Wings above the Diamantina
( Bony - 3 )
Arthur W. Upfield
Arthur W. Upfield
Wings above the Diamantina
Chapter One
The Derelict Aeroplane
BECAUSE THE DAY was still and cool and invigorating, Elizabeth elected to accompany her father on a tour of the fifteen hundred square miles of country called Coolibah. The sample of late October weather in the far west of Queensland had nothing to do with Nettlefold’s decision to make this tour of the great cattle station of which he had been the manager for thirty-two years. With him such a tour came within the ambit of routine work, but on this occasion he wished to inspect a mob of store cattle before they were handed over to the drovers who were to take them to Bourke for the Sydney market; and, further, he wanted to inspect the condition of the feed in a huge paddock, named Emu Lake, which had been resting for two years.
“I am glad you came, Elizabeth,” he said, while the comfortable car took them ever westward of the great Diamantina River.
“I am, too,” the girl replied quickly. “The house is always very quiet when you’re away, and heaven knows it’s quiet enough when you are home.” Elizabeth smiled. “And then when you are away something always happens to the radio.”
Her beautiful face gave the lie direct to those who say that the Queensland climate ruins feminine complexions. Her hair was deep brown, and so, too, were her large eyes. The colouring of her face was fresh, and only her lips were touched with rouge.
“This is the fourth time you have come with me since we took to cars,” he pointed out after a little silence.
“The fifth time,” she corrected him.
Laughter narrowed his eyes and rounded his brick-red face.
“Well, a car is not so slow and boring as the buckboard used to be. I remember the first occasion you came out with me. You were only five years old, and, although we joined forces against your mother, it was a hard tussle to get her to let you go.”
“That was the time the river came down while we were outback, and we had to camp for two weeks waiting for it to subside enough to make the crossing back to the house. I remember most distinctly poor mother running out of the house to meet us. I think that my earliest memory is of her anxious face that day.”
“She had cause to be anxious. There was no telephone from the homestead out to the stockmen’s huts in those days, and no telephone from the stations up north by which we could have ample notice of a coming flood. Before you were born your mother often came with me and used to enjoy the camping out. We were great pals, your mother and I.”
The girl’s hand for a moment caressed his coated arm. Then she said softly: “And now we are pals aren’t we?”
“Yes, Elizabeth, we are pals, good pals,” he agreed, and then relapsed into silence.
They were twenty miles west of the maze of intertwining empty channels of the Diamantina, and thirty-five miles from Coolibah homestead. Ahead of them ranged massive sand-dunes, orange-coloured and bare of herbage save for scanty cotton-bush. Here and there beyond the sand crests of the range reared the vivid foliage of bloodwood trees, while beyond themrose a great brown cloud of dust.
“That’ll be Ted Sharp with the cattle,” Nettlefold said, with reference to the dust cloud.
“How many are we sending away this time?” asked the girl.
“Eight hundred-I am hoping. It will depend.”
The track led them round a spur of sand running upward for forty odd feet to the summit of a dune. It then led them in and among thesandhills, following hard and wind-sweptclaypans, on which the wheels of vehicles left imprints barely visible. The Rockies, Elizabeth had called them the first time she had induced her father to stop here for lunch and permit her to scramble up one and then slide down its steep face with shrieks of laughter and boots filled hard with the fine grains.
Then, as suddenly as they had passed into the seeming barrier, the car shot out on to a wide treeless plain, a grey plain which was fringed along its far side with dark timber. Before them milled a slow-moving mass of cattle, moving like a wheel, and driven by four horsemen. A fifth horseman, leading a spare saddled horse, came cantering to meet them. When they stopped he brought his animals close to the car. Off came his wide-brimmed felt hat to reveal straight brown hair and the line across his forehead below which the sun and the wind had stained his face. Above the line the milk-white skin made a startling contrast.
“Morning, Mr Nettlefold! Morning, Miss Elizabeth!” he shouted, before dismounting to lead the horses closer. To the girl he added with easy deference: “I thought you would have gone to Golden Dawn and had a flip or two with those flying fellows. All the boys were going to ask for time off to go up and look-see the bush from above if this muster hadn’t been ordered.”
“Somehow I just couldn’t be bothered,” she said, smiling, and not unmindful of his lithe grace in the saddle. “Anyway, the eggs in the incubator were due to hatch yesterday, and while they were hatching I could not be away from home.”
“A good hatching?” he asked, with raised brows.
“Yes. Ninety-one out of the hundred.”
“How do they weigh up, Ted?” interrupted Nettlefold, his thoughts running on more important things than chickens.
“Fair. Ought to average eight hundred pounds dressed. There’s eight hundred and nineteen in the muster. Will you look ’emover?”
“May as well, now that you’ve brought the spare hack. Who have you got with you beside Ned Hamlin and Shuteye?”
“Bill Sikes and Fred the Dogger.”
Nettlefold nodded and then, telling Elizabeth he would not be long, he swung into the saddle of the spare hack and rode away stiffly towards the milling cattle. Ted Sharp waved his hat to the girl. Elizabeth smiled and waved back. He was the most cheerful, life-loving man she had ever known.
With the smile still playing about her lips she watched them ride towards the cattle: her father stiffly, his head stockman with the swinging grace of one who spends the daylight hours on the back of a horse. Sharp pointed out something relative to the cattle, and the horses began to canter in a wide arc.
Ted Sharp had arrived from nowhere in particular eleven years before, and even now he was not much more than thirty. When he came to Coolibah Elizabeth had been a tomboy of fourteen, and her mother had been dead four years. From early childhood she could ride, but with the coming of Ted Sharp her horses and her riding improved beyond measure. He was a born horse-breaker, beside being a first-rate cattleman, and it was not long before he was promoted boss stockman. He appeared to be a born boss stockman, too, for he never had the slightest trouble with the men.
Presently her father and he came riding slowly back to the car. They were in earnest conversation, and she guessed without hesitation the subject of discussion. She could not possibly be wrong, because when two men meet anywhere in cattle country they talk cattle.
“We’re all going to Golden Dawn to-morrow, Miss Eliz’beth,” the boss stockman called out while distance still separated them. “Mr Nettlefold says we can go. Hope to see you there, too. You must command your father to take you.”
“I never command my father to do anything,” she corrected him, her serious expression belied by laughing eyes.
The big, bluff manager of Coolibah regarded her with obvious pride. Everything about her-the grey tailor-made costume, the modish hat which did not conceal the golden sheen of her hair-combined to place his daughter on an equal footing with the smartest city women.
“No, you never command, Elizabeth,” he said slowly. “But somehow I always obey.”
Giving Sharp the reins of the horse, he walked to the
car and climbed in behind the wheel. There, having settled his big, strong body, he proceeded to cut chips from a large plug of black tobacco, the kind which has long gone out of fashion amongbushmen.
“Tell Sanders that I have arranged credit for him at Quilpie, Cunnamulla and Bourke,” he directed. “Ask him to let me know by wire when he has trucked these beasts because there may be enough fats in Bottom Bend for him to lift in January to take to Cockburn for Adelaide. We’re due for a dry time after this run of good seasons, and I don’t want to be caught overstocked.”
“All right! There’ll be fats enough in Bottom Bend, I’ll bet.”
“There should be, provided we don’t get an overdose of windstorms to blow away all the feed. Well, we’ll get on. Want to get back home to-night. So long!”
“So long, Mr Nettlefold! Aurevoir, Miss Eliz’beth.”
Having given the manager a quick salute, the boss stockman was less hasty with the daughter. She eyed him coolly, but her look only made his smile broaden. She laughed at him when the car began to move, and returned his salute with a white-gloved hand.
Twenty minutes later they were across the plain and among the stunted bloodwoods and the mulgas. Here in this imitation forest grew no ground feed of bush and grass, but it provided good top feed in dry times.
A few miles of scrub, and then their way lay across a wide area of broken sand country criss-crossed by water gutters that appeared to follow no uniform direction. It was barren save for far-spaced, thirst-tortured coolibah trees, and here and there patches of tussock-grass. An amazing place, this. It was the studio of the Wind King who had chiselled the sand hummocks into fantastic shapes, a veritable hell when the hot westerlies blew in November and March.
Sixty miles from home they boiled the billy for lunch, the car halted in the shadow cast blackly on the glaring ground by three healthy bloodwoods. The girl set up the low canvas table beside the running board. She busied herself with cut sandwiches and little cakes and crockery ware which her father never thought of bringing when he travelled by himself. Alone, his tucker box furnished with a tin pannikin and a butcher’s killing knife, bread and cold meat, tea and sugar, sufficed him. His wife, and, after her, his daughter, had failed to alter the habits of his youth when he served as a stockman, and later as a boss stockman.
“Ah! By the look of things we are going to do ourselves well to-day,” he said cheerfully.
“Of course,” she agreed emphatically, smiling up at him. “You would not expect me to be satisfied with a thick slice of bread and an equally thick slice of saltmeat, would you?”
“Hardly. What’s sauce for the old gander would be sandstone for the young goose. However, I am not sure that elegant living is good for a man. I have noticed lately a touch of indigestion. I never had that when I lived on damper and salt meat and jet-black tea.”
“Probably not, Dad; but you now have a touch of indigestion because you once lived on those things,” she countered swiftly. “Pour out my tea, please, before it becomes ink-black.”
Nettlefold was happy because his daughter was with him, and she was happy because he was so. Elizabeth was not the bush lover that her father was. The bush had “got” him in its alluring toils, but she had resisted it and, having resisted, escaped it. Paradoxically, she found no love for the bush, and yet hated the city.
The meal eaten, he gallantly lit her cigarette, and, with his pipe alight, began to pack away the luncheon things. She watchedhim, her eyes guarded with lowered lids, and told herself how fine was this simple, generous father of hers. It was understood that when she was out on the run with him she was his guest, staying at his country house, as he put it, and as his guest she was not to do any of the chares.
Then on again, through the gate into the great Emu Lake paddock, a fenced area eighteen miles square. The stock having been excluded for two years, the grasses lay beneath the sun like turned oats. Patches of healthy scrub encumbered the undulating grasslands like dark, rocky islands. Here in this paddock sheltered for two years, the kangaroos were numerous; and, on nearing a bore-head, the travellers were greeted by a vast flock of galah parrots.
Every twenty-four hours seven hundred thousand gallons of water hotly gushed from the bore-head to run away for miles along the channel scooped to carry it. Years before, when the bore first had been sunk to tap the artesian reservoir, the flow was nearly eleven hundred thousand gallons every twenty-four hours.
Day and night, year in and year out, the stream spouted hot from the iron casing to run down the channel now edged with the snow-white soda suds. Not within half a mile of the bore could cattle drink the water, so hot and so loaded withalkalies was it.
Nettlefold drove the car beside the channel for some distance before turning to the north along an old and faint track. About ten minutes after leaving the bore stream they emerged from dense scrub and were on the dry, perfectly flat bottom of a shallow ground depression from which the paddock was named. It was edged, this waterless lake, with a shore of white, cement-hard claypan lying like a bridal ribbon at the foot of swamp gums crowned with brilliant green foliage. The girl uttered a sharp exclamation, and her father unconsciously braked the car to a halt.
In the centre of the lake, and facing towards them, rested a small low-winged monoplane varnished a bright red.
Chapter Two
Aerial Flotsam
“THAT’S STRANGE!” Nettlefold said softly, still sitting in the halted car and gazing across the flat surface of the lake. In area the lake was some two miles long and about one mile wide. On it grew widely spaced tussock-grass which, because of its spring lushness, the kangaroos had eaten down to within an inch of the ground. Had Emu Lake been filled with water-as it had been after the deluge of 1908-it would have been a veritable bushjewel. Now the colouring of the lake itself was drab. Without the water it was like a ring from which the jewel had fallen, leaving the mere setting.
“I believe there is somebody in the plane,” Elizabeth said sharply. “Isn’t that someone in the front seat?”
“If there is, then your eyes are better than mine,” her father replied. “The pilot must have made a forced landing. We’ll drive round a bit and then cross to it.”
Nettlefold had to take care when negotiating the steep yet low bank to reach the ribbon of claypan, and then, because the machine was a little to the left, he drove the car along the firm level claypan strip until opposite the aeroplane, when he turned sharply out on to the lake bed.
The heavy car bumped over the tussock-grass butts, the open spaces between them covered with deep sand, and so eventually drew to within a few yards of the spick and span red-varnished monoplane.
Slightly above their level, a girl occupied the front seat. Her pose was perfectly natural. Her head was tilted forward as though she were interested in something lying on her lap. She was quite passive, as though absorbed by an exciting book. No one could be seen in the pilot’s cockpit.
“Good afternoon!” called Nettlefold.
The occupant of the monoplane offered no acknowledgment of the salute. She continued impassively to gaze down at her lap. She made no movement when he called again.
“It certainly is strange, Dad,” Elizabeth said uneasily.
“I agree with you. Wait here.”
John Nettlefold’s voice had acquired a metallic note. Alighting from the car, he walked towards the plane until his head became level with the edge of the front cockpit. He was then able to observe that the girl’s eyes were almost closed. She was not reading. She was asleep-or dead…
“Good afternoon!” he called for the third time.
Still she made no response. He gently pinched the lobe of her left ear. It was warm to the touch, but his act failed to arouse her.
“Come, come! Wake up!” he said loudly, and this time he shook her, finding her body flexible with life. He failed, however, to awaken her.
Nor, he assured himself, was the rear cockpit occupied, although here were the controls of the pl
ane.
“Is she dead?” asked Elizabeth from the car.
“No, but there is something peculiar about her. Come here, and have a look.” Then, when she had joined him: “She looks exactly as though she is asleep, but if she is I can’t wake her. Where, I wonder, is the pilot?”
“Walked away for assistance, I suppose. The plane appears to be quite undamaged. Ought we not to lift her out? She may be merely in a faint.”
“Wait… one moment! Don’t move about!”
Nettlefold’s bush-acquired instincts now came into play. His gaze was directed to the ground in the vicinity of the machine. As mentioned, the grass butts were widely spaced, and between each cropped butt the lake surface was composed of fine reddish sand. Their own boot and shoe prints from the car were plainly discernible, but there were no other tracks left by a human being. The pilot had not jumped from the machine to the ground on their side. Neither had the girl.
Having walked round to the far side of the machine, the cattleman discovered that neither the girl nor the pilot had dropped to the ground on that side. When he rejoined Elizabeth he had made a complete circuit, and he at once proceeded to make a second, this time one of greater circumference.
“There wasn’t a pilot,” he said when he again joined his daughter. “That girl must have piloted the aeroplane herself. No one has left it after it landed here.”
“But if she controlled the machine she would be in the rear cockpit, wouldn’t she?” queried Elizabeth.
“Doubtless she was. She must have climbed forward to the front cockpit after she landed the machine. That no one has left the machine is certain. No one could have left it without leaving tracks.”
With compressed lips, Nettlefold stepped back the better to view the crimson varnished aeroplane from gleaming propeller to tail tip. It was either a new machine or had been recently varnished. Along the fuselage in white was painted the cipher, V. H -U, followed by the registration letters.
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