“Keep close,” said Norrie; “but if you lose me, keep still.”
It was not easy to keep close to such erratic activity in the dark. Norrie, intently inspecting the floor at times, developed an insatiable curiosity and energy. He said little. He kept going. He might have forgotten that such a preferable enjoyment as daylight was now well behind them.
“Come here,” he said at last. He stood then, relaxed and indifferent, as though here they would turn back, and with his lamp illuminated black sand at his feet. He idly scraped the ground with his foot.
“Know what that is?”
“Sand.”
“Cassiterite.”
“What’s that?”
“Haven’t you brought that Highland fling with you? I’m showing you what we came for.”
“This stuff?”
“It’s as ripe as a freehold in Piccadilly. The floor of this hill is tin. It only wants spades.”
Norrie stooped, and poked the grains about with his fingers.
It only wanted spades. Colet felt a little hungry. It was near midday. Besides, Norrie himself was just scooping the sand as if he were a child at the seaside. Norrie twisted round, and turned up his torch to Colet’s face.
“I say, Colet, blast you, you haven’t got the expression of a lucky man. But you might try to behave like one. Sing something agreeable.”
“Me? Hang it, you’re not setting a lively example. I thought it was dirt.”
“So it is. So it is. There’s acres of it. Well, we’ve found it. Let’s go and get something to eat.”
XXXII
Now they had found it, now they stood firmly upon the security which most men desire but usually fail to reach, their campfire, somehow, burned with less of its old companionable light. This was the end of the hunt. Norrie had explained, rather seriously, with hardly a lift of his usual buoyancy, what the law of averages, or something mathematical, had calculated against the chance of good luck coming to men on a rummage like theirs. This good luck, nevertheless, had coincided with their track in space; and to some extent, it appeared, that was not wholly because of blind chance; it had happened, too, because of a little artful designing by knowledge and intelligence. Norrie, with that, then looked round the camp, not perhaps as if his interest in life had gone, but as if that particular day and place had failed in savour for him.
“We shall get used to this scene, Colet. A sort of home.”
Colet followed his friend’s glance. The immense front of the forest on the opposite bank was still majestic and illegible. It was the same forest? Well, when he saw it first it had seemed outside time. Once he had seen it as a symbol of that which does not pass with the episodes of passing men; it was superior to days and nights. The cry of the tiger in the night, while he was sleepless, watching the stars, not knowing what was to happen on the morrow, was only a disturbing but relevant note in a great passage. Yet something hardly definable had happened to his view of it all. Good fortune had changed it. Perhaps the forest itself was no different; maybe he was not exactly the same man, and so could not see things as he did before. What was lost?
It was extraordinary, but the discovery of the hoard afforded them less to talk about than had such a trivial matter as the song of an unknown bird. Yet now the song of the bird passed unremarked. Tin did not prompt Norrie, now he had plenty of it, to a pleasing similitude of his old relish of Malay fables, which have no market value, though they can keep a campfire bright till late. The assurance of much tin induced in Norrie even a certain correctitude. He could no longer abjure their Chinaman with his accustomed histrionic abandon. He was direct, and saved time.
Colet, reviewing it all, while Norrie was diligently drawing a map, rebuked himself. He ought to feel excited. No good. He didn’t. What does not excite the interest cannot be made to do so by any deliberate concentration of reason. If intelligent discontent is the beginning of progress, is it also the end of happiness? Of all the frauds of the sensational drama, this joy on access of riches, this elation on the discovery of the treasure chest, as though it were wealth, was the silliest. There was nothing in it. More seemed to be lost than was gained. That was hardly fair of the law of compensation. One’s light was not turned up, but down. Colet had hinted to Norrie that there was not so much blithe interest in these abundant and exclusive details of business, this strict adherence to the mining law of the country, as there used to be in his sparkling nonsense. Norrie’s eyebrows moved in surprise at a consequence of good fortune which he had not remarked. Then he assumed a show of his drollery.
“Of course, I’m purged of dross. Fever and the tin have done it. I’m pure now. I’ve got salvation, I feel almost kind. Too kind to be lighthearted.”
Almost impious to say damn the tin, but Colet had that desire.
It was night, and Norrie, still at his work, not present enough in the body to notice that his pipe was out, sat beside a lamp. An apparition formed by the campfire.
“Sorry to disturb you. May I come in?”
Norrie scrambled to his feet in quick alarm, but before he was upright he had recovered himself. A glance had satisfied him.
“Come along in.”
The stranger entered, and sat on a box between the friends, looking in appeal from one to the other, as would a child that had been naughty, but was sick.
