Breakaway House

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “That will be splendid,” she cried joyfully at the prospect of a dream coming true. “If we don’t go to New Zealand I shall be disappointed. All right, I’ll get back some time tomorrow.”

  So it was about the time Nora drove a gig loaded with swags and hens and pups, and a family of cats, to Bowgada homestead, with Ned and Tremayne riding wide on the flanks in the hope of shooting eagles perched on solitary dead cork trees, that Frances sped back to Breakaway House.

  The day having been windy, dusty, and unpleasantly hot, Frances was glad to be home to lounge away the rest of the day in the drawing room, writing up her diary and retiring early to bed, leaving her uncle at work on his books in the office.

  The next day, Friday, was calm, brilliant, and cool, and at about two o’clock she ordered her horse to be brought in and saddled. Tonger being out, she had afternoon tea alone, and at four o’clock she left the homestead on one of those exploration trips which so delighted her.

  For here at Breakaway House she was very lonely. Since leaving Perth she had missed the intimate society of youth. There were days together when she did not even see her uncle who never troubled to explain what he had done or where he had been. Since the scene, subsequent to her taking over the management of the house, a scene which had revealed her determination that the loose moral conditions she had found could not continue, the hands and servants showed little love for her, even if their respect was maintained. Of all the staff, only the girl who had conveyed the note to Tremayne was able to be admitted into her confidence. The rest treated her with an unfriendly reserve which conveyed their resentment of the altered conditions she had achieved.

  Uncle Morris could manage his run and his men. His flirtations were no business of hers – provided they were not conducted under the same roof. His drinking bouts were horrid at first, but after she bravely bearded him concerning his behaviour to her, he conducted himself with greater circumspection, often confining himself to his office where he had had a stretcher bed fixed up.

  Frances was no shrinking milk-and-water miss. She had inherited in full measure the stubbornness of the Tongers. It was this trait in her character to which Morris Tonger bowed with grace as his home comforts became vastly improved, more in accordance with that home governed so well many years ago by Amy, his much tried wife who had eventually eloped. Like the animal he was, he loved luxury; and never, even in his worst hours, did he fail to appreciate that his niece was a born housekeeper.

  But affection, love! There was little on either side. Sober, Morris Tonger was bearable. There were even moments when he was the old Uncle Morris she had known as a child. And when sober he respected her for her self-assurance, her poise, and her stubbornness in the battles between them.

  Yes, Frances was a lonely girl at Breakaway House, a girl starved of congenial company. Lonely evenings in the drawing room after lonely rides along the breakaways.

  LEAVING the homestead, she set a course which would take her ship – a horse — to the point of the southern headland thrusting into the valley half a mile eastward of the house. The island off this point or headland appeared to be joined to it when viewed from the house, but on drawing close to the point a passage was revealed between it and the island, five hundred yards in width.

  Less than half the height of the steeper rock-strewn headland and covering about ten acres, the island presented perpendicular rock walls supporting a crown of red earth covered in thick but stunted Bogota and mulga scrub. This crown now gleamed dully in the light of the westering sun.

  The “strait” was carpeted with boulders set far apart over a mass of granite and quartz and ironstone splinters, a kaleidoscope of greys and whites and dull reds. Frances noted these colours with delight, and as usual was thrilled by the wildness of this sea-less coast. Her horse followed a stone-cleared cattle pad which brought her to within fifty yards of the island.

  The sharp impact of one pebble against another distracted her attention from two magpies chasing a crow from the vicinity of their nest. It was not a natural sound, on this calm quiet afternoon, for it came from beyond her horse’s head and not from the island’s shore.

  The second pebble she distinctly saw before it struck the ground. Strangely enough, it appeared to fall out of the sky, and on impact it smashed into tiny flakes. Interested by this peculiar phenomenon, she glanced upward to the island’s summit to see curving outward and downward from it what appeared to be a piece of white quartz. When it fell beside the horse, interest gave place to astonishment, for the white quartz turned into a slip of paper weighted by a small stone. Mastered by curiosity, she dismounted, picked up the paper, and read in hurried scrawl:

  On the seaward side of this island there is an easy path to the summit. Come up. I badly want to talk with you. H.T.

  Harry Tremayne! What on earth was he doing up there? Why ever did he not come down instead of dropping this intriguing note at her horse’s feet? Surely he was the most extraordinary man she had ever met! As though she did not know of the easy path to the top! Had she not often gone up there to see from its northern-most side the great sweep of country enclosing the homestead? Why the secrecy?

  Again she read the note. With it crushed in her hand, she led the horse round to the south side of the island, gained its east side, and from there walked up the only slope, following a pad used more by kangaroos than cattle. When halfway up, dense scrub formed walls which almost met, but at the top she came out into a tiny clearing skirted by giant boulders among which the scrub trees grew. An Aborigine stepped quickly into sight and smiled at her. She recognised him as Ned, the Bowgada hand. He motioned her to follow him.

  With increasing mystification, she obeyed, and presently saw through the thin tree trunks Harry Tremayne standing against the angle formed by two great rock slabs. Here, evidently, he and Ned were camped, for on the ground were two light swags, leaning against a rock were two rifles, beside a small smokeless fire was a billy-can, and hanging to tree branches were dilly bags and what appeared to be the skins of eagles.

  “Welcome to my Cannibal Island, Miss Tonger,” Tremayne cried, when he had ordered Ned to take charge of the horse. His eyes were alight and dancing. Her two hands were taken for an instant into his strong brown ones, and when he released them, the note remained in one of his. “I saw you about to pass by and I simply had to invite you to accept our poor hospitality.”

  Tossing the spill of paper into the fire, he addressed Ned: “When you’ve fixed Miss Tonger’s horse, put on the billy. Miss Frances – I thought you were on your way to Perth.”

  “I would have been, only Uncle recalled me from Mount Magnet. But what are you doing here? What does all this mean?”

  “It’s quite a story. Might I make you a cigarette?” he asked eagerly, his grey-blue eyes regarding her with strange fixity. “I can make a nice one when I want to.”

  “Thank you!” she said, although in the pocket of her cord breeches reposed her case and matches.

  Snatching up his swag of calico sheet and one blanket he unrolled it, folded it, and laid it over a low flat-topped rock. He then led her by the hand to this improvised seat from where she watched his slim fingers carefully roll the finest cigarette he had ever made.

  From his hands her gaze rose to the top of his bent head, hatless, revealing to her the two-inch hairless scar of the bullet. “What happened to your head?” she asked, experiencing sudden tenderness despite the lightness of her soul.

  When he looked up at her he was grinning in the old way. He proffered the cigarette, and when she took it there appeared with magical quickness a lighted match.

  Ned, who had poured water into the billy from a canvas bag, squatted over the fire and carefully fed it with tinder-dry sticks. Smoke was absent. It was very quiet and peaceful up here. The sunlight filtering through the scrub trees tinged the daylight with green.

  “Of course, I went to the balancing rock as I said I would do,” Tremayne said when he had lighted a cigarette for hi
mself. “There was someone at the foot of the balancing rock. I thought it was you. That someone waved to me in greeting and I stopped Major and waved back. You see, I was so sure it was you that I suspected nothing. I made a fine target for that someone who deliberately shot me.”

  “Shot you!” she echoed.

  He nodded, looking up at her from where he carelessly lounged at her feet. In his eyes there was neither pain nor anger, just plain happiness that she was there. For a moment it was like that; then abruptly his mouth fell into lines of sternness, and into his eyes crept a cold gleam. “Whom did you tell I was to go to the balancing rock on Wednesday at three o’clock?” he demanded.

  “Tell! I told no one.”

  “But you must have told someone. Think!”

  “I say I told no one. I’m positive.”

  For a second or two he regarded her amazed face with pursed lips and half-shut eyes.

  “It must have been a sheer coincidence, then, that that murderous beast was there, or perhaps he saw me when a long way off and took position there.”

  “But I don’t understand, Mr Tremayne.”

  “Well I do, and don’t.”

  “Didn’t you see him afterwards? Didn’t he go to you to see what he’d done? Are you sure it wasn’t an accident?” Frances asked desperately.

  “It was no accident,” he told her. “I saw the flash of the rifle. He waved to me hoping I would stop and present a motionless target, which was precisely what I did do. I was knocked off my horse, knocked unconscious. I lay there beside an old man saltbush for several hours, and he never came down to ascertain if I were dead or alive for fear of leaving tracks. Later on, your uncle and a stockman named Alec came riding from the south, and, seeing my horse grazing nearby, came over and found me. Your uncle thinks it was a ricochet bullet fired by one of two kangaroo hunters shooting away back from the breakaway edge.”

  “But you told him about the man who waved to you; the flash of the rifle?”

  “No. I didn’t tell him that.”

  “But why not?” she pressed him, astonished.

  “Because I didn’t want your uncle to know I knew it wasn’t a chance ricochet bullet which came to within half an inch of killing me.”

  “But why not, why not?”

  “Listen to what followed,” he urged, and proceeded to relate all the happenings of that day and night; the passing revellers, the methods they adopted in the attempt on his life. “Those men came from Breakaway House. They know I’m looking for John. They know I’m a policeman. Are you still sure that you didn’t tell anyone?”

  CHAPTER XXI

  NO DECEIT BETWEEN US

  “MR TREMAYNE, I repeat that I told no one about your proposed rendezvous,” Frances said in tones which excluded further doubt. “You’ll admit that I never did agree to meet you in spite of your persistence. You have no cause to think me cheap.”

  “Excuse my butting in,” he said with a disarming smile, “but let us get things right between us. I never did regard you cheaply, and I want you to believe that my foolery was just foolery. I’m not laundered by gay feminine society and ironed by drawing-room etiquette, and, consequently, I’m not subtle. Because my manhood has been spent in a land where men are few and women are even fewer, I met you rather as man to man than as man to woman. At no time did I think of hurting you; at no time have I held you cheaply.”

  “Perhaps, I shouldn’t have used the word ‘cheap’ .”

  “In one respect you were entitled to use it, Miss Tonger. I’m beginning to see that I shouldn’t have made the suggestion of meeting you so soon after our first acquaintance, but I sought the meeting for three reasons. First, because I wanted to secure your confidence and your silence regarding my identity; second, because I found pleasure in your society; and third, because with bush people friendship is not dependent on an exchange of visiting cards. Does that clear the ground between us?”

  “Yes, it seems to.”

  His face magically regained its youth. Seated on the ground at her feet, dressed in light khaki drill slacks and open-necked shirt, hatless, and recently shaved, the thought occurred to Frances Tonger that never had she looked into such a frank and open face as that then presented to her. Like every woman since Eve, intuition informed her when in the presence of a wholesome man, and here at her feet lounged the antithesis of her uncle, Morris Tonger.

  “In one respect I’m sorry you didn’t go to Perth,” he said. “I suppose you couldn’t manage to take a holiday in Perth right away?”

  “No – not even if I wanted to go, which I do not.”

  What he next said was softened by the good-humoured smile in his eyes.

  “I’ve a good mind to arrest you for being dangerous to the Western Australian Police Force, take you to Perth myself and lock you up in my people’s house with my mother for gaoler.”

  “But why?” she asked, half seriously, half laughingly.

  “With you safely at my parents’ house, my mind would he relieved concerning you.”

  He then said to Ned: “Go over to the far side and keep a look-see on Breakaway House. If you see anyone tracking along this way, you run and tell me.”

  “Orl ri’, Mr Tremayne. Tea made,” Ned announced, and rose to depart with the silent swiftness of his race, carrying with him a rifle, but leaving behind by the fire a Leonile club, the weapon of his immemorial ancestors.

  Tremayne rose, too. He poured tea into half-pint tin pannikins, added sugar, and set one pannikin with a spoon beside the girl.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the Leonile.

  “The Aborigine’s most dreadful weapon,” he replied, picking up the club and holding it up for her inspection. It was fashioned like an emu’s head and neck, from a mulga root. The head was larger than an orange, while the beak, which was aligned at a right angle to the neck, was tapered to a point and hardened with fire. The long handle, or neck, bore a series of rings which Ned had cut with a flint. “One tap on the head with this makes a second tap quite unnecessary,” Tremayne said grimly.

  Frances shuddered. “Put it down,” she implored. “It’s a terrible thing.” She sipped her tea, wishing he had milk to offer her.

  He was making fresh cigarettes.

  “Mr Tremayne, will you take me fully into your confidence?” Frances asked earnestly.

  “I would like to. I…I…” For the very first time he faltered, revealed hesitation and doubt, when always he had been so assured, so confident.

  “Go on,” she requested, leaning a little forward towards him. “What were you going to say?”

  “We appear to have arrived at a position of some delicacy,” was his prevarication. “Haven’t you guessed that I’ve come to regard your uncle with grave suspicion?”

  “Yes, I’ve guessed that.”

  “And that the time will come when you’ll have to decide whether to stand for him or against him?”

  Making no immediate reply to this, she looked pensively at the red-tinged wood coals of the fire. For a little while this mental attitude controlled her.

  He waited, watching her immobile features, sensing something of her loneliness, her isolation from youth and happiness, and from life proper to her beauty and her age. If to her he at times looked much older than he was, to him sometimes she appeared aloof, too restrained, as though her youth had been much too brief. When she spoke he knew that her words were the result of no idle observations.

  “Mr Tonger is my father’s brother,” she said slowly. “He has paid for my rearing and my education. I owe him loyalty if little else. It’s all so very difficult for me. You see, I owe something, too, to your father and mother who have been kind to me, and to your brother who once proposed marriage to me.”

  Again she fell silent, and Tremayne made no effort to break in on her train of thought. He was thinking of John, a fearless youngster; could picture his eager face as he poured out his love at the feet of this peerless girl.

  She said at long la
st: “I would like to know all that you know. Then I could the better decide what to do. If I should elect to stand by my uncle I would, nevertheless, not act or think against you. You see, Mr Tremayne, it seems that I must believe you will be fair.”

  And so it came about that he related the whole story without a shade of doubt that she would respect his confidence. He began with the suspicions of the Myme mine directors, and went on to the killing of Hamilton, John Tremayne’s mission and his disappearance, and all the details of his own work; the strange lights in the vicinity of the balancing rock, the tracks of midnight riders and pack-horse strings.

  “Now we come to that rock blasting stunt the other night which killed my horse, and would have killed me had I been on his back,” Tremayne continued. “The next morning I rode down to the place. I saw that the huge rock slab had been weathered partly from its base, leaving a strip of about three feet wide which held it from falling over the track. I saw, too, about fifty yards further down the track a much bigger slab of rock partly eroded by the weather from its wall base, and there I found two drill holes stopped with wooden plugs to keep the holes clear of earth and dust. The condition of the plugs proves that the drilling was done about a year ago.

  “Mr Filson says that his father engineered the road some fifty years ago, and that he, the son, never had any blasting done. We agree in assuming that someone drilled those holes, as well as the holes behind the slab blown out the other night, for the purpose of stopping the Myme mail car should it carry a large consignment of gold to the railway. The mine usually dispatches its gold in a guarded truck by the straight route crossing the breakaways where they peter out up north.

  “The holes having been drilled, the motor party, which knew of them, had merely to fill one set of them with gelignite fitted with detonators, and explode the charges with a spare car battery when it was judged that the falling slab would pinch me and my horse. Such a result would have appeared to be an act of nature – an unfortunate accident.”