The Battling Prophet Read online

  “You on to another angle of the smuggling racket, eh? Got something of the kind up your sleeve, and think you’ll try to put one over poor silly me. And someone down there with plenty of standing got on to you and blew the gaff to your Department.”

  “There could be something in what you suspect,” slowly admitted Bony, delighted with this gift road of escape. “However, it’s a little far-fetched, as my wife would say. That summons from Brisbane cannot be side-stepped, though, and I’ll have to report back. I’ll compile a memo covering my psychological research work which you may find useful, and will post it from Sydney.”

  “The subject of your memo wouldn’t be the death of Ben Wickham?”

  “How could it be?” Bony mildly enquired. “I understand that you permitted the body to be cremated and the ashes scattered over the dead man’s estate.”

  “True enough. Had to. Couldn’t allow the body to explode with booze fumes after it was buried deep in a respectable cemetery.”

  “Then why mention Ben Wickham?”

  “Interesting bloke, that’s all.” Boase again smiled only with the corners of his mouth. “I suppose the real truth is that you were playing the wag and enjoying a nice spot of sport with the kingfish. I’ve done it myself. Sometimes it don’t come off, and then you have to run around your pals to find out who the blasted pimp is. If you ever do find the darling who put you away, let me know. I’ll fix him. We policemen have to stick together.”

  “Which is why I came to you.”

  “Wise guy. You might do the same for me one day.”

  “I would not miss the opportunity.” Bony rose to go. “Thank you, Boase. See you again sometime.”

  They shook hands, both satisfied, both aware he was not believed by the other. Almost casually, Superintendent Boase asked:

  “When will you be leaving Adelaide?”

  “By to-night’s express. I’ll fly north from Melbourne. I’ll let you know who pimped on me, and you might arrange something one dark night.”

  “You come up all the way by road coach?” asked Boase, idly fingering a document.

  “Yes. On arrival in the city, I parked my case and found a café where I loitered over a pot of tea and a newspaper. After leaving the café, I strolled up King William Street and...”

  “Cut. No point,” interrupted Boase. “Asked because I was thinkin’ of something else. What about dinner at the Railway Dining Rooms before your train leaves? Meet you there in an hour.”

  Bony gladly agreed, and they were given an alcove table where they could talk. After the entree, Boase said:

  “You know, Bony, you’re not hard to work with, although you never work to the book. There have been times when I envy you your independence. I am not alone in that, either. You got more pals here than you think. Sinclair’s one of them. Being private secretary to our Chief Commissioner, he’s as near the hub as anyone can be. Yet he knows nothing outside that communication from your own Chief, and he told me he feels there’s a lot he could be told by his own boss.”

  “Did his boss issue the instruction to Mount Gambier that made Gibley call on me?”

  “Yes.”

  “D’you know Senior Constable Gibley?” asked Bony.

  “Met him a couple of times. Bit of a stay-put, apparently.”

  “Clean slate?”

  “Far as I know. Come off it, Bony. What are you up to down there?”

  “I’ll tell you. I went there for the fishing. I stayed with an old character named John Luton. He interested me in the various effects of alcohol on the human brain. In modern parlance, I think he has something. Have you heard anything about that?”

  “No. Tell.”

  Bony related Mr. Luton’s convictions, which included that covering his belief in the cause of Ben Wickham’s death. When done, Boase was thoughtful. He asked:

  “You do much digging?”

  “No.”

  “Couldn’t have been in Gibley’s report to Mount Gambier. Would have come through to us, otherwise. Still, kind of cranky idea I’d hesitate to pass on when I was a constable. What gives it significance is the possibility that from Luton’s ideas on grog and your interest in his ideas sprang that something which brought about your recall to Brisbane. Must be someone down there so important that if you don’t get back to Brisbane like a bat out of a Nullarbor Cave, you’ll be chucked out of the Department with not the faintest hope of being reinstated.”

  “It does seem that someone at Cowdry fears ... me.”

  “Sure enough,” agreed Boase. “I’ll keep it in mind. Let me know if you should find out what it’s all about, will you?”

  Bony concurred.

  “These are funny times, as you’ll agree,” Boase said, seriously. “Sort of complex to what they were before the war. They talk about the cold war as though it is something going on millions of miles away. I know of at least two cold wars going on here in Adelaide, and not between the Russians and us, either. Yes, I’ll keep this Cowdry business in mind. Time to go. I have an order about you. Have to see you off the State premises.”

  “Indeed!” politely murmured Bony.

  “Yes. Nothing personal. I asked for a good companion. Nice-looking and smart. She’ll accompany you as far as Serviceton.”

  The policewoman was all that Boase said of her. She was wearing a tailored suit, and Bony was presented to her on the platform. They sat together in the first-class compartment, and at Serviceton she expressed regret that she had to leave the train and catch the incoming express back to Adelaide. Serviceton is just outside the South Australian border, and the Melbourne-Adelaide expresses pass a few miles beyond this point.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mr. Luton’s Panacea

  IT had been a hard day for Mr. Luton. For him the bottom of the craft of life had been badly holed, and the buoyancy of the previous days was gone. He had come to place strong faith in D.-I. Bonaparte, faith based on personal liking and respect for superior intelligence. Not by the flicker of an eyelash had he betrayed the blow to his faith given by Bony’s defection following the boasts bearing up what had appeared to be superb independence of the Boss.

  If you lose faith in someone, you find faith in yourself badly shaken, and that was the feeling from which Mr. Luton suffered during this hard day of Bony’s departure.

  Knocker Harris failed to cheer him. In fact, Knocker Harris was this day a little boring because he was inclined to condemn D.-I. Bonaparte merely through feeling that Mr. Luton was condemning him. When Knocker Harris broached the subject of Mr. Luton’s loneliness, Mr. Luton snapped him short, knowing the suggestion which would be bound to follow. Knocker’s affection for Mr. Luton was that of the weak for the strong, and sometimes the strong is wearied by the ingredient of adulation.

  What irritated Mr. Luton more was Knocker’s opposition to the occasional benders. The opposition wasn’t expressed in plain words, and the excuse was Knocker’s ulcers, which forbade him to join in the riot, when actually it was just plain wowserism, in the view of Mr. Luton.

  Hang it, if a man can’t have a drink without being criticised, it was just too bad. Mr. Luton stared savagely at Knocker Harris and told him he didn’t need nursing, that he was still able to feed himself, and quite capable of telling people like Knocker Harris to get to hell out of it.

  That was the way it went this afternoon of the day Bony left for Adelaide. Mr. Luton took from the cupboard the part-filled bottle of whisky, poured half a tumbler of the spirit and drank it neat, right in front of Knocker Harris.

  Knocker looked solemn and sighed loudly. He produced a cigarette and popped it into his mouth, paper and all, and the manner in which his jaws chewed further irritated Mr. Luton.

  “You had better get back to your own camp,” growled Mr. Luton. “Be dark in an hour, and I got chores to do.”

  Knocker accepted the hint, gazed disapprovingly at the bottle, and departed. Mr. Luton thereupon had a real snort, which emptied the bottle. He walked without a trac
e of faltering to the sitting-room, and proceeded to dismantle the stretcher used by D.-I. Bonaparte, placing the blankets in a cupboard, the sheets in the wash-tub in the adjacent laundry, and the stretcher on a wall-rack in his own room. Then he relaid the fire on the open hearth, took wheat to the penned fowls, and fed and chained the dogs to their abodes at the bottom of the garden.

  Rain scatted on the corrugated-iron roof, just to mock the drought. The wind was rising. The day passed out in a painful swoon, and Mr. Luton drew the blinds with care, locked both front and back doors, and prepared his dinner of cold fish and hot tea.

  Untold millions of men would have revelled in Mr. Luton’s situation. The stove burned warmly. The light shed brilliance on the clothed table bearing the dish of cold fish flanked by cut lemons. The doors were shut, barring out from this castle the night and the wind. And in the basement was that of such allure as to bring old Omar Khayyam leaping from his dusty grave.

  Yet material comforts alone do not achieve the acme of content. Mr. Luton had come to value home comforts, but not above the value and importance of friendships. Friendship is like a tree—the slower it grows the stronger the weft and the longer the life.

  To pluck a man off a pub wood-heap, cart him off from the scene of his fall and nurse him back to sanity used not to be an uncommon act. There was little of the ‘do good-ers’ about these Samaritans—just plain insurance taken out against the day when they, too, might lie with the dingbats on a pub wood-heap. Friendship is not formed thus, but is formed between men who experience together hardships, trials, and victories. The icy winds of winter sweeping day and night across saltbush plains, and the torrid heat of summer within a mulga forest, will unite men or send them tearing madly out to a salubrious city. Because young Benjamin Wickham joined John Luton in the job of moving tons of goods’ with a string of bullocks, nothing could break a friendship thus cemented.

  “Excepting death.”

  Which was what Mr. Luton was thinking as he ate his dinner, sitting stiffly upright in the Windsor chair with table manners of long ago.

  The rain stopped scarring on the roof. It had to, because Ben had said it wouldn’t rain enough to fill an egg-cup off an acre catchment of claypan. Having dined, Mr. Luton cleared the table, washed the dishes and strode to the front sitting-room fire. He sat in this favourite easy chair listening to the seven o’clock news, but this evening even the items about the Cold War failed to arouse his usual contemptuous snort. But when the silky tones of the announcer introduced the news reviewer, he did snort:

  “Not here you don’t, you ruddy echo.”

  The growing fire drove him back, so that he couldn’t touch the fender with his slippered feet. And then his eyes rose slowly, to rest their gaze on the bullock yoke.

  With axe and adze, chisel and glass-paper he had fashioned that yoke and fitted it on the neck of the finest bullock that ever lived. It had been a hefty steer, and no man could say what breed he was. Awkward, unreliable, rebellious when yoked into the middle of the team. Awkwardness gave place to sure and deliberate movement, and very early in its career Mr. Luton found it unnecessary to use his whip.

  Eventually, Squirt was promoted to lead bullock on the offside, the key position in the team, because as the off-side leader he was partially shielded from the driver by the near-sider. No matter where Mr. Luton was along the line of twenty-six or twenty-eight animals in pairs, as long as his voice reached Squirt, this magnificent leader instantly obeyed. Team bullocks are quite intelligent in the hands of an intelligent driver, and Squirt was a king among bullocks.

  A grand old feller, Squirt. Sell him! No. When Mr. Luton sold the team after Ben had left to take up his inheritance, he kept Squirt in a pub stable and yard for a month, and then took him to his grazing property, where both could enjoy comparative retirement from those endless tracks flowing from mirage to mirage.

  With the place went equipment, among which was a heavy two-wheel dray. When Mr. Luton needed firewood, he would take the huge whip to the home paddock gate and crack it. Within minutes Squirt would appear, and Mr. Luton would yoke him between the shafts of the dray and set forth for a load of dry timber. He would drive the old bullock between standing trees, leaving but an inch or two clearance to the wheel-hubs. He would command Squirt to ‘come here’ or to ‘gee-off’, and the animal actually appeared to delight in obeying. Often he would look back over a shoulder, at first Mr. Luton thought, at himself. It occurred to him that Squirt was looking back for the long-vanished team mates, and so he pretended the team mates were behind Squirt, and put on the performance of old days. The shouted profanity, the masterly conjunction of adjectives, and the strings of most improper nouns brought the ghosts of all the dead ‘artists’ of the tracks crowding around Mr. Luton with admiration. And Squirt would actually pretend he was straining his insides to haul the dray from a non-existent bog.

  He died of old age. Mr. Luton spent four days digging a grave and burying him, like a kid mourning a car-slain pup.

  A man has to love something. What is love? You tell me.

  Ben turned up, an older Ben, a Ben more assured of his own strength, the same old fighting Ben created by Mr. Luton from a Ben who was disillusioned and soured. Ben wanted a mate—that’s all. Ben was having a rough time down at Mount Mario, what with a sister who never ceased her efforts to reform him, and the professional meteorologists who had never ceased to scorn his work, in press, in conference, in private homes and clubs and bars.

  A snort! A bender! The hoo-jahs! Rub the bottle! The genie! Take us back twenty years! The glare of the sun! The dust of the track! The smell of the bullocks! The atomic reports of the whips! The muscles under the hides of men and beasts rippling with power!

  Thus passed the evening of this day. About eleven, Mr. Luton went to bed, having wound his pocket watch, filled his pipe, and set a glass of water on the bedside table. When he woke and snapped on the light, it was shortly after one o’clock. He drank the water and set a match to his pipe and lay with the bedclothes tucked under his chin and one hand gripping the pipe-bowl.

  It appeared that the heeler at the bottom of the garden couldn’t sleep either. Now and then he would emit a short yelp as though tormented by a flea, because he couldn’t be hungry, and he needn’t be cold if he stayed inside his kennel.

  Having smoked the pipe of peace, Mr. Luton snapped off the light and tried for sleep. It was very quiet without, save for the occasional bark of the dog, added to, at long intervals, by the barking of the other. Marauding fox, thought Mr. Luton. Well, the hens were locked up safely enough.

  An hour passed and still Mr. Luton was awake. Leaving the bed, he dragged on a dressing-gown and raised the window blind. Outside, the garden with the laundry and the woodshed and distant hen-house were stilled by the moon, as were the trunks of the trees beyond the garden.

  Mr. Luton broke abruptly into positive action. He switched off the bedroom light and passed to the living-room, where he re-kindled the stove cinders with brushwood. He dragged the table aside and went down under, taking no light, and presently came up with an unopened case marked ‘Rum’.

  Re-closing the trap, replacing the linoleum, and pulling the table back to its normal position, he opened the case with a steel implement like a jemmy, and having a claw which easily ripped wood lightly nailed. Without haste, Mr. Luton poured rum into a tin pint pannikin, and added a few drops of water.

  While this first deep-noser was establishing contact, he removed the sheaths from the remaining eleven bottles, placed the bottles in the cupboard beside the stove and the straw he pushed into the stove. Two drinks later, he smashed the case into kindling wood, and tidily placed it in a small box kept handy for the purpose.

  The tide in the bottle was down two-thirds when he went to the back door, intending to shout at the irritating dog. The moon was low. No cloud marred the radiant night.

  He did not shout at the dog. Instead, he closed the door and took another drink, a real snort this time, a
nd walked, steadily and surely, to the sitting-room. He took down from the wall one of his beloved whips, passed out to the front veranda and along the cinder path to the gate in the wicket fence, the whip slanted over a shoulder, the long belly and long leather lash trailing on the ground.

  No bullock driver ever appeared to the stars and the sleepy birds as this one did. Mr. Luton, arrayed in dressing-gown and slippers, white hair ruffled, white moustache bristling, walked with his old-time slouch towards the line of great trees near the river-bank. He paused to survey these trees. Then he spoke:

  “Now, Ben, first thing you got to remember is that bullocks can’t hear too well if they don’t want to. Another is, bullocks don’t understand polite language. If you say to ’em: ‘Git-up there!’ they think it’s a cat purring. Now watch and listen to me.”

  Mr. Luton whistled—one long-drawn note. “Smokey! Red! Pieface! You loafing get from a Tory-bred snivelling bloody runt. Come here, Squirt! Bit more! Come here, Squirt! Red! You...”

  Mr. Luton’s by no means palsied arms lifted the whip off his shoulder, and slowly proceeded to whirl in a circle above his head the heavy leather, reaching some eighteen feet. His tall body swayed to gain momentum, and suddenly tautened, swung slightly backward to halt the whip handle. The leather flowed away like a living anaconda, flowed to the very tip of the lash with a deafening report.

  “That’ll do! Whey! Whoa-back!” The driver turned slightly to his rear. “Get the knack of it, Ben? The voice is more important than the whip-crack. You never hit a beast if he don’t deserve it. Remember that bullocks is a bit sensitive. If you mooch along thinking of the last pub, the bullocks will likely enough fall down dreaming of the last time it rained and brought up the pigweed. If you put guts and energy into your driving, them bullocks will put energy into their hauling. And you got to steady ’em and get ’em all hauling together. I’ll show you how to get ’em excited, to pull through this here sand-bog.”