Fifteen hundred feet below, and seemingly so near that it was possible to drop a pebble upon the roof, stood the Baden Park Hotel, red-roofed and cream-painted. Nearer to the watcher, the hen-houses and the stables appeared like so many silver matchboxes, and the hens in freedom like white and black pinheads upon light green velvet. Nearer still was the square of the deserted vineyard.
Throughout the days of his vigil he had seen nothing untoward in the lives of those down at the hotel. Ferris Simpson fed the hens morning and evening, and her brother looked after the dray horse and the gelding he had recently purchased. On one afternoon he had harnessed the bigger animal to the dray and brought in a load of wood and thereafter was seen cutting the wood at a saw bench. Bony never once sighted Glen Shannon, and no other man appeared to take the yardman’s place in the hotel organisation.
His early-morning scouting expeditions were not quite so profitless. He found that the hotel’s electric power was brought over the range from the Station homestead, and that a direct telephone line connected the two places. And that was all, save the addition that Glen Shannon had done a great deal of hiking both before and after his, Bony’s, stay at the hotel.
Because on the afternoon of this fifth day he wanted to sleep, he pinched out the current cigarette and carefully preserved the end to leave no clue to himself, as well as to conserve precious tobacco. Then, ready to move, he stood for a minute to scrutinise the scrub back of the boulders.
People could become lost and die in this country. A man could wander through and through it seeking help and never finding it. And yet! Bony recalled the story told by two men constructing a fence in the bush, a dozen miles from the nearest road and a hundred from the nearest township. They had run out of meat, and one had taken a rifle and hunted two miles from camp, where he had shot a kangaroo. As he was skinning it a mounted policeman rode out of the scrub to charge him with having killed a kangaroo in the closed season.
It was like that here—and probably more so. Because the bush looked empty, felt empty, the odd chance of someone observing him had to be recognised and countered with the utmost caution. There had been three men with Simpson at the road junction, three men he had not seen during his stay at the hotel. They might have come from Baden Park Station: they might be three of the hard doers Old Man Simpson had spoken of. And to clinch the argument for caution, no one had heard the three shots fired at Detective Price. No one would have done so had the pistol been fitted with a silencer.
The summit of the range back from its precipitous face was almost flat, the slope becoming gradually steep as the land fell towards the valley in which was situated Baden Park Station. Along the upper portion of the mountain back, the trees were short and the scrub was low and sparse. As he proceeded down the back, Bony employed every artifice to reduce the number of his bootprints. To glue feathers to his naked feet with blood, as his maternal ancestors were wont to do to evade pursuit, was out of the question, and the next best method, wearing boots of sheepskin with the wool on the outside, was prohibited by the toughness of the minor shrubs and the sharpness of the granite chips.
Fortunately, opposition, if encountered, would be by white men and not aborigines.
Taking advantage of granite outcrops and large flakes of stone which had become surface “floaters” from a parent reef, Bony made his way diagonally down the mountain back, intending to reach the track from the hotel to the Station after it had crossed the summit. The birds were his allies who saw everything, who twittered at everything which moved.
Quite abruptly he looked out over the valley, a wide and luscious valley, ironed into the greensward of well-tended paddocks whereupon grew wide-spaced red gums, providing shelter for stock. Down the centre of the valley ran a wide creek, its water gleaming like silver, and the creek partially encircled a spacious white house surrounded by ornamental trees. Near-by was a great domed block, the observatory, which in turn was flanked by outbuildings and the shearing shed. It was the most beautiful pastoral property Bony had ever beheld.
Continuing diagonally down the slope, he came to the road from the hotel. He followed the road, keeping wide from it, visually examining the scene ahead and watching the birds, and so to the foot of the range, where he was confronted by a fence.
With his back to a tree and himself partially concealed by scrub, he studied this fence. It was eight feet high. Iron posts carried the wires between larger strainer posts set every thousand feet apart, and from the ground upward every six inches was a barbed wire strained to the tautness of a violin string. Set at an angle of forty-five degrees, iron arms reached outward to carry five barbed wires. It was impossible for anything on four legs to climb over or pass through, and even the rabbits were frustrated by wire-netting. Save with wirecutters, a man could not conquer this fence.
This must be the fence which Shannon had had in mind.
The gate was to the right, and cautiously Bony moved closer to it. It was the same height and similarly constructed, being fitted with a peculiar lock, which had no keyhole and no bolts. Outside the gate stood a small hut or shelter shed, from which a telephone wire passed to the nearest pole, carrying a telephone power line from the homestead to the hotel. Fifty feet inside the gateway a narrow band of metal was inset into the roadway.
Bony had seen similar fences built round government experimental farms, but never such a one enclosing private property. The cost per mile must have been very high, but in this case was certainly an insurance against the theft of extremely valuable animals and breeding secrets.
He smoked three cigarettes before moving away from the tree to stand beside the road for a close-up view of the gate. Now he observed that it was electrically controlled and without doubt was controlled from the house. And then, as though to show him how the gate worked, into the background silence of the day entered the humming of a car engine.
He wasted not a second in gaining concealment within a clump of scrub.
Simpson’s Buick came snaking down the road to be stopped before the gate. Simpson was alone. He left the car and entered the little hut, and the ringing of the telephone bell reached Bony. Simpson was inside less than thirty seconds, and on emerging he crossed to the car and entered it.
The gate slowly swung inward. Simpson drove through the gateway. The car must have passed over the strip of metal inset into the road, and the gate closed silently, excepting for the final soft metallic clang.
Chapter Fifteen
Cracks in the Picture
MASKED by the leafy green in which he had found concealment, Bony relaxed and made a cigarette by shredding his collection of ends.
It was evident that the electrically powered gate was controlled from the distant homestead and that it had been opened when Simpson had announced his arrival by telephone. It was also evident that when wishing to leave the property the weight of the car passing over the metal strip would open the gate and keep it open long enough for the vehicle to pass through.
Beyond the fence at this place the scrub had been thinned to such an extent that the homestead could be seen without difficulty. Bony estimated the distance as being a fraction under two miles, the road to it running straight and level and marked at intervals by side posts, painted white. At this low elevation he could see the red roofs of the buildings and the massed ornamental trees forming an arboreal oasis on the plain of the cultivated valley. Slightly higher than the trees rose the domed roof of the observatory.
What he could see of Baden Park Station was of interest to Bonaparte the traveller, but held little significance to Bony, the investigator into the disappearance of two young women. That James Simpson was a constant visitor to the homestead was accounted for by his childhood association with Carl Benson, by his ability to play an organ, and by the friendly association of their respective fathers.
The American yardman had certainly seen this fence, and it was most likely that he had visited the homestead with Simpson. There was no significance in Shannon’s
visit to the homestead, although there was in the vagueness with which Shannon had spoken of fences in general, as though he shared a secret and could not refrain from seeking further information about a particular fence.
Bony was content with his own situation at the moment. The shade cast by the scrub was cool and he had found a comfortable back-rest against a boulder. Curious to see how the gate did open to permit Simpson to pass from the property, he decided to wait—and fell asleep.
The flug-flug of horse-hooves awoke him to see, riding past him on the far side of the fence, a stockman. He was not markedly different from a thousand other men employed on pastoral properties, save that he was better dressed. Instead of slacks, he wore riding-breeches and leggings having a brilliant gloss, matching the brown boots. His open-necked shirt was of good quality, and the horse he bestrode caused Bony’s eyes to sparkle. Not common with the thousand stockmen used for comparison, was a repeating rifle in a polished scabbard attached to the saddle, and when the rider dismounted at the gate and the horse moved round, Bony saw attached to the other side of the saddle a compact wire strainer and a pair of shears within a leather case.
The man was on normal duty riding the fence, inspecting it for defects, as men are employed on government vermin fences. He walked his horse to a tree beside the road and neck-roped it to the trunk, and then, producing tobacco and papers, he proceeded to manufacture a smoke. The sun still shone from a clear sky, and the late afternoon was restfully peaceful.
Like Br’er Rabbit, Bony remained snug in his little bower, although he did not have Br’er Rabbit’s obvious reasons for cautiousness. The stockman was young and fair-haired, keen and probably intelligent, but Bony continued to lie low. There was an indefinable something about the rider which divorced him from all Outback stockmen, and, try as he would, Bony could not detect it.
Having smoked the cigarette, the rider made himself another. He did not draw close to the gate and he appeared to have no intention of hurrying to the homestead, where his fellows would now have knocked off for the day.
Bony heard and saw the returning Buick before he did. The road being straight and well surfaced, Simpson drove at a mile per minute, and when he stopped the car just before the metal road strip the rider raised his hand in a careless salute before passing behind the car and arriving at the driver’s lowered window.
Simpson’s face registered subsiding anger. The younger man’s face registered change from good humour to concern. What they said Bony could not hear, but it was evident to him that Simpson rapidly explained what had put him out and that the other listened with sympathy.
Thus a full minute passed, when the younger man stepped back and Simpson put the car into gear and moved it slowly over the metal strip. The gate began to open. The young man called loudly enough for Bony to hear:
“Don’t envy you your job.”
Simpson nodded that he had heard and drove through the gateway, the car leaped forward to take the mountain grade at a speed clearly indicative of the driver’s mood. The gate clanged shut, and the rider rolled his third cigarette.
Ten to fifteen minutes passed, for Bony disturbed by a crow which was unpleasantly suspicious of the clump of scrub in which he lay, when he heard the approach of another horseman coming to the gate from the opposite direction. This second stockman was as nattily dressed as the first. He also bestrode a horse which made Bony’s eyes light with admiration. Like the first, he had a rifle in its scabbard attached to the saddle. He was older, grey of hair, stolid and stern.
The younger man freed his horse and mounted. Again he raised his right hand in greeting and the other returned the salutation, before the horses came together and were walked at a smart pace along the road to the homestead. Then it was that Bony detected the indefinable difference with the common run of stockmen.
They rode not with the easy grace of stockmen, but with the stiffness of soldiers.
The picture of the luscious valley and the magnificent homestead, the fenced paddocks, divided by the well-kept road, the electrically controlled entrance gate and the efficient fence, and the two horsemen returning to their quarters, was somewhere not quite true to the Australian scene. In balance and proportion, yes. It was its atmosphere which was not truly authentic, and Bony was mystified and therefore troubled in mind.
He wondered how often the boundary fence was patrolled. He assumed that the two riders had left the homestead together to reach the fence on the far side of the homestead, and there to part and “ride the fence” to meet at the gate. It would certainly be uneconomic not to inspect such a fence regularly and maintain its high efficiency.
The sun said it was twenty minutes to six when Bony left the clump of scrub and made his careful way upward along the mountain slope, and on reaching the crest overlooking the hotel he sprawled for a little while behind a bush, watching the way he had come and the birds about him, to see if they had an interest in other than himself.
Not that he suspected having been trailed or observed at any time since leaving Inspector Mulligan. The country about the Baden Park Hotel and Lake George was uncultivated, unfenced, unstocked, but somewhere in its virgin close was the reason why Simpson had ordered him to leave. Somewhere beneath the carpet covering the great amphitheatre must be evidence proving the fate of two lost women, and Bony believed that it was the possible discovery of such evidence which had motivated the licensee.
The fiery sun was threatening the stilled waves of distant mountains as he made his way along the back of the range, his mind concentrated on the business of progressing without leaving tracks, and thus needing to choose firm granite slabs and tussock grass, which would almost immediately spring up again when his weight was removed.
He came to a wide crack in the face of the range, and down this crack he proceeded from ledge to ledge, to reach its shadowy bottom, and then down along its sharp decline to where it emerged at the base of the mountain face. Thereupon he needs must progress diagonally down the basic slope of the range in full view of anyone at the bottom, a risk he had to accept, for there was no other way within several miles.
His descent brought him behind the little mountain of rocks in which he had established his secret camp. The pile was at least two hundred feet in height and was composed of rocks, not one of which weighed less than a ton. The base was honeycombed with rough passages between the rocks, the passages, save one, being irregular in width and length. The one led to the very centre, and just before it ended there was a narrow branch passage giving entry to the cave which he had made his headquarters.
Gathering wood, he carried it to his retreat, his boots crunching upon the rock chips littering the passageway and then sinking a little into the sandy floor of the chamber. He made his fire between two boulders forming the walls and went out again with his billy and quart-pot for water. The sun was setting, and the little mountain and the great mountain face behind it were painted russet and purple. To his joy, he found a rabbit in one of his snares deep in the scrub beside the whispering stream.
Half an hour later the damper loaf was rising within its bed of hot ashes, and he was dining on bread baked the previous night and grilled rabbit, with milkless tea as the wine. He was a king in his palace, the bright-eyed rock lizards his courtiers, and, on the ramparts without, the changing of the guards—the night birds taking over duty from the day birds.
The cries of the guards without could not reach him in his granite chamber, were not strong enough to penetrate along the granite passages and down through the multi-shaped crevices through which entered the waning daylight. Although the chamber smelled dankly and the sand floor was damp, it was just pleasantly cool. Its massive solidity gave the feeling of restful safety to a man who, for fourteen hours, had striven to avoid the eyes of enemies.
When he had eaten, the light was cloister-dim. The little fire no longer produced flame, but the red ashes gave out comforting heat. It could not be thought that Bony had lost the art of squatting on his heels, h
is slim fingers being employed with paper and tobacco, for the balance was maintained with the ease of one who had not sat in a chair for many years. His gaze passed to the small heap of grey ash which the rising damper had cracked open and, through the cracks, was sending upwards spirals of steam having the delectable aroma of baking bread.
At some place outside the cave a stone clinked against another.
The brown fingers ceased movement, the body of the man solidifying into a bronze image of “A Stockman Taking His Ease”. Stones do fall one upon another. Twice, once in the night and once in the day, Bony had heard the rumble of rocks crashing down a mountain face. The wearing elements leave rocks balanced precariously on ledge and point, and the moment must come when the wind and rain and the heat and cold will topple them over.
It was growing dark within the chamber when yet again a stone fell against another.
The precious cigarette was thrust into a side pocket. From the other side pocket came an automatic pistol. As a sleeping bullock will wake and with one action be in full stampede, so Bony rose from his heels and was in the passage outside the chamber, his back pressed against a rock, his head turned that his eyes could watch the perpendicular line of a corner.
A dingo! He doubted that it was, for a wild dog treads as lightly and as surely as a cat. It might be a rock wallaby. It might be a man. It might be merely the action of the falling temperature dislodging granite chips.
The light was going fast, being drawn upward through the granite sieve. The silence was a Thing roaring its menace into the brain of a man. Imagination was a weapon turned against him.
Was Imagination creating the slow-growing bulge on the line of that passage corner? Was Imagination creating with a granite chip and a sound a living Thing which skulked just beyond the corner, which...? Was Imagination creating a steady glint of light at the corner line and at the height of a man’s eyes?
The Mountains Have a Secret Page 11
