The Sands of Windee Read online

  A vast milling, dust-raising, baaing, struggling mass of animals! The level of water in the reservoir tank feeding the trough began gradually to fall. Then from the surging mass one sheep became detached. It was the old ewe leader. She ran back over the way she had come, followed by several others, and then stopped when two hundred yards from the tank, looking back with cunning placidity. In twos and threes, their bellies distended with water, sheep left the mob and joined her, then, with her, to stand a while looking back. Not one ran ahead. And not before all but a few lingerers had drunk their fill did she lead them out across the plain to the scrub and dry grass, the red mounting dust, now rising straight and to a great height, marking their passage.

  The army corps of galahs was retreating by battalions to roosting-places in the mulga-trees on the hills. A thunder of hoofs caused Dash to look to his left and observe the second flock of sheep—also led by a single animal—charge in and around the second trough. When they also had gone the sun was set and Dash lay with his .22 Savage resting in his arms. There were seven kangaroos within point-blank range of his rifle, namely, three hundred yards.

  Dash settled down to careful shooting whilst the light held. The cartridges he used cost fourpence each, so that he could not afford to miss often. Dot, firing from his .44 Winchester his own loading cartridges, the cost of which he had carefully worked out at five shillings per hundred, could well afford to take chances; but his weapon was far less deadly beyond two hundred yards than the Savage.

  His partner heard him shooting, and sometimes cursing. A quite friendly rivalry existed between them when in the morning they counted their respective bags, after which the merits of their rifles would be argued. The light began to go rapidly, and presently Dash missed for the first time that evening. His following shot also was a miss; and, slipping down behind the rampart, he walked to where a single blanket was folded in its length. Beside it lay a double-barrelled shot-gun of beautiful workmanship, several boxes of BB size cartridges, a billy-can of cold tea, and a hurricane-lamp.

  It was his night position. It was situated in a right-angle on the narrow strip of level ground between the bank of the dam and the rampart of mullock. In a similar position in the opposite angle lay Dot. Each of them commanded two sides of the square-shaped tank, and to shoot each other was impossible unless one fired diagonally across the water.

  Lighting a cigarette, Dash lay back on the blanket resting his head on his hands. To regard him then was to wonder what form of madness had exiled him from home and country. There was no trace of dissipation on the strong sunburned face, no hint of weakness about the straight mouth and square chin.

  His cigarette finished, he sat up and sipped from the blackened billycan. Above him the sky was blue-black and the stars did not twinkle with so-called tropical brilliance, despite the fact that it was cloudless. The features of the mullock marking his zone of operations were blurred by the general shadow, but those angles of the rampart commanded by Dot still revealed the crevices among the rubble in a soft amber glow. The level summit of Dash’s rampart was clear-cut against the dull pink sheen of the western sky. That skyline would be visible all night long, hence his then position.

  A form, soundless in movement, grotesque, almost monstrous, slowly pushed up on that skyline. Dash reached for his shot-gun. The form became still for a moment, then slowly changed from the grotesque to the beautiful, from the monstrous to the lovely, when the kangaroo sat up, his tail resting on the ground balancing him like a third leg, his small but noble head and lifted stiffened ears outlined as a clear-cut silhouette against the darkening sky.

  A sharp flash, a roar, and the ’roo lay thrashing in its death agonies.

  “Poor devil!” sighed Dash.

  From beyond the bank a succession of twin thuds went out as warning to the converging kangaroos, when one or more gave the signal by jumping and bringing their tails down on the earth with a sound like that of a stick beating a dusty carpet.

  Dot fired, and Dash heard the wounded ’roo “queex-queex” with pain and anger. Then his attention was taken by the rising figures of two’ roos directly opposite him and less than twenty yards distant. He fired twice rapidly, and both animals fell dead. Dash was thankful.

  At about eleven o’clock the shooting became less frequent, and Dot at last called out for an armistice. Dash agreed, and lit his lamp. Whereupon each man dispatched his wounded animals with his hunting-knife.

  “How many?” Dot asked when the lights revealed both at their respective camps.

  “Twenty-nine,” replied Dash without enthusiasm. “What is your tally?”

  “Thirty-three,” came the triumphant answer.

  After that silence fell once more. The tall partner lay on his side, smoking and thinking. The air was still heated by the roasted earth. The silence became oppressive, more oppressive than the sounds of continuous thunder.

  Presently the armistice was called off and hostilities were resumed till dawn.

  ***

  “Thank heaving, to-day’s the last day of me week’s cooking!” Tom said during breakfast, with tremendous fervour in his drawling voice. “Yours starts to-morrow, Ned. An’ then you can show us yous can cook better’n Bony.”

  “He wants a lot of beating, does Bony,” the young rider conceded. “I’ve met that bloke before somewhercs, but I can’t place ’im. When ’e smiles I nearly get’ im, but not quite. Anyways, ’e can cook, and ’e can break-in ’orses, and ’e can play on a box-leaf. Not a bad sort of a bloke, Bony.”

  “Naw. Quiet-like,” Dot agreed.

  “Deep,” rumbled Tom.

  “Deep as ’ell,” chimed in Ned. “I’ll place’ im one of these days. I know I runned across’ im somewheres. Maybe in Queensland; maybe up in the Territory.”

  Dash rose from the table and wiped his lips with a handkerchief. Dot rose immediately after, and wiped his with a bare forearm.

  “We’ll do the washin’-up,” he said to the stockman.

  “Good-oh!”

  When the washing-up had been done and they went outside to smoke cigarettes in the long shade cast by the hut, they watched the two riders set out in their respective paddocks on jogging horses. The army corps of galahs was mobilizing in continuous battalions about the dam. The crows were strutting suspiciously around the dead kangaroos, whilst high above them several eagles circled with wings as still as those of aeroplanes.

  The cigarettes smoked, Dash went over to the ton truck, whilst Pot procured the skinning-knives and steels. Into the truck presently they loaded a dozen’ roos and took them a mile away towards the hills, where they were dumped and Dot fell to skinning them. Dash brought the others to Dot in similar loads, and when all were thus removed from the vicinity of the dam he also fell to with his skinning-knife.

  It was not work that an English gentleman would do voluntarily.

  By ten o’clock the animals were skinned, for both were practised workers. Back again at the hut, they drank cold tea and smoked another cigarette; after which Dot set to work pegging out the wet skins on a hard clay-pan with short pieces of wire used as nails, whilst his partner mixed and baked a damper and a brownie, and peeled the potatoes in readiness for that evening’s dinner.

  For lunch they had cold mutton, bread and jam, and tea. The merciless sun beat down on the iron roof above them, and set all the plain outside dancing in the mirage. The stillness of noonday settled on the world, and the only things that moved were the heat-defying crows and the eagles settled on the heap of carcasses one mile nearer the hills.

  Having lunched, they smoked, and slept until four o’clock, when Dash put the leg of mutton in the camp oven and prepared the simple dinner, and Dot went out to take up skins pegged out the day before, and now as hard and dry as boards. Ned came riding home, and, pausing beside Dot, announced triumphantly:

  “I remember Bony now. He was a police-tracker at Cunnamulla in’ twenty-one. Got his man, too.”

  “You don’t say!” Dot calmly
observed.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The Great Will-o’-the-Wisp

  DECEMBER WAS BORN in a temperature of 100°. When it was twelve hours old the mercury of the thermometer on the homestead veranda recorded 115°.

  Every well on the Windee holding was in requisition, for three of the great open dams were dry, and the water-level in others was rapidly sinking. The early summer thunderstorms that year were extraordinarily erratic in their courses and afforded no measurable rain. It was now more than three months since the last rain fell.

  Over all that vast extent of country owned by one man there was not to be found a single green shoot of grass or herbage. East of the range of hills the hot and rainless period had no apparent effect on the sturdy saltbush; but the salt in this tiny shrub, plus summer heat, caused the sheep to linger round the troughs at the watering-places and consume much more water than those on the range itself and on that vast stretch of country west of the range. Here the winter grasses raised by a plenitude of rain to the height of a tall man’s knee were wheat-coloured. Mile after mile of yellow grass, like an illimitable wheatfield just before harvest, lay encircling the ever-widening areas of bare land in the neighbourhood of the dams and wells.

  Bony was out, riding the last horse of his breaking-in contract—a contract he had extended as long as possible. His horses were a credit to him, and Stanton was pleased, as well he might be. He offered the half-caste the contract of erecting a set of sheep-yards a mile above the homestead on the creek, and the versatile Bony accepted, exceedingly glad that his open stay at Windee was to be prolonged.

  He was riding a gay young filly, all black without a single white blemish, and, whilst riding with his habitual care, he was considering a point that required explanation. Within the last week he had definitely felt a change in Marion Stanton’s attitude towards him.

  Her pleasing democratic bonhomie, pleasing because bonhomie was the natural expression of her sunny nature, had vanished, and had become replaced by an unaccountable coldness. Instead of personally asking Bony to saddle Grey Cloud for her evening ride, when he almost always accompanied her, she had instructed the station groom to perform the office on three consecutive evenings. Once she and Bony almost met on the office side of the house; but, seeing him, Marion had deliberately turned in through a wicket-gate.

  Not only was Bony perplexed. He was saddened also by this inexplicable change of front, because he had delighted in her beauty as well as in her personality. Going back over the rides they had taken together, he could find not one that indicated how he had offended.

  Her coldness apparently affected Jeff Stanton as well. During the last few days when he had met the squatter Stanton was subtly changed from the bluff, downright man of his reputation. When Jeff looked at him Bony felt that he was being rejudged, and by a man carefully adjusting the scales. His changed attitude was not the result of bad work on Bony’s part. Of that Bony was quite sure.

  Both these people accepted him for what he was. The colour-bar in him was no bar to them. He pleased the squatter by the thoroughness of his work, and he pleased the girl by his intellectual gifts and attainments and his sympathetic personality. And now suddenly he sensed that he displeased them both. This displeasure he could not understand. He had no clue to it.

  Reaching the road junction, he guided the filly off the track more by his knees than with the reins, and eventually tied her to the tree in whose fork he kept his sheepskin sandals. It was a very still day, and before leaving the horse he watched her for a few seconds, and then, seeing that she was neither suspicious nor suspected the proximity of any other horse and rider, Bony moved away on yet another examination of the scene of Marks’s disappearance. He had covered twenty-five yards when he came on the tracks of a single horse, a horse that had walked.

  At once Bony was interested. There were, he knew, no horses in that paddock. The tracks indicated that it was not a loose horse broken into that paddock from another, for the trail was too straight to have been made by a riderless animal. He threw himself into a quick ambling stride, as that of a man wearing snow-shoes, and back-tracked the strange horse till he found that it had left the main road about four hundred yards Windee side of the road junction. Turning about, he followed the tracks back to where he had picked them up, and continued to follow them, his mind going over recent weather conditions to ascertain their age. They were between seventy and seventy-seven hours old—approximately three days—and the horse that had made them was either Grey Cloud or Doll, Jack Withers’s mare. Of that Bony was naturally very sure, for the shape and size of the hoofs of every animal he had broken and every animal in work at Windee had been carefully inspected and memorized in his ordinary routine.

  The strange tracks led Bony direct to the clay-pan and sand-ridge where Marks’s car had been found, and where he had been presented with a sapphire by the industrious ants. They led north from that place, and, coming to the fire-site he had so meticulously examined, they circled twice before going on again for nearly half a mile, when they began to take a wide curve that eventually ended in a straight line going back to Windee.

  Why had the rider made an obviously special visit to that fatal locality? Was it because he, Bony, was suddenly held in suspicion? If so, had the suspecting person made that visit to look for proof that Bony also had visited that place? The purpose of the rider was all too obvious. Walking slowly to his tethered horse, Bony smiled. The unknown rider had found no proof that Bony had ever visited the place; but he, Bony, had found proof that a strange rider knew precisely where Marks’s car had been found, and also knew where three kangaroos and a human boot at least had been consumed by fire.

  Had the unknown rider ridden over that maze of sand-ridges to find proof of Bony’s activities? It was the outstanding question. If so, Bony was suspect by someone. Was that someone Jeff Stanton, or his daughter, or both; and were the coldness of the one and the curious weighing of the other the outward signs of their suspicion? Their altered attitude seemed to indicate suspicion of him, and that in turn indicated that they knew something about Marks’s disappearance after all.

  Since the afternoon was yet young, Bony took the Mount Lion road for no other purpose than to quieten his mount, his mind concentrated on the tangle of this Windee skein, which appeared to be becoming increasingly tangled. So absorbed was he in this mental effort that he was startled when Sergeant Morris spoke to him and he saw the policeman sitting his horse at the edge of the track.

  “Day, Bony!”

  “Good day, Sergeant! We are well met.”

  “I was on my way to Windee on the chance of speaking to you,” Morris said in his grim way. “We are fortunate to meet here.”

  “Indeed we are.” Bony gazed about with an abstracted look. Then: “I see there a fine pine-tree throwing a most inviting shade. For at least thirty minutes I have not smoked a cigarette.”

  “Good enough,” Morris agreed softly, smiling at the perfect accent and studiously correct grammar.

  Their horses standing in the shade of another pine-tree, the two men threw themselves on the soft red sand cooled by the shade, and set about rolling each a cigarette. Then: “Have you any news, Sergeant?”

  “Yes. Headquarters have consented to send for your dear friend, Mister Illawalli. You appear to have the power of charming even a police chief.”

  “Your chief commissioner is a man of perspicacity,” Bony murmured. “However, in common with my own chief, he is a man of fixed ideas, at least in regard to myself.”

  “In what way?”

  “They will persist in regarding me as a policeman, one who arrests petty thieves and ordinary inebriates; whereas I am a crime investigator. On the other hand, they know how useless it is to hurry me, or direct me, for they know that when I want a thing done I have most excellent reasons for having it done.”

  “Won’t you tell me why you have persuaded Headquarters to fetch your friend from North Queensland at an expense of something
like two hundred pounds?”

  There was a note of pleading in Sergeant Morris’s voice, and for a little while Bony studied the strong face cast in the military mould. He asked a somewhat surprising question: “Do you believe in spiritualism?”

  “I think there is more in it than the sceptics will admit. Why?”

  “Do you think that if you take a half-caste baby, rear it, educate it, and finally teach the grown man a profession, that he will follow the profession most of his life and remain a lifelong unit of the white man’s civilization?”

  “I’m damned sure he wouldn’t. The black blood in him would pull him back into the bush. Every bushman knows that. It’s happened too often.”

  Bony sighed. “Yet there are intelligent Australian people who will not believe it. However, as you appear to be a man with an open, reasoning mind, I will take you a little into my confidence.”

  “Good! I’m all attention.”

  “Very well. There is a very great number of people who regard the Australian aboriginal as standing on the lowest rung of the human ladder. Because they have found no traces of a previous aboriginal civilization, no settlements, no buildings, no industry, they say that he always has been a man of a very low type. Yet, for all that, he has possessed for many centuries that which the white race is constantly striving to obtain, and which its striving brings no nearer. The blessed possession I refer to is Contented Happiness, the only human possession worth having....

  “The despised black man, ignorant, without wisdom, is contentedly happy. He desires nothing but life’s essentials. In his profound ignorance and unwisdom he ruthlessly practises birth control. He makes sure that the very occasional mental degenerate and the physical weakling will not reproduce their like, and he keeps the population down well below a point which the country’s natural food supply will support by the same method of birth control.