The Black Opal

The men stood in groups outside the hall, smoking and yarning together before going into it, on the night John Armitage was to put his proposition for reorganisation of the mine...

Paul hummed and talked of the music he was going to play as they went along. He called to Sam Nancarrow's old nag, quite pleased to be having a horse to drive as though it belon...

Watty and George were well satisfied with their night's work when they went out of the bar into the street. Michael was with them. He said nothing, but they took it for granted...

Sophie went into the shed where her cutting-wheel was soon after eight o'clock next morning. She took up a packet of small stones George Woods had left with her and set to work...

"See Ed. means to do you well with a six-horse team this evening, Mr. Armitage," Peter Newton said, while Armitage was having his early meal before starting on his all-night dri...

The visit of an opal-buyer ruffled ever so slightly the still surface of life on the Ridge. When Armitage had gone, he was talked of for a few days; the stones he had bought, th...

It was still light; the sky, faintly green, a tinge as of stale blood along the horizon, as Sophie and Potch walked down the road to the hall. At a little distance the big build...

At first people talked of her, of Paul, of Sophie, and of Michael. They gossiped of her looks and manner, of her strange air of serenity and content, although her life on the Ri...

Through the heat came the baa-ing of sheep on the plains, moving in great flocks, weary and thirsty; the blaring of cattle; the harsh crying of crows following the flocks and wa...

Armitage was busy going over parcels of stone and bargaining with the men for the greater part of the next day. He was beginning to have more of Dawe Armitage's zest for the bus...

Sophie often met Arthur Henty on the road just out of the town. Usually it was going to or coming from the tank paddock, or in the paddock, on Friday afternoons, when he had bee...

Michael had lit the lamp in Rouminof's kitchen; innumerable tiny-winged insects, moths, mosquitoes, midges, and golden-winged flying ants hung in a cloud about it. Martha M'Crea...

In a few weeks thought of the robbery had ceased greatly to disturb anybody. Michael settled down to working with his new mates, and the Ridge accepted the new partnership as th...

Tenders had been called for, to clear the course for the annual race meeting. A notice posted on the old, wild cherry tree in the road opposite Newton's, brought men and boys fr...

Potch had gone to the mine on the morning when Michael went into Paul's hut, intending to rouse him out and make him go down to the claim and start work again. It was nearly fiv...

The unwritten law of the Ridge was that mates pooled all the opal they found and shared equally, so that all Jun held was Rouminof's, and all that he held was Jun's. Ordinarily...

Darling pea was lying in purple and magenta patches through the long grass on the tank paddock when Sophie went with Ella and Mirry Flail to gather wild flowers there.

Watty was winding dirt, standing by the windlass on the top of the dump over his and his mates' mine, when he saw Paul coming along the track from the New Town. Paul was breakin...

Potch had looked towards Michael's hut before he went into his own, next evening. There was no light in its window, and he supposed that Michael had gone to bed. In the morning,...

"Here he is, Michael," he said. "George and Peter are helping him out of Newton's dog-cart. And Archie Cross and Bill Grant are coming along the road a bit behind."

Lying under the coolebah at midday, after they had been burrowing from the shaft for about a week, and Michael was talking of clearing mullock from the drives, Potch said:

It was one of those clear days of late spring, the sky exquisitely blue, the cuckoos calling, the paper daisies in blossom, their fragrance in the air; they lay across the plain...

The days which followed that night when Sophie had dropped the great opal were the happiest Potch had ever known. They were days in which Sophie turned to smile at him when he w...

The men met to talk about Michael next evening. The meeting was informal, but every man on the fields had come to Fallen Star for it. The hall was filled to the doors as it had...

The sky was like a great shallow basin turned over the plains. No tree or rising ground broke the perfect circle of its fall over the earth; only in the distance, on the edge of...

Nothing was moving on the wide stretch of the plains or under the fine, clear blue sky of early spring, except this train of shabby, dust-covered vehicles. The road, no more tha...

His voice was as distant as though he were talking to a stranger. He had been trying to read, but his mind refused to concern itself with anything except the night before, and t...

Days and months went by, hot and still, with dust-storms and blue skies, fading to grey. Their happenings were so alike that there was scarcely any remembering one from the othe...

"While you were away Arthur Henty came here to see Sophie," Martha said. "She hasn't been feeling well ... and I came up to have a look at her. She's been doing too much lately....

"You can't bluff me," Potch heard him say. "You may throw dust in the eyes of the men here, but you can't bluff me.... It was you did for me.... It was you put it over on me--to...

Michael and Potch were at work next morning as soon as the first cuckoos were calling. Michael had been at the windlass for an hour or thereabouts, when Watty Frost, who was goi...

Word was quickly bruited over the fields that the American, one of the best buyers who came to the Ridge, had arrived by the evening coach. He invariably had a good deal of mone...

"It's what I wore, meself, white muslin, when I went to me first ball," Mrs. George Woods said, standing off to admire the frock of white muslin Sophie had on, and which she had...

"Take 'em." George Woods did not turn. He was carefully working round a brilliantly fired seam through black potch in the shin cracker he had been breaking through two or three...

The sunset was fading, a persimmon glow failing from behind the trees, its light merging with the blue of the sky, creating the faint, luminous green which holds the first stars...