anything foolish. If the summit was suddenly to mist over they would know to stay put until morning. But in her heart Mary was terrified. She imagined a rock slide set in motion by the weight of the snow. She saw them venturing to the edge of a bluff, perhaps the mighty organ pipes, and the snow giving way and sending them crashing downwards nearly a thousand feet. She imagined any of a dozen incidents and all of them became vivid and concluded in her mind.
After two hours Mary knew that she would have to come down. Once again she lit the lantern, which she had put out to save the oil during her vigil by the fire. Wherever Tommo and Hawk were they could not descend in the dark, and she knew that no search party would set out to find them until first light. Mary set off down the path again and arrived at Strickland Falls nearly an hour later. She was scratched about and bleeding, for travelling a bush path at night is harrowing and her descent had been perilous. She had fallen on several occasions, though fortunately she had not lost the lantern. It took her another forty minutes to get back to the mill where Ikey and Jessamy were waiting, both of them terribly anxious. They'd already been up to Strickland Falls, and found it locked and had themselves not long been home.
Ikey had never seen Mary cry, but now she sat at the kitchen table and wept as she slowly spilled out the story. She blamed herself for letting the boys go, though Jessamy reminded her that they had roamed the slopes since they were four years old and the mountain was, in every sense, their own backyard.
At midnight Ikey left Jessamy asleep in an old armchair and Mary seated at the kitchen table with her head in her arms. Although she was tired and distraught almost beyond thinking, the ever-practical Mary had devised a rescue plan. She would make her appearance at Peter Degraves' saw mills at seven o'clock the following morning, when the timber cutters set off to work the slopes. But first she would call at the Degraves home and ask him for permission to pay his men a day's salary to send up a search party for Tommo and Hawk. They would set off from Strickland Falls so that if the children had spent the night safely in the hut on the summit they would be met along the path, not more than an hour and a half after first light. At this point the search would be over and the men, already on the mountain, could return to their work.
Mary was not foolish enough to suppose that this permission would be easily granted, for while her past employer was by the standards of the time a good man, he was tough and she knew he would expect her to pay for the value of the timber not produced while his men carried out the search. The loss of Tommo and Hawk would not be seen by him as a matter of great importance. Mary was of course, perfectly willing to meet his demands. The cost of a day's work of a hundred timber cutters would exhaust her available liquid resources, and possibly put her in debt to the brewer, but she cared not in the least about this.
Having resolved what to do at first light, she fell into a fitful sleep at the kitchen table only to be wakened an hour before dawn by Ikey.
'Come, my dear, I have brought help!' he said, shaking her gently by the shoulder.
Gathered in the street outside the Potato Factory were more than a hundred people. A more motley collection of the hopeless and forlorn would have been difficult to find anywhere in the South Seas. None among them would ever voluntarily have put one foot on the lowest slopes of the great mountain.
They were the drunks and whores, gamblers, pimps, touts, publicans' cellarmen, barmaids, whalemen and jack tars as well as other assorted human scrapings from the Hobart waterfront. Ann Gower, now the owner of a waterfront bawdy house, had taken a donkey cart and loaded herself upon it together with a large tea urn, so that she, too, might help.
Mary took one look at the crowd and knew Ikey must have finally gone senile. Though she perceived a handful of jack tars young enough to be useful, if the vast majority of this scraggy lot set foot upon the mountain, even on a cloudless summer day, few would return with every limb intact or even their lives, and most would be incapable of reaching the first tree line.
'Whatever has possessed you, Ikey Solomon?' Mary cried.
'My dear, I had thought to find some stout lads who might be persuaded to take on the search, but it is a great compliment to you that many felt that they should themselves come!'
After the initial shock, the sight of Ikey's caring volunteers lifted Mary's courage enormously. She thanked them for their generosity of spirit, but pointed out that the mountain was a dangerous and foreign place for most of them, and that they would more easily lose their own lives than help to find Tommo and Hawk.
She told them of her plan to use the timber cutters who worked the mountain slopes for Mr Peter Degraves' saw mills. If he should lend his support as she hoped he might, the mountain would be extensively searched before the day was out.
In fact, Mary knew that the mountain could not be thoroughly searched in a week or a month, and if Tommo and Hawk had fallen down a precipice they might never be found.
'You have shown me a great honour,' Mary concluded, 'and I am most touched by your concern. I thank you from the bottom of me heart.'
People among the assembly shouted their encouragement and started to disperse when Ann Gower stood up in the cart. 'Oi!' she shouted, waving her arms to indicate that they should gather around. The crowd soon assembled about her, and waited for her to speak. 'You all knows who I is, and if ya don't, why not?' she bawled out. There was a ripple of laughter and she waited for it to die down. 'But Mary Abacus some 'ere knows only fer the decent beer she sells, but also knows 'er as a good woman. But she be more'n that, and I should know! Mary Abacus be the salt o' the earth, no better woman may be found on this island nor any ovver place I knows of!' Ann Gower paused and looked around her. 'Now we knows 'er brats what's lost ain't 'ers born, and we knows 'ow they come about. But that don't make no difference and even that one be black, that don't matter neiver! What do matter is that she loves 'em, and if we can't 'elp to find 'em because we not the sort to take to mountain climbin', we can pass the 'at around to pay for a few stout lads what knows the mountain and can make a search!'
She opened her handbag and took out ten shillings. 'Two shillin' be a good wage for a day for a timber cutter, so I now pays for five o' the buggers. Who's next?' Ann Gower pointed to Bridget from the Whale Fishery. 'Bridget O'Sullivan take orf ya bonnet and use it as an 'at, there's plenty 'ere what's mean as cat's piss, but they'll 'ave trouble denyin' a pretty girl like you!'
Very soon Bridget had collected a total of three pounds and sevenpence from the crowd. Ann Gower gave it to Mary, who knew well enough not to protest. It was a gesture of respect, and she accepted it for the generosity of spirit it represented.
Mary looked at the crowd with tears in her eyes. 'Thank you all,' she said simply. Turning to Ann Gower she smiled. 'You're a good woman, Ann Gower!'
Ann Gower drew back and looked askance at Mary. 'Don't ya go ruinin' me repitashin, Mary Abacus. I be a real bad woman, but a bloody good whore and ya knows it!' She turned to the crowd. 'C'mon, folks, it be sun-up soon, time to go 'ome to bed!'
Peter Degraves agreed readily to Mary's request but put only sixteen of his men to search the mountain, sensibly pointing out that the boys would only have covered a small section of the mountain to reach the summit and that sixteen men could cover this thoroughly. He accepted that she should pay them their daily wage though he did not ask her for compensation for the two days of sawmill profits he would lose because the men were taken away from their work.
'I'll write it off to good labour relations,' he laughed, Mary's earlier labour reforms at the Cascade Brewery had been maintained, and Degraves knew that he had been repaid a thousand times over by the loyalty and the honesty of the men who worked for him.
After two days the men had thoroughly searched the mountain and had not found the slightest sign of the two boys. Further searching was not practical. The mountain might hide their bodies for years if they had fallen down some deep ravine, but because it was assumed that Tommo and Hawk would have been in the area facing Hobart Town and near the top of the mountain, this was where the search was focused. Eventually Mary conceded that nothing more could be done, though she personally spent the next two weeks alone on the mountain still desperately searching for her children.
Once she found a trap set for wood pigeon typical of the kind the boys might make, and on a thornberry bush adjacent to it she discovered a tiny tuft of opossum fur. Her heart started to beat furiously. After two days of calling out the boys' names her voice had ceased to function, and now she searched grimly and silently, entering small ravines and squeezing through rock formations terrified that at any moment she might come across the broken bodies of her sons. She was badly cut and scratched about and when she returned at night her clothes were often ripped to shreds. She ate little and her eyes became sunken, and her anguished silence made people
