Fire Salvage
LUDBI’S DEATH quickly drifted into the limbo of things forgotten. Sergeant Morris discovered that no one among Moongalliti’s tribe knew or could remember the buck on Mertee’s side who had driven the fatal spear. It was more than probable that no one belonging to Mertee’s tribe, save the thrower of the spear himself, could have named the slayer. The details of tribal battles are lost in the excitement of the participants, which is extreme, and, since it was not deliberately planned murder, the law passed it over. Ludbi was buried in due course with the usual tribal honours.
At the end of the first week in November Bony was still cooking in the men’s kitchen. By then he was utterly bored, and he was more pleased even than Jeff Stanton when Father Ryan telephoned to say that Alf the Nark was recuperating in the Mount Lion gaol, and would be ready for work at the end of a further two days.
Hearing this, Bony sighed relief, and the men sighed for the opposite reason. Runta, who came regularly at sundown to obtain food and roll her big black eyes at the handsome cook, began to wail when Bony informed her of the approaching return of Alf the Nark. She spoke fair English.
“You come camp with me, Bony,” she said with delightful naiveté. “You marry me and you’m work no more for old man Jeff, eh? I get plenty tucker for you.”
“Bimeby,” replied the unabashed Bony, prevaricating. He spoke in her vernacular. “You’m no like Bony for long; Bony very bad man. He’m got awful temper. He’m beat two lubras with a waddy, so hard that they die.”
“Oh! Oh, Bony, you fool me!” gasped Runta. Very solemnly Bony shook his head. Then, placing the tip of his forefinger against the middle of his forehead, he said significantly: “Sometime now, sometime presently, Bony bad fellow. Killum quick. Debil-debil in here.”
Runta faded out. Bony knew that he had frightened her temporarily, but that next evening her courage would permit her to gaze again on the adored one. His reading was correct. Watching for her, he espied her coming up along the creek, and, when she finally reached the kitchen and poked her head in through the doorway, she became as a rough-hewn block of black marble.
Bony was seated on the floor. His fine straight hair was fiercely ruffled. His face was smeared with flour. Before him stood a statuette fashioned from dough, and he was menacing this statuette with a very businesslike waddy or club. And then Runta saw herself being examined by wild, terrible eyes, and she saw her hero move forward on his knees and one hand, the waddy in the other. He was creeping towards her. Quite evidently it was one of the periods of “sometime now, sometime presently”. Poor disillusioned Runta fled screaming.
From the doorway Bony watched her flight and experienced a qualm of remorse. Playing Don Juan was not a weapon he used often, but in this instance he considered the end justified the means. From Runta he had discovered an important fact, whilst through Runta he had broken the ice of suspicion and was now well received by Moongalliti.
Alf the Nark came back in triumph. He entered the kitchen and resumed his duties with not a particle of grit on his poor liver. Bony went back to his horses, and in five days had his first post-cooking horse in the last stage of its training. Thenceforth on every afternoon he rode by devious ways to the junction of the two roads, and for several hours walked about in his sheepskin sandals, or over-shoes.
On previous occasions he had found where the skinned carcass of a kangaroo had been burned. A charred piece of wood, a bone or the long tail of the animal, invariably not skinned, charred and blackened, always indicated where the carcass had been burned, in spite of the ever-encroaching sand. There was nothing unduly startling in this, since, on many stations, the single condition laid down by the squatter in giving his permission to skin- and fur-getters to operate on his holding is that all carcasses must be burned. Rotting carcasses are breeding-grounds for the blow-fly, and this fly is the sheep’s greatest enemy.
Walking in ever larger circles, with the spot where the abandoned car was found as a centre, Bony had carefully examined almost half a thousand acres. On that area he had found the remains of almost a hundred fires, and these fires had been lit between eight and twelve weeks previously, or, to be more precise, some had been lit before the disappearance of Marks, and some after.
It was no mean feat to establish the approximate dates of those fires. Yet it had been done to Bony’s complete satisfaction by observing the quantity of sand swept over them, and the condition of a bone here and there, which had been partially cleaned of flesh by the ants where it had not been so cleaned by the fire.
After this point of date had been decided, he learned in his roundabout way that the kangaroos shot and burned there were the work of Dot and Dash, who at that time were camped near a well, situated a mile south of the road junction in what was called South Paddock. He determined to examine that camp-site after he had re-examined all those hundred fire-sites.
The re-examination of the fire-sites occupied the afternoons of more than a week, and at the conclusion of this second scrutiny Bony decided that one particular site might be well worth examining for a third time. With no little difficulty he smuggled away from the homestead a short-handled shovel and a small-meshed sieve, and took these tools one night to a fire-site about four hundred yards north of the road junction and three hundred yards north of the abandoned car site.
The following morning he made pretext to require more particular instructions about a certain horse of Jeff Stanton’s, and heard his individual orders to the men. During that afternoon no one of them would, in their work, be riding near the fire-site he proposed to sift with his sieve. At three o’clock he started work.
Of the hundred-and-odd fires that Bony had superficially examined, this particular site had one peculiarity. It had been a large fire, and the reason of that might have been that more than one carcass had been burned there. On the other hand, Bony did not exclude the possibility that the charred remains of a human body might lie below the charred remains of a kangaroo. A second fire might have been lit over the site of the first.
Very carefully he removed the sand that had drifted round and over this fire-site, proclaimed by a kangaroo’s hind-foot. One by one he removed a quantity of bones by feeling for them in the loose combination of sand and ash. Satisfied that he had recovered all that the fire had not consumed—and ordinary fire consumes very few bones—he carefully sorted them and eventually obtained proof that all belonged to the bodies of three kangaroos.
A further fact he discovered was that the wood which burned the carcasses had not been just thrown on them and fired. Jeff Stanton’s condition had been carried out conscientiously, for Dot and Dash had laid a bed of wood to make the burn more thorough.
Now with great care Bony began to put the ash and sand mixture through his sieve. The residue remaining from each sieve-load he emptied on a chaff-bag, and when he was satisfied that the whole of the fire-site had passed through the sieve or lay on the bag, he paused in his labours and began making and rolling a cigarette.
With the most interesting section of the examination before him, Bony smoked complacently and visualized the scene of the killing of Marks. The act committed, it was at once urgently necessary to dispose of the body. Fire was the easiest and most practicable method. There were no disused mine-shafts down which to throw a body and then explode over it a few tons of earth and rocks. There was no steam power on Windee, no big steam boiler to drive the shearing machinery, no big boiler furnace to incinerate a human body. All Windee power plants were petrol-driven.
There was to be taken into consideration, however, the probability that the murderer or murderers of Marks might have scooped a hole anywhere in that vast region of sand and simply buried the victim, certain that the first windstorm would wipe out all tracks. That method of disposing of the body would naturally occur to the average mind, especially the mind of a killer who was a new-chum to the bush.
This theory, however, was discounted by two facts. Not one of the fish in Bony’s net
was a new-chum, and not one fish was there who did not know that, although the first windstorm would obliterate all tracks, there was the certainty that a future windstorm would blow the sand from the body and expose it. To obviate this danger the murderer might have taken the body by truck or car from the scene of the crime and buried it in hard ground on the great plain, or somewhere near the hills.
If that were so, Bony’s task would be infinitely greater, but the hangman’s rope for the murderer would be infinitely more sure. He was not safe whilst the body existed in whole or in part, and, whilst Bony had so far nothing tangible on which to base his belief, he did believe that the body no longer existed, in whole at least. Ludbi had known, and Moongalliti knew, the killer of Marks. The killer, therefore, was absolutely in their hands. They would blackmail him for even a pound of tea, and, knowing that their demands would inevitably increase, the killer would have vanished before then if he were not absolutely secure from blackmail, even secure from their accusation, in the knowledge that no body existed. No one had left Windee since Marks had disappeared. Neither Moongalliti nor Ludbi had come into any coveted possession, such as good clothes or any of the hundred-and-one trinkets of which a blackfellow dreams. And, given the chance, the aboriginal becomes a front-rank expert at blackmailing.
Bony extinguished the cigarette and put it in a pocket before drawing the bag of sieve residue to him. Every piece of matter he examined with his keen eyes, finally to lay it down on his other side. Most of the material was plain charcoal. There was a quantity of blackened pieces of furred skin and five small bones that he decided were knuckle-bones. Since a kangaroo’s paw is five-fingered and similar in shape to the human hand, and since many kangaroos have paws almost as large as the human hand, Bony considered that these bones came from kangaroos’ paws. To be sure on that point he pocketed them with the intention of sending them to the Research Department at Headquarters.
The pile of seeming rubbish on the bag was growing appreciably less. Still, there might yet be evidence that something more than kangaroos had been burned. Marks’s teeth had been gold-filled, and, although the fire would have sundered the gold from its setting of bone, its temperature would not have been high enough to melt the gold. And then he came on melted metal, and his knife proved it lead. It had run into irregular flat cakes. He found three such cakes of lead, and knew them once to have formed bullets that had killed the burned kangaroos. From that he knew it was Dot who had shot those animals, for Dot used a .44 Winchester carbine firing a lead bullet, and Dash always used a .22 Savage firing a soft-nosed nickel-plated bullet.
The refuse not yet examined was becoming a very small collection, but to the very end Bony persevered. He had concluded that his work was fruitless, yet he felt no disappointment, for there were other avenues to be explored, when he came upon a single blackened boot-sprig, a boot-nail less than half an inch in length. Hurriedly he went through the remainder. It gave him nothing of significance. His reward for all his labour that afternoon was a single little boot-nail.
The nail proved that something in addition to kangaroo carcasses had been burned there.
Quite slowly, smiling radiance came to Bony’s face.
Chapter Twenty-one
At the Source of Life
SUMMER’S FIRST heat-wave found Dot and Dash at Carr’s Tank, twenty-two miles south of Range Hut, and lying at the west foot of the ranges. The tank was a great square earth excavation from which thirty-thousand cubic yards of mullock had been taken by bullock-drawn scoops. The mullock formed a rampart, and through this rampart cement pipes conducted the water from a shallow creek—when water flowed in it—beginning in the hills.
Wholly enclosing tank and banks was a six-wire fence, but so numerous were the kangaroos that hardly one strand of wire remained taut. With no difficulty whatsoever they climbed through the fence to drink at the dam in preference to drinking at the man-made sheep-trough a hundreds yards out, and kept filled by a windmill.
Still farther away was an erection of corrugated iron, hessian bags, and flattened petrol-tins, which served as a kind of house for two stockmen. This sort of house substitute was less in evidence on Windee than on the great majority of Australian stations. There exists an Act that requires the squatter to house his men in enlarged iron boxes, also an Act requiring him to use poison-carts to destroy rabbits. However, since no one lives in the bush with the intention of settling there, but rather to make a cheque and then settle elsewhere, the want of any degree of comfort is a matter of indifference.
The two stockmen and the partners were having an early dinner, since the latter had to be at their places at the dam before sundown. In spite of the terrific heat in the interior of the hut the four men appeared to enjoy eating, seeming hardly conscious of the perspiration that ran from them, brought out by the scalding hot tea drunk from tin pint pannikins. The wind, gusty and hot, rattled the iron sheets nailed to the framework of the structure, and sometimes thickened the atmosphere with fine red dust. Countless flies hummed and settled in eyes and on bare necks and arms. That day the temperature in the shade at Windee was from 102° to 112°. At Carr’s Tank there was no shade much for a distance of fully a mile in any direction.
“Feeling a bit warm, Dot?” queried Ned Swallow, a youthful, lank, red-headed rider.
“Not exactly,” Dot rejoined, helping himself to what purported to be plum duff. “I was jest wonderin’ whar the draught was coming from. Say, Tom!”—to the second rider—“you sure can make plum duff!”
“That’s a better pudding than general,” Tom growled.
“Well, it’s fillin’, anyway. Try some, Dash?”
“I think not,” Dash said, eyeing it suspiciously.
“Seems as though the outside third of it kinda got stuck on the cloth when you heaved her out, Tom,” Dot observed.
“Yus. I forgot to wet the cloth afore I put her in. Still, it’ll go better cold. She’ll have lost that slummicky look. Don’t you blokes wait to wash up. Me and Ned’ll do that.”
“You are very decent, Tom. I’ll roll a cigarette, and Dot and I will adjourn.” Dash went outside and dried his face, neck and arms with a towel. The sun was getting low, and already thousands of galahs whirled about the tank, or strutted on the banks looking like tiny grey-coated soldiers. Around the tank lay a plain covered with fine red dust. One mile away the scrub began. Before the tank was sunk, all that plain bore scrub-trees, but by now the stock converging there daily had eaten or killed them. Across this arid desert drifted an occasional low cloud of red dust, whilst at a point far to the north-west a huge towering red column denoted that the sheep were coming in to drink.
Dash settled himself at the summit of the rampart at that angle which commanded the iron reservoir tanks, windmill, and troughs giving water to two paddocks, with a great sweep of the plain beyond; whilst Dot, at the opposite angle, commanded the shorter stretch of plain bounded by the range.
As a slowly oncoming destroyer sending up a red smoke-screen, a long line of sheep moved across the plain to the dam. Shadows of tank and windmill lengthened with magical rapidity, and the wind became merely a fitful zephyr.
The red dust-screen came ever nearer. Dash could observe the faint white figures of the leaders of the flock of three thousand sheep. On his side Dot could see a similar flock of sheep coming from the other paddock to drink. A mile away three black pin-heads behaved as well-drilled jumping fleas, and between each jump a spurt of dust arose. They were the vanguard of the kangaroos coming leisurely to the dam in fifteen-foot jumps, tireless, wonderfully speedy, infinitely more graceful in action than a racing horse or whippet-dog. At the edge of the scrub numbers of these animals, who had slept and drowsed away the day, were sitting bolt upright watching their leaders, and in twos and threes and fours they bounded out on the plain, so that a few minutes after Dash had seen the first three pinheads he could easily count thirty.
Water! The Spring of Life!
The nearest wa
ter lay eighteen miles to the north; the next nearest thirty miles to the west. Between these places the only moisture to be found was in the sap of the trees. In a week or so, when the last of the tiny grass roots were dead, twenty to fifty thousand rabbits would come to water every night with unfailing regularity. Numbers of them even then were drinking at the edges of the square sheet of water in the dam. Others were converging on it in easy stages of a few yards’ run, with pauses to sit up and look around with alert suspicion.
When the sun, still fiercely hot and flaming red, was but four fingers above the horizon, the dust-cloud was within a quarter of a mile of the troughs. Fifty sheep were to be seen moving at its base. Tens of hundreds walked in the cloud in several parallel lines. Dash could hear their plaintive baaing above the scream of the birds, and he observed with never-slackening interest how but one sheep of all that great flock constituted itself the leader. It was an old yet robust ewe. When but a hundred yards from the troughs she broke into a quick amble, followed by those immediately behind her. That seemed to be the point when every following sheep broke from a walk into a run.
A white flood of wool rolled over the ground to the water. The galahs rose from the troughs with a thunderous roar of wings to fly a short distance away and settle like a grey blanket on the expanse of plain. The white flood, reaching the trough, poured around both sides of it and rolled outward as from a centre when the main body of the sheep swelled its volume.
A vast milling, dust-raising, baaing, struggling mass of animals! The level of water in the reservoir tank feeding the trough began gradually to fall. Then from the surging mass one sheep became detached. It was the old ewe leader. She ran back over the way she had come, followed by several others, and then stopped when two hundred yards from the tank, looking back with cunning placidity. In twos and threes, their bellies distended with water, sheep left the mob and joined her, then, with her, to stand a while looking back. Not one ran ahead. And not before all but a few lingerers had drunk their fill did she lead them out across the plain to the scrub and dry grass, the red mounting dust, now rising straight and to a great height, marking their passage.
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