“So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”  T
HE firm of Messrs. Winze and Clinskeen, Mining and Stock Agents, of Pitt Street, Sydney, is known as well, if not better, in “outside” wilds as even in Sydney. The establishment is one of those remarkable outcomes of Australian push and enterprise that are to be found in these colonies and nowhere else in the world. The office before us is the focussing-point of two great fields of operations,—mining and stock-raising. In the ground-glass case in the office—dedicated, as a black letter notice on the door informs us, to Mr. Clinskeen, the station-business partner—a subtle brain is directing the business affairs of fifty large stations a thousand miles away, comprising a total area of perhaps 50,00069 square miles. Any hour of the day you may drop in at the office, and you are sure to find somebody from the “Far North” closeted with the keen-eyed, courteous, military-looking old gentleman and his shorthand clerk in the little glass case aforesaid. Tall, slim, darkly-bronzed men, in well-cut clothes and be-puggeried light-felt hats, come there and drawl out their ideas about “fats,” stores, capital, artesian-bores, and the like, whiffing long cigars meanwhile, and everlastingly “nipping” from the decanter of “three star” upon the table. One of these bowed out, perhaps the “boss-drover” of a mob (herd) of fat cows, which has lately arrived from the north in Sydney, enters, with his dirty, rough, cabbage-tree hat in his hand. He has a jolly, brown-red face, and has come to get his “accounts squared up.” He is a bit “breezy” just now, for he has already begun to “knock down his cheque” (spend his money); but he sobers up under the keen “no nonsense” glance of Mr. Clinskeen in little less than no time. He is not quite happy, to tell the truth, about these same accounts. Thoughts will enter his head about that beast that disappeared mysteriously about the time he had to wait with his cattle near Swindle’s grog-shanty, at Parakelia Creek, for five days, whilst his black boys tracked some of his pack-horses that had wandered away. His mind is not quite easy either about his enormous butcher’s bill; for Mr. Clinskeen knows something about the awkward mistakes that will arise sometimes with drovers, in mixing up their own private grog account with the “rations expenses’ list.” However he has got down with only a loss of one and a half per cent. of70 his “O. B. Fours,” and his business being soon dispatched to his satisfaction, he goes away as contented as may be. Jew money-lenders, hydraulic engineers, stock-inspectors, patentees of “ear-marking” machines, come and go, and then more squatters. The flow of business through that little glass office is never ceasing.
 
On the opposite side of the clerk’s outside office is Mr. Winze’s special apartment. “His claim,” he calls it, for he it is that conducts the mining part of the affairs of the firm, and he is thoroughly professional in speech as well as action. Born a “Cousin Jack” (a Cornishman); working for his living when nine years old in the submarine levels of a great, rambling tin mine on the ragged sea-front of the Old-land; educating himself by the light of flaring tallow-dips, whilst the moisture of the mine walls fell upon his book; the noisy man-engine creaking mournfully by his side, and the sea roaring far up above his head, he has fought his way through life; and, by means of Australian gold fields and Cornish pluck, is now one of the wealthiest and most respected of Sydney’s citizens. He does not see so many visitors in his little sanctuary as his business-brother Mr. Clinskeen does, over the way; but it is through his far-sightedness and practical knowledge of mining that the firm has amassed the capital that his partner can lend to such advantage to their run-holding clients. Mr. Winze is sitting, as our curtain rises, at his paper-strewn table. He is a powerful-looking, squarely-built, elderly gentleman, with magnificent, dark-brown eyes, and well-formed head covered with thick iron-grey hair. The expression of his face shows that much of 71 the youthful fire remains; and although over sixty years of age, he is really younger in many respects than some of the town-bred, thirty-five-year-old clerks in his own office. By the side of the mining partner is an open iron deed-box, from which he takes several pink-ribboned bundles of papers. He reads rapidly through some of them, glances at others, taking notes meanwhile; then, glancing at a clock upon the wall opposite, turns towards the corner of the room where his lady type-writer is seated, and informs her, with a kindly smile, that he will not require her presence till three o’clock. Left to himself, he stretches himself, and letting his gold pince-nez fall upon his broad chest, with a shake of his head, proceeds to fill and light his “thinking pipe,” as he calls it.
 
“Disengaged, sir?” at this instant says a red-headed clerk, opening the door after first knocking on the glass. “Mr. Angland, sir.”
 
“Oh, how d’ye do, Angland? Come in; right to time to a minute. Easy to see your heart’s in the work you’ve undertaken. Sit down over there, that chair’s more comfortable. This other one is an old mate of mine, let me tell you. It has a history. I made it myself from the ‘sets’ that gave way in the O’Donaghue, when what we thought was the ‘hanging-wall’ caved in, and showed us the true reef again, and a nice little fortune too on the other side of a ‘horse.’
 
“Can I offer——no? You’re almost an abstainer. So much the better. Well, I’ve thought out your matters carefully,—and when I say that, knowing, as you do, that your uncle was the nearest approach to a brother I ever had, and that his wishes are 72 sacred to me, I think you’ll believe me.” Pointing to the table with a paper-knife made from a piece of silver-kaolin from Broken Hill, he continued, after a pause, “I’ve just been going through his papers again, so as to be well posted up against your coming. Now, to drive right into the subject,—and perhaps you’d better not interrupt me till I ‘clean up,’—to go right ahead, I propose that you leave for the north at once. That you go to Cairns, in company with a tough old practical miner that I’ll introduce you to,—a ‘hatter’ who knows a lot about that part of the coast range. You’re not safe here, evidently. This little arch-business the other night showed that; and, almost teetotaler as you are, you may possibly be helped, nolens volens, to a drop too much—excuse the joke—that will leave you not worth ‘panning out.’ It’s no use your travelling under an assumed name now. You’ll be watched, likely, in any case; and I intend to hedge you round in a better and different way. You shall be a public character to a small extent. You shall go under the distinguished auspices of the Royal and Imperial Ethnological and Geological Society of Australasia.
 
“Plain Mr. Brown, or John James, Esq., may disappear; and it’s too late to look for traces of either when missed. It’s very different, let me tell you, with an accredited explorer of the Royal and Imperial—excuse the rest. He is under the eyes of the public wherever he goes; and there is much protecting virtue in the words ‘Royal and Imperial,’—and this is especially the case here, in republican Australia. Odd, ain’t it? Now you have trusted me because poor old Sam, your uncle, told you to do so; and 73 you mustn’t object to my old miner friend going with you. If the poor old boy has kept something good up there, in the mining way, for you, you wouldn’t be able to do things properly without an old hand to teach you the ropes and dodges. If you went by yourself you’d be shadowed and tracked down, safe ‘as a Cornishman’s set.’ How about money? Ah! that’s all right; but if you do want any, draw on me to any amount.”
 
Claude murmured an expression of thanks.
 
“Not at all,” continued Mr. Winze, rising, “and now you’ll come and take lunch with me, and afterwards we’ll interview the scientists.”
 
After lunch, seated in a corner of the splendidly appointed smoking-room of the “only” club in Sydney, Claude’s new friend and ally discloses to him the past history of the late explorer.
 
“Now, all you know about your uncle, you say, is that you thought him ‘the grandest fellow you ever met;’ that you saw little of him when he visited London in 1878, with his native boy Billy, whom you are to find; that his time was much taken up with lecturing and seeing old friends; and that the late Dr. Angland, your father, and he did not quite hit it altogether. Both seemed to respect each other, but they didn’t combine well. You’ll see the same sort of thing every day,—first-class fellows, who respect each other’s good qualities, but haven’t enough in common in thoughts or prejudices to become friendly. Will fence with each other in a friendly, but stilted conversation, but won’t amalgamate any more than sickened silver will with gold on a badly managed74 battery-table. Well, the main reason of the—antipathy, I suppose we must term it in this particular case—I’ll explain. Have you a match? Have used all mine. Burn more matches than tobacco, I verily believe. Your uncle and your mother were the only children of a wealthy London merchant of the old school,—a man whose word was as safe as a Bank of England note; punctilious to a fault; and who, from what Sam used to tell me, would have died of horror, I verily believe, if he had lived to see the modern way of conducting business affairs. He was one of those straight-laced, horribly exact men of the last generation; one who never traded beyond his capital, and never owed a ha’penny. Old Mr. Dyesart would have turned his only son out of his house, I believe, if he had found him borrowing sixpence on an I.O.U. or promissory note. Sam was brought up on these lines, and inherited all the best points of his father’s character. He was, however, of a speculative turn. When he became a partner in his father’s business he developed a taste for big things, and at first rather startled the steady old clerks in the tumble-down offices in Fenchurch Street. I recollect his telling me how he took up the trade in maize from America which commenced after the last Irish famine, and did splendidly. Things went on well, and the old gentleman and his aged clerks felt more confidence in Sam in regard to his speculations, the vastness of which often caused his father at first to storm at his son, and afterwards to admire him more than ever. Then bad years came, and Sam’s Australian wheat connection drew him into various ‘wild cat’ ventures in Queensland sugar plantations 75 and gold mines, and before long the credit of the old-established firm was in danger. He did not tell his father, and hoped to tide over the bad time, and anxiously searched for an opportunity to recover himself.
 
“With all this trouble on his shoulders, he still,—he was ever the same,—he still could think, feel, and work for others. He was indeed, as you say, ‘a grand fellow.’ As one of the ‘great unpaid,’ he was exercising his official position of Justice of the Peace for some little country town near London where he lived, when a young girl was brought before him one day charged with being an immoral character and without means of support. She told a pitiful tale. She was from Australia, she said, having left all a year before to follow the fortunes of a young libertine, who, as traveller for the soft-goods firm by whom she was employed, had come in contact with and ruined her. He had been commissioned by his firm to buy for them in the chief manufacturing towns of England, and, having been already seduced by him in Sydney, the girl had no alternative—or desire either, if you ask me—but to accompany him to Europe when he told her to do so. After a brief sojourn in London he deserted her; gave her the slip. Without money, friends, or much of a character, left helpless in the great city of a strange land, and afraid to write to her parents, she fell into the ranks of the wretched ‘necessary evils of the pavement.’ Now instead of passing over this girl’s story with an incredulous smile, as most J. P.’s would have done, he communicated through his agents with the girl’s parents,—no, it was the girl’s brother, a gold miner,—and, paying 76 her passage, packed her off back to Sydney again. The girl never reached home, but died on the voyage, of consumption, I think Sam said, contracted by the fearful life she had led in London. You’ll see why I mention this matter by-and-by. Soon after this, Sam saw what he thought was at last a chance of winning back his losses. It proved a ‘duffer.’ This, with other mining speculations, proved to be the straw to break the business back of the old firm; and, happy only in the thought that his father had been spared the shock and disgrace of the collapse by quietly dying beforehand, Sam Dyesart left for Australia,—‘To cure my wounds with the hair of the dog that bit me,’ he used to say, for he turned gold miner............