The Black Opal

circling flash, Michael’s inspiration came to him. He went across to his hut, lighted a candle when he got indoors, and took the black pannikin he kept odd pieces of opal in, from the top of a bookshelf. There was nothing of any great value in the pannikin⁠—a few pieces of coloured potch which would have made a packet for an opal-buyer when he came along, and a rather good piece of stone in the rough he had kept as a mascot for a number of years⁠—that was all. Michael turned them over. He went to the corner shelf and returned to the table with a cigarette box the same size as the one Rouminof had kept his opals in. Michael took a piece of soiled wadding from a drawer in the table, rolled the stones in it, and fitted them into the box. He wrapped the tin in a piece of newspaper and tied it with string. Then he blew out his candle and went out of doors again.

He made his way carefully over the shingles to Charley’s hut. When he reached it, he leaned against the wall, listening to hear whether Charley was still asleep. The sound of heavy breathing came slowly and regularly. Michael went to the back of the hut. There was no door to it. He went in, and slowly approached the chair in which Charley was sleeping.

He could never come to any clear understanding with himself as to how he had done what he did. He knew only a sick fear possessed him that Charley would wake and find him, Michael, barefooted, like a thief in his house. But he was not a thief, he assured himself. It was not thieving to take from a thief.

Charley stirred uneasily. His arm went out; in the dim light Michael saw it go over the pocket which held the packet of opal; his hand clutch at it unconsciously. Sweating with fear and the nervous tension he was under, Michael remained standing in the darkness. He waited, wondering whether he would throw off Charley’s hand and snatch the opal, or whether he would stand till morning, hesitating, and wondering what to do, and Charley would wake at last and find him there. He had decided to wrench Charley’s arm from the pocket, when Charley himself flung it out with a sudden restless movement.

In an instant, almost mechanically, Michael’s hand went to the pocket. He lifted the packet there and put his own in its place.

The blood was booming in his ears when he turned to the door. A sense of triumph unnerved him more than the execution of his inspiration. Charley muttered and called out in his sleep as Michael passed through the doorway.

Then the stars were over him. Michael drew a deep breath of the night air and crossed to his own hut, the package of opal under his coat. Just as he was entering he drew back, vaguely alarmed. A movement light as thistledown seemed to have caught his ear. He thought he had detected a faint shifting of the shingle nearby. He glanced about with quick apprehension, went back to Charley’s hut, listened, and looked around; but Charley was still sleeping. Michael walked back to his own hut. There was no sight or sound of a living thing in the wan, misty moonlight of the dawn, except the whitetail which was still crying from a wilga near Charley’s hut.

The package under his coat felt very heavy and alive when he returned to his own hut. Michael was disturbed by that faint sound he had heard, or thought he had heard. He persuaded himself he had imagined it, that in the overwrought state of his sensibilities the sound of his own breath, and his step on the stones, had surprised and alarmed him. The tin of opals burned against his body, seeming to scar the skin where it pressed. Michael sickened at the thought of how what he had done might look to anyone who had seen him. But he put the thought from him. It was absurd. He had looked; there was no one about⁠—nothing. He was allowing his mind to play tricks with him. The success of what he had done made him seem like a thief. But he was not a thief. The stones were Rouminof’s. He had taken them from Charley for him, and he would not even look at them. He would keep them for Paul.

If Charley got away without discovering the change of the packets, as he probably would, in the early morning and in his excitement to catch the coach, he would be considered the thief. Rouminof would accuse him; Charley would know his own guilt. He would not dare to confess what he had done, even when he found that his package of opal had been changed. He would not know when it had been changed. He would not know whether it had been changed, perhaps, before he took it from Rouminof.

Charley might recognise the stones in that packet he had done up, Michael realised; but he did not think so. Charley was not much of a judge of opal. Michael did not think he would remember the few scraps of sun-flash they had come on together, and Charley had never seen the mascot he had put into the packet, with a remnant of feeling for the memory of their working days together.

Michael did not light the candle when he went into his hut again. He threw himself down on the bed in his clothes; he knew that he would not sleep as he lay there. His brain burned and whirled, turning over the happenings of the night and their consequences, likely and unlikely. The package of opal lay heavy in his pocket. He took it out and dropped it into a box of books at the end of the room.

He did not like what he had done, and yet he was glad he had done it. When