“What do you reckon, Lew? Come along the beach or along the cliff?” Bony asked to prevent tension.
“Cliff way. Tide’s too far up to take the beach.”
Despite the warning, Bony tautened his muscles and Lew emitted a faint hiss when abruptly Sadie stood on the cliff above the path. She was wearing old clothes as when supposedly watching for Bony. Hatless, her hair seemed to take a tinge of blueness from the sky. For a few moments she stood there as though calculating the risks of the beach, and then moved the gunny-sack strap to her neck the better to use both hands in the descent. The sack was bulky.
“Taking him grub and water,” whispered Lew. “Must be water. None in the caves below.”
Sadie progressed with great care as though the contents of the bag were both precious and fragile, and when she had gone halfway to the pile of jumbled rocks backing the narrow beach she stopped and again regarded steadily the sea still a hundred feet below, and as steadily looked along the battlemented faces of the barrier in their direction. Lew whispered:
“Now what’s she at? She’s got to go all the way down and make this way to climb a bit to the caves.” The hiss issued again through his teeth when Sadie neither went on down nor turned in their direction. She left the known way down and climbed over a rock out-thrust and then proceeded with apparent ease in the opposite direction towards the overhang.
“She’s going away, not coming,” Lew said. “No caves that way that I know, and I don’t think Fred knows of one, either. We talked about this bit of cliff.”
“She seems to be on a ledge,” Bony observed. “Parallel with the beach.”
Sadie went now with obvious confidence. She passed under the bulging rock overhang, proceeded onward for several yards, turned into the cliff face and vanished.
Chapter Twenty
The Altar
THE SLAPPING waves crept up the rock-littered beach like the cautious feet of a Tasmanian tiger. Under the unruffled surfaces of the sea could be seen the sand ripples it flowed over in its eternal surge. In the grey light Australia’s Front Door, now dark and forbidding, defied the Antarctic and was indifferent to the mighty blows being prepared in the Region of Ice.
By Lew’s leather-covered wrist-watch Sadie had disappeared into the rock face at one-fifty-three, and as the sun was not visible there was no other agency to check the time. Not that Bony was that interested. The minutes at first fled, then dawdled, but the tide waited not for Sadie to reappear, and eventually covered the beaches. After once again looking at his watch. Lew said:
“Nearly twenty to four. Must be spending all the afternoon with Marvin.”
At ten minutes to five, Lew said with impatience strange in an aborigine:
“Could be another way up.”
“Unlikely there is another way to the top less difficult than the one she came down by, Lew. Take it easy. She’s having a good old gossip with Marvin. There! Look?”
Sadie Stark was again on the ledge beneath the overhang. Her gunny-sack was weightless, and now she walked almost in haste to reach the out-thrust of rock, to climb over this dangerous obstruction, and make her way up the rough pathway to the top. Then she was gone, and Lew regarded Bony with brows almost meeting, and Bony was gazing steadily at the place where Sadie had reappeared, hoping for a sign.
Marvin Rhudder did not appear, and after a long long wait and the wearing away of expectancy, Bony decided his next move.
First, he went to the rear of the clump to be assured by the tree signal that all was clear. Secondly, he ascertained the time from Lew, and tried to forecast the weather, and he gambled that the threatened storm would hold off for another twelve hours.
“He’s not going to show himself in daylight, Lew. He’ll come out and up to the top when it’s dark, using his torch like he did the night before last. We’ll shift camp closer to the place where he’ll reach the top, and we’ll wait for him there and knock him out, and put the cuffs on him I borrowed from Sasoon.”
“Easy,” agreed Lew, eyes glinting with the excitement of coming action.
“Not easy,” Bony told him. “We can’t play the fool with a man like Marvin. We can’t just tussle with him, give him the chance of getting away into the darkness. We’ll move camp right now.”
They took possession of the tree-clump into which the mystery man had slipped, and at once Bony stationed himself at the edge of the cliff and within two yards of the point where Sadie had gained the top. Lew was looking around for a suitable length of wood to employ as a waddy, for the plan was that as Marvin was getting to his feet at the cliff Bony was to tackle him about the legs and Lew was to lay him out.
Here they were stationed in the clear between the tea-tree where the ridge and its signal-tree could be seen until it grew dark. Their rear, therefore, was maintained as the signal did not fall to danger. The sea left the beaches and drained away over the sand-flats, and vanished. The Front Door of Australia loomed like the back of a guarding giant until the night shrouded it.
“Don’t you hit too hard,” Bony softly urged Lew. “We want him on the gallows-trap, remember. And don’t miss, although it’s an insult to tell you about that. Now, no more talking.”
The night hours passed by in racking progression, and there was no evidence that the animal had left its lair. The new day, drab and sickly, found Lew asleep and Bony decided on his next move. As Marvin hadn’t come up to be clubbed and captured, he would go down before Marvin could be expected to waken. There would be unavoidable risks, but then their would be risks in any set of circumstances applicable to this present situation.
The wiser course would be to send Lew for reinforcements armed with rifles, to block off this section of cliff and either starve or thirst the hunted man into surrender. That would be the routine plan to adopt, and it was a hundred to one it would never succeed in this terrain and governed by the ruling conditions.
Only a fool would think that Marvin Rhudder would surrender tamely; that he was unarmed; that he lacked the intelligence to take evasive action; that he was ignorant of the cracks and crevices, the caves and caverns comprising every hundred yards of this part of the coast. And did Marvin break his neck on the rocks, or should he be drowned, when seeking to escape arrest, no credit would be given Inspector Bonaparte.
Rousing the aborigine, they ate and drank sparingly of the water. Then Lew was taken several yards along the cliff and shown a heavy boulder which could be pushed over in the event that the ridge signalled approach from the rear. He was given clearly to understand that if Bony had not returned by noon he was to report to Breckoff and bring assistance. Thus it was hoped that the boulder would give the alarm by its crashing.
Once over the cliff edge Bony went down with care not to dislodge a rock-splinter or one of the large pebbles which might start an avalanche. He carried an automatic in his right hand and from his hip pocket protruded the bulb end of a powerful torch. The handcuffs he left with Lew to bring down when needed, and he was coldly determined to shoot Rhudder in a leg at the slightest excuse given him. He was not burdened with illusions of acting fairly to this insult to the human race.
Poor Marvin Rhudder! Poor sick Marvin! Marvin Rhudder so needful of tact and understanding. The poor man, always hunted by the police, always hounded into court and then into prison, as they hounded those poor desperate convicts sent out from England only because they stole a rabbit to save themselves from starving to death. Vote for the Government that won’t hang! Vote for the Mercy Party!
And yet he was another policeman doing his job to help preserve the peace and protect people from violence, from degenerates and killers.
On coming to the place where Sadie had left the descending path, he saw that the out-thrust of rock concealed the ledge running away parallel with the beach, and thus Lew was given full marks for knowing of the place ahead into which Sadie had gone. Here, too, he employed care because a slip could mean a broken limb, and on the far side found an uneven le
dge of varying width. At places the wind-driven sand lay deep and here were Sadie’s footprints.
He glanced upward for a sight of Lew, and remembering the heavy boulder, hoped the aborigine would think to look first before he had to roll it over. All he did see was a black hand being waved to him.
Pressing on he came under the bulging rock overhang, following the ledge which now was a mere eighteen inches, wide, until he came to a shoulder of the rock wall. Here he stopped. Here he gave himself a full minute to recover from the rush descent, and to strain his hearing to detect human sounds above the noises of the sea. Breathing returned to normal, muscles rested, and nerves calmed by the fixation of the mind upon one purpose, he edged round the shoulder, to see cliff-face beyond face, surmounted by the fringe of scrub and based upon the jumble of rocks termed beaches. Ten yards distant a black orifice in the dark-grey wall indicated a cave.
Without haste he covered those ten yards to bring his back to the wall outside the hole. It was higher than he and five feet wide. Again he listened for human proximity, heard nothing to betray a sleeper, or human movement. Slowly he moved forward, round and into the entrance of what he came to see was a very deep cavern for there was no light from its interior.
He was astonished by the hurricane lamp on the ledge of rock some four feet inside what was the passage-like entrance.
Maintaining his back against the rock wall, he worked into the entrance till opposite the lamp. Beside it was a tin box obviously containing wax matches.
He halted here, regarding the lamp and the matchbox whilst his startled mind recovered from the slight shock of seeing these ordinary mundane objects. His left ear subconsciously sought human sounds, his right registered the little noises of the sea which came creeping in after him. With them came the air current to defeat his nose.
The lamp reflected the daylight as dull pewter. It was of the cheap but efficient kind found on every farm. Both it and the match-box were untarnished by the salt air, and appeared to be placed there for use by a visitor. Aware that he was exposed against the light to anyone deep in the cavern, he moved on again eventually to come to another corner and find on its far side safety in the darkness.
Here he could register smells, or rather only one smell which triumphed over others, the perfume of boronia strong and pervading. He was unsure that he could detect the smell of kerosene, and there seemed to be another smell he could not name. The interior silence emphasized the exterior noises.
With his feet he found stones, and picking one up he tossed it from him. It fell with a soft thud. Sandy floor. He tossed another and this one clunked on rock. Falling to his knees he tossed more stones in varying directions, and then bending forward to bring himself nearer the floor, he called:
“Come forward with your hands up, Marvin Rhudder. Police here. Quite a bunch outside, waiting to take you.”
No one answered, there was not even the echo of his own voice.
Having announced his presence, Bony was aware that all the advantages lay with Marvin. Marvin had merely to sit and wait. He knew every twist and turn of this place, every obstruction. Time was on his side in any battle of nerves, and such a contest must not be permitted. Bony straightened his arm to one side and flashed on the torch.
The brilliant beam sliced the darkness to contact dark rock. There was no shot. The beam moved to one side, crept along the rock wall, came to an opening, hesitated in order to probe, moved on again. Still no shot, and in Bony growing confidence that the place was not inhabited. His light illumined a pressure lamp hung from a peg driven into the wall. A metallic gleam came from below the lamp, and the torch revealed a large box or chest with heavy brass bolt and socket.
In Bony’s hand the light disc went back and round the wall to his left, and there came into view a box-shaped rock lying on a sand foundation and clear of the wall. On this rock were two heavy candlesticks in which remained the butts of white candles. Between them lay what appeared to be a beret. From it there returned to Bony the reflection of a silver cross within a circle.
Bony advanced to this rock and almost tripped on the rocky floor. His light revealed the floor to be ribbed by rock, the ribs separated by swathes of fine sand, dry and soft. The sand was much disturbed by human feet, and the impressions greatly blurred. Coming to the isolated rock, the first oddity of several was that the sand on which it rested bore no imprints, was as smooth as though worked on by the thin edge of a board.
The rock itself was about three feet high, eight feet long, and some three feet wide, The top was level, almost flat. The candlesticks were eighteen inches high, each having a square base so that a hard blow would be necessary to upset them. In the sconces the candle ends promised yet another hour of burning.
The beret! It was as an emperor’s crown flanked by shoe buckles to the man who stood before it, pinning it with his light beam. The ornament proved it to be similar if not the actual beret worn by Marvin Rhudder that moonlit night he was seen by Karl Mueller. If not the actual beret it was one identically like it and described by Sasoon when he went to the Inlet on that first visit. Here it looked to be the centre-piece, with the candlesticks, of an altar.
There was lead in Bony’s shoes and a lump in his stomach when he turned about and crossed to the box beneath the pressure lamp. As he had thought at first, it was a chest, a large cabin chest made of what could be mahogany, and bounded by copper hoops, with a brass bolt thrust into its keeper.
The anticlimax was affecting him as he made an examination of this cavern. He found that it extended some thirty-five feet from the tunnel-like entrance with a maximum width of about twenty feet. At the inner end several ridges of rock rose like teeth from the sandy floor, and at one side there was an opening into another and much smaller hole or cavern. The fine sand on the floor momentarily interested him, and the only explanation for its presence could be that it had been brought in by the wind, or carried in by an exceptionally high tide in a past age.
Coming again to the entrance he stood there to smoke a cigarette and sternly readjust his mind following the period of great tension. It was now obvious that the man he sought was no longer living in this place, if ever he had lived in it. His beret was here, and his suitcase with personal articles, and the money for which, with little doubt, he had murdered, had been hidden in a hollow tree.
Sadie had told him that Marvin Rhudder had been sent away by the strong-willed Luke who himself had departed, and what he had discovered in this cavern supported the supposition that Marvin had really left many days before and that memory of him was being kept green by Sadie Stark, as parents have done by keeping on a table articles associated with a son killed in war.
Chapter Twenty-one
Record of a Knight
HAD HE HAD another assistant he could have sent him to the top to reassure Lew who would be wondering if he had been snared by Marvin Rhudder.
“Marvin wasn’t down there,” he said when seated with Lew. “I couldn’t smell much because the place is full of Sadie’s scent, boronia. Sand patches about the floor but it’s too fine and dry to retain tracks.”
“Then what she go down there for?” was Lew’s natural question.
“I think she has taken some of Marvin’s things there just to keep to herself. There’s a beret much like the one he wore when he came home. There are other things which don’t belong to him. I saw a big copper-bound chest, a couple of old candlesticks, three old-time harpoons and a broken-handled shovel. Then in a smaller cave off the big one, I came on a kerosene box in which there were knives and forks and spoons, tin pannikins and plates, everything rusty and not used for years. Another examination of the place will probably reveal other articles.”
“Harpoons!” said Lew. “Why harpoons down there?”
“I think it could be this way. Long before Marvin left home for good, he and the other boys and the two girls made that cavern their secret camping place. It must have been after your son fell out with them, otherwi
se he would have told you about it. On a ledge there was a cigar-box containing fish-hooks and lead sinkers, and they looked old and rusty.”
“See in the chest, Nat?”
“I didn’t look. I’m saving that till next time. And I want to be down there when Sadie calls next time, too.”
Having mentally digested this information, Lew said that Marvin ‘must be someplace else’, and Bony told him of his conviction that Marvin had left this part of Australia.
“Then we can go home, eh? We’re getting short of tucker.”
“If you had gone to school like Fred, Lew, you’d know that the word conviction isn’t another word for proof. We have to have the proof, and when Sadie comes next time, she’ll give us the proof by what she does down in that cavern. What do you think she does down there all the afternoon?”
“Ask me another, Nat.” The aborigine grinned mirthfully. “Me, I’m only an old abo what never went to school like Fred. What about look-seeing into that cave I told you about under our last camp?”
“All right. I’ll keep watch up here.”
“Might run into Marvin in that cave,” Lew said, gravely.
“You’d be lucky, Lew. Ask him up for a drink of water and the last of our tucker.”
“No fear. You can have that Marvin feller. He’s not copping me from behind a rock.”
“You’d sooner go home?”
“Dunno.” Lew grinned his cheerful grin. “Might be better here starvin’ than be home workin’.” He thinned his voice to a high whine. “Get away from me, Lew. Now where you been and the dinner waiting an’ all. An’ me cooking with no wood in the stove. An’ no tobaccer ’cos you pinched it all.”
“Home can’t be that bad, Lew,” Bony protested laughingly. This humorous interlude he found a relief after the tension and the disappointment. Lew vigorously asserted that it was worse, and that town life had ruined the women, and he became really convinced that life with Bony under conditions of starvation was preferable.
Bony - 26 - Bony and the White Savage Page 15
