"The old man seems fair broken up," Watty remarked.
"Depends on how Sophie gets on whether we have anything to do with Armitage and Son--again," George replied. "If she's all right ... well ... perhaps it'll be all right for them, with us. If she doesn't get on all right ... they won't neither."
The summer months passed slowly. The country was like a desert for hundreds of miles about the Ridge in every direction. The herbage had crumbled into dust; ironstone and quartz pebbles on the long, low slopes of the Ridge glistened almost black in the light; and out on the plains, and on the roads where the pebbles were brushed aside, the dust rose in tawny and reddish clouds when a breath of wind, or the movement of man and beast stirred it. The trees, too, were almost black in the light; the sky, dim, and smoking with heat.
Paul had not done any work in the mine since he had been laid up with sun-stroke. When he was able to be about again he went to the shelter to eat his lunch with Michael and Potch. He was extraordinarily weak for some time, and a haze the sun-stroke had left hovered over his mind. Usually, to stem the tide of his incessant questions and gossiping, Potch gave him some scraps of sun-flash, and colour and potch to noodle, and he sat and snipped them contentedly while Potch and Michael read or dozed the hot, still, midday hours away.
When he had eaten his lunch, Potch tossed his crumbs to the birds which came about the shelter. He whistled to them for a while and tried to make friends with them. As often as not Michael sat, legs stretched put before him, smoking and brooding, as he gazed over the plains; but one day he found himself in the ruck of troubled thoughts as he watched Potch with the birds.
Michael had often watched Potch making friends with the birds, as he lay on his side dozing or dreaming. He had sat quite still many a day, until Potch, by throwing crumbs and whistling encouragingly and in imitation of their own calls, had induced a little crested pigeon, or white-tail, to come quite close to him. The confidence Potch won from the birds was a reproach to him. But in a few days now, Michael told himself, he would be giving Paul his opals. Then Potch would know what perhaps he ought to have known already. Potch was his mate, Michael reminded himself, and entitled to know what his partner was doing with opal which was not their common property.