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If Spurling were standing at his side, he would not disturb himself to look at him. If Mordaunt were to come to him, well, he might perhaps turn round to look at her. He began to dream of her as he had seen her in the locket. They were both back in the old homeland. He was talking with her in an English garden and a thrush was singing overhead.
Percy's face was somewhat white; for the last half-hour he had been strangely subdued. "I don't feel very good," said he. Spurling eyed him critically, then scanned the faces of the others. The Barracouta was rising and falling on the long swells in a manner decidedly disconcerting to weak stomachs. Stevens and the young Italian did not look much happier than Percy.
"Yes, I do not object; but we MUST have the coal that is really the important point. As to Jack in the foundry, I will get somebody else. I suppose we shall have to pay more." "How would it be, sir, if you put Sims in Jack's place, and Spurling in Sims' place? You would then only want a new labourer, and you would pay no more than you pay now.
At dawn, as though a golden door had been opened, the creatures passed in and disappeared, and he saw them no more till sunset. For himself, he would gladly have lain down, and died, had not Spurling with the same indomitable courage which he had displayed on the Dawson trail, roused him up and compelled him with his brutal jibes to play the man.
Then he noticed that his companion was deadly pale. "What's the matter now," he asked; "are you so badly cut up at parting with such dear friends?" "Did you hear what he said?" gasped Spurling, pushing his face nearer, and staring Granger squarely between the eyes. "Did you hear what he said? 'You say the man is dead, and you've shown me his grave, and yet. . . . And yet what?
I had to guide Spurling round that. At first, before I saw you and knew who you were, I was tempted not to warn you, to let you take your own chance and go on by yourself, and, perhaps, get drowned; but now, after I have seen you and after what you have told me, I can't do that." "So you were tempted to let me drown myself, and now you are repentant?" Granger bowed his head.
Since Spurling had lain down, he had altered his position, so that now his body stretched across the entrance, with his head in the corner where the two walls met, forming an acute angle with the threshold so that, though he prevented the door from opening more than two or three inches, directly it was opened his person would be visible, and exposed to attack.
Across his shoulders, through the window behind him, fell a shaft of moonlight; in front of him, dazzling his eyes, was the redness of the glowing charcoal, and the yellow of the jumping flames; within hand-stretch to the right lay Spurling, with his feet toward the fire and his head within six inches of the threshold.
From the first day he had nicknamed Mordaunt "The Girl," because he was so surpassingly modest and had no beard to shave. So he and Spurling had shouldered Mordaunt's burden, and had made him their partner, and had carried him through to the gold-fields alive. Where was Jervis now? he wondered; then his thoughts returned to the panorama of that eventful journey.
"Damn your softness," Spurling broke out. "I want to forget the past, and to live like the beast I am. How could I shoot down even an Indian to defend myself, if I were to remember things like that! It's gold that's changed me; and now that I've got it I intend, at all costs, to win out." "Yes, it's gold that's changed us," Granger said. Presently he paused again.
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