Chapter Twelve
The Smugglers’ Apprentice
THE MEN quickly checked the pack balance and the straps of every horse, and again Bony led with Jack, the rotund and cheerful smuggler.
“Brian sent the dog back to tell us with the green ribbon that the scenery don’t hide no one but dinkum Irish.” He chuckled. “Dinkum Irish nails us, Nat. Red Kelly was tellin’ us your name for us true Irish.”
“There’s a mighty lot of Irish who aren’t dinkum,” reciprocated Bony. “How about all those bastards in the government?”
“Bloody rats,” snorted Jack. “Same with them in the police. Same with the Customs, same with all gov’ment departments. To hell with ’em. All the bastards can think about is two things.”
Horses’ hooves clip-clopped on rock. The ‘cathedral’ walls fell apart and they were again in the open, climbing steeply up the side of a gully.
“What are the two things?” pressed Bony, and when Jack replied there was no smile behind his eyes.
“Well, one is a sort of mania to tax people, specially poor people. Can’t wear nothing without its being taxed. Can’t eat and drink nothing without being taxed. Taxes all the time. The other is forever filling their own pockets. Every time a new parliament sits first thing to do is raise their wages. But they’re cunnin’ bastards, you know. For every pound they raise their own wages they increases ten times their perks what they don’t pay no income tax on. They get gold passes for everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if they give themselves gold passes to get ’em into public lavatories so’s they don’t have to pay thrippence like us poor people.”
“You could be right,” heartily agreed Inspector Bonaparte. “But the police can’t raise their own wages.”
“Oh them!” The contempt in Jack’s voice was genuine. They arrived at the top of the gully, reached the rim of the highland surrounding Cork Valley, rose up from the fog into the clear rays of the rising sun. To one side there was a small patch of scrub, and Jack hurried the horse train to it and there permitted the panting animals to spell.
“Bit of open country to cross,” he said. “Got to keep a lookout for chance airyplanes. Let’s take a decko.”
Bony accompanied him to the edge of the scrub-patch, and wasn’t interested in chance aeroplanes. He was standing on a plateau of broken grey rock crisscrossed by streaks of foot-high bush. Level with this plateau was the summit of the fog. They were standing on a large raft afloat on a sea of snow, a sea without ripples extending to all points of the compass, and larger blue-black masses like islands having small mountains on them.
The sun’s rays were warm compared with the darkness of the fog from which the party had emerged. Bony opened his lungs to the air, the thought that to smoke would be gross insult to nature. Turning about he gazed over the concealed gully and had to use his imagination to create the picture of Cork Valley, the settlement and the paddocks, and the track up the hill slopes to the white house on the far side. But … no! There was the white house occupied by Conway’s mother and his broken brother. Bony could just see its roof above the white walls darker than the field of fog.
With his telescope that invalid brother could see them across the five miles or so of flat fog. The house was to the north, the sun was rising south-of-east. There came from the white house four distinct flashes. Jack and Steve both witnessed the signal but offered no explanation and Bony did not seek one.
There was an island half a mile to the south and from the island rose a thin column of black smoke. Jack said:
“Right-oh me feller-me-lads.”
He hauled on the lead rope and the horses moved forward after him and Bony across their ‘raft’ to its far side, and then went down into the fog like stepping into the sea. The chill air met them again, and soon they were pressing onward through low scrub in which the trees appeared as giants minus heads and arms.
An hour passed, or what Bony estimated to be an hour, and Jack tirelessly led on the string of pack-animals. He seemed to be impatient, often tugging at the lead rope, and now and then Steve at the rear could be heard urging the horses to a quicker pace.
Thereafter, Bony began to think that riding one of the horses would be preferable to this continuous trudging over an uneven wallaby-pad. Unused to mountains, the muscles of his thighs and calves began to complain. Imperceptibly the fog thinned, and the sun appeared as a faintly blue disc. The giants now had arms spread wide and heads of massive foliage, and not long after he saw that the blue of the sun had changed to gold, and the trees and the bush and the rocks took on pastel tints. Somewhere to the left he could hear water singing a ceaseless song, and heard, too, the cackling laughter of kookaburras, and the harsh cries of the jays.
He was surprised to see a fern tree, and later the ropes of a climber about a tree. Now they must be travelling through a gorge wide and deep beneath those upper rafts and islands he had admired early in the morning.
For the third time a dog appeared, and not the same beagle this time. There was a green ribbon tied to collar—the green light to proceed—and when the ribbon had been removed by Jack, the dog wagged his tail and trotted on ahead, nose to the ground, to catch up with Brian Kelly scouting beyond sight of the party.
“Them dogs work out wide of young Brian,” Jack explained. “Great snifters. Snift a stranger, or anyone, a mile off. Funny what you can do with dogs. You can even teach ’em never to bay, no matter what.”
“They’re better on the hoof than I am,” Bony confessed, and the rotund man grinned as though to tire a half-abo plainsman was an achievement.
“You gotta train, Nat. You’ll harden up. Anyway, we’ll be spelling soon.”
Half an hour later they did, after walking straight through a wall of scrub into a great open-mouthed cave. The lathered animals gave proof of the pace adopted by the men. The packs were removed and then Bony could see that one animal carried two bags of chaff, and another blanket-rolls and saddle bags which contained food.
A fire was lit and tea brewed. While the horses munched chaff from canvas nose-bags, they ate cold pickled pork and bread and butter and drank strong tea, Steve and Jack occasionally taking a sip of ‘wine’ to keep out the cold. Bony was glad to relax, sitting on his folded overcoat and resting his back against a partially filled sack of chaff.
The scene could have been staged, for it contained stagy characters, feeding horses, gear and merchandise.
It was more than presumption that they were engaged in an illegal traffic. Well, when there is profit in a trade, illegal or not, there are men ever ready to engage in it. What Bony could not as yet clearly understand was their mental attitude—shared by Red Kelly—to Irishmen in government and police, for in demeanour and words they had shown distinct hostility which sign-posted a schism among the Irish transplanted to Australia. It was deeper than the normal Irishry.
Another angle bothered him. The customary single-mindedness with which he tackled a criminal was being reduced through attacks made on his own weaknesses. Despite the recently disclosed reason why Mike Conway had picked him up and brought him to Cork Valley, there was no blinking aside that all the Conways had treated him, a confessed horse-thief, with unusual kindness, an attribute which must spring from a deeper motive than training him as a scout for their smuggling expeditions. The foundation on which he had built a most successful career was being undermined by this liking of people whom he ought to regard with cold antipathy since probably among them were ruthless murderers.
Bony rolled a cigarette, stretched his legs luxuriously, and marvelled at himself for actually thinking: ‘Well, why be perturbed about such a problem, full of meat and tea in this cool cave and amid such a homely scene and people?’ And then there was a beagle dog looking at him, and attached to the animal’s collar was a piece of paper tied with a strip of red cloth.
“Tottie! Here, Tottie.”
Bony looked towards Jack who had spoken and Jack was a changed man, no longer of cheerf
ul mien. He was now deliberate in action as he untied the ribbon and released the paper. “Writin’ on it, Steve. Brian knows we can’t read writin’.”
“He knows I can,” Bony said. The men gazed at him, the little man suspiciously, the lank Steve with hope. “Pass it over,” Still Jack hesitated, and there was an edge in Bony’s voice when he said: “You said red on the dog’s collar meant danger. The message tells what danger and where. Pass over that paper, Jack.”
They were surprised by the undertones of command, and for an instant looked at him as though seeing him for the first time. He was still reclining against the bag of chaff, and Jack came forward on his hands and knees to surrender the paper. Bony read out the message.
“ ‘Two men following you. They just crossed Flood’s Gap. Take the water track. Better hurry!’ ”
“Crikey, yes! Come on. Load up and get,” snapped Steve, and they sprang to the job of repacking.
“How far back’s Flood’s Gap?” demanded Bony, almost tossing a pack saddle across the back of a horse, and not pausing for an answer.
“Half a mile,” replied Jack. “Get on, hurry. We got to be well up the water track before they can catch up … if they’re after us.”
“After us, all right,” snarled Steve, and Bony sought further information as he slung sack-protected bundles on to the saddle, and felt rather than heard the gug-guggle of liquid within.
“How far ahead is the water track? Tell me. Describe the road. I’ll have to wait about here and trick ’em somehow. Then I’ll overhaul you.”
“Bit under a half-mile on you come to a shallow stream with a wide sandy bottom. We follow the stream up for a quarter-mile to a fork. We take the right stream. Until we get to the fork we’re wide open for them fellers to see us, and which stream we take from there. We follow that right stream for nigh on a mile, and leave it at a flat rock covering an acre or two.”
“And after that?”
“You want to know a lot, Nat, don’t you?” queried Jack, and Bony now panting under the strain caused by necessary haste, sneered:
“Hell of a good set-up, eh? Wandering about and leaving horse tracks for a blind man to follow with the tip of his stick. What sort of turn-out is this? And you arguing the bloody toss at a time when the demons are on our heels. Get going with these lumps of cat’s meat. Get some steam out of ’em.”
“All right … all right. But you ain’t the boss,” rebelled the fat man, and now Steve broke in.
“ ’Bout time he was. I knew this track was too risky. Said so to Red and Brian. Never liked it. Come on you!” He grabbed the lead of the front horse, and the others urged the train into a frantic walk out through the screen of bush and into the sunlight of the wide-floored gorge.
Here Bony paused to look back and down. He could see nothing moving among the dotting boulders and the low bush and tall iron-barks. But he inwardly shuddered at the crass stupidity revealed by the plain trail of horse tracks, going back and down to the reported trackers, and continuing upward after the hurrying pack train.
For a little way he followed the train, running from tree to tree, visually searching the rear from each tree, and eventually the train disappeared ahead, and he waited in the shelter of several hillside boulders to gain sight of the followers. A few minutes after that they appeared.
They were following the horse trail, plain enough for a city pavement walker to follow. They carried equipment on their backs and were dressed in the stout clothes of the bushwalker, the city fellow who delights in spending his holidays and week-ends in tramping through the mountains à la senior boy scout. The more experienced are truly expert, and most of them belong to a club or organisation.
These two men Bony was now watching were equipped to spend days and nights in the mountains, and it was obvious that they were physically fit to carry their equipment. He recognised them. They were the two who had crossed Red Kelly’s paddocks. Now they were walking steadily up the gorge, eyes on the tracks and Bony waited for them to see the tracks turning off into the scrub masking the cave. Here they halted, and their actions proclaimed them to be experienced bushmen. They spent less than half a minute there, and again proceeded up the gorge.
Their interest gave Bony the opportunity to slip away from the boulders, and he ran on after the horse train, seeking means by which he could delay the pursuers. The slopes of the gorge abruptly drew close and became exceedingly steep, forming a natural gateway to a much wider one crossing it, like the top bar of the letter T.
From the gateway Bony could see the horse train splashing its way along the bed of a stream which came down from the right, and now there was no doubt that the bushwalkers would arrive at this place before the train could reach a spur at the junction of two lesser streams. Bony saw how they could be delayed—if there was time left to him.
Unencumbered by the heavy overcoat he had packed on a horse, he raced back into the ‘gateway’ and climbed the right slope, pulling his felt hat forward, and knotting a handkerchief about his nose and mouth in the approved style of the hold-up thug. From a hundred feet up he could see the two men, still in the wider section of the gorge. He was sobbing for breath after climbing two hundred feet, and here, as previously observed, there was a wide ledge thickly littered with boulders, ranging from a ton to several pounds, which had fallen from the higher slope.
He shouted. The men looked up, saw him, stopped. One raised a pair of slung binoculars to his eyes, and Bony thumbed his nose. Halted, they conferred, and Bony gained two minutes. Then they came on with that steady pace which tells of trained leg muscles. They stopped again when Bony toppled over the ledge a boulder weighing a hundred odd pounds, and they watched the boulder falling and bouncing and smashing its way down to the horse trail they were following. They watched a second boulder smashing down to thud on the trail closer to them, and the third which thudded still closer. The retreat began when the fourth boulder loomed like a sputnik over their heads.
Chapter Thirteen
No Guns for Smugglers
THE STREAM averaged ten feet in width and was seldom more than a foot deep. The water was icy cold and crystal clear, and the grey sandy bottom was ribbed and ceaselessly in movement.
At the place where the pack train reached the water the hills were swept back to form a narrow valley; the floor covered with coarse grass, the slopes massed with buttresses of rock and robust trees.
The men urged the horses to frantic effort, accepting the risk that a load might slip under a horse’s belly. The animals splashed themselves, their packs and both men, and rear-man Steve shouted to them, waved a stick and ploughed after the rearmost horse despite the constant shower of water thrown up by their hooves.
Steve was furiously angry, but not by the water, which was incidental. He was an easy going man, prone to give way early in any argument. He had voiced his objection to this track, but had not pressed it against the decision reached by Red Kelly and his son. They depended on the fog’s continuance. He had countered that early in the season the fog cannot be relied on.
The plan had been to reach the cave behind the scrub screen before, or at least soon after, the sun thinned the fog to a light mist, even dispelled it. They were to stay there, fog or no fog, until night fell again and then proceed to the valley, and take a zigzag track up the opposite slope. The first part of the journey, from Cork Valley to the cave, was thought to be comparatively safe when the fog was thick, and bushwalkers and others don’t usually walk about these mountains.
Now it was essential to take a dangerous cross-track to an alternative track by which they could reach O’Grady and his truck.
Steve was experiencing the nightmarish effort of trying to run in leaden boots. For what seemed an hour they were right out in the open and in clear sunlight, and constantly he looked back, expecting to see the two followers in the valley behind them. Unable to see Bony, Steve thought of treachery, and swiftly reviewed all the early reservations they had had about this stranger
who had come to Cork Valley. The suspicion that he was a police spy returned, and he could see nothing ahead but disaster following his surrender to the views of the Kellys.
The Kellys always shouted and bashed their way through life; the Conways used their brains and spoke softly.
The junction of the two streams was eventually reached, and Jack took the right one which became narrow and deeper but still sandy. Almost at once the hills closed in tight and concealed them from the valley, and Steve paused to peer back from a tree and received renewed hope when he saw nothing that moved, not even Nat Bonnay.
He signalled to Jack that all was clear at the rear, and the train leader reduced the pace. Keeping to the stream, they proceeded for half an hour when the bottom became rocky and they were forced to turn up from it to a large area of rock. Here they left what was now a gully and moved into a still sharper gully rising steeply to the south.
An hour later, horses and men were scrabbling up rock steps to enter a veritable maze of gigantic boulders which once had been the core of an alp. Behind one of these rock masses stepped Brian Kelly.
He was dressed much like the bushwalkers, but he carried only a lightly-filled rucksack, and slung from a shoulder were powerful binoculars and strapped to his leather belt was a pistol holster, too large for the weapon concealed there.
“Nice how d’you do!” snarled Jack, and Steve grinned his anger and said not a word. “We better camp here.”
Brian nodded and assisted them to remove loads and saddles. When the horses were tethered to a rope, the young man spoke for the first time.
“Could have been worse. Would have been worse if it hadn’t been for Nat.”
“How so?” asked Jack, leaning against a rock and opening a flat tin of tobacco. “Me and Steve’s wetted to the skin ’cos we had to take to the stream. Me matches are soaked. Papers would have been, too, if they wasn’t in the tin.”
Bony - 25 - Bony and The Kelly Gang Page 9
