The Gold Stealers

The Gold Stealers by Edward Dyson

Edward Dyson's The Gold Stealers opens at the ramshackle Waddy schoolhouse, a building assembled piecemeal by public subscription and repeatedly hauled back into shape whenever it slants off its piles. Its schoolmaster, Joel Ham, B.A., is a sardonic, hard-drinking eccentric who canes his pupils with ironic commentary while treating them with unusual candor. Two boys, Dick Haddon and Jacker McKnight, play truant beneath the schoolhouse floor, are caught fighting after being dragged out covered in cobwebs, and are punished; a wild ink-well incident triggers a mass escape by Dick and Ted McKnight, McKnight's younger brother. The township organizes a hunt for the runaways, with the Wesleyan superintendent Ephraim Shine sent to pressure the Widow Haddon, Dick's mother, into surrendering her son. She refuses to cooperate with a manhunt and reveals her enduring loyalty to Frank Hardy, a young miner wrongly convicted of gold-stealing at the Silver Stream mine and sent to prison after Shine, the mine searcher, found gold planted in his belongings. Shine clumsily proposes marriage to her and is rejected. Dick and his friends hide in an old disused shaft they call the Mount of Gold mine, run as a pretend mining company, where they encounter Gable, a mentally childlike old man, and receive news that Frank's brother, Harry Hardy, is returning from droving work to investigate the frame-up. Harry arrives, confronts his mother and Mrs. Haddon about the case, and nearly attacks Shine in chapel over his sanctimonious sermonizing about the Hardy family, but is stopped by Shine's daughter, Christina, with whom he shares a charged, unresolved history and mutual attraction neither will admit. Dick, deputized by Harry as an informal spy, urges Harry to take a job underground at the Silver Stream to watch for the real thieves. Meanwhile Dick's mock-bushranger antics escalate: a raid on Jock Summers's orchard (where Dick is captured and freed through Christina's intercession), a large-scale theft of Cow Flat's goats that erupts into the "Great Goat Riot" between the two townships, and finally a night of playing bushrangers on goatback that ends with several boys captured by outraged locals and, absurdly, reported in the Yarraman Mercury as a dangerous armed gang. Fleeing arrest, Dick hides alone near the old Red Hand shaft and witnesses Ephraim Shine and Joe Rogers emerging from a secret connection to the Silver Stream workings with stolen gold — and learns they struck down Harry Hardy underground, leaving him for dead near the rising water of the pumps, staging it to look like an accident. Overhearing this, Dick steals the thieves' hidden gold bag, then makes a perilous solo journey down through the connected workings to find Harry, drags him clear of the rising water, and escapes undetected before the next shift arrives. Harry is found alive and taken to hospital with concussion. Dick returns home exhausted, comforted by his mother, while Christina Shine, terrified by rumors of Harry's death, arrives seeking reassurance. Waddy meanwhile buzzes with exaggerated newspaper accounts of the "gang" of bushrangers, and Dick faces impending trial for the escapade even as he alone holds the knowledge of the true gold thieves and his rescue of Harry.

By Edward Dyson · First published 1899 · Genre: Adventure, Crime, Historical Fiction · 25 chapters · 86,503 words

First lines

THE schoolhouse at Waddy was not in the least like any of the trim State buildings that now decorate every Victorian township and mark every mining or agricultural centre that can scrape together two or three meagre classes; it was the result of a purely local enthusiasm, and was erected by public subscription shortly after Mr. Joel Ham, B. A., arrived in the district and let it be understood that he did not intend to go away again. Having discovered that it was impossible to make anything else of Mr. Joel Ham, Waddy resolved to make a schoolmaster of him. A meeting was held in the Drovers' Arms, numerous speeches, all much more eloquently expressive of the urgent need of convenient scholastic institutions than the orators imagined, were delivered by representative men, and a resolution embodying the determination of the residents to erect a substantial building and install Mr. J. Ham, B. A., as headmaster was carried unanimously.

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Australian literature · Bushrangers · Crime fiction · Gold rush · Historical fiction · Adventure · Action · Thriller · Mystery · Suspense · Outlaws · Colonial era

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The Gold Stealers is listed on Textopian as a novel by Edward Dyson, dated 1899 CE.

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