The House Of Cain Read online

  “There are no hot nights in Australia,” wrote one famous traveller. Some town-planning expert must have told him that––he was never on the Border Fence in February.

  Monty awoke about midday and rose at once to quench his thirst from a hanging canvas water-bag. Martin and the boundary-rider, who still slept soundly, missed the sight of the big man facing southeast by south, the direction of Melbourne, and smiling gently as though at some sweet memory. When Martin did awake, Monty was reclining within his fly-proof net smoking his appalling pipe.

  “Want a drink, old lad?”

  “Please, Monty. Phew! it is hot. Is it daylight?”

  “Yes; just gone two o’clock,” the big man replied, filling a pint pannikin from the bag. Carefully raising the net to exclude the ever-present flies, he passed the pannikin within. Then, with his arm well shrouded by the net, he searched for and found the blind man’s cigarettes and matches.

  For that was a part of Monty’s work. Besides the cooking and the usual camp fatigues, he was obliged to do all the camel-tailing, or, in other words, hunt for and bring the beasts back to camp preparatory to the night’s march; do all the loading and unloading, and wait upon his afflicted brother even to cutting up his food and pouring out his drink.

  All the responsibility of the expedition fell upon his shoulders, but, his shoulders being broad, he did not mind. When he should have been taking his due proportion of rest he was attending to Martin, which he minded less. It certainly was a labour, but a labour of love.

  Action, hardship, and hope, however, had dispelled the first phase of Martin’s affliction, as Monty had guessed would be the case. Gone were the impatience, the moroseness, the really terrible fits of temper. No complaints came from him now. He was rapidly becoming his old gentle self, sympathetic to those less fortunate, firm in his opinions, steadfast in his loyalty. It was the mind rather than the body which had attracted Austiline to him. It was his strength of mind, united to a brilliant imagination, rather than his instinct for business organization, itself no mean thing, which had caused that canny judge of men, Sir Victor Lawrence, to push him so rapidly up the ladder of newspaperdom.

  Even his brother Monty was viewing him in a new light––a light, nevertheless, not so new to Austiline or his many friends. One little trick he brought out now which for long had been in abeyance, and that was the slight drawing-down of the extremities of his mouth when he was leading one to final catastrophe in discussion, or when he was––in vulgar parlance––pulling one’s leg. But the nature of his blindness forbade that expressive twinkle which he had in common with the big man.

  This change in Martin was a source of never-ending gratification to Monty Sherwood. The words of the eye-specialist were constantly in his mind: “Severe shock or intense excitement might restore activity to the paralysed nerves.” He lived in secret hope that their goal would provide the necessary shock or excitement. Mrs. Montrose had hinted at difficulties and dangers in the way finding Austiline and bringing her out of “smoke.” Squeezem Harry’s experience indicated their nature. Even common logic predicted them.

  Why should Anchor, if he were only an inventor, settle in the heart of such a wilderness, when equal secrecy could be found within a few miles of a railway which could bring his supplies with economy and dispatch? If Anchor was a master criminal, the head of a great under-world organization for protecting criminals from justice, then Monty knew of no more desirable locality than Lake Moonba. The big man scented excitement as a dingo scents the blood of a beast slain by marauding blacks.

  Martin dozed off again after a cigarette, and Monty had taken the smouldering butt from him for fear of fire. Outside the nets the flies kept up a monotonous drone. Sometimes a bell tinkled when one of the camels shook its head, and that occasional sound told Monty that the animals were camped in the shade, waiting patiently for the cool of the evening before they started feeding. Not till five o’clock did the boundary-rider stir, grunt, and roll out of his net to search for the water-bag.

  “I bin on this blasted job now for nigh on two years without a spell,” he informed Monty when he had drunk at least a gallon of water. “I’m finishing up at the end of next month, when it’s me for Sydney with a four-hundred-pound cheque to spend on wine, women and pictures, and then more pictures, more women, and heaps more wine. I bin dreaming about it all for two long, blanky, lonely years.”

  “Not a bad place, Sydney, for a holiday,” Monty agreed.

  “Too right. But I’d want fifty quid a week to work there. Couldn’t live there under. They tell me the price of booze has gone up something scandalous. Wish that sun would go down and send these flies to bed. I could do with a feed.”

  Hendry, as the man called himself, was a product of the wilderness. The glare of the sun had screwed his glittering eyes to mere points, the heat had roughened and cracked his skin to the semblance of old parchment. The lack of moisture in the atmosphere had made him lean; and constant labour on the very plainest of food had made him as hard as bloodwood.

  Wilderness is a better name than bush for the really appalling country over which runs the Border Fence for nearly two hundred miles in a straight line. The bush country, farther east and south, is kind in its shade, soft in its colours, and homely. Here there was nothing, nothing but sand-hills divided by narrow flats, nothing but stunted dying mulga and needlewood trees, nothing but watercourses filled with blown sand, nothing but the great vermin-proof fence erected to keep back the migratory dingoes, rabbits, and emus from the pastoral country of New South Wales, and in places sometimes buried by the ever-moving sand. The deserts of North Africa are beautiful in-placid death: here the wilderness is dreadful with the convulsions of the dying.

  They lit a fire towards sunset and sat in its fragrant smoke to cheat the flies, and when it was dark Hendry put the billy on to boil for tea; and Monty, after serving his brother with a meagre ration of water with which to wash, produced tinned delicacies that made Hendry’s eyes open wide.

  “Say! are yous the Prime Minister?” inquired the boundary-rider.

  “Not yet––but I may be lucky. My name’s Sherwood, Monty Sherwood.”

  “The Monty! By cripes! I heard tell of yous. Pleasedter-meet-cher! Where you bound for?”

  “Going north for a little dogging.”

  “So––so. You should do well. There’s plenty of dorgs on the South Aus. side of the fence. Prince Charlie brought in a couple ’undred scalps only last week. I’m getting a few along this section.”

  “Dry time bringing ’em down, I suppose?”

  “You bet. They followed the scattered thunderstorms from the Strzelecki Creek and east from Lake Frome and are having a gay old time on the cattle, which are dying in hundreds.”

  “Is it as dry as all that?” Martin asked.

  “Yep. Had no rain since I bin on the job, bar thunderstorms at Christmas, which came at the wrong time. Up on Melloo Station they shot three thousand head to preserve what little scrub there was left, keeping only a handful of pedigree bulls and cows.”

  “Feed pretty scarce, eh?”

  “Scarce, Monty, ain’t the word. There ain’t no ground feed at all,” Hendry informed them, whilst making little cakes of baking-powder dough and frying them in smoking hot fat. “The country’s as bare as the back of me ’and. Course there’s mulga and needlewood, but it’s almost dead.”

  The discussion over Hendry’s flap-jacks and Monty’s tinned beef, tinned asparagus and tinned fruit was mainly about bores and dams, water-holes and soakages, camel-feed and other very necessary information which a wise bushman invariably seeks; for stark tragedy lurks about a dust-dry waterhole when the traveller with empty drums relies for his life on water which has vanished.

  The next morning Monty’s six camels and the boundary-rider’s three came shuffling in their hobbles to stand in the smoke of the camp-fire, like the men, to escape the tormenting flies.

  “Dope’s getting a bit stale,” Hendry remarked, c
utting a pipeful of tobacco preparatory to turning in.

  “M’yes,” the big man agreed. “Better treat them now.”

  So they nose-lined the beasts and smeared the hair about their eyes with a mixture of fat and kerosene; and, the treatment finished, the sagacious animals rose to their feet, held silent conference with their eyes, and decided to make at once for a patch of shade they preferred.

  Camp was broken after sundown that evening, when the mercury was 106 degrees, and the Sherwoods parted with regret from the optimistic boundary-rider, who was going south that night to a sand-hill that needed his attention.

  Animals, like humans, follow a path once it has been made, and, like man-made paths, the pads formed by cattle and camels are never straight. Following the pad made by the boundary-rider’s camels, which twisted and turned over humped sand-hill and narrow flat, and always within a few yards of the great fence, they pushed northward at a walk all night, making only a midnight halt for “lunch.”

  Each night, travelling twenty-five to thirty miles, they passed a boundary-rider at work on some part of his twenty-one-mile section. Every day the sand moves. Unceasingly the men have to fight the sand to save the Border Fence from obliteration. It was when the main track from Yandama to Tilsha Stations was reached that they passed through one of the few gates into South Australia, reaching the homestead of Tilsha on the last day of the month.

  Here they were received with the universal bush welcome, being urged to stay a day, or a week, or a month. They stayed two days, warmly entertained by the news-hungry community of five persons, who exacted promises that they would return the same way.

  From Tilsha Station they proceeded northward for some thirty miles to a selector’s house set amid serried ranks of gigantic sand-dunes. Monty had never seen that drought-stricken country so parched and barren of life. Here there was no tank water. There was no water whatever between Tilsha and the selection. When he was tailing the camels the only tracks he saw were those of scorpions and one or two jew-lizards. With the exception of crows and eagle-hawks bird life had vanished. Animal life there was none.

  At Minter’s Selection they found the man and his wife on the verge of ruin; but, nevertheless, were received cordially. Luxuries and many necessities of life the Minters were entirely without. They were without hope, without ambition, although the woman pretended to hope. Mentally they were dying like the stunted, withering scrub-trees.

  Minter himself was a little dried-up man of fifty or thereabouts. His face was a leathery mask, but his black eyes were lively and keen. Martha, his wife, was tall and painfully thin, a woman worn to a shadow by hardship and never-ending labour. Like her husband’s, her complexion was burned black, but behind her light-blue eyes was an expression of wistfulness which struck Monty as pathetic, a light of both tragedy and divine trust.

  “It was bound to come, this drought,” Minter remarked whilst the guests sat with unaccustomed ease in roughly-made but comfortable chairs on the tiny veranda of the corrugated-iron house that evening. “Here’s Martha and me worked all our lives like niggers––to see our savings sink into the ground as each beast lay down to die. For near twenty years her and me flogged bullocks from the Hill to Tibooburra with loading. We been in this back country all our lives. We were born in it, and we’ll die in it, but could we get a living area of land well into New South Wales? Not on your life. There’s none to get. The squatters, who use about half their holdings, have got all the land worth having.

  “We took a chance here. Martha wanted for years and years a home of her own. And the palaver we had to put up to the South Aus. Government to get this bit of a selection here in country the big men wouldn’t take as a gift was amazing. The lying swine tell the English people there is millions of acres of land to be had for development, when they know perfectly well there’s none. They don’t want ’em on the land; they want ’em working for small farmers at a quid a week, or walking the streets looking for a job, so that when a job does fall vacant the bloke what runs the fastest gets it. Land! Look at it! Nice sort of land, eh?”

  The big man cut chips of tobacco off his plug with unwonted energy, and Martin sighed. They were aware, as every bushman is, of the terrible gnawing land-hunger existing in Australia. Martin at least understood the struggle going on between the land barons of the bush and the country farmer near the coast on the one side, and the army of homeless bush people on the other. The former have the land and want immigrated labour because it is cheap; the latter hate the immigrant because he competes in the over-stocked labour market and in the meagre land supply.

  Men of vision, men of unsullied patriotic ambition, are crushed between the two; the blind man being but one of a little band with power to speak and gain a hearing. And now blindness had left that little band without a leader. He sighed again. Almost he could hear the woman’s plaintive cry, reiterated for years: “I want a home, John. Oh, John! I want a home of my very own.”

  Minter gazed out moodily over the surrounding desolation. His wife, upright on her chair, her lean roughened hands laid listlessly on her lap, closed her eyes as though with pain.

  “I thank God me and Martha was wise enough to have no children,” said Minter a little fiercely.

  Martin heard a chair pushed back, heard a stifled sob and hurrying footsteps run into the house; and those little sounds so eloquent of many a bush tragedy made him yearn to be able in some way to comfort this heroic woman. Minter swore. Then:

  “There, there! I’m always saying something I shouldn’t,” he said; and Monty, to cover an awkward break, asked him what the country was like farther north.

  “About the same as this right away to Birdsville,” answered Minter, rousing himself from his lethargic depression. “There is no water in the Strzelecki. Your best route is to travel due north from here for about thirty miles, when you’ll come to a creek. I know for sure there’s water in a fair-sized hole in a bend beneath a high sand-hill. You can’t miss the sand-hill, ’cos it’s higher than the others and can be seen for miles. You ought to get some dogs there. Then sixty miles northwest by north from there you’ll strike a bore and a house. It ain’t but half a mile from Lake Moonba. Feller by the name of Anchor lives there. Sort of inventor, they say, and as mad as Poddy’s dorg. You want to go careful of him, though. Appears he don’t welcome visitors.”

  “Are there no other houses between here and Innaminka?” Monty asked.

  “Not a one––nor a fence either, when you get through my camel-paddock.”

  “This man, Anchor: you say he’s an inventor. What does he invent?”

  “Aeroplanes, I think. Flies one, anyhow.”

  “Humph! Well, we’ll break camp to-morrow,” Monty announced. “By those clouds coming up from the west, we’re in for a cool change.”

  “Looks like it. Wind and dust, but no rain. Don’t matter much what comes. We’re broke.”

  Later Mrs. Minter appeared, pausing first at the doorway to scan, as had become a habit, the western sky for any indication of the breaking of the drought.

  “There’s a change coming, John,” she said hopefully.

  “Looks like it, Martha. Perhaps it’ll rain,” her husband answered with amazingly assumed cheerfulness.

  “Oh, if it only would!”

  And, when it did rain, a week or so later, she and her man rushed out of the house and danced like mad people in the torrential downpour.

  CHAPTER XIII

  THE INVISIBLE TERROR

  "CERTAINLY we are now well into the Never-Never country,” remarked Monty at the evening meal the day they left Minter’s Selection. “We may consider this camp our base of operations, old son.”

  “Describe it, Monty,” requested the blind man, sitting on the soft sand, a pack-saddle for a back-rest. Monty cut up half the contents of a two-pound tin of tongue, added a portion of preserved potatoes, and deposited the enamel plate, together with a slice of damper and a spoon, in his brother’s lap. Then, seeing that the panni
kin of tea was within Martin’s reach, also the salt and pepper-which the blind man easily distinguished by touch of the tin containers––he helped himself, saying in his slow drawl:

  “If I were ‘A. E. Titchfield’ I could do it properly. Being just an ordinary kind of bloke, I can’t. Anyway, we are camped on the edge of a bit of a water-hole in a creek described to us by friend Minter. Beyond the creek rises a deep, reddish-coloured sand-hill, smooth and rounded like a whale’s back. At the foot of the sand-hill is a solitary box tree.”

  “Good. In what position am I relatively to the box tree?”

  “Facing it. The water in the hole is deep brown in colour and unpleasantly thick. In your pannikin of tea one would easily imagine that cow’s milk had been added. Is that enough description, Martin?”

  “No, of course not. That, mine eyes, is only half the picture,”

  Martin replied with a smile.

  Monty gave a humourous groan.

  “All right. Only you will have to excuse my elocution. Descriptive speech doesn’t go well with chunks of ox tongue. Well, behind us runs a flat as bare as your elbow, flanked by a sand ridge covered with mulga trees that look as though a fire had swept through them. Still they are not too bad, and the cracking sound you hear is the branches being broken by our camels. There is neither grass nor herbage within sight. How will that do?”

  “You are coming on famously, but what colours are there? A picture is not much without colour.”

  “Martin, old lad, you’ll want flowers on your table next,” Monty went on with another sepulchral groan. “The sun is setting behind the purple-looking sand-hill in the far west. Distance and shadow make it look purple. The foreground is bathed in gold, with streaks of silver running through it where the sand-humps beyond cast quarter-mile shadows. The sky at the zenith is the colour of cadmium, and foretells wind. Near at hand the putty-coloured forms of our mokes make light splashes against the almost black mulga trees. Mahogany-brown is the colour of my beloved pipe; your shirt makes––”