Books › Blue Book v059 n06 [1934-10], 1934 › scan 6
Scan 6
Blue Book v059 n06 [1934-10], 1934
14 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1I—The Valley of Golden Silence
3Illustrated by Paul De Leslie
5posed to be safe; the miner and his wife were friendly people. No one had troubled much when she did not return that night, save Tim Murphy, the lessee of the hotel, a pseudo-Irishman from Sydney, who growled at her absence in the Christmas season, as he growled at everything that threatened to deprive him of a penny of profit. Genial Irish, with an accent turned on like the beer taps, was Murphy in the bar; out of it, everyone feared his tongue and sometimes his coarse, heavy hand.
7The second day passed over, and Murphy began to get indignant—a bit troubled too. What did the Wilsons mean by keeping his star attraction? For that Persis Cameron was, even if she did give herself stuck-uppish airs, and wouldn’t drink with the men. Night was coming again; if she didn’t turn up tomorrow, he would certainly send for her. He didn’t—quite—like the look of things.
9Out on the front veranda a sudden silence, with a single voice speaking, caught his attention. Slipping at once into his genial Paddy-from-Cork manner, he stumped on thick short legs from the back of the house. “Shure now, bhoys—” he was beginning, when the sight of Mark M’Cracken silenced him. Something was up.
11Like a figure of Silenus he stood listening, mouth open, huge beard straggling down over pot-round belly. Above him the electrics, the wonderful electrics, shone, on the armchairs, the fancy tables, the looking-glasses, china vases, crystal and silver, that had been carried up from the far coast by plane, even as the hotel itself, bit by bit, had been carried; all of it brought into being in a night and a day almost, as if by some enchanter’s spell, here in the heart of Stone Age, tameless New Barbary. He did not see, outside, the immense dark shapes of the ranges blacking out the stars, or hear, below the plateau, the Laurie River, mother of death and gold, muttering ill-will against the whites who had dared her passes. He was listening, shocked and troubled for once, to the pilot.
13BRIEFLY, unemotionally, Mark was telling the men that Wilson had gone out with him that morning to locate a missing plane in the “big bush.” Wil-
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.