Although the actual fire was dying, although his eyes were registering no visual scene, his mind continuously and clearly saw a bright fire consuming a small leather case. The fire in the mental picture did not die down, neither did the leather case progress into ashes. It was a mind picture stilled, like one of ten thousand pictures comprising a film fixed upon the screen because the projector had ceased to function. And away beyond the horizon of mirage and sand-dune and scrub sat another man, in similar pose, seeing with the eyes of his mind the same, stilled picture.
Presently Itcheroo found his mind rebelling against the iron discipline placed over it. He found it increasingly difficult to maintain the picture of the leather case being burned by the fire, and ultimately it faded, flickered and vanished, to be replaced by images of crows and the branches of the scrub trees vibrating in the wind. Now he could hear the crows and the wind in the scrub; and, too, he could smell tobacco smoke.
First he moved his arms so that his eyes might become used to the daylight by gazing at the earth beneath his legs. Then his right hand slid up and over the forearm to take the precious churinga stone and slip it into the dillybag suspended from his neck. That accomplished, he raised his head, to see, squatted opposite him beyond the fire, the stranger half-caste in the very act of blowing cigarette smoke towards him. For a full second of time he looked into the cold eyes of Napoleon Bonaparte, and then his gaze was directed by the gaze of the cold blue eyes to the fire, in which still remained charred portions of the leather case and the charred leaves of several notebooks.
“So! You big feller magic feller, eh?” observed Bony. “You stealum sergeant’s dillybag from my swag, eh? You sendum mulga wire to Illprinka feller, and Illprinka feller he run and tell-it Rex McPherson. You fine blackfeller all right.”
Chapter Nine
The Enigma
THE gully eastward of the McPherson homestead was far less steep-sloped than that dammed by the great concrete-faced wall. The floor of the eastward gully was wide and comparatively flat, providing an excellent ground in the shade of the bloodwoods for an aboriginal camp. Through the camp lay the long sheet of almost permanent water created by a low barrier composed of firmly cemented boulders; and on either side of the water were built the humpies of tree-boughs and bags and bark, small humpies sheltering families and large humpies sheltering the unmarried bucks and the widows.
This morning the entire camp exuded an atmosphere of domesticity. Below the dam wall lubras were engaged washing dungaree trousers and the shirts used by bucks, recently employed as stockmen, who now had rejoined the tribe, these garments having to be returned to store. About the large communal fires lubras were baking iron-hard flap-jacks of flour as the nardoo seeds were scarce, and men were fire-hardening spear points or carving spear throwers, or making head and arm bands and dilly-bags. The birds maintained an incessant tumult, to which were added the barking of dogs and the excited yells of a ring of young men surrounding two who were fighting with bare hands with reasonable conformity to the boxing rules as laid down by the Marquess of Queensberry and introduced by the second McPherson through Chief Burning Water.
At the upper end of the sheet of water was situated the chief’s humpy. He was now lying outside it, on the broad of his back, with a small girl on one side of him and his younger wife, and the mother of the child, on the other.
The child, pot-bellied and straight-legged and in the toddling stage, was engaged in constructing, with the contents of a box of matches, what was supposed to represent a fowl-house. The site of the building was on the chief’s naked stomach.
“It’s not high enough yet,” he observed in the Wantella dialect. “Chook-chook will fly out if you’re not quick.”
With the enviable concentration of small children, Burning Water’s youngest child continued to build the walls of the “chook house” until the mother said she thought they were high enough. Across the walls were laid matches to support pieces of leopard-wood bark, representing the white man’s iron roof sheets. Eventually the house was finished, and with a swiftly changing countenance the child regarded her prostrate father with laughter-lit eyes.
“Willi-willi no blow down chook house this time,” she taunted, and the man and the woman joined in admiration of the building.
“You wait till a willi-willi comes along,” Burning Water said.
“It won’t blow my chook house down this time,” predicted the small girl, and then fell into a pose still and expectant.
Chief Burning Water had to obey certain rules in this game. He was not to sit up. He was not to shake the house down with the muscles of his stomach. He was to lie perfectly flat and try to blow down the house by blowing across his chest. As he took air into his lungs, the child and its mother alternately watched the man’s expanding chest, to be sure that an upheaval of its foundations would not be the cause of the house’s collapse. Pop was likely not to play the game fairly, if given the chance.
Burning Water expelled air in the direction of the house, but it defied the attack, and the child and its mother shrieked with joy. Again Burning Water blew and again failed.
“I’ll do it this time,” he boasted. “You watch.”
For the third time he drew air into his lungs, and then with mighty effort he blew downward along his great chest towards the house on his stomach. Purposely he contracted his stomach muscles and the house fell in ruins.
The toddler and her mother shrieked with glee, the little girl chanting:
“Ya ya! You moved your tummy! You moved your tummy!”
“I didn’t,” Burning Water indignantly denied.
“You did! You did! You did!” chanted the victor.
Burning Water pretended to be crestfallen and exhausted with effort, and then the child jumped upon his stomach and danced until he rolled his body and she fell to the ground. All were laughing when the elderly wife working over the “private” fire called that the strange half-caste was approaching the camp.
At once the younger woman ran into the humpy and the child ran to join her. The older woman went on with her work as she was supposed to be past the period of being attractive to any man. Burning Water stood up, dusted himself by shaking his body much like an animal, and then called for his pipe and tobacco.
The older woman trotted to the humpy to take the pipe and tobacco plug from the younger who remained within its shelter. Burning Water saw Bony halt when fifty yards from the camp and sit on his heels in conformity with aboriginal etiquette. The tobacco and pipe were brought to the chief, and he left camp to welcome the visitor.
“Good day!” he said, his black eyes beaming, and on his face a smile.
The now standing Bony repeated the greeting, adding:
“I’ve come to talk of men and matters, and I suggest we make a little fire up the gully where we can draw maps.”
Burning Water nodded assent, and together they walked from the camp to a bend in the gully where flood-water had scooped a great hole in the right bank. Here they made a fire and, like men down the ages, sat on their heels one either side of the rising blue smoke.
“Did you see the aeroplane last night?” inquired Bony.
“Yes. Its coming alarmed the tribe, for even the children knew that Sergeant Errey and Mit-ji died because of the aeroplane.”
“You kept silent on that point?”
“Yes. But—well, you know how news cannot be hidden.”
“I suppose Itcheroo was the newspaper?”
“You know about Itcheroo?”
“More than a little. The aeroplane pilot dropped a message when he flew over last night. Here it is.”
The small sheet of paper was passed through the fire smoke to Burning Water who read the neat writing on it, and afterwards stared at his visitor with eyes empty of expression.
Bony stood up, waited for the chief to stand. He then gave the sign seen by Sturt when that explorer met aborigines beyond the north-west corner of New South Wales. Solemnly he said:
/> “We stand on the square of squares, and within the circle where we face the moon rising in the east. Who wrote that message?”
“Rex McPherson wrote it.”
Again Bony made the sign and then sat down on his heels. Burning Water followed his action.
“We talk in confidence,” Bony said slowly. “I am glad you recognized me, and I appreciate your reluctance to reveal what The McPherson might not like. Let your mind be easy. The McPherson has told me everything: about Tarlalin, about Rex their son, about the troubles Rex created, about the abduction of Miss McPherson. What do you think—about Rex?”
“When the brat was born its head should have been dashed against a tree. It became a man with a mind more evil than a world filled with Itcheroos. If The McPherson had but granted my request.”
“Oh! That was——?”
“I wanted him to let me and my bucks go into the Illprinka country and there exact justice for the crimes done against us. But The McPherson would not. He might have let us go if Rex McPherson had harmed Miss McPherson that time he abducted her.”
“I suppose it is that The McPherson still loves his son,” Bony suggested, and was surprised that he was wrong.
“No. The other thing is greater.”
“The other thing!”
“Justice.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Then listen. The McPherson is like Pitti-pitti who lived in the Land of Burning Water in the days of the Alchuringa. Pitti-pitti was half kangaroo, half snake. He made the eagles, the doves, the emus and the kangaroos, but he would not make snakes because he knew they were bad.
“One day a blackfellow went to him and asked him to make great trees to provide good shade from the sun as the scrub tree gave only poor shade. And so Pitti-pitti began to walk about over the Land of Burning Water making bloodwood-trees. But all the walking about made him tired, and he made two sons to help him with the work. One son was evil and the other was good: the good son loving the kangaroo part of his father, and the evil son admiring the snake part of him.
“The evil son went away behind a river of burning water, and there he laboured to make a snake. Not being as good as his father at making things, the evil son could only make a small snake, a little grey snake the colour of the saltbush. The little grey snake ran about all over the country dropping baby snakes, and presently many of the poor blackfellows were bitten and died very quickly. When the kangaroo-snake man found out what his evil son had done, he said:
“‘I loosed the snake in me when I made my evil son who made the little grey snake that ran about dropping little baby snakes that grew up to bite the poor blackfellows and make them die. It is all my fault that poor blackfellows are lying dead in the Land of Burning Water. What can I do to atone?’
“A willy wagtail who heard him say that said to him:
“‘A great evil has been done. You first created the evil. You must finish the evil. If you don’t, the little grey snakes will kill all the poor blackfellows and none will be left to sit in the shade of the bloodwood-trees.’
“And so the kangaroo-snake man took his evil son to the top of a high hill, and there he bound his evil son to him and he jumped from the top of the high hill and both were killed. But the evil lived after him and his sacrifice was in vain.”
Burning Water, having finished his story which he and all his tribe believed to be pure history of those fabulous days of the Alchuringa, proceeded silently to smoke his pipe. The head band of white down, glued to a base of human hair, forced his grey hair upward to a waving plume. Even in the inelegant posture of sitting on his heels his bearing was graceful. Bony saw its intended allusion to McPherson.
“The McPherson has more than hinted to me his dislike of my coming to investigate the crimes which have been committed in the Land of Burning Water,” he said, quietly. “What you have said concerning Pitti-pitti and his evil son applies, of course, to The McPherson and his son, and The McPherson’s thoughts about his son. The McPherson must not be permitted to judge, sentence and put the sentence into effect.”
“It would be a thing greater than I could do,” asserted the alleged savage man. “But The McPherson is a great man. Sometimes I have thought him a greater man than his father. After he and I and some of the bucks had stopped Rex from carrying off Miss McPherson, he said to me he would punish Rex by banishing him from the Land of Burning Water. Yesterday he came to me. He said: ‘It is enough, Burning Water. Tomorrow—meaning today—I will call all the bucks from the run, and you and I will lead them into the land of the Illprinka and find Rex, and I will hang him as I was responsible for his birth.’”
It was as though a blind had been drawn upward to reveal another McPherson to Bony. He saw a man as near to the aborigines and their philosophy as Burning Water was to the white race and its philosophy. He saw a man steeped from early childhood in aboriginal thought; and, as he, Bony, had put on the veneer of white civilization, so McPherson had put on the veneer of the aborigines’ mentality.
“It would be a bad thing for him to do,” Bony told Burning Water.
“It would be a foolish thing for him to do, for, like Pitti-pitti he would not right the wrong done by his son,” Burning Water said, surprisingly. “What does a blackfellow do when he sees a dangerous fire?”
“He calls on the lubras to put it out,” Bony replied.
“Therefore,” continued the chief, “it is not The McPherson’s task to put out a fire which threatens to burn us all. All my life, The McPherson has been my friend and I have been his friend. This dangerous fire, called Rex, has put a barrier between us in this matter of the dangerous fire, he is the man and I am the lubra.”
They fell silent, the chief smoking his pipe, Bony his eternal cigarettes. Then:
“Do the Illprinka men trespass on your land much?”
“More and more. I have urged The McPherson to let the Wantella teach them a lesson, and he says always that the time is not yet. We have gone often into the Illprinka country to get back stolen cattle, but we never found them.”
Another period of silence held them smoking thoughtfully.
“Do you think it’s likely that The McPherson would surrender to his son’s demands?” asked Bony.
“No. He couldn’t do it now, when he knows we know how the sergeant and Mit-ji died. No, not that. He decided to act like Pitti-pitti did, back in the Alchuringa days.”
“Would you assist him to attempt to do that?”
Burning Water moved the direction of his gaze away from the questioner. He hesitated before saying:
“If the McPherson asked me to go with him to take and hang his son, I would plead with him not to go. But if The McPherson ordered me to accompany him I would obey. He is my chief. As I have told you, he is my friend.”
“Well, then, let us pass to another subject—Itcheroo,” Bony proceeded. “You remember that I put Sergeant Errey’s attaché case in the swag before we left the camp of the cabbage-trees? Well, when I unrolled the swag in my room after having bathed yesterday evening, the case was not there. This morning I found Itcheroo squatted before a little fire and sending or receiving a mulga wire. In the ashes of his fire were the charred remains of the case and the sergeant’s notebooks.
“We need not bother ourselves at this time with the hows and whys of that theft, for overshadowing them is the fact that Itcheroo is in Rex McPherson’s service.”
“I have suspected it for some time,” replied Burning Water. “Mit-ji was another magic man, and I am glad Mit-ji is dead. Were Itcheroo to die we would be happier. Perhaps The McPherson will give his assent. There are those who wouldn’t miss with a spear once The McPherson said it was to be so.”
“Oh! Well, we’ll leave Itcheroo for the time being. Did you see Doctor Whyte when he was here two months ago?”
“Yes.” Burning Water chuckled. “I found Doctor Whyte kissing Miss McPherson in the garden.”
“Did you like him?”
“He is
a brave man. He flew his aeroplane upside-down, and he made it fall like a leaf falling from a gum-tree. He took me for a ride one day he was here. I liked it.”
“Where did he land his machine?”
“On the edge of the plain beyond the great dam. The McPherson had all my people removing the sand walls between the claypans to make a landing ground.”
“I have sent for Doctor Whyte,” Bony told Burning Water. “I would like him to take me out over the country of the Illprinka. Meanwhile I want you to call on two or three of your reliable bucks to maintain guard round the house at night, for in my mind is the possibility that when next Rex McPherson strikes he will try again to abduct Flora McPherson. The message indicates that he is still determined to force his father to retire and hand the station over to him. That would presuppose he thinks no one saw him kill the sergeant and Mit-ji; or he is mentally deranged and cannot view the inevitable consequences of that act. Do you think he is mad?”
“No. He’s like the white man’s devil. He thinks he is the greatest man in the world who need fear no other man.”
Bony stood up, and Burning Water rose to stand facing him.
“Would you,” began Bony, “would you accompany me into the land of the Illprinka to take Rex McPherson and bring him back to be handed over to the police for trial and judgment?”
“If The McPherson said——”
“Never mind The McPherson in this matter. It is between you and me.”
For half a minute the chief of the Wantella did not reply.
“I would. It would be a good thing for us to go into the land of the Illprinka and take Rex McPherson. That would bring peace to The McPherson and to Miss McPherson and to all my people.”
Bony smiled and held out both his hands. They were gripped in black ones.
“We may go tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. Now draw for me a map of the tribal lands.”
Chief Burning Water took up a stout twig and, selecting sand which was level, he drew a large-scale diagram of McPherson’s Station and the land westward and northwestward of it, filling in with ranges of sand-dunes, creeks and watercourses, and vast areas of cane-grass swamps.
Bushranger of the Skies Page 8
