‘No hard feelings, I hope.’ I remembered Westrop, so long ago it was almost unreal, and Freeman hovering there, misunderstanding my silence. I didn’t say anything, feeling dazed and thinking of the future. It was ages since I dared to think of that. And Kadek … I wondered what Kadek would do, the ground cut from under his feet. And suddenly I was laughing wildly and uncontrollably, and Les Freeman and his lawyer standing there in an embarrassed silence.
In the end I told him the whole story of the Blackridge deal. They didn’t believe it at first, but when I called the warder and got my manuscript, they believed me then all right. Not that there was much they could do about it, but it served its purpose. It opened Freeman’s eyes to Kadek and got me the backing I needed if I did eventually go back into the Gibson.
In the event, it wasn’t money that held me up, but the claims ban. Freeman had paid my lawyer’s fees and given me a draft on the Company’s bank for $10,000. In addition, I still had the 5,000 shares acquired when I exercised my option, and though the market had broken by the time I reached Kalgoorlie, Lone Minerals were still firm at $9.72, so that my total capital at that moment was more than enough to mount a small-scale prospecting expedition.
Culpin was still in the North West and Kennie living with his mother again. But I didn’t stay with them. I stayed with Jim and Edwina Norris. They were as kind and hospitable as ever, and it was Jim who put me on to a long-wheelbase Land-Rover that was almost brand new, owned by a survey outfit that was cutting back. The nickel fever was dying down, the Palace bar less crowded. Iron and copper, that was the future of Australia, according to the wise boys, and any day now the pegging ban would be lifted. Rumour had it that there would be changed claim requirements so that all those who had jumped the gun would have to peg again. ‘It’s going to be like the old gold-rush days,’ Kennie said, as I sat with him once more on the battered verandah, the hens pecking in the dust at our feet and his mother singing softly as she got our supper ready. ‘Laverton in particular. They’ll be lined up, waiting for the off — waiting for the mine wardens to announce the new pegging regulations. But this time there’ll be men in helicopters coming down from the skies. Nearly six months’ backlog, it’ll be like an army on the move.’ His voice was excited, his mood one of intense anticipation, and he kept on glancing at me, knowing why I had come, waiting to be asked.
I suppose it was all my fault in a way. Chris Culpin was still somewhere in the Pilbara, and though Kennie had heard he was now concentrating on a prospect in the Bamboo Springs area, I had an uneasy feeling that Kadek would have notified him that I was out of prison and told him to keep an eye on me. I should have warned Kennie. I should have made it absolutely clear to him that a confrontation with his father was a distinct possibility if he persisted in accompanying me to the Gibson. But I didn’t. He was a trained geologist, and now that he had been in the desert, now that he knew what it was like, just the two of us in the empty desolation of that vast area of sand, I preferred to have him with me rather than somebody I didn’t know. And he wanted to come. The moment I had arrived back in Kalgoorlie he had been pestering me to take him. It wasn’t only that he was fascinated, almost obsessed, by the idea of discovering whether the Monster existed or not, I think it was also the challenge that appealed to him. And we were in winter now, the going would be easier, the heat and the flies less exhausting.
It was settled that evening after supper. Edith Culpin knew why I was there. She was very quiet during the meal, but she knew her son had got to make it his own way, and I think she liked me. ‘You’re going back into the Gibson, are you?’ She was sitting facing me in the Victorian parlour, the best tea service in front of her, the antimacassars white in the lamp light, the furniture and the bric-a-brac all gleaming.
‘Not immediately,’ I said. There was no hurry since I was the only person alive who knew the location. And now that I had a prospector’s licence there was something I wanted to do first. But I didn’t tell her that I was going to peg the Coonde wanna claim. She was a loyal little woman and I was afraid she might tell her husband.
‘And Kennie?’ She was looking at her son, not apprehensively, but her face looked sad and the loneliness showed. ‘He’s going with you, isn’t he? That’s why you’re here.’ And I realized that she had been bottling this up, consciously keeping herself in check all through the meal.
Kennie laughed, that quick nervous laugh I remembered so well. ‘Alec hasn’t asked me yet, Mum.’ His eyes were on me, a pleading look.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m asking you now. I’d like you with me if you can manage it.’ I was watching his mother and I saw the blank look in her eyes.
But she said at once, ‘I think you should go, Kennie.’ And then she turned to me again. ‘But don’t take any chances, please. Chris always said the Gibson was about the worst. And you ought to have two vehicles.’
‘We will have two,’ I said. And I told her about the Land-Rover waiting for us at the Kurrajong Soak, Ed Garrety’s old Land-Rover. All it needed was a new fuel line and carburettor union.
‘And when will you be in the desert, so’s I know?’ Her voice was low, the nervousness well under control.
‘The middle of June I would think.’ The pegging ban was being lifted at noon on June 5. The new regulations would be published in the Government Gazette that day and we might have to start from Marble Bar in order to get the full details from the Mining Registrar’s office. Even if they were broadcast over the radio, we would still have to go to Marble Bar to register the Coondewanna claim.
Edith Culpin didn’t say much after that. She had accepted that Kennie would go with me, but she needed time to get used to the idea. And Kennie, now it was settled, was full of questions, plans, the things we would need. He had the sense not to ask me about the location, but I showed him the battered wallet that had belonged to McIlroy. ‘It was in here was it — the location?’ He was turning it over in his hand. And then he opened it and peered inside. There were a few old Australian pounds there, that was all, and he looked at me, his eyes questioning.
‘I destroyed it,’ I said. ‘It’s all in here now.’ And I tapped my head.
He smiled. ‘Safest place, I reck’n.’ He passed the wallet to his mother, who held it for a moment in her hands, gingerly, as though it were a tiger snake. ‘Won’t bite you, Mum,’ he said, laughing.
She looked at him, and then down at the wallet again. ‘So this was Pat McIlroy’s — his actual wallet.’ She turned it over in her dry, neat hands that were almost as worn as the leather. ‘Well I never — all these years. You know, Chris would have given his eyes to get hold of this. Once those rumours started, he could hardly think of anything else.’
‘You tell him to lay off, Mum. That don’t belong to him. that belongs to Janet Garrety now her father’s dead.’
She nodded. ‘I expect you’re right, but Chris wouldn’t see it that way and no good telling your father what he ought to do.’ She handed it back to me carefully, as though it were a museum piece. ‘That’s two men it’s killed,’ she said, so quietly that I hardly heard her. ‘Don’t let you be the third.’
I put it back in my pocket, thinking of only Ed Garrety and his young hopes for Jarra Jarra, and three days later we left for the Pilbara, just the two of us in my new Land-Rover.
* * * *
Before leaving we checked that ABC would be broadcasting details of the new pegging requirements, and at noon on June 5 we were back on the shoulder of Mt Coondewanna with our portable radio tuned into the Kalgoorlie station. We had reached Golden Soak just before seven the previous evening and in the dusk the scene around the old mineworkings in the entrance to the gully had been appalling, the flyblown carcases of dead cattle everywhere and those that were alive so gaunt, so bone-staringly thin as to be resemble nothing less than a horrible cartoon of famine. Water they now had — not much of it, but enough. It welled out of the ground in the hollows of the caved-in costeans. But cattle can’t survive on water alone and now all the flat land below the mine buildings was a desert, the arid vegetation eaten out, the mulgas stripped of bark, even the spinifex gnawed to its roots. Many of the beasts were too weak to move, lying thick in the gully so that it was only possible to get the Land-Rover through by the horrible process of terrifying them with shouts and the blaring of our horn so they were forced to their feet.