To the uninitiated their actions would have been childish. It was as though they childishly lit little fires in make-believe imitation of the great fire. Then, seemingly afraid of their little fires, they proceeded to beat them out. Yet they worked with systematic thoroughness. Their little fires laid a swath of black ash twenty feet wide and a bare hundred yards from the main fire, there creeping against the wind as an old man may walk.
Now and then one straightened his back and wiped the running sweat from his eyes with fist or forearm. Their clothes were rent and grimed, the legs of their trousers holed by sparks, their boots being slowly burned off their feet. Their bodies were filthy with perspiration and soot, but the living spirit of these two illiterate chunks of humanity was an inextinguishable, indestructible point of brilliant purity.
“Cripes! Where the ruddy hell ’ave yous been?” one of these “chunks”, barely recognizable as the Stormbird, demanded of Withers. “Did yous bring the tea and tucker?”
“My oath!” Jack Withers assured the tall, raw-boned and iron-hard man who invariably raised a fight wherever he went. “We left the tea and the billies and the grub on the tank. Better take a spell, an’ me an’ Bony ’ull carry on.”
“’Bout time too,” grunted Combo Joe, who was short and broad, and able to lift a ton-truck clear of bog. “Any one ’ud think this ’ere wus a picnic.”
“‘Oo’s yer lady friend, Jack?”
“This ’ere is Bony, friend of mine,” Withers grinned. “This ’ere is Mister Stormbird and Mister Combo Joe”; but never could Bony decide which was which, for upon each was directed one of poor Jack Withers’s eyes.
The relieved lurched away and the relief took over. Then followed three hours of such work as made it a period of agony. Bony’s arms ached excruciatingly. His eyes smarted and wept water. His throat became parched and sulphuric. He was dimly aware of Withers moving with the seeming tirelessness of a machine, and knew not that to his companion he presented a similar picture. Lit by the flames he created, bathed in the lurid light of the main fire, his brain heated to boilingpoint, Bony at last came to regard himself as being the one opponent of the creeping monster always pushing him ahead of itself. It became a malignant personality with a million eyes and a thousand fiery arms, with whom he was engaged in a fight to the death. And such a fight, an endless and unequal battle, for his arms and legs were encased in lead.
“Well, ’ow’s she going?”
Bony staggered upright and looked into the face of the Storm-bird with glassy eyes. “Tired!” he wheezed.
“Fat-ee-gu-ing kind-er life,” the Stormbird remarked, only between each word was an horrific oath. “’Ere, give us yer bag and fire-stick, and let’s see yer run like a two-year-old to the tank where we left yous a couple of billies of tea. Come on, Combo! These blank overgrown children ain’t done nothink since we bin gorn. Now watch two men ’ave a go!”
He leered like a gargoyle on Notre Dame. Bony forced a smile. In spite of three hours’ rest, the Stormbird was a deadly weary man, but the very pride of his manhood compelled him to hide it as much as possible behind his jeers. Whilst Bony had had only one spell of work, the Stormbird and his partner had had three such spells. It was Combo Joe who set the pace, and, hell and damnation, the Stormbird could keep up with him, “blarst im!”
It was two o’clock in the morning when Withers roused Bony from a fitful sleep, and for another three hours they relieved the others on the treadmill of nightmare. They worked without thought, men governed by one idea, driven by it, each muscle whipped by it. But when they were relieved their walk back to the tank and the horses was almost two miles, and in their ears was the Stormbird’s injunction to get a spell, for the wind was veering to the south of west and freshening, and the fire there slowed in its march to the toddling of a small child.
***
Withers awoke to daylight, and to find that Bony had vanished and with him Grey Cloud. Bony had left at dawn. He rode back south to the fence, traversed it westward for three miles, and then turned due north. In this way, if Dot and Dash had gone west or north-west from Carr’s Tank, he was bound to cross their horses’ tracks. Riding at an easy canter, his body crouched over the gelding’s neck, Bony searched the ground a good twenty feet beyond Grey Cloud’s head, for it is far easier to distinguish a track a little ahead of one than it is to do so at one’s feet.
He cut the partners’ tracks seven miles north of the fence, just when he saw that the fire, at this distance from the breaks having mushroomed far to the west, lay ahead of him to force him out of his north-bound path. Once on the tracks, he turned north-west, followed them till they struck the Freeman’s Run-Nullawil road, followed them on the road to the State Border Fence, thence for a further five miles, and lost them where the road ran, dimly marked across an iron-hard clay-pan.
He was balked for half an hour before he again discovered the tracks, very, very faint, and saw the ruse Dot had adopted to throw off trackers.
Bony understood then that, not meeting with the expected helpers from Freeman’s station, Dot had decided at the clay-pan to muffle their horses’ hoofs. It had been done at the sacrifice of each man’s single blanket. For the four feet of each horse one blanket had been quartered, and each portion tied about a hoof. After that they had ridden over a large area of clay-pans adjoining each other. They had progressed thus but half a mile when the first hoof-tip penetrated its blanket protection and left its tell-tale mark on the clay-pan for Bony’s lynx eyes to detect.
Now, in a generally north-western direction, Bony continued, ever following tracks that became more plain, sometimes espying particles of blue-dyed wool, then a worn strip of blue blanket, and finally brought to the place where the pieces of blanket had been discarded and the men had drunk tea made with water from the canvas bags slung from their horses’ necks and secured hard against their chests with a strap looped round the saddle-girths.
It was now noon. Bony followed the example of the pursued. Dismounting, he removed Grey Cloud’s saddle and the water-bag hanging from his neck. He urged and succeeded in persuading the animal to roll on a patch of loose deep sand, and then left him to graze at will, the bridle still on his head, the bit slipped from his mouth, but the reins dangling because Bony could not afford to risk losing him.
The detective made and drank his tea without sugar, for sugar is a thirst creator in the heat of late December. He ate nothing, but smoked three successive cigarettes, and allowed his aching body to relax for but thirty minutes.
Again in the saddle, he noted that the wind was very much stronger. The air, too, was blue with smoke that came not from the Windee fire.
Chapter Forty-five
Smoke and Flame
BONY CAME TO THE HUT normally occupied by Dot’s old friend, situated on the north boundary of Freeman’s Station, shortly after noon. The occupant was not at home, and Bony proceeded to water and feed his horse with chaff found in an outhouse and put the absent tenant’s billy on the fire he quickly made inside the hut. Whilst it was coming to the boil the half-caste interestedly glanced round to read what was to be read by all-observant eyes.
There were no blankets on the rough wooden stretcher. The ashes in the fireplace had been cold. There were no dogs chained up outside. Within remained the owner’s tucker-box and billy-cans; without there were no canvas water-bags. He had left after, and not before, Dot and Dash had called and gone on, for the tracks Bony had been following were obliterated about the hut by the other tracks of horses and men. Dot’s friend evidently was interested in sport and bushrangers, for lying on a shelf were several volumes of the late Nat Gould’s works, and quite a miniature library of Australian literature featuring Ned Kelly, Starlight, Morgan, and other eminent law-breakers.
After eating, Bony replenished the gelding’s feed-box and slept for four hours. Much refreshed, he ate another meal, watered his horse, placed sufficient chaff in a bag for two light “feeds”, mounted a fence, set his horse in a wide arc
, and picked up the partners’ tracks. It was then five o’clock, and he had left himself approximately three hours of daylight.
Now at a gallop, now at an easy canter, he followed after Dot and Dash with the sureness of a bloodhound. Placed at a disadvantage in that he could not follow tracks in the blackness of night, whereas the night would not prevent the quarry from travelling so long as Dot could see the stars, Bony determined to cover as much ground as possible before the daylight waned and vanished. Arrived at the northern boundary of this run he saw where a deep fire-break had been burned along the east-west fence. Ahead of him, to north and west, lay the vast region of “open country”, unsettled, unfenced, uninhabited. Into it had gone Dot and Dash in the middle of summer, when there had been no rain for four months, when even the seemingly permanent water-holes might, when reached, be dust-dry.
On this account the detective had no fear, though the country was strange to him. The partners would travel from water-hole to creek pothole, and hill range rock-hole. He would reach those watering-places by simply following their horses’ tracks. The possibility of the partners’ poisoning the water behind them did not occur to him, for that would be a crime no bushman would commit, no matter how great a felon and how hardly pressed.
That evening the sun sank into a bed of crimson down, sank deeper and deeper, whilst its colour changed rapidly from pale yellow to crimson, from dark red to dark amber before it vanished half an hour before it was timed to reach the horizon. Bony watched it disappear, noted the cloud low-hung in the west, noted, too, how the wind came from that quarter. For another hour he pressed on, and when night fell he had not come to a water-hole, and was obliged to tether Grey Cloud to a tree and offer him chaff slightly dampened from the canvas chestbag, and the ration poured in a heap at the foot of the tree.
Over his little fire Bony boiled his quart pot and made tea, still taking it without sugar. After eating, he sat on the heels of his boots and smoked cigarette after cigarette, pushing together four sticks whilst the tiny fire consumed them. He sat and tended his fire in the way his mother had done—but not his father, who would have built a fire over which it would have been impossible to crouch.
For several hours he sat thus on his heels, his mind working on the rounding-off of this case he was engaged on. He fitted together the few pieces of the jig-saw puzzle given him by the sands of Windee, and added the remaining pieces fashioned by the magic of his imagination. He knew that his work had been good, that once more he had brilliantly succeeded, triumphed as never before had he triumphed; for had he not built a splendid mansion with a few bricks he had made without straw?
And the mansion he had built was never to be seen by men who expected to see it! He was to deny its very existence; further, he was to swear he never had erected it. He was to see men’s eyes cloud with cynicism, watch men’s lips curl in unuttered gibes, thinking they saw the great Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, the favourite of the men on top—the favourite, too, of the fickle god, Luck—brought down to their level by failure. And this was to be because of a woman’s beauty, both physical and spiritual, which acted on his scarred soul in a way no white man possibly could understand.
Even so, he did not repent his determination to follow his chosen path. Dereliction of duty, service to justice, was strangely absent from his reflections. He did not think, when he decided to hide his mansion, that he would frustrate the almost universal law of retribution, making himself thereby an accessory to murder, and the accomplice of a murderer.
He was thinking of Marion Stanton, and recalling the inward light that radiated from her, when he sank backward on the ground and fell asleep. The labour of the fire-fighting yet held its effects on his body and, for him, he slept soundly. He did not hear the slow-paced rhythmic thud—thud—thud whilst kangaroos sped by him in tireless twelve-foot jumps. He was unaware of the dingo that came and sniffed at him but a few yards distant, and then faded away in the eastern blackness. Grey Cloud both saw and heard kangaroos, dingo, and several foxes passing eastward, and he fidgeted because his eyes began to smart and his nostrils were tickled by smoke. The awakening fear animating the wild things, instinct making them flee rather than tangible evidence of the thing that reddened the western sky, became transferred to Grey Cloud. Several times he snorted and tested the neck-rope. Why did that man tarry when other living things ran? Why was it this two-legged god lay inert on the ground here in a land where Fear was stepping into its dread kingdom? At last Grey Cloud could bear it no longer: he whinnied long and loud.
Lying on his back, Bony awoke without other movement than opening his eyes. The stars he looked for were invisible, and sleepily he was wondering if this indicated rain, when his horse whinnied again. Bony sat up and, doing so, faced west. He could see the stark outlines of bush and tree, the trunks hidden, the branches forming a silhouette of domes and towers, spires and masts, and the filigree-work of giants, held against a background of vivid scarlet that gradually faded towards the zenith of the sky. The smoke-laden air was the colour of old port.
And the wind blew on his face direct from the west, a steady wind, stronger than it had been for many days.
Now on his feet, Bony examined the conflagration that he knew was sweeping towards him as fast as a horse could gallop. To his credit, he weighed his chances of escape whilst he drank the remainder of the tea in the quart pot and with long flexible fingers rolled a cigarette.
A probable twenty-five miles lay between him and the hut tenanted by Dot’s friend. There lay safety, for about the hut the land was free from grass, as to a greater extent it was free about the wells and tanks of Windee. It was quite possible for the fire to cut him off before he could reach it, and drive him eastward, where he would surely meet the slowly westward-creeping Windee fire.
On the other hand, somewhere north of him—indicated by the map in Jeff Stanton’s office—lay a great gibber-stone plain where the sparse grasses and stunted bush would not feed the advancing fire. How far north was that plain he did not precisely know, for when he examined the map he memorized chiefly the station watering-places. Anyway, Dot and Dash were riding north of him, and he had promised Marion Stanton to bring back Dash.
Two minutes later he was astride Grey Cloud, headed into the trackless, uncharted north lands. The fire-reflecting sky revealed the earth as though seen through dark-red tinted spectacles; it showed, too, the fleeing forms of many animals and sometimes the upright figure of a rabbit observing all this disturbance with wondering eyes which reflected the scarlet glow.
Unable now to follow the partners’ tracks, Bony rode a little east of north, rode at an easy loping canter, as though he were giving Grey Cloud gentle exercise. Even when the sting of the smoke noticeably increased he refrained from urging the horse to greater speed. Once they crossed a clay-pan measuring an acre in extent, and he was tempted for a moment to dismount on that area of bare ground and await the coming and the passage of the fire-demon. On foot he would gladly have availed himself of this slender chance; but the fiery onslaught, he was sure, would prove too much for Grey Cloud, who would become unmanageable, would bolt away and meet his doom.
When the dawn penetrated the smoke pall, paled its terrifying colour and painted it warship grey, Bony now and then could see between the trees the tips of high-flung flame in the far distance. The horse was going like a machine, but his breathing was taxed and the steady pace was beginning to tell at last.
Direction was no more ascertainable now than it had been in the starless darkness of early morning. Bony trusted implicitly to his bushman’s sixth sense, and when finally the sun penetrated the smoke pall, appearing in colour as it had done when last he had seen it, he found he was heading only a degree or two west of north.
He kept Grey Cloud’s head pointing in that direction, riding for a further half-hour, when the outward appearance of the gelding and the inward hint of sluggishness decided him on a “blow”. Pulling up his animal, he removed the saddle, rubbed th
e horse down with the saddlecloth, and took a mouthful of water from the bag, at which Grey Cloud looked pertinently.
Within the bag was a little more than a gallon of water, and, observing how the horse regarded it and him, Bony hesitated, regretting he had not brought with him a hat. However, his shirt of stout calico served. Removing it, he first scooped out a hole in the ground, and, pushing the shirt over and into the hole, covering it, he emptied therein half the contents of the bag. It was barely sufficient to moisten Grey Cloud’s mouth, and Grey Cloud wanted more, but was refused.
Not now on the partners’ tracks, horse and man in strange unsettled country, the scarlet sun threatening to make the day unbearably hot, and a vast bush-fire racing on them, the unthinking might say that Bony did a very foolish thing, and the animal-worshipper pronounce it a noble deed. Bony was neither fool nor sentimentalist. He realized that he was in a most dangerous position, with the odds against him of getting out of it. His single hope of winning through lay in the stamina and speed of Grey Cloud. Of not lesser importance than the “blow”, taken whilst precious minutes went by, was the little drop of water given a horse that had not drunk its fill for more than eleven hours at a time of year when Central Australia is at its worst.
Man and horse delayed no longer than fifteen minutes. When again in the saddle, Bony could see on his left hand columns of smoke whirling upward against a background of dark grey. He started then to ride east of north, a slow loping gallop, and, whilst thus riding, numberless kangaroos, with an occasional fox, and, at lesser intervals, a dingo, raced across his path headed east, knowing not, as he did, that most probably the Windee fire spreading north awaited them.
The wind, fortunately, did not increase when the sun rose, changing in colour from crimson to deep yellow, yet in less than thirty minutes the oncoming fury compelled Bony to turn several degrees eastward. Anxiously he sought to peer through the drifting, stinging fog for some fortunate haven of refuge that might be presented in the form of broken clay-pan country or the gibber plain. After another twenty minutes he again was forced to alter his course farther to the east, with the racing fire less than a mile distant.
The Sands of Windee Page 26
