Wings Above the Diamantina Page 10

  On entering the hut, he found the stockman washing the supper utensils, and while he made up his bunk Ned talked volubly of the aeroplane mystery. Having made his bed for the night, the detective began to remove his collar.

  Opposite him was Ned Hamlin’s stretcher with its untidy blankets denoting that the bed had not been made for a week at least. One blanket was nearly touching the floor, and between its hem and the floor was to be seen a solitary unwinking eye staring at him with baleful hatred.

  Chapter Ten

  “Embley” and “’Arriet”

  RARELY DID BONY carry a weapon on his person. The small but no less deadly automatic pistol which accompanied him on the job was generally pushed negligently among old garments in his suitcase. Sometimes he forgot to take the pistol with him, but he never forgot the old pair of drill trousers, two old shirts, the battered felt hat, and the elastic-sided riding boots.

  At the moment he saw the unwinking eye looking balefully at him, the suitcase was pushed beneath the stretcher on which he was sitting. Now, with slow deliberation, while he stared back into the eye, he leaned forward and down, his left hand first feeling for the case and then, having found it, beginning to search blindly under the lid for the pistol.

  Ned was talking cheerfully, but the detective no longer was heeding him. The position of the eye to the ground indicated a snake—a large snake—and, quite probably, a tiger snake. Tiger snakes are fighters when cornered, and Bony was offered no possible escape to the hut door if it chose to attack. Slowly and soundlessly he withdrew his hand from the suitcase, in it the pistol. Continuing to maintain deliberate movement, he regained upright position on the bed, slipped back the safety catch, and took steady aim, at the still unwinking eye. He knew that if he did not kill the snake with his first shot—and like all normally civilized men he was not an infallible marksman—he would not do it with a second or third shot, because the snake would act too quickly.

  “Hey! What’s up? Whatcher doing?” Ned burst out. “Hey! Don’t shoot! That’ll be Embley or ’Arriet.”

  Bony hesitated. The stockman leaped the space between table and stretcher and pressed down the detective’s wrist.

  “Cripes! That was a narrer squeak,” he rasped out.

  “I don’t like tiger snakes,” Bony told him coldly. “Stay still while I kill that one. If you hop about like a bird it...”

  “That ain’t no snake, Bony,” Ned said assuringly. “That’s one of my goanners. It is either ’Arriet or Embley. They’re both quiet enough if you knows ’ow to ’andle ’em. I told Shuteye and Bill to make sure that the ’en-house door was fast. Hey, you! You come outer that,” he added to the solitary eye.

  “Sure it isn’t a snake?” Bony asked, still with grave doubt.

  “Too right! You wait! Don’t move!”

  Ned slipped back to the table where he added some tea to a spoonful of tinned milk dropped into a pannikin. The warm tea and milk he poured out into a pie-dish, and then hastily rejoined Bony, who still sat motionless on his stretcher.

  “Now, you watch,” he implored, eagerness and pride evident in his voice. Then to the eye: “Now, you! You come outer that and drink up your tea,”

  Ned placed the dish on the ground between his and Bony’s feet. The baleful eye winked for the first time. The blanket hem began to move, and from under it was thrust forth a narrow, snake-like head from the jaws of which flickered a long, fine, blue tongue. Then, inch by inch, the blanket hem was raised, and slowly there issued from concealment the long lizard body of an Australian goanna. It was of the Monarch species, one with powerful bulldog legs, thick strong neck, a thick tail, and a round body. Its under-throat and chest were of a sickly yellow, but its back was dark-green and patterned with black diamonds. Like the alligator it roughly resembles, it waddled across the floor of the hut with deceitful sluggishness. It came to stand with swelling neck at Bony’s feet, its head slightly twisted to one side so that one eye might regard the detective with suspicion. Then, abruptly, it began to drink from the dish.

  “Embley’s seven feet six and a bit,” Ned told Bony. “Ain’t she a beaut? Lord, ’ere comes ’Arriet! Them two idjits have let ’em out instead of shuttin’ ’em up. Hey, there! Shuteye! Bill Sikes!”

  “What you want?” demanded Bill Sikes from the tent beneath the pepper-trees.

  “Come here, you and Shuteye,” Ned ordered angrily. “Here’s ’Arriet and Embley. You’ve let ’em out. Come and take ’em back. You knows I can’t ’andle ’em properly.”

  ’Arriet, observing her friend taking supper, waddled with incredible speed to join her. Bony, now no longer fearing snakes, yet remained quite still. He was unaware precisely how tame these reptiles had been made, but they could not be excessively docile or Ned would not have called the blacks. More than once he had stayed a night with a lonely stockman who made a pet of a goanna, but these monsters presented quite a different picture. Embley, for instance, was again regarding him with cold suspicion while she swelled out her throat and stiffened her short legs. ’Arriet continued to drink the tea with obvious appreciation.

  And then two dark figures appeared in the doorway. Shuteye was arrayed only in his shirt, and Bill Sikes was as nude as his forebears.

  “Grab ’em!” snapped Ned.

  It was a command which could not well be obeyed smartly. The blacks moved forward cautiously. Foot by cautious foot they advanced on the suspicious Embley and the tea-drinking ’Arriet. Then Bill Sikes grunted a signal, and simultaneously making a little rush they each seized a tail and began to haul with persistent steadiness. Inch by inch they dragged the reptiles to the door, the captives clawing up the soft floor, the captors yelling with excitement. Out through the doorway they went. Ned rushed to the lamps, snatched down one, and followed them with shouted advice.

  Bony seized the remaining lamp and rushed out after Ned. In the darkness, Shuteye and Bill Sikes were yelling their delighted laughter, and from their direction came the bumps and thumps of heavy bodies. Dust whirled past the rays of Bony’s light.

  “Stick to ’er!” ordered Bill Sikes.

  “You bet! I stick like Jacky,” panted Shuteye.

  “Of course you stick to ’em, you pair of idjits,” yelled Ned from within the fowl-house. “Cripes! They got out through an ant-eaten board. ’Ang on to ’em for a bit whiles I mends it. Waltz ’em some.”

  “You wants to hurry up,” shouted Bill Sikes. “I ain’t no alligator trainer. Not me!”

  Directed by Ned’s light, Bony ran to the fowl-house. He found it to be enclosed with a wire-netted yard which was roofed with netting as well. Inside the roughly constructed house Ned was frantically piling sand against the hole.

  “That’ll do for the present,” he announced with whistling breath. “We’ll get out and repair her from the other side. Them two can’t hold them raging animals for ever.”

  When outside the netted yard, Ned shouted an all-clear, and into the lamp-light came the heaving forms of one beshirted and one naked aboriginal hauling on sinuous reptiles struggling to go the opposite way and clawing up great clouds of sand dust in their determined efforts. Foot by foot the goannas were dragged to the fowl-yard. First, Shuteye had to drag his captive into the yard, then to swing it round so that it faced the house and he had his back to the doorway. When he let go, the monster shot forward, and he shot backward out through the doorway. It was then Bill Sikes’s turn, and, having liberated his “animal,” he jumped out and Ned shut the crazy door of the yard and secured it with fencing wire.

  “You see,” he cried, “we gets a bit of sport sometimes without going inside to the races.”

  “I believe you,” cried the delighted Bony. “I think that I shall thoroughly enjoy my visit at Faraway Bore.”

  “Too right, you will,” he was assured. “You need never have any fear of snakes around here when Embley and ’Arriet is in the offing. We lets ’em out in the daytime, and we can get ’em back ’ome with a dish of tea or a bit of liver
cut up fine, but they’s a different proposition after dark. Get a sugar bag, Bill, and a bit of string. We’ll fill it with sand and lay it agen that hole they made. Just as well the boss is sending out timber and tar.”

  “Where are the fowls? Have you any?” asked Bony.

  “Course. They’re over there in their joint wot we built a month back. You see, we’ve only ’ad Embley a month, and ’Arriet less’n three weeks.”

  “And what do you intend doing with them?”

  “Doin’ with ’em?” echoed Ned. “Why, we races ’em. Every year on our birthday, which falls the same day, me and Larry the Lizard races our goanners to Gurner’s pub wot’s on the road to St Albans across on Tintanoo. Larry works on Tintanoo, you see. He thinks hisself the greatest goanner trainer in Australia, but back in 1880 my Australian Prince beat his Silver Star by nine lengths and a bit.”

  Ned waxed enthusiastic.

  “Larry can train ’em all right,” he went on, “and he’s got the knack of picking ’em. This year, having Shuteye and Bill Sikes here with me, I’m hoping to get a runner wot’ll put it acrost his reptile. Embley in there is a flier, and ’Arriet’s got plenty of tow, but they ain’t neither of ’em certainties.”

  Bill Sikes brought the bag and a shovel, and the hole in the fowl-house was effectively stopped. For a little while Bony had entirely forgotten that he was a detective-inspector. His speech had been less grandiloquent. The capture of the escaped goannas had brought to the surface of his strangely mixed personality a latent ebullience.

  He was up at dawn, and the water in the billy was boiling with the tea in it when Ned Hamlin vented a soul-stirring yawn.

  “What-cher-doing?” he demanded, when with half-opened eyes he began loading his ancient pipe with the black plug tobacco used by his boss. He swung his naked legs out over the edge of the stretcher revealing that he had slept only in his shirt. His moustache was ragged and his hair was raised to a mop. Bony saw that the “night” pipe was smoked empty, while the colour of the tobacco now going into the “day” pipe made him shudder.

  “You want to give over them cigarettes,” he was advised. “Real coffin-nails, they are. I wakes up every morning about three, smokes me night pipe, and then snoozes a bit more, and I don’t hack and bark in the mornings.”

  Not till he had sipped half a pint of scalding black tea did Bony roll his first cigarette. By that time Ned had pulled on his trousers. He crossed to the billy, having snatched a pannikin from a nail in the wall, and the fumes of his tobacco floated in the still air beneath the roof.

  “You gettin’ an early start?” he asked, blinking his eyelids.

  “Yes. The sky promises wind.”

  “But them blacks searched for tracks all around Emu Lake,” Ned protested. “What they missed is nothink.”

  “Then that nothing may be of interest to me.”

  “You reckon someone fired the aeroplane?”

  “I am uncertain about that. That’s why I want to examine the ground before a windstorm wipes away the writing on the ground.”

  “Well, I reckon that aeroplane set fire to itself. No one could have got close enough to fire it without leaving tracks for that Shuteye and Bill Sikes to pick up. Howsomever, you know best. If you see a likely looking goanner, get them blacks to snare it and bring it ’ome. A cuppler days before the race at Gurner’s pub, we’ll give all the reptiles we’ve collected a trial gallop so’s we can pick out the fastest. You go along and kick them two to life. Shuteye will go for the horses. It’s his turn. I’ll cook the breakfast.”

  “All right! Oh, by the way, how far is this Mitchell’s Well from here?”

  Hamlin blinked rapidly. His answer did not come as pat as it should have done considering the number of years he had been working at Coolibah.

  “About fifteen miles, it’d be.”

  “Good track?”

  “No, pretty rough. It crosses a lot of nasty water-gutters. Thinking of going there?”

  “I may, yes. There is a windmill there, isn’t there? Not a running bore?”

  “That’s right! A windmill, and when the wind ain’t enough to work it there’s a petrol engine wot works a pump.”

  “Who looks after it—the water-supply, I mean?” Bony asked carelessly.

  “Oh, any one rides across now and then.”

  “Who went the last time?”

  “I did.”

  “When?” Bony again asked, indifferently.

  “Oh, a cuppler days before we mustered the cattle for the drovers.”

  “Sure?”

  Again Ned blinked his eyelids, saying:

  “Too right I’m sure.”

  When Bony asked him if he had heard the noise of a passing aeroplane, or the explosion that occurred at Emu Lake when the monoplane was destroyed, he shook his white-thatched head.

  “Where did Ted Sharp go that night the aeroplane was stolen at Golden Dawn?”

  “Eh?”

  “You heard what I said, my dear Ned.”

  “Oh, Ted Sharp? He took a run across to Mitchell’s Well.”

  “That’s strange. A moment ago you said that you were the last to visit Mitchell’s Well, and that you did so before the aeroplane was stolen.”

  The kindly face was troubled, and a child could have seen that Ned was lying and that he was a poor liar. When Bony spoke again, his voice was low and friendly.

  “Now look here, Ned. I am here to carry out an investigation. As you know, a young woman is lying very ill in at the homestead. I suspect foul play. What Ted Sharp did that night doubtless has no bearing whatever on my work here, but it is just possible it may have. I want the truth from you. Where did he go that night?”

  “If I tell you, you won’t tell the boss?”

  Bony hesitated. Then slowly he said:

  “No, if his absence had nothing to do with my case.”

  “Well, it hasn’t, any’ow,” Ned said, faintly triumphant. “As a matter of fact, he rang me up last night before you and the boss arrived asking me to say that he went across to Mitchell’s Well if any one asked. You see, he took a short trip to Gurner’s Hotel to get a bottle of whisky. The boss is dead nuts on any booze being brought on to the run, and he’d roar like hell if he knoo that Ted had gone to the pub.”

  “So that’s it, is it? Why didn’t he tell me that and have done with it? How long was he away?”

  “He left about nine and he got back about one. You won’t put him away, will you? He’s a good sort, is Ted Sharp.”

  “No, Ned, I will not do that. And you need never let him know that you told me.”

  “You can rely on me for that, Bony. If all the ruddy Johns were like you, this blinkin’ world would be worth livin’ in.”

  Half an hour later a bunch of horses came streaking for the yards with a yelling Shuteye riding behind them in the swirling dust they raised. The sun came up, a blood-red, enormous disk to hang awhile above the line of distant scrub bordering the long narrow stretch of open broken country of low sand-dunes and claypans. The sun’s rays stained light-red the ceaseless gush of water falling from the inverted L-shaped bore-head situated some six hundred yards north-east of the hut. Less than a quarter of a mile west of the ramshackle structure and its guarding pepper-trees ran, north-south, the Emu Lake fence, westward of which outstanding patches of scrub merged into a dark-green mass.

  “You want good flash horse alonga me?” Shuteye asked, when he had yarded the hacks.

  Bony smiled.

  “Not to-day,” he replied, a little regretfully. “We will want the quietest horses of the bunch for to-day’s work.”

  Ned had one-pound slabs of grilled steak waiting for them, and he cut slices off a yeast loaf and filled the pannikins with tea. After breakfast three quiet horses—quiet for Queensland horses—were saddled, and to the saddles were strapped quart-pots and lunches. The three trackers walked the horses to the gate in the Emu Lake fence, and from there they rode towards the lake at a jog-trot.

 
A wise man, the detective elected to talk about cattle, horses, goannas, and the weather: of anything save the business of the day. No longer was he wearing a wretched collar and city clothes. Of the three Shuteye was the neatest.

  Bony inhaled deeply. The hot sun already was striking on their backs. The sleeves of Bony’s shirt were rolled above the elbows, and its neck was opened wide. He was feeling that delicious sensation of being wholly free, and he wanted badly to relax as he had done the previous evening, to make a waddy and, with his companions, go hunting.

  The desire vanished when abruptly they left the scrub. The light increased when the open dun-coloured plain of the dry lake stretched forward from the low sand-wall and the strip of white claypan. The body of Napoleon Bonaparte no longer commanded his attention. It was now his brain that thrilled, as his body had done, when through the windows of his blue eyes there was registered the expanse of flat, treeless land in the centre of which lay strange black and shapeless objects.

  They rode at a walking pace across the kangaroo-eaten tussock-grass stubs, noting how they grew widely apart and how the bare ground was covered with fine sand.

  From the saddle Bony surveyed the scene of desolation, the far-flung remains of a once beautiful man-made bird. The engine was a mere mass of metal junk. The steel framework of the fuselage was twisted beyond recognition of its original shape. The wreckage of the starboard wing had been thrown far by the exploding petrol-tank or tanks, while all about black patches of ground indicated where liquid fire had been thrown outward from the centre.

  “I would scarcely have believed that exploding petrol would have such destructive force,” Bony told his companions. Shuteye offered no comment. Bill Sikes grunted.

  “Well, to work. I understand that you two have hunted for tracks all about this wreckage and all round the lake.”

  “Too right,” they both assented.

  “And yet it is quite probable that after the boss and Miss Elizabeth left with the unfortunate white woman a man came here and deliberately set fire to the monoplane,” Bony persisted. Then he fell into Shuteye’s manner of speaking. “You two blackfeller, you look-see alonga white feller’s boot-tracks. You no thinkum white feller wise to black-feller’s dodges, eh? You no thinkum white feller do same as blackfeller when he run away with lubra, eh? You no thinkum p’haps white feller put blood on his feet and stick his feet in feathers till blood dries hard so’s they not come off, and then he walk about without making no tracks, eh?”