Reason opposed such a notion, but the idea was nourished by the darkness and the wind hissing among the trees. Much of reason is evolved for the express purpose of comforting men who live life like those who shoot unknown rapids in frail barks. A coward can easily deny his God when he is young and the sun is shining, but it is the believer in God who can command courage as he dies. Then it is faith, not reason, that takes the hands of a man to lead him on.
So, even as Bony thrilled at his triumph over fear, so did he wish himself back in his bed in the men’s bunkhouse.
The Three Sisters were above him now. He could see them as the wind-swayed branches moved. The Southern Cross was not visible, it being masked by the creek trees. It was ten minutes after eleven o’clock.
One of eleven possibles! Which one the Strangler? Of course it was a man and not a bunyip. Come away! cried Bony’s mother. Stick it, old man! urged his father. Dreyton, Donald Dreyton. He knew when Mabel and Frank walked alone. He was camped only four miles away when Mabel walked alone. If he was innocent, why did he conceal, keep the piece of flannel and not at once hand it to the police? Tom Storrie! He was a strong youth, with hands like legs of mutton. Fred Storrie, his father! He was tall, lean and as strong as a bull. He knew when Alice walked alone, or could have known. He knew when Frank walked alone. Did he mistake his daughter for someone else, and then, discovering his mistake just in time, release her from his hands and, thinking her dead, leave her? Physically and mentally, Hang-dog Jack was the most likely of all the possibles. He could_____
Abruptly Bony ceased to breathe.
The back of his head rested against the trunk of the tree, and the trunk had received a distinct blow....
Continuing to keep his head pressed against the trunk, Bony slowly turned it so that his left ear came to be pressed against the rough bark and he was able to look up into the swaying branches.
Among them he could see no fantastic shape. The skin at the nape of his neck was prickling, while the feeling in his legs drained away like blood. His hair felt dry and brittle. Now he could faintly hear a regular tattooing on the trunk, but he could not locate its origin. When the tattooing ceased he heard a soft rasping noise as though something was sliding down the bark to reach him.
Yet he could see nothing, and the horror gripped his muscles and tortured his nerves. Stilled to stone, Bony waited with his right hand caressing the pistol and his left hand gripping the torch. He looked for, but failed to see, either man or bunyip. The rasping noise ceased, and he dared to free his pent breath. His straining ears hurt and then felt exquisite relief when they caught the sound of a sharp hiss.
There was someone or something on the far side of the trunk against which the detective was pressing his head. The strange tattooing began again, and Bony recognized it for what it was. It was being produced by a nervous man’s fingers, and this man, too, was pressing himself against the tree-trunk. The wildly staring half-caste saw the outline of the man’s head bulge outward from the trunk line, slowly, deliberately, until he saw half a man’s face. Swiftly Bony’s eyelids drooped to mask the white of his eyes.
The seconds passed, and neither man moved a fraction of an inch. The unknown continued to stand peering round the trunk; Bony continued to lie perfectly still, watching the half-face exposed to him. Had his own face been white he must have been seen, for now intuition rather than visual proof assured him that he was not discovered.
Even whilst he waited thus, Bony was experiencing admiration. The unknown had not arrived via the tree-branches and then down the trunk to his present position. He had come along the ground. He had come as silently as an aboriginal along the edge of the creek-bank which passed the tree only three or four yards beyond it. Bony knew that his super-sight and hearing had not been at fault. For a white man it had been an achievement, and that he was a white man was proved by the faint gleam of white face protruding from the trunk of the tree.
From the direction of the homestead Bony now heard the unmistakable sound of footfalls. To turn his head or to make the slightest movement would have betrayed him to the man on the other side of the tree, but presently the detective knew that a third man was coming along the creek track. He was now close. Now he was passing. Then the half-face vanished behind the tree, and swiftly Bony changed the angle of his head so that he could see the opposite line of the trunk and watch the track as well.
Walking the track was a man. He was walking towards the Broken Hill road, and for an instant of time he became silhouetted against the sky above the township. His shape, his gait, the manner in which one arm was swinging, all informed the detective that he was Hang-dog Jack.
The next moment the Wirragatta cook had vanished into the dark of the night. Bony waited, listening with all his power, to hear, if not to see, the fellow on the far side of the tree move away from it. Still more seconds passed, and he heard no sound nor saw any movement other than the waving branches above. Hang-dog Jack’s footfalls faded into the night as his shape had done. Still Bony waited, certain that the other man had not moved his position.
The moment arrived when he could wait no longer. With the pistol now free of the coat-pocket, he slowly and noiselessly drew up his legs, and then he began the operation of raising his body whilst still pressed against the trunk. Up and up, inch by inch, and so till he gained a standing attitude, still pressed to the tree.
With the pistol ready for instant work from the hip, the detective slowly sidled round the tree, his head a little in front of his body, his right eye seeing past the trunk and his left eye blinded by it.
There was no one behind the tree. As silently as he had come so had the white man departed.
The Wirragatta cook had disappeared in the direction of the Broken Hill road, and Bony dared not use his torch to ascertain if the unknown man had trailed Hang-dog Jack or was still close by. The silence of the unknown’s departure was astonishing, because, unlike his arrival behind the tree, his departure had been listened for. From this vigil so far, one fact stood out in great importance. Hang-dog Jack walked the creek track in the middle of the night without the smallest effort at concealment or even silent movement.
Bony felt no uneasiness about the cook—if he were not the Strangler. Hang-dog Jack was exceptionally strong and he was, too, an expert wrestler. No man was better able successfully to resist physical violence. The detective reviewed his own actions in the immediate past. Should he have bailed up the unknown who had watched the cook pass by? Had he done right by making no attempt to apprehend the unknown for identification? Yes. To have done this would not have proved the unknown to be the Strangler, for Bony had not seen the fellow up among the tree-branches. He could not be charged with vagrancy, or with being on enclosed land or with any one of the hundred charges used for the purpose of holding a suspect.
Who he was Bony naturally would have liked much to know. Yet he would prefer to remain in ignorance of his identity if the knowledge did not prove him to be the Strangler. The pressing matter at the moment was to learn the direction taken by the watcher from the tree. To Bony an examination of his tracks would provide evidence of his identity as sound as that of fingerprints. Once he saw them he never would forget them, and would surely recognize tracks made by the same man at any future date. That he had followed the cook Bony was inclined to believe, but until he had proof he could not know if this were so. He might be within a few paces of him, and to use the torch to examine tracks at this stage would be foolish.
Accustomed to the noises created by the wind, Bony failed to notice its increasing violence until a stronger gust came roaring along the creek. It was ominous. It came, this gust, like an express train, and like a train it roared its passage towards the Broken Hill road.
Continuing to press his body against the trunk of the tree, his head and his eyes incessantly moving, Bony listened and endeavoured to register sounds made by human agency. He could detect nothing moving save the smaller branches of the tree above him.
&nbs
p; One thing was obvious. Hang-dog Jack at least would return to the homestead, having come from it, and it was more than probable that he would follow the creek track again rather than return by another way unmarked by track or pad. If the unknown watcher was on his trail Bony determined, at the least, to see his shape.
The only way of seeing an object on a particularly dark night is to get it silhouetted against the sky, and so Bony sank to the ground, and like a stalking fox he crawled from the tree to the edge of the creek-bank, at this place five feet above the creek-bed and sharply steep.
Employing extreme caution not to get too near the edge of the bank, where he might be precipitated with noise to the gravelly bed, he worked his way towards the Broken Hill road, still on hands and knees, for some fifty to sixty yards, when he reached a point midway in the break of the bordering trees. Now he could look towards the plain and see clearly the line it cut against the lighter tinted sky. Between that line and himself passed the creek track, and no living thing could use the track and not be seen silhouetted against the sky.
The detective knew this place well. He was lying along the edge of the creek-bank, and an attack could not be delivered from that side, nor could it come from a tree, because the sky above him was clear of branches. For the first time since leaving the stately leopardwood-tree he felt safe.
A lightning mind was probing for the reason of the cook’s midnight walk. Hang-dog Jack’s destination was as mysterious as the open manner of his going to it. This latter argued that he was not the Strangler, but opposed to it was the assumption that were he the Strangler he would have nothing to fear. If met and questioned, he could say that being unable to sleep he had chosen to take a walk. There was no law in existence to forbid it. He was even keeping to a semi-public road.
The wind gusts were appreciably stronger when, an hour later, Hang-dog Jack returned. He was actually humming, and the sound reached the tensed Bony before the fall of the cook’s boots in the soft sand of the track. As he passed across Bony’s skyline there was no possibility of mistaking his squat, powerful figure and the long, swinging arms. He was walking at a comfortable pace, like one to whom time and circumstance are of no moment.
The ugly figure disappeared towards Wirragatta. Still tensed, Bony waited as motionless as a blue-tongued lizard waiting to trap a fly. As distinctly as he had seen Hang-dog Jack he saw the second man run along his skyline, following, not the track, but the tree-line and passing the detective within less than five yards. He ran crouching so that he appeared not unlike a giant crab. Only during a space of four seconds was Bony able to watch him, and, although he was Quite unable to determine the fellow’s identity, he did know that the cook was being stalked.
Who was this second man and why was he stalking the cook? Always suspicious of the obvious, Bony reasoned that he might be, like himself, merely an observer. That the stalker was not Constable Lee, Bony was sure. That he was not Donald Dreyton, he was much less sure. Had it been anyone else who walked the creek track save Hang-dog Jack, Bony might have hastened after him to render assistance if necessary. He scarcely felt uneasy, on the cook’s behalf, as it would have required much more than hand pressure on Hang-dog Jack’s throat even to inconvenience him.
What was of greater importance was the fact that the second man had walked across the break in the tree-line and therefore had left his tracks there. Yet Bony continued to lie at the bank edge and wait. To see those tracks he must use his light, for by dawn they would certainly have been wiped out of existence by the wind, but to use the light would betray his presence if not his activity. And for the moment Bony knew this to be unwise. He waited fully thirty minutes, and he would have liked much to wait longer before he decided that if he further delayed in examining the tracks he would never see them at all. Up the creek was coming a heavy gust of wind with the roaring of a great waterfall.
And the wind beat him even as his light showed the line of tracks but a few feet distant.
Like a thousand devils the wind howled among the trees and plucked at their branches to tear many from the parent trunks and lay them violently on the ground. It threatened to throw the detective off his feet, and when it passed it left him gasping.
The line of tracks was still distinguishable, but each of the footprints was become blurred and almost filled in. It was quite impossible accurately to estimate the size of the boot or shoe worn by the unknown, although it was possible to establish that the size was six or seven or eight. The little, but important, tell-tale marks proving how the man walked and what part of his soles was given most work were gone, destroyed by the wind, perhaps before that last gust.
Bony had not time to feel to the full his disappointment when he made a discovery. Although he could quite clearly see his own tracks along the creek-bank, he could not discover the tracks made by the unknown after he left the tree to stalk the cook towards the Broken Hill road. There were his tracks running westward after the cook, but there were no tracks running eastward. An examination of the road revealed Hang-dog Jack’s double line of tracks, but no others. How, then, had the unknown man left the tree-trunk round which Bony had observed him watching the cook?
As silently as the stalker of the cook, so did Bony walk back towards the tree against which he had sat for so long. The absence of the stalker’s first line of tracks worried him, because there was suggested a further complexity. The double line of the cook’s tracks proved that the wind could not have erased from the earth the stalker’s first line of tracks. Yet the stalker had left but the one line, that of his passage towards Wirragatta. Was the stalker, therefore, not the unknown man who had watched the cook from behind Bony’s tree. Had he been for a long time farther towards the Broken Hill road waiting the coming of the cook? If that were so, then it appeared that the stalker was not the unknown, that the unknown had not gone after the cook towards the Broken Hill road and was still between Bony and the homestead. Were, there four men along this creek tonight, not three—Bony, the unknown, the cook, and the stalker?
Then came the attack—swift and silent and sure....
His caution overcome by chagrin and the problem set him by the tracks, Bony failed to keep watch on the branches beneath which he was walking. He heard the light impact of feet on the ground immediately behind him. Nervous tension having been relaxed, the communication between ear-drums and brain was lethargic. Before he could turn and defend himself, before he could begin the attempt, vice-like hands encircled his throat and neck.
Instantly his breathing was stopped. The primary pressure was terrific. It was a band formed by interlocked fingertips across his windpipe, hand-palms pressed to the sides of his neck, and two thumbs cruelly crushed against either side of a serial segment of the spinal column.
As the overwhelming horror flooded his brain before the air stoppage began to take effect, Bony abruptly went limp. He drew up his legs, but his body was held on its knees by the two hands at his throat. A throbbing hum was in his ears, but beneath this inner sound he heard distinctly one having an exterior origin. It was low, throaty laughter—a dreadful, gleeful chuckling telling unmistakably of the lust to kill. The power of the life-destroying hands was equalled by the power of the arms supporting his weight.
Instantly Bony’s hands went upward to tear away the band of bone and flesh about his neck, and it was then that he became conscious of the automatic pistol in his right and the torch in his left hand. Tautened muscles rather than intent pressed forward the light switch, and the strong beam moved to and fro between the branches like a searchlight hunting an aeroplane.
The pistol cracked even above the roar of the wind and the roaring in Bony’s ears. He doubled it round and against his side, and at terrible risk to himself endeavoured to shoot his assailant. The night was now becoming unnaturally dark to Bony’s starting eyes, and then swiftly the threshing branches against the sky faded into a general void.
Again and again the pistol cracked, but, although his forefinger could still c
ontinue to press and release the trigger, Bony could not move the angle of his body more than was permitted by the muscles of his neck below the Strangler’s hands.
He began to slide downward into a pit. Once again the pistol exploded. Then he felt himself flying across immeasurable space. In his brain a light flickered with astonishing rapidity. When it stopped, pain ceased. Consciousness ceased, too.
Chapter Sixteen
The Doctor’s Patient
SO LIMITED WAS the scope of Dr. Mulray’s practice that to receive a night call was unusual. He was awakened by a persistent knocking when the dawn was breaking on a new day of high wind blowing coldly from the south.
The doctor’s bedroom was the front room, left of the tiny hall; his study-cum-consulting room was opposite. He was, therefore, not difficult to awaken by the knocking on his front door in a township where electric lighting and bells were notably absent. The temperature this early morning was lower than it had been for weeks. With the fall, the wind’s power over the sand particles had waned to vanishing point. The air was bracing, even in the doctor’s bedroom, and as he heaved himself off the bed, Dr. Murray knew that while he had slept a cool change had arrived.
“All right! All right! I’m coming!” he shouted when the knocking continued. Breathing heavily, the old man struggled into a worn dressing-gown, picked up the oil lamp he had lit, and thudded out to the hall and the front door. The wind caused the lamp to flicker badly, but standing outside he saw the burly Constable Lee and the much smaller Joseph Fisher.
“Admit us, please, doctor. I am in need of your services,” urged Bony. The tones of his voice caused the doctor to stoop to glare at him, and then he abruptly straightened and turned to the study door.
“Come in and let me have a look at you. Shut the door, Lee,” he commanded. Within the study, having put down the lamp, he watched the detective lurch into the room, and then gently assisted him into one of the two old but comfortable leather armchairs.
Winds of Evil Page 14
