid lumps of quartz, with yellow glinting in the cracks.

The panning took longer than the crushing, but it was done at last, and the greeny gold sediment was poured into Dick’s handkerchief. He brought the four corners together, and John, with a bit of string, put a lashing round the handkerchief so that the precious dust was as safe as if it was in a bag. Dick took two or three small lumps of quartz and put them in his pocket.

‘I might want to try with a raw bit,’ he said.

‘We’ll get all this lot crushed before you get back,’ said Nancy. ‘Good luck to you, Professor.’

FORLORN HOPE

Dick was off.

‘Don’t forget the pigeons,’ Peggy called after him.

‘Tacks,’ shouted Nancy. ‘And the old purse for the patch.’

He was out in the sunshine, racing across the narrow gulch, climbing the side of it, and hurrying across the Topps.

He had gone perhaps a hundred yards when he stopped short.

‘Better write them down,’ he said to himself. ‘I’m sure to forget them if I don’t.’ He pulled out his pocket-book and wrote ‘Pigeons, Nails in drawer in hall, Nancy’s old purse.’

Then he ran on, stumbling and hot, over the uneven ground.

Squashy Hat, with problems of his own, was coming nearer to the gulch. He had noticed that boy, hurrying through the bracken. He looked back at the white spots up on the hillside behind him, and along the line they pointed out across the Topps. He must have another look in daylight. If only those children were playing somewhere else. …

Susan, Nancy, Peggy and John were in the mine.

Dorothea, Titty and Roger slept in their tents.

Dick, his mind full of mineralogy, tiptoed through the camp, pushed off on Peggy’s dromedary, found his balance on it after one frantic wobble and, braking fairly hard, began the steep descent down the old track, through Tyson’s wood.

The motor car that had stopped at the side of the Dundale road was gone. The visitors who had rested there, eaten their sandwiches by the roadside and admired the view over the hills, were already a dozen miles away. A thin wisp of blue smoke curled in the grass where they had been. No one saw it. This time there were no watchers on the Great Wall.