Chapter Twenty-Five
The Rabbit—And The Hunters
THE SUN, rushing upward from the bottom of the world, began to flood the sky above the Loftus farm. While the first beam of its light sank downward to the farm it painted with the whiteness of snow the squadrons of tiny puff clouds hanging without movement in the still air, so still that the smoke from the smouldering haystack rose in a straight column to within a few hundred feet of the clouds, where it mushroomed into a brilliant snowcap.
But this morning, there were no watchers of beautiful natural phenomena. Although so early, men were gathering together in parties, were converging on the wheat town in their motorcars and trucks, for all night Bony had been engaged in rousing the farmers in the district. Faced with much loss of time before police reinforcements could be hurried to the district, Bony had purposely released the essential facts, knowing that by so doing he would arouse the countryside to assist in the capture of Landon by cutting off all roads of escape.
A party of a dozen men stood in a group on the summit of the long granite rock west of the Loftus homestead, watching Bony walking slowly along the strip of soft moss-grown earth between the rock and the line of dense scrub. Each of them carried either a rifle or a shotgun. A little in front of them, keeping them back from the working half-caste, as it were, stood Detective-Sergeant John Muir.
The watchers saw Bony now in his hereditary element, far removed from a lady’s bedroom. His hands were clasped behind his back; his head was thrust forward and his face downward. Presently he stopped, dug his heel into the spongy earth to make a mark, and then, looking up and at them, he crossed the short distance to the rock. He said:
“Gentlemen, as Sergeant Muir has told you, I have been engaged by the Western Australian Police Department to track down Mick Landon. I have no objection to you watching me at work. You may have the privilege of observing at work the finest tracker in Australia, for I have done much work for the Queensland police, if you leave behind you your weapons.
“Understand this. The Law requires the person of Mick Landon. At present I am the Law which demands the person of the supposed murderer of George Loftus that he stand his fair trial before a qualified judge and a jury of his peers. There”—Bony waved a hand to indicate all the vast extent of western bush—“there in that bush is Landon. I am going to get him for the Law. If you insist on bringing your firearms so that you may shoot him at sight, so that you may cheat the hangman of his fees, I shall refuse to make any effort—now. But, later, I shall start off on his tracks and get him today, tomorrow, or next week.”
Several of the men murmured protestingly. Their mass temper was ugly, and Bony’s only assistant was John Muir. The detective-sergeant would have spoken to them impulsively had not Bony, with most rare impulsiveness, stepped in front of him.
The crowd of angry men could not well be managed by the two policemen. They not only desired to take the law into their own hands, but in their eagerness to do so would constantly obstruct Bony and threaten to destroy the hunted man’s tracks. All the policemen but one on the staff at Merredin were guarding important roads, searching motorcars and trucks, and the railway stations at which every train would stop. They, with parties of volunteers, were the nets set at the rabbit holes of a huge warren. In the bush ran the frantic rabbit.
“Please think,” Bony urged the small crowd with forced calmness. “Let us look at your picture. Armed, you come on Landon. You riddle him with bullets and shot. In an instant his agony is over. He is dead. He is at peace. Now look at my picture. He knows how hopeless are his chances of escape, because he will guess I am on his tracks. He is taken alive. He stands in the dock fighting a losing battle for his life. Observe the sweat of terror on his face. He is condemned, and dies his first death. Cannot you see him dying a thousand times while he waits to hear the footsteps of the hangman? And you would be merciful to him. You would be merciful to one who stole Loftus’s wife and murdered Loftus himself. You would be merciful to one who, although accidentally, shot Miss Jelly and then prevented me from going to her assistance. Come now! Which picture do you prefer?”
“What about it, sergeant? Will he hang?” demanded the Spirit of Australia in his powerful voice.
“I have never been more sure of a man being hanged,” Muir replied grimly.
The crowd whispered among themselves. Then the old-young giant said:
“All right! We leave our guns behind. Ted can take ’em down to the constable guarding the house. But when we gets Landon we will see that he arrives safely at the Merredin lockup.” Over Bony’s sharp features flashed a whimsical smile, but his deep blue eyes continued to sparkle with emotion. There were those among the crowd with sufficient imagination to cause them to thank their lucky stars that they were not the rabbit.
“I am glad to find that you are men of perspicacity,” he said in his grand manner. “At all times, please, keep behind me in as compact a body as possible. The sergeant will follow immediately behind me, in order to protect me should Landon be lying in ambush. Landon is armed. If he shoots me dead, if he shoots Mr Muir dead as well, even if he shoots half of you dead, then the survivors remember to take Landon alive to the hangman and not dead to the coroner.”
Having known Bony for years, John Muir was astonished by the hatred in both the voice and the face of this otherwise calm and gentle-natured man. Hitherto Bony had revealed mental detachment in his placidly conducted, unhurried manhunting. Muir did not understand Bony’s friendship with the two Jelly girls and did not know of the remorse his friend suffered at having taken Lucy Jelly to the Loftus house, with its tragic result.
For the first dozen yards of the trail any one of those men could have tracked Landon, but when once Bony plunged into the thick-growing bogeta bush the ground became iron-hard and covered with the dead and blackened needle-pointed leaves. Yet, for Bony, the ends of broken branches and stripped twig tips blazed a trail easy to follow.
The thick-growing bush gave place abruptly to larger and more varied bush, with here and there comparatively open spaces where grew white gums and gimlet-trees. Here a short curve, as though drawn with a pencil, there a turned stone, now a newly broken dead twig, once a shining brass shell from Landon’s revolver, all indicated the hunted man’s mental condition. Until then he had not remembered to replace the discharged cartridges with live ones. Both Bony and Muir wondered how many live cartridges Landon did possess. For distances of several yards Bony, the tracker, saw nothing to aid him, but by now he knew that Landon took longer steps with his left leg and, therefore, was prone to circle always to the right. Save the empty cartridge shell, the following crowd saw Landon’s tracks but five or six times in a mile. They could not see the little links of the long chain over which Bony almost ran, sure and faultless.
With John Muir close behind him, and behind the sergeant the crowd of eager men, Bony suddenly came on to a strip of clear mossy ground edging the gentle slope of a granite rock. Not having seen this “knob” during his walk from the great Burracoppin Rock to the Loftus homestead sometime previously, he turned to those who followed, saying:
“Can anyone tell me the area of this rock?”
“About forty acres,” someone replied.
“Thank you! Landon stepped on to the rock at this place. Unless he is still on the rock in hiding, he must have stepped off it. I shall see where he left it. I suggest that you men walk over the rock to make sure he is not here whilst I walk round its edge to pick up his tracks, if he has gone farther on. Please don’t move off the granite till I have picked up his tracks; otherwise you might destroy them.”
“You won’t slip away and leave us in the lurch?” queried the Spirit of Australia, his tall, straight figure a head above the others.
“I will not. You have my word.”
“I’ll back it, blokes,” Hurley cried. “Come on! Let’s give this knob an overhaul.”
But five minutes later, before the area of granite could be thoroughly
searched, they heard Bony’s shout, and, running and leaping over the uneven surface, they rejoined the detective with the exuberance of schoolboys.
“Got ’em?” they shouted with exultation.
“Yes.”
Pointing to the ground, Bony smiled in a way which made John Muir shiver. To the crowd there was revealed on the ground no scratch, no faintest impression.
The huge granite rock south of the original site of Burracoppin, when it was dependent on the passing traffic on the old York Road for existence from the custom of the prospectors to and from the new-found goldfields of Southern Cross and Coolgardie, must cover an area of four hundred acres. Towering above the original site of the Burracoppin Hotel, marked now by the fragments of thousands of bottles, the hill of granite appears like a great sea-washed rock; whilst from other points the imaginative observer may picture a miniature barren range cooling after one of the cataclysms which shook the world in its youth. It was on this huge rock that Bony once had sat and gazed on the valley of the wheat belt through which passes the Perth-Kalgoorlie railway.
Having taken every precaution not to be seen by chance searchers, having taken advantage of every crevice, every gully, every water runnel, Landon had reached a position on the highest peak whereon was built a surveyor’s trig, like a beacon to warn England of Napoleon’s invasion.
The man lay in a shallow declivity which, after rain, held gallons of water. There was now no water there, for the fierce sun long had sucked it into vapour. The hunted commanded a clear view of every side of that particular peak, and, being on the highest peak, even long-range rifle bullets could not reach him.
He had arrived there long before dawn, in time to witness the passing of the night-running mail-and-passenger trains at Burracoppin. He was convinced that the shadows converging upon him while he struggled with Bony were the figures of policemen, and he was sufficiently intelligent to know that all avenues of possible escape would have been closed to him before the attempted arrest had been made. Yet so sudden the final wrecking of that life of sensual abandon, when he had become lulled into security by the seeming apathy of the police, that it was not before he had reached the Burracoppin Rock that he realized the hopelessness of his case.
When standing near the trig, watching the lights of the passing trains, his mind had been swamped with despair. Time had returned to him a measure of calmness, and he had grimly decided that he would fight, and, if possible, kill many of his relentless enemies, before he turned the revolver upon himself. Before the dawn had come he had gone down to the old town water soak, filled the petrol-tin bucket attached to the windlass rope, and, having raided a solitary garden of all the vegetables he could carry, had returned to the trig, with water and food to last him many days.
The early sun began to heat the rock. There was no wind to keep down the temperature, and he lay in the long shadow cast by the trig, constantly peering round the carefully built cone of boulders. Now and then fits of helpless rage made him writhe. If only he had not been so supremely foolish as to have lingered near the Loftus homestead waiting a chance to get possession of the money hidden in the flock mattress, he might have boarded one of those trains before the cordon was properly drawn. On one of those trains, preferably that bound to Kalgoorlie, he could have travelled fifty or one hundred miles before dropping off at a wayside station to make a clean break for life.
Now, in broad daylight, he regretted his action remaining on the rock, in losing all that precious time during which he might have slipped through the cordon. It was too late now. Death had become a living entity, a stalking monster which sooner or later would reach him through his own stupidity; either by his own hand or by the hands of enraged men, or from the caress of the hangman’s rope about his neck. There was no escaping death. Yesterday he lived without fear of it. Today he faced its creeping approach with so much horror that he could not clearly think. Then he saw the stalking death, and his teeth clenched fiercely to prevent his crying out at his loss of the remnants of his manhood.
With awful fascination Landon watched Bony and his followers cross a small clearing a quarter of a mile from the eastward edge of the great rock. He tried to count the number of men, but failed. They were bunched too closely together. Well, he would get many of them before they got him. Without doubt they were on his tracks, for he remembered crossing that clearing. Fool! Oh, fool! Why had he not kept on? Why had he stayed there to fight against inevitable death?
Better end this agony now, at once. He looked at the revolver, pointing the muzzle at his eye, imagined the leaping flame and the tearing, smashing bullet streaking through his brain like a comet—and hastily pointed the weapon from him. No, he couldn’t pull the trigger. He excused himself on the plea that he might make a mistake, might only wound himself, and then tossed aside the revolver and clawed his face with his nails, so hateful was the realization of his cowardice.
When again he looked up and then down over the rock curves, he saw one of the pursuers. Now he was fighting for strength of mind, struggling to banish that devil of fear by conjuring mental pictures of dramatic scenes in which he was the hero. Probably, had not Bony appeared just when he did, on the edge of the scrub, which came almost to the east foot of the granite spurs, Landon might have regained self-control and died a brave if vile man.
The appearance of the two detectives and the small crowd of followers dissolved Landon’s morale as a snowflake in the hell of his imagination. He collapsed mentally. Physically he became governed by the subconscious imp of Fear which dwells deep in the mind of every man and woman.
With the swiftness and the snakelike glide of a goanna he ran down the western slope, carrying with him only the revolver, so great being his panic that he left behind him the small box of cartridges. Reaching the encircling spur, he raced away, anywhere, with no sense of direction, with no thought of direction, possessed by the one overwhelming desire to escape those human bloodhounds.
For fully half a mile he ran in a headlong rush, tearing his passage through belts of dense scrub which shredded his clothes and lashed his face, quickly bathed in perspiration, his magnificent chest coming to heave like that of a panting dog. He stopped only when he reached the summit of a quartz ridge, and then, looking backward, could see the peaks of the Burracoppin Rock through the tops of a line of white gums. Men were running about the rock like ants about a pebble.
On he went, senselessly wasting his strength by the rapidity of his progress. He came to the old York Road at the crossroad which led in a gentle fall to the Burracoppin railway station. A car was speeding up the road towards him. Himself concealed in the bush, he saw four men, other than the driver, and their gun barrels were pushed out over the car’s sides. They were as sportsmen out for rabbits. He was the rabbit.
Utterly exhausted, he reached a smaller granite mass half a mile due south. There he flung himself down on the sunheated rock, vainly trying to conquer the demon that rode him. Stupidly he looked at his empty hands, vainly tried to flog his mind to tell where he had dropped the revolver. Time! The passing of time made no impression on his mind. He could think of nothing but that carload of men who looked like sportsmen out for rabbits. His hands rubbed up and down his shredded trousers, the fingers working as the legs of caught crabs. The corners of his handsome mouth sagged. His face was grimed with sweat and dust. Every nerve in his body twitched.
And when he saw Bony step out of the scrub on to the rock at the exact place he had stepped on the rock, when he saw the crowd behind the two detectives, he sprang to his feet, waved his arms over his head, and shrieked.
He saw the crowd with Bony open out fanwise. Their sport sticks, cut to assist them through the bush, appeared to him like gun barrels.
“I give up—I give up!” was his wailing cry when he ran down the rock slope to the surprised tracker and his escort. They knew he was without a weapon because they had found the cartridges on the great rock and the revolver behind the bush where he had hidden from th
e “sportsmen” in the car.
“Save me! Help me! I give in—I give in!” Mick Landon sobbed when he fell at Bony’s feet and wrapped his arms about the tracker’s legs.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Finalizing A Case
“SO YOU see, John, your Burracoppin case was after all very simple and very sordid, requiring only one qualification in the personality of the investigator to achieve success.”
Bony was smiling into the alert military type of face of John Muir while he and the detective-sergeant lounged in the shade of a big salmon gum on the side of the Goomarin Road a mile out of Merredin. A week had passed, and the magistrate at Perth had remanded Mick Landon for trial on the capital charge.
“What is that necessary qualification? How did you know that George Loftus’s body was in the haystack? How did Jelly happen to become mixed up in the affair?”
With a face indicative of extreme pain Bony sighed. With slow significance he said:
“The qualification necessary in such a case is one which I possess to an acute degree and which in you, so far, I find lacking. You and our two chiefs are all lacking in patience. It is probable that you will eventually rise to the Western Australian Commissionership because you have organizing ability and an excellent address, but you will never make an outstanding detective. Colonel Spender is an excellent head of a police department, but he would be unequal to solving the mystery of a lost collar stud. In many respects Colonel Spender and you are akin.”
“Don’t rub it in too hard,” Muir urged with heightened colour. “You have answered my first question in a most offensive way; now please answer the remaining two.”
Mr Jelly’s Business Page 23
