Bony spoke no more for a full half minute. Then he said as fiercely:
“Is shedying! Is she badly hurt?”
When the farmer replied it was as though he lifted a bag of cement from Bony’s shoulders.
“No, thank God! The bullet has passed through her body high up on her right shoulder. I fear that it has shattered the blade, but I don’t know for certain.”
Whilst Mr Jelly saturated the squares of sheeting to wash the wound and to form cold compresses, the detective rolled the long strips into bandages. Bony was hunting for pins when the rapidly approaching car roared to a stop outside the house. There entered the Spirit of Australia in the van of two other men. “What’s up, Bob?” he demanded in tones of unaccustomed softness.
“Landon shot her,” Mr Jelly replied sharply.
“So Hurley told us. But why?”
“I’ll answer no damn questions now,” Mr Jelly said with equal sharpness. “We’ve got to get her home quickly. Mrs Saunders can look after her properly until we get a doctor. Come on! Give us a hand to get her into the car.”
Bony found Eric beside him when they had passed the limp form into the waiting arms of her father, seated in the rear seat of the car. With but ill-restrained impatience he said:
“Eric, straddle that machine of yours. Go to Merredin as quickly as possible. Find Sergeant Westbury. Tell him to come out at once. Tell him to bring a doctor. Tell him to bring Sergeant Muir. Tell him we want Landon for the murder of George Loftus, and to organize search parties to stop him getting on the trains or escaping by somebody’s car. You’ll ride fast, won’t you?”
“No one has seen me ride real fast yet.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Mrs Loftus Passes On
THE CAR moved off with its burden and its passengers. The motor-cycle made off at racing speed along the east side of the rabbit fence. Bony ran out to the road. He stopped the first car which came along, explained the situation to the driver, who then consented to act on Bony’s instructions. They speeded away on a tour of the country south, east, and north, rousing the farmers, getting guards on all main and subsidiary roads.
When at twenty minutes to eleven Mrs Loftus and her sister drove in through the farm gate the haystack was in flames.
Mrs Loftus drove the car to the back of the house, put the brakes hard on, and gazed with the fixed stare of the hypnotized at the stack of hay blazing at both ends.
A fire brigade then could have extinguished the flames within a few minutes, provided, of course, that the pumps were fed with water from hydrants. The fact that the stack was newly built must be taken into consideration to account for the rapidity with which the fire gained a mastering hold, for with an old stack the hay would have become compressed with the passage of time.
The ruddy glare lit up the house, the stables, the cart shed, and the dogs’ kennels. The three dogs lay in recumbent attitudes, as though asleep. The gentle south wind had but little effect on the flame-lit smoke until it had risen two hundred feet in leaping, spark-streaked spirals which formed the huge column.
“How could it have got alight? Someone must have done it, sis!” Miss Waldron exclaimed indignantly.
“It looks like it,” Mrs Loftus agreed absently. She was thinking how strange it was that she simply could not put from her mind a picture once she had seen of a Viking funeral pyre, even while she wondered why it was that Mick Landon did not come out of the house; for he was nowhere near the stack, and the lighted lamp indicated that he must be at home.
In agreement with her, Landon had excused himself from his duties as secretary to the meeting early in the proceedings on the plea of indisposition. He had hired, Fred, the garage-man, to drive him back, and at the old York Road fence gate he had got out of the car, telling Fred that he preferred to walk the rest of the way, hoping that the exercise would do him good. Landon then had kept to the main road until he reached the north-east corner of the farm. Cutting in as he did from the corner to the cart shed, Hurley, of course, could not possibly haveseem him. At his arrival at the homestead the silence of the dogs had warned him.
Soul-shrivelling foreboding seized upon Mrs Loftus while she sat in the car. An imp perched on her shoulder and shrieked into her ear, “You fool! You fool! You fool!” She could see it all now, the stupidity of all that self-deception, the wilful creation of that illusion of happiness and security. “You fool! You fool! You fool!” She should have known that Time would wear away the covering she had so carefully woven about her skin.
The car engine had stopped, and without troubling to start it again-it meant cranking, since the self-starter was out of order-she got out and walked round the house to the door, closely followed by Miss Waldron.
“Hullo, Mick! Where are you?” she called when, at the doorway, she failed to see the hired man.
On the step of the door she stood. The shattered fragments of the china vase beneath her feet made her look down to observe them whitely gleaming against a background of water-veneered boarding. The lamp was set at the farthest end of the table. The big enamelled basin was still on the floor between the table and the bedroom door. At the same time both she and her sister saw the bloodstained swabs and the stained water in the basin.
Mrs Loftus was experiencing a slow invasion of cold which had no centre in any part of her body and yet seemed not to come from without. She heard her sister’s cries of alarm but felt no affect from them. They sounded such futile, childish cries, now that the wonderful barriers she had built between herself and disaster had been apparently torn down.
Mick! Was that Mick’s blood in the basin? Whom had he discovered here, and what had happened to him? Oh! These hammering questions! Never during all her lifehad she felt so icily calm.
Unable to have known, yet she did know that the secrets that the house contained were no longer there. For fully a minute she stood gazing down at the open hearth, stripped of its covering of crimson tissue paper, incuriously noting that one of the three lifted bricks rested on the other two, knowing that the japanned box had been taken without troubling to bring the lamp near to assure herself.
Heedless of her sister’s questionings, she turned away from the fireplace, picked up the lamp, and carried it into the bedroom. The counterpane and the blankets cast on the floor, the remains of the torn sheet, were clues which, added to the bloody swabs and water, proclaimed plainly that someone had been badly injured. For the first time she felt fear, fear for the man she loved so passionately. Where was Mick Landon? Where was the man who had swept her into a world of delirious delight?
The mattress did not appear to have been disarranged. However, still holding the lamp, she raised the foot of the flock mattress and calmly scrutinized the opening she had cut and sewed together. She could not detect Lucy Jelly’s work, but she must make sure, she must know the worst. And then? And then? Well, all along, in her inmost heart, she had known that she would have to take the last long journey. And now that this departure seemed imminent, she knew that the journey would have no terrors for her if her lover accompanied her. Suicide pact; yes. That is what people would call it.
As though she opened a door and stepped into a room, she came to hear the questions being fired at her by Miss Waldron. She realized now that her sister could no longer remain with her. She would have to leave at once, before they came to find, to find-
“You see, we have had burglars,” she said in a clear and steady voice. “They have gone now, after taking what they wanted and firing the haystack. The police will come and ask questions, and you must not be here then. I shall be all right, but I want to be alone. You cannot sleep in your veranda room tonight. You must go to theKingstons.”
“But-but-, sis-I can’t leave you know,” objected Miss Waldron loyally. Mrs Loftus melted for a second. Her sister saw a fleeting expression of wistful tenderness sweep into the marble-pale beautiful face. Mrs Loftus said:
“If you love me, you will go without arguing. I have made a mess o
f everything. Here you see the visible expression of the wreckage of my life. Drive yourself to theKingstons in the car. Please, please don’t stop to argue. Go-at once.”
“But-but-”
“Go!”
Miss Waldron shrank back from the look of blazing fury suddenly leaping in her sister’s eyes. What she saw in them terrified her, and in backing to the door she wanted to scream when Mrs Loftus steadily followed her. The strain at last became unbearable. The mystery of this night, the suspicion that her sister held some awful knowledge, made her long to lean against someone stronger than herself; and her sister would not support her. She began to sob, no longer able to resist her sister’s dominance. Helplessly she permitted herself to be hurried to the car and pushed into the driving seat. When Mrs Loftus had cranked the engine she came back to Miss Waldron to say:
“Good-bye! Go to theKingstons. Tell them not to worry about me. Do not come back till tomorrow afternoon.”
“All right, sis. Let me kiss you.”
“Kiss me! My God, child! Go! Go at once. Do you hear?”
And so Miss Waldron drove off over the bumpy track to the farm gate, stunned by perplexity, horrified by her sister’s strange mental condition. Mrs Loftus watched the red tail-light grow small, saw the sweep of the headlights turn southward when the car reached the main road. A vicelike hand gripped her arm.
“Where has she gone? Didn’t you hear me shout?” Landon demanded sharply. “We had a chance with the car. Why did you let her take the car?”
“Mick! Mick! What does it all mean?” shesaid, quickly limp now that he was at her side to hold her with his love and protection.
“It means-come into the house. Is anyone there?”
His presence, his touch, melted that terrible frozen feeling which had kept her as stiff as a robot. She clung to him now as her sister had wished to cling to her. She was on the verge of hysteria, unable to realize that he was roughly dragging her into the house. He slammed the door shut behind them.
His eyes were bloodshot, the sinister slate-blue eyes unnaturally wide and fixed. He brought his handsome face close to hers, and she wanted to cry out when she knew that the action was not prompted by the old desire to kiss her. Never before had she seen his mouth with the lips drawn back.
“Means?” he said. “It means that the play is over. They must think that Loftus is in the haystack. Anyway, I fired it when I saw Bony and the others leave. I found Bony here. There were two other men waiting to grab me, but I came too soon. Bony’s a tracker all right. A police tracker he is. I’ve got to get away. You have to give me a chance. You can give me a chance if only you keep your mouth shut. I want that money. I want that box to take away and hide somewhere else.”
“You wouldn’t leave me, Mick?” she asked with stricken features.
“Of course I must leave you. You’d be a drag. I’ve got to keep going till I get out of the State. There’s no sense in our both getting caught. I’ll get the box; you get the money.”
“The box has gone. You idiot! Firing the stack won’t help us. Who was hurt?”
“They got the box!” For seconds Landon stared incredulously.
“Yes, they took the box,” she said dully, despair seizing her when she saw him with the eyes of searching truth.
“Well, it only helps them to what they already know. I want that money. It can’t help you. I’ve got to keep going; go before they come back. They’ve taken the girl home. I could hear them talking when they were putting her into the car, even though I was up on the rock.”
“Girl! What girl?”
“Lucy Jelly. She was here with Bony. He charged me, and the gun went off. She was wounded.”
Snatching up a carving knife from the dresser, Landon rushed into the bedroom. Mrs Loftus followed, carrying the lamp. In the act of putting it down on the pedestal table she began to laugh dreadfully.
“You’re a fool, Mick. What chance have you got when they’ve got the black box?” Again she laughed, shrilly, mockingly, with the devilish notes of a kookaburra. “Lucy Jelly! Ah! Ah! Lucy Jelly! Get the money, Mick. You can have all of it. You may go and leave me to face it out alone, dear, foolish, stupid Mick.”
“Stop it!” he shouted when she began to laugh again.
“I can’t help it, Mick. You are just like a poor little bunny in a netted warren with a ferret.”
With one long stroke he gashed the end of the mattress for a yard. He searched for and found the package, looked at it swiftly, placed it in his pocket. And yet again Mrs Loftus laughed.
“Look inside! Look inside! Don’t you understand why Lucy Jelly was brought here?”
With his gaze fixed on her, Landon’s hand went into his pocket and brought out the package. Now looking down at it, he slipped off the covering of white paper, unfolded the newspaper, turned it over, and then allowed it to slip from his fingers to the floor.
“Where is the money, you?” he snarled at her in a way which finally unmasked him, revealing himself to her as a broken reed, a clay idol, a weakling, a cur.
“Can’t you see that they brought Lucy Jelly here to sew up the mattress after they had cut it and got out the notes?” she asked with withering scorn at his mental obtuseness. “It wasn’t Jelly who came here the night of the Jilbadgie dance and took the candle. It was Bony. I remember now that he wasn’t at the dance for hours. He came here and felt the package in the mattress and saw that he couldn’t sew it up if he cut my stitching. He brought the girl here tonight to do that for him. But how he found out about putting George in the haystack I can’t imagine. They offered to buy the hay, knowing that we wouldn’t sell. You would have fired it then, but I met bluff with bluff: But, oh, what’s the use! It’s no use you running away. They’ll get you without very much bother.”
“They’re going to have their work cut out,” he said with quiet defiance. Then with sudden pleading:
“You love me, don’t you, Mavie? Why drag me into it? They’re bound to get you. Why not say that George treated you badly and that the night he came home he was drunk and attacked you? You could clear me if you like, you know.”
“Love you! I don’t love the thing you are. I thought I loved a man. Go on. Run away. But Bony will get you. He’s a police tracker and more-he’s a clever detective. They took off the regular ones and put him on.”
“If they do get me I’ll see that you hang.”
And so they stood, each clearly revealed to the other in their evil beastliness. They shrank from each other, because the horror each saw in the other they each could see in themselves.
“No, they won’t hang me,” the woman said with a vicious laugh. “I have descended from the pioneers. You, you have risen from the gutter.” She ran to the easel and from a grooved crosspiece of the frame snatched a small bottle. Facing him again, she cried: “You would run away with the money, eh? You would leave me to face it out, lie to protect you from what is coming to you, eh? I die that my death will convict you as my accomplice in the murder of my husband. Murder! A nice word. Craven! I go where you haven’t the manhood to follow. But-you-will-be-sent-after-me-Mick. That is sure.”
He watched her lift the uncorked bottle to her mouth. He watched her swallow the contents without making any action to prevent her. He ran out of the house, ran in thefirelit glow towards the great rock, leaving the woman who had wrecked his soul with her allure and whose soul had been wrecked by his unclean beauty, left her writhing on the bed in the first awful sweat of lingering death by poisoning.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Rabbit-AndThe Hunters
THE SUN, rushing upward from the bottom of the world, began to flood the sky above the Loftus farm. While the first beam of its light sank downward to the farm it painted with the whiteness of snow the squadrons of tiny puff clouds hanging without movement in the still air, so still that the smoke from the smouldering haystack rose in a straight column to within a few hundred feet of the clouds, where it mushroomed into a brilliantsnowcap.
But this morning, there were no watchers of beautiful natural phenomena. Although so early, men were gathering together in parties, were converging on the wheat town in their motorcars and trucks, for all night Bony had been engaged in rousing the farmers in the district. Faced with much loss of time before police reinforcements could be hurried to the district, Bony had purposely released the essential facts, knowing that by so doing he would arouse the countryside to assist in the capture of Landon by cutting off all roads of escape.
A party of a dozen men stood in a group on the summit of the long granite rock west of the Loftus homestead, watching Bony walking slowly along the strip of soft moss-grown earth between the rock and the line of dense scrub. Each of them carried either a rifle or a shotgun. A little in front of them, keeping them back from the working half-caste, as it were, stood Detective-Sergeant John Muir.
The watchers saw Bony now in his hereditary element, far removed from a lady’s bedroom. His hands were clasped behind his back; his head was thrust forward and his face downward. Presently he stopped, dug his heel into the spongy earth to make a mark, and then, looking up and at them, he crossed the short distance to the rock. He said:
“Gentlemen, as Sergeant Muir has told you, I have been engaged by the Western Australian Police Department to track down Mick Landon. I have no objection to you watching me at work. You may have the privilege of observing at work the finest tracker in Australia, for I have done much work for the Queensland police, if you leave behind you your weapons.
“Understand this. The Law requires the person of Mick Landon. At present I am the Law which demands the person of the supposed murderer of George Loftus that hestand his fair trial before a qualified judge and a jury of his peers. There”-Bony waved a hand to indicate all the vast extent of western bush-“there in that bush is Landon. I am going to get him for the Law. If you insist on bringing your firearms so that you may shoot him at sight, so that you may cheat the hangman of his fees, I shall refuse to make any effort-now. But, later, I shall start off on his tracks and get him today, tomorrow, or next week.”
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