Billabong Gold by Mary Grant Bruce

Author:Mary Grant Bruce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Australia, juvenile, fiction
Publisher: Distributed Proofreaders Canada
Published: 1937-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIV

RAIDERS IN THE DAWN

‟YOU seem to be pretty certain it’ll be all right,” Mooney said.

“Well, you know as well as I do what Walker told us. The sluices are cleared out when they’ve got time; it’s a long job, and they wait until it’s worth doing. They did it last Wednesday. By Saturday night there ought to be plenty of gold for the takin’ in the first box—that’s where all the heaviest bits get trapped. We won’t bother with the other boxes.” McGill looked confident. “Sunday mornin’, just before dawn, is our time.”

“Well, it’s your job,” Mooney said. “Not mine.”

“I don’t want you,” snapped his chief. “Todd an’ I can pull it off.”

He leaned back against a tree, pulling at his pipe. They were sitting in a rocky hollow in the scrub, far enough from the diggings to be able to talk without being overheard: unless such a one as Carston had been there to gratify his detective instincts by lying on the top of a boulder. But Carston was far away now: the group of hard-featured men had the hollow to themselves.

“I’ve studied it all out,” McGill said. “Night after night I’ve watched, an’ though you can hear someone movin’ in one or other of the camps earlier on, they’re all dead asleep just before daylight. ’Specially on a Sunday morning, when nobody gets up early: they sleep like dead men then. There’s really no difficulty in it. I waded nearly across the creek last night, just to see—the sand’s as hard as one needs underfoot, an’ the water’s never up to my middle, even in the deepest part.”

“B-r-r!” muttered Todd. “It’s a cow of a time to go paddlin’!”

“You won’t think of that once we’re in. We take a straight line across: got to keep to it, too, ’cause that darned old Chow has been an’ set yabbie-lines out from the bank below the boxes.”

“Silly ol’ fool he must be,” remarked Mooney. “There’s no yabbies in a creek like this one.”

“A Chow wouldn’t know that, I reckon. Anyhow, we’ve no need to go near them; they’re south of the sluice-cut, an’ the straight line across is the shortest, so we’d choose it in any case. I know just where to go in: there’s a sapling stump at the place, dead opposite the boxes. Once we get to that it’s time to take to the water.”

“I reckon,” said Todd gloomily, “that it’s goin’ to be none too easy to get the tarpaulin cover off that box. Walker told me they lash it down pretty tight an’ ship-shape.”

“Yes, but he told me just the way they do it. I’ll cut the cover open if I can’t get it off quick enough. But I’d rather not; we may be able to call other nights if we leave things lookin’ the way we find ’em. Your job is to help me with the cover an’ then to hold our sack open while I shovel in the stuff. When that’s done, you get back with it, quick as you can without splashin’, an’ take it over to our camp.

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