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Updated: July 16, 2025
But so unhappy was he, so much disgusted by the tragic figure in the picture, that he postponed his visit and went after his luggage. His luggage was all right in the warehouse, and he arranged that it should be sent down to Nobble. Waggons with stores did make their way to Nobble from the nearest railway station, and hopes were held out that the packages might be there in six weeks' time.
The woman was closely veiled, so that he could not see a feature of her face; but he knew her figure well, and he remembered the other woman who had been half-companion half-servant to Euphemia Smith when she had come up to the diggings, and who had been with her both at Ahalala and at Nobble. The woman's name, as he now brought to mind, was Anna Young.
The population of mining districts in Australia is peculiarly a shifting population, so that the most of those who had known Caldigate and his mode of life there were gone. The old woman who kept Henniker's Hotel at Nobble had certainly heard that they were married; but then she had added that many people there called themselves man and wife from convenience.
"What's he up to there?" thought Rake, surveying the place, which was wild, solitary, and an unlikely place enough for a head groom to be found in. "If he ain't a rascal, I never seen one; it's my belief he cheats the stable thick and thin, and gets on Mr. Cecil's mounts to a good tune aye, and would nobble 'em as soon as not, if it just suited his book.
I did not know that Caldigate had married Miss Bolton, nor that Euphemia Smith had claimed him as her husband. 'I am able and willing to swear that they had not become man and wife up to June 1873, and that no one at Ahalala or Nobble conceived them to be man and wife. Of course, they had lived together. But everybody knew all about it.
Up to this time the Bolton telegrams and the Caldigate telegrams had elicited two facts, that Allan the Wesleyan minister had gone to the Fiji Islands and had there died, and that they at Nobble who had last known Dick Shand's address, now knew it no longer.
The woman was dying, the husband had been for the priest, and on the way to what proved a death-bed, Father Fagan improved the shining hour by trying to nobble a straying vote. The clergy make the most of their opportunities. At Boardmills Father Skelly spread out a ballot paper on the altar at Sunday service.
He also had been commissioned to seek for evidence, and to bring back with him, almost at any cost, whatever witness or witnesses he might find whose presence in England would serve Caldigate's cause. But he brought no one, and had learned very little. He too had been at Ahalala and at Nobble. At Nobble the people were now very full of the subject and were very much divided in opinion.
'It is the beastliest hole I ever put my foot in since I was born, said Dick, who had just stumbled and nearly came to the ground with his burden. 'They told us that Nobble was a fine town. Henniker's hotel was a long, low wooden shanty, divided into various very small partitions by thin planks, in most of which two or more dirty-looking beds had been packed very closely.
'You did not do badly yourself. When I first reached Nobble you had the name of more money than I ever made. 'Who's got it now? Eh, Caldigate! who's got my money now? 'It would take a clever man to tell that.
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