Breakaway House

by Arthur W. Upfield

  BREAKAWAY HOUSE

  by

  ARTHUR W. UPFIELD

  ETT Imprint

  Sydney

  ETT IMPRINT & www.arthurupfield.com

  PO Box R1906, Royal Exchange NSW 1225 Australia

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers.

  First published by Hutchinson & Company 1987

  This eBook edition published by ETT Imprint 2015

  Copyright William Upfield 2015

  ISBN 9780994309655 (eBook)

  Digital edition distributed by

  Port Campbell Press

  www.portcampbellpress.com.au

  eBook Conversion by Winking Billy

  CONTENTS

  I: Breakaway Meeting

  II: Breakaway Girl

  III: Miss “It”

  IV: The Cattle Duffer

  V: A Deal in Cattle

  VI: A Fox Hunt

  VII: Suspicions and Facts

  VIII: At the Myme Hotel

  IX: Tremayne Behaves Queerly

  X: Breakaway House Ball

  XI: Tremayne’s Trickery

  XII: What the Parson Said

  XIII: The Affair at Acacia Well

  XIV: A Problem Solved

  XV: Blackmail

  XVI: The Attack

  XVII: A Pleasant Host

  XVIII: A Night Ride

  XIX: The Ambuscade

  XX: The Island

  XXI: No Deceit Between Us

  XXII: Morris Tonger at Home

  XXIII: The Bunyip

  XXIV: The Tree Trunk

  XXV Colonel Lawton Arrives

  XXVI: The Tea Party

  XXVII: Hurried Arrivals

  XXVIII: Colonel Lawton Explains

  XXIX: An Outraged Husband

  XXX: The Battle

  XXXI: The Colonel’s Plans

  XXXII: Falling Darkness

  XXXIII: Vengeance

  XXXIV: Again Sunshine

  CHAPTER I

  BREAKAWAY MEETING

  THE brilliant yet balmy sunshine of early September fell on a hatless man lounging on a wide seat made of gum saplings, a man whose strong face would have aroused speculation in the observant – had he been anywhere else but just where he was. Here, on the lip of a Murchison breakaway, colourful space with far-flung boundaries so overwhelmed one with a panorama of scintillating tints – an intoxicant to the imagination and a vision of freedom known only to swift birds – that a solitary man was lost in the grandeur of his surroundings.

  This was the rock-bound coast of a sea that never was. Never had the ocean roared against the rock-strewn foot of this curving, hundred-foot cliff which swept away to the north-west to end in a mighty headland of black and brown stabbing into a sea of dove-grey saltbush, and, to the south, curved out to westward to end in an escarpment of ironstone and granite rubble amongst which specks of mica reflected the sun as though an escaping thief had thrown away all the jewels of India. Perhaps it was familiarity, or perhaps some secret sorrow or flaming hope, but Brett Filson seemed blind to this imposing picture.

  To reach the cliff, you left his homestead by the front door, walked through the small vegetable plot lovingly cared for by Soddy Jackson, the cook, passed through the garden gate, crossed the Myme-Magnet track, passed through another gate in a six-wire fence, pushed the hundred yards through thick mulga and, abruptly, burst out upon the granite edge of a precipitous cliff one never dreamed was there.

  Such was the surprise Western Australia gave to Harry Tremayne when he, having left his saddle-horse in the Bowgada yards and inquired for Brett Filson, followed Jackson’s careful directions.

  With the wall of dark green bush at his back, Harry Tremayne barely noticed the figure on the bush seat, the man whose hair was almost white, whose left shoulder was slightly lower than the other, and in whose right hand was the comfortable handle of a serviceable stick. Against his will his gaze was drawn instantly to the electrically attractive vision of colour and space.

  “Wanting to see me?” the seated man asked with quiet yet distinct articulation.

  Tremayne started, as though from a reverie, and walked with the mincing stride of a horseman the few yards to confront the Bowgada squatter. “Mr Filson?”

  He looked down on the face of a man who knew suffering, encountered the hazel eyes of one who was courageous, a man hardly forty years of age, and yet…and yet…

  “Yes, I’m Filson. What can I do for you?”

  Brett Filson examined the tall young man standing squarely before him, instantly approved of the powerful shoulders, slim hips, and feet encased in riding boots. He liked, too, the wide-spaced grey-blue eyes, the features chiselled as though from the dark wood of the omnipresent mulga itself.

  Tremayne seated himself beside the squatter of Bowgada, tobacco and papers magically appearing in his hands. “I’m Harry Tremayne,” he stated in the soft slurred accents of central Australia. “I’ve been up for a look-see at Myme which, I’m told, is a very rich mine. Thought I’d come along to have a yarn.”

  “Good! For that I shall be owing you something,” Brett said, smiling at the bushman’s habit of never at once coming to business. A stockman, probably, this Harry Tremayne. In fact, a stockman, most certainly. Looked efficient and dependable.

  Brett’s eyes turned away, to peer into the haze partially obscuring the turrets and domes of an opposing breakaway on the western horizon. When again he glanced at Tremayne it was to find himself being thoroughly examined. “Satisfied with me?” he asked.

  Tremayne nodded, before lighting his newly made cigarette. “I was told that you’re a man to be trusted, but I’m apt to rely a lot on my own judgment,” Brett was informed. “Until this minute I was undecided whether to tell you I was a stockman wanting a job, which I’m not, or a policeman with a special commission, which is the truth. Interested?”

  “Of course,” replied Brett, noting how the slurred speech of the bushman became submerged in the clipped tones of official authority.

  Imagination transformed Tremayne into a bird which slipped off the edge of the cliff a few yards from them, glided downward steeply and then more levelly to speed over the rock-strewn slope falling away to the dove-grey plain, onward into the light beams which seemed not of the sun, ever onward to mount at last over the mysterious summits ten miles distant.

  “Not a bad view,” were the four words which dispelled the fantasy.

  “Er – no,” Tremayne agreed, suddenly grinning at the older man. “It’s a great view, one in miniature equal to anything America can show us per medium of her moving pictures. Now – oh yes! I was telling you that I’m a policeman on a special job. Do you remember the case of six months ago when a man was found shot at the bottom of an old mine shaft away out from Myme?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was a C.I.B. man sent up to investigate the suspicion of the mine directors that a lot of gold was being stolen. He’d not been on the job three weeks before he was murdered. His reports contained nothing definite save his belief, unfounded on fact, that a keen, well-organised gang was operating.

  “The chief dispatched half the police force to rope in Hamilton’s slayers. They achieved nothing, drew a blank, fell down on it. There was a young uniformed policeman stationed at Pinjarra who, having a month’s leave due to him, asked permission to take a run up here and try his luck. Robbins was a likeable chap, keen on his job, and well coached in detective work by the chief himself, who was his father. When I refer to the chief’ I mean the Chief Inspector, not the Commissioner. />
  “Robbins got his chance, Mr Filson. He arrived at Myme with a swag lashed to a bike, looking for work. For a month he knocked about among the old prospectors and dry-blowers on the outskirts of Myme, and when he did get a job at the mine, on the surface, his leave was extended. Being a strong young fellow, and intelligent, he worked his way into the crushing plant and laboured among the cyanide vats. Finally, he reported his opinion that the gold was stolen in the ore, and not after its treatment, which meant that it had to be treated elsewhere.

  “As you can see, the problem then facing him was to discover the locality of the snide plant. Find that and the murderers of Hamilton would be found, because only the men who feared Hamilton would have killed him, and the only men who feared him were those whom he was there to get – the gold-stealers.

  “Robbins – that wasn’t his real name, but the name he was known by at Myme – first examined the country north, east, and south of the town, and, knowing of the breakaways, at last decided to look them over.

  “Which was how it came about that he arrived here one evening – to be exact, August tenth – and stayed that night and the following day and night at the pressing invitation of your generous cook, Soddy Jackson.”

  “I remember him. He asked for work,” Brett said quietly. “But the busy time was just over.”

  “So he said,” Tremayne continued. “The day he was here he wrote the chief a long letter, which wasn’t unusual, describing your cook and other hands and you most fully. Apparently Soddy Jackson is familiar with your entire history.”

  “The devil!”

  “Don’t worry,” Tremayne responded, chuckling. “Your dossier is entirely in your favour.”

  “That’s fortunate.”

  “Yes – for me as well as for you,” Tremayne agreed, again serious. “The letters Robbins wrote to the chief and to his mother he left with Jackson to post, which was done. Do you remember which way Robbins headed when he left Bowgada homestead?”

  “Yes. Towards Breakaway House. If you use these glasses you’ll see Breakaway House homestead at the foot of that round hill over there on the horizon.”

  The policeman accepted the proffered binoculars. His gaze leapt the ten-mile gulf and was presented with a low, turreted, battlemented ridge, blued faintly by distance, yet with the dark tints of the mulga growing at its summit and the blue-grey of the saltbush at its foot still clear to the eye. Like a small town nestling in a cove on a rocky coast, the buildings comprising the homestead of Breakaway House station dully reflected the sun with their iron roofs.

  “Draw in a little. Do you see the hut and windmill halfway across?” Brett directed.

  “Yes. I’ve got it.”

  “That’s Acacia Well. It’s one of my huts. Just beyond it is the north-south boundary fence separating Breakaway House from Bowgada. Near the hut is the track from station to station, crossing that valley.”

  “I see, and the valley being ten miles across, how long is it?”

  “Almost forty miles. At the south end this and that west breakaway join, whilst to the north they grow further and further apart, their extremities eventually merging into the general level of the country.

  “As you can see, in the long ago, a wedge of land approximately four hundred square miles sank hundreds of feet below the general level, leaving about eighty miles of precipitous cliffs. Wind and rain have together fashioned the breakaways, eroding great boulders from the cliff face, carving out caves and caverns which once provided shelter for the Aborigines, and now shelter cattle and sheep, kangaroos and dingoes.”

  “Plenty of scope for a gold-stealer’s treatment plant?”

  “Hereabouts nature is most kind to gold-stealers.”

  “I should say! You didn’t see Robbins again after he left you that morning?”

  “No,” replied Brett Filson. “Offhand I couldn’t tell you if he got as far west as Acacia Well, but we can find that out from Ellis who’s stationed there. But – am I to understand that Robbins vanished?”

  Tremayne gazed steadily at his companion on the gum-sucker seat, saying: “The letter he posted here was the last the chief or his mother received. Up until that time he’d written to his mother by every mail – once a week.”

  The policeman paused, maintaining a short silence, and then went on, “Something has happened to that lad. Something as bad as happened to Hamilton. For seven years I’ve been up in the Kimberleys; never asked for a transfer because I liked it. Would sooner be a trooper in the Kimberleys than an inspector in Perth. The damn bush has got me fast. It’s my…it’s my home. And when I heard that Robbins had vanished I demanded six months leave of absence, and got it per telegram. You see, Mr Filson, Robbins is my brother, and Chief Inspector Tremayne is our father. My father wrote to say that my mother’s frantic about young John. All of which is why I’m sitting on this seat with you. I’m going to get those birds who killed Hamilton, a city man, and now appear to have killed John, also a city man. As I’ve already explained, I’m a bushman and I have a reputation for quick and accurate shooting and good tracking to keep up. If that snide treatment plant is anywhere along those eighty miles of the breakaway, I’ll find it.”

  Observing the passionate face and the gleaming eyes of this lean, virile man, Brett Filson said earnestly: “Let me help. I can’t do much. You see, I was smashed up in the war, but I’ll do all I can. I remember Robbins – John Tremayne – a nice boy. Yes, let me help.”

  “You’re being very decent, Mr Filson. Shake?” Tremayne was now smiling, if a little grimly. “You can begin helping me by giving me a job as your overseer. I understand you’re short of one.”

  “Right! You can start tomorrow. We’ll go back to the house now and clean-up for dinner. But, as you’ll be living with me, don’t for heaven’s sake call me Mr Filson. My Christian name is Brett.”

  “I’ll remember it, if you don’t forget mine Harry.”

  CHAPTER II

  BREAKAWAY GIRL

  HARRY TREMAYNE settled into his place on Bowgada station as a keystone settles into a well-built arch.

  His first impressions of Brett Filson remained unchanged; liking and admiration for the man intermingling. Badly wounded in the war and still suffering the effects of the wound, Filson was quietly triumphant over disabilities which in a lesser man would have produced a human wreck.

  The few hands he had met were all up to Tremayne’s standards of direct simplicity, generosity and bonhomie. Perhaps Soddy Jackson, who expressed political views strangely out of line with his behaviour, was an extraordinary character in a land of characters, but Old Humpy and Charlie English with his wife, Millie, and Alf Dodder were normal lovable bush people.

  To them it quickly became apparent that Tremayne was woefully ignorant of sheep management, although an expert hand with cattle and horses. The new overseer made no bones about his lack of sheep knowledge, frankly admitting that his experience had been won on cattle stations where sheep were as rare as women. But as for bushcraft, there was nothing they could teach him.

  The day he met Frances Tonger was overcast and cold. From the southern end of the breakaways blew a soft yet penetrating wind. He was riding southward along the Bowgada-Breakaway House boundary fence when he noticed in the distance a horseman riding towards him on the other side of the fence.

  Here, in the middle of this north-south valley, the eastern breakaway, six miles away, resembled a rugged coast of headlands and bays, almost within stone-throw; whilst that to the west, at the foot of which nestled the buildings comprising the homestead of Breakaway House, and but four miles distant, had alongside it a chain of mounds which looked precisely like a chain of islands.

  The brown filly he rode was vicious, a would-be man-killer. Unlike an honest, spirited horse who determinedly bucks right at the start of a day’s work, this horse behaved well – until she thought that her rider’s attention was momentarily relaxed. She seized her first opportunity after she and Tremayne had been out an hour, whe
n, with astonishing quickness, she entered into a series of bucks. This failing to dislodge her rider, she determinedly tried to crush his offside leg against a solitary cork tree.

  Naturally Tremayne’s temper became ruffled and he administered a sound thrashing which only served to make the horse angry as well as vicious. He vowed that never again would he ride this horse when working, for a horse that bucks after an hour’s good behaviour is a dishonest horse, a useless horse to any stockman, and one giving financial loss to its owner who employs men to ride out to examine sheep and their tracks and watering places, not merely to ride a horse.

  Engaged in administering this chastisement, Tremayne failed to see the girl who cantered towards him and only when she spoke did he realise that the rider he had observed far along the fence was a woman.

  In clear ringing tones she cried: “You beast! How dare you beat a horse like that?”

  Astonished by this feminine voice, Tremayne ceased his belabouring and fell to staring at as pretty a face as he had seen for a very long time. Her presence so unsettled him that he forgot the filly; and the horse, knowing it, reared on her hind legs, pawed the air with her forefeet, sat down and rolled backwards like a playful pup. Within the cloud of grey dust which the filly stirred up, the girl saw Tremayne standing beside the undignified animal, and then, as the brute began to scramble to its feet, watched him leap back into the saddle. The Breakaway House girl saved the horse a thrashing commensurate with its vicious behaviour.