The Sands of Windee Read online

  Bony rode now with but two regrets in his heart. His hope of salvation was vanishing quickly. He regretted that he would fail to take Dash back to Marion Stanton, and he regretted that he had not brought a revolver, for when the end drew very near a revolver bullet would be far more merciful than fire. He thought of his wife, so understanding of his dual nature, and of his sons, especially of Charles, who would so easily slip into his shoes and honourably carry on his father’s successes.

  He and the horse suddenly swept on a mob of kangaroos halted in frightened perplexity. The grey and the red and the chocolate coloured forms, some with white chests, hardly moved when Grey Cloud dashed through them. They were stupid with fear and dazed by the smoke. A fox on a rabbit-burrow was digging furiously, and not two yards from it a rabbit sat at an entrance-hole calmly cleaning its face as does a cat. The fear of natural enemies was swamped by the greater fear of the advancing universal destroyer.

  The minutes passed, three all told, when Bony saw the barrier that had turned back the kangaroos. The smoke ahead rapidly thickened. Then within it he saw first a faint pink glow that deepened with his progress. As from a photographic plate in a developing bath the opaqueness began to break up. There appeared blots of crimson that magically brightened into glittering flames, magically increased in number, isolated flames and chains of flame, flames that remained stationary, and lines of running darting flame which clung low to the earth.

  There burned a section of the Windee fire, creeping slowly as a man may walk against the wind. Bony knew it was the beginning of the end, for he was now in a fiery corridor less than a mile in width, a corridor whose walls of fire were rushing on him together.

  He was forced northward. For the first time he dug his heels into Grey Cloud’s flanks, determined to ride until the horse dropped or became mad and ungovernable with the swelling terror. That would be the exact end for both horse and man.

  The reality of life became an horrific phantasmagoria. To them gathered a racing escort. Before, beside, and behind them fully a thousand creatures of the wild fled in their company, seeing in Grey Cloud a leader, a living thing that still moved with purpose. Excepting on their right, where lay the Windee fire, the racing horse and its rider became hedged in by bounding kangaroos, galloping foxes and dogs, bellies to ground, tongues lolling, tails horizontally stiff. Rabbits scurried or crouched, dazed by the flying forms and pounding feet of the larger animals. Snakes writhed and struck in impotent fury: goannas glared down malevolently from the topmost branches of the trees, hate and anger incarnate in reptilian beauty.

  Rapidly the temperature rose. The corridor now had shrunk to a quarter of a mile in width. The multitude of terror-impelled animals so increased that many were swept against the trees and left struggling with broken legs. A flock of half a hundred emus—the ostriches of Australia—rushed into the escort, joined it. and pounded along with it.

  No longer did Bony attempt to guide his horse. Panic governed Grey Cloud as it governed the wild host about them. The man’s eyes burned, great circles of pain bathed in gushing tears. He was aware now of individual incidents that excluded the grand total effect of this inferno undreamed of by Dante. He saw flames, blue and yellow, lick upward about a giant sandalwood tree. He saw another such tree more firmly gripped by fire, and with a flash of his old interest in natural phenomena saw how the fire was forcing the oil of the tree to the leaves and causing it to drop from their points, splashing into little founts of fire on the ground.

  He saw a thirty-foot pine-tree split open in a gush of fire with the report of a gun. He saw rabbits running aimlessly, lost from the scattered burrows, not pausing even when they raced into the line of scarlet creeping with a hiss through the grass. He heard their screams between the sharp reports of bursting trees, the thudding of falling branches, the roar of flame, and the upward rush of heated air.

  The smoke shut out the sun. The daylight waned, and was replaced by a crimson glare that lit the scene of a vast stampeding mob of animals, in whose centre sped a grey horse bearing a hunched rider. A grand drive by the hunter, Death!

  Quite suddenly the passing trees vanished. The ground rose gently. To Bony came the sound of pebbles being struck by hoofs, and then he knew and would have screamed his triumph, and the triumph of all those animals and birds who had followed his leading, had not the smoke so choked him. As through the narrow end of a funnel, horse and man, kangaroos, emus, foxes, and dingoes poured out on the blessed gibber-stone plain where the fire could not pursue.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Bony—and a Prisoner

  THE SUN AT ITS ZENITH laid the shadow of Bony’s head about the toes of his boots. It beat down on him and the horse he was leading with a more pitiless heat than that of the roaring, crackling fire from which they had escaped, almost by seconds, early that morning. It heated the smooth gibber-stones to a temperature that would have fired a match held against any one of them.

  Slowly horse and man were moving over a vast treeless expanse, a plain so gently undulating that it appeared deceptively flat, yet which gave effect to the mirage that offered delusive glimmering sheets of water in every direction. Here and there low, stunted bushes, greenish blue in colour, defied the scorching sun long after the tussock-grass had died. Tiny lizards, brown, grey, and green fled into the shelter given them by the bushes. An goanna, four feet long, with yellow-marked green body, snakish head and long tapering tail, slid with astonishing rapidity into its hole. Of other ground life there was none. Two thousand feet above the earth three eagles circled as so many manoeuvring aeroplanes. Little larger than pinheads, they swerved and circled with never a beat of a wing, waiting and watching, watching and waiting.

  The man’s head was covered with a blue silk handkerchief, knotted at the corners. He walked at his normal pace, head bent downward, eyes following the tracks made by two horses. The gelding, which he led, followed with sagging head and lack lustre eyes. It was Grey Cloud, but he appeared to possess the chameleon power of changing colour, for now he was the colour of old brickwork, and his hair was matted and caked hard with the dust a thousand animals had raised in their race for life.

  Grey Cloud then could neither gallop, nor canter, nor trot. His big heart was almost broken, and if he could not drink before night fell he would lie down never more to rise. Bony’s supply of water would not have filled a pint pannikin, and if he did not reach water by nightfall, then shortly after the dawn of the next day he would lose his reason, gradually discard his boots and his clothes, stagger a little way naked, and fall down on his face never again to rise and walk.

  Yet still he possessed hope. He had circled in a great arc, and so had cut the partners’ tracks. Then he had followed them across the gibber-littered plain, where for long distances the tracks were invisible to a white man’s eyes, where the only indication of the passing of the men he sought was a freshly disturbed stone moved by a horse’s hoof. Those tracks must lead him to water eventually, for the horses ridden by Dot and Dash could not exist without a drink at least once in the twenty-four hours.

  Bony’s head ached. His eyes felt like twin balls of simmering fire. It was far too agonizing to raise his head and look out over the plain that jazzed in the heated air. The silence of the world was that of the King’s Chamber in the Pyramid of Cheops, and when Grey Cloud plaintively whinnied the low musical cry startled the half-caste and caused him to stumble. Even then he dared not subject his tortured eyes to the glare of the plain. A whistling breath fanned his neck, and he became aware that Grey Cloud was very close behind him and was suddenly excited.

  Then it was he forced himself to look up, and between blinking eyelids he saw a scattered clump of dwarfed scrub-trees a hundred yards ahead, and the forms of two horses tethered each to a tree. Grey Cloud tried to whinny again, but it was an imitation of water being sucked out of a sink. Now he was level with his master, now he pulled on the reins, now he was attempting to run forward; for among the trees lay a wide slab of ro
ck, at whose foot aboriginals had laboriously widened a long crack in the rock that supported the slab.

  Whilst partly controlling his horse, Bony untied one end of the long neck-rope brought for the purpose to tether him to a tree, and during the last frantic dash the animal made towards the rock-hole, Bony managed to whip his end of the rope round a tree and secure him.

  “So they sent you, Bony?”

  Bony in a dazed way heard Dash speaking. He saw Dash as though he looked at him through slightly frosted glass. He tried to speak, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and, knowing he would be unable to speak unless aided by water, he struggled with the frantic gelding till he loosed the canvas bag, whereupon he drank some of the contents and spat out the remainder.

  “Give horse a drink, Dash,” he managed to force through cracked and bleeding lips. “In your hat. Two hatfuls only.”

  “Righto! But mind how you tread. The place is alive with snakes. Dot was bitten.”

  “Dot was bitten! Dot was bitten!” The phrase kept repeating, the consonants striking his brain with hammer blows. As through the frosted glass he saw a tree just out of reach of Grey Cloud’s hoofs, and, lurching to it, sat down with his back to the trunk; and only by long practice, for he could not see what he was doing, he rolled a cigarette. Slowly he smoked, his head resting against the tree, his eyes closed. Two minutes later Dash gave him a pannikin of cold tea, slightly sweetened. He managed a smile.

  “You and Dot are my prisoners,” he said.

  “I may be, but Dot has escaped you,” Dash said with his chin outthrust. “We got here early this morning. It was just as dawn was breaking. Dot trod on a tiny snake not more than six inches in length. It struck him above his boot, and he died in less than ten minutes. I did all I could, but he went out.”

  When Bony again spoke his voice was nearly normal, but Dash thought he was delirious.

  “I am glad of that, Dash. It was best for him and for me, although it was not a nice death. If the law had taken its course he would have been hanged, and in other circumstances you would be hanged also.”

  “I think not. Dot would have spoken,” Dash rejoined harshly.

  “Well, well! We’ll talk of it later,” Bony murmured. “I’m all in. Bring mc a little more tea, and give Grey Cloud another hatful of water. No more.” And, when the tea had been brought him: “Don’t run away, Dash, my dear man! I’d only have to run after you, and I’m leg-weary.”

  ***

  Four days later, when the sun was westering, Bony and his prisoner arrived at Carr’s Tank Hut. There was no one in occupation. The two men dismounted, and, after tying the horses to the hitching-posts close by, Bony with his head invited Dash to follow him inside.

  There Dash proceeded to make a fire, and was aware that Bony went at once to the telephone and gave one long ring, which was the call for the Windee office. The prisoner knew that to get through to Mount Lion police-station, Bony would first have to ring up Windee. Then Bony was speaking.

  “Yes, this is Bony. Yes, I have him here with me. Oh no, he has given no trouble. Does there happen to be a car or a truck available?”

  A long pause. Then: “Oh, then please send him out for us, will you? You’ll come too? Very well. All right. Yes, everything is all right.”

  Dash watched Bony replace the receiver. Then he heard: “Quick! Off-saddle! We must wash and shave and get into something clean. Miss Stanton is coming to claim my—yes, my dear Dash—you!”

  Chapter Forty-seven

  The Infallible Bony

  ON BEHALF of several politicians and more than one general it has been claimed that each was solely responsible for winning the Great War. All of which argument, of course, is absurd. The generals played their part equally and no more thoroughly than the privates in the trenches and the nurses in the hospitals. If any people did not win the war it was the politicians. Not because of, but in spite of the politicians, was the war won for the Allies.

  Father Ryan’s part in the war with the Fire Demon was equal to that of every individual man who wielded a bag and a fire-stick. Victory found him no less exhausted than any of them, and it was with a sigh of contentment that he sank into an easy-chair in his study after a hot bath and an excellent dinner provided by Mrs Morris.

  In the little priest’s world everything was well. Jeff Stanton was giving all his hands a holiday and a dinner the following day which would be talked about for many a year. The good Father had found on his return to Windee homestead that which delighted and astonished and perplexed him, for Sergeant Morris could be induced to make no explanation. Not only had he seen Marion regard her lover with shining eyes, but he had been informed by her that she was to be married to Dash as soon as a special licence could be procured. And lastly, to his infinite relief, Sergeant Morris had informed him that he had “moved on” Mrs Thomas.

  Whilst he sat and smoked a cigar, seated in the great armchair facing the window, with the red-shaded standard lamp behind and the excitable moths trying to come into the room and frustrated by the wire gauze screen, Father Ryan felt the luxury of eased limbs as well as that of an easy mind after a period of doubt and worry. On the table lay a few letters and several bundles of newspapers and magazines, but he was far too comfortable, physically and mentally, to deal with them just then. He heard someone, a man, talking with Sergeant Morris in the policeman’s office farther along the veranda, but this called for no remark, since the sergeant was often busy late into the night. The voice came to him in a low murmur for quite a little time. Then suddenly it ceased. The office door was closed, steps sounded on the veranda. His study door, which opened on the same veranda, was opened quietly, and as quietly closed, and when he lazily turned his head he beheld Mr Napoleon Bonaparte.

  “Good evening, Father Ryan!” Bony said in greeting. “I have called because I am in trouble, mental trouble. Will you render me help?”

  On his feet at once, the little priest smiled benevolently, and indicated a chair. He remained standing until Bony had seated himself.

  “Try one of my cigars,” he said in his clear voice. “They are a fine medicine for trouble.”

  “Thank you, but cigarettes of my own make are not so strong. Permit me to be busy for a moment.” Then, when the cigarette had been lit and Bony had inhaled deeply: “Whilst not of your particular faith, Father, the practice of confession interests me. I want to confess certain matters to you, and hope to receive from you absolution for what I have done. I am a weak man and a vain man, but I wish you to judge if my weakness was a sin or a virtue. You are not too tired?”

  “I am never too tired to receive confidences or confessions. Nor am I ever too tired to help a distressed soul. Speak on, my son! Francis Bacon has it that ‘the light that a man receiveth by counsel from another is drier and purer than that which cometh from his own understanding and judgment’.”

  Bony did not speak for a little while, and Father Ryan surveyed him with interest, noting his grey lounge suit, the dark grey tie beneath a spotless collar, and the black shoes. He wondered at Bony’s taste in clothes and the absence of striking colours. There seemed nothing odd, therefore, when the half-caste produced a card and, leaning forward, placed it in the little priest’s hand. For fully a minute Father Ryan read and re-read what was printed on this card. Then with knit brows he said:

  “You surprise me, Mr Bonaparte. I was not aware that you are a detective-inspector of the Queensland Police.”

  “It is part of my confession, Father. Only the police of Mount Lion are aware of my position other than now yourself. Before I come to the personal question I should like to tell you about an affair that happened many years ago.”

  “Proceed!” Father Ryan settled himself deeper into his chair.

  In concise terms Bony told him the full story of the stolen bride, and because the priest remembered odd details of the affair he found himself becoming deeply interested. Yet he wondered why he was being told all this in Bony’s low clear voice and
somewhat flamboyant language. His words came without hesitation or fumbling in their selection, and then quite suddenly Father Ryan was jerked upright by the calm statement that:

  “The stolen bride is Mrs Thomas, lately a visitor at Mount Lion; and the abductor, Joseph North, is Jeffrey Stanton, of Windee.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure,” he said, his voice lowered, his eyes for a second resting on the open window behind the priest. “There is nothing I shall say tonight of which I am not sure. The legacy that the affair of the stolen bride left was in the form of a document purporting to be a confession of the man to whom North took the girl for shelter. It was obtained by or for the girl’s mother, and was given to Mrs Thomas, as she was and remained legally, and a clever copy came into the possession of her brother, Luke Green, alias Marks.

  “For a while we will follow this Luke Marks. As a young man he joined the New South Wales Police, resigned to join the A.I.F., was granted a commission, and was wounded in the head. After the war he became a member of the Licensing Branch of the police and, using the power invested in him, gathered together quite a little sum. A subsidiary source of income was blackmail, and one of his victims was Joseph North, alias Jeffrey Stanton.

  “Both these sources of illicit income naturally would have an end. Marks was compelled to run from an investigating commission which, as is the way of commissions, would invariably punish a guilty man of low rank and whitewash as guilty a man of high rank. He determined to get out of the country, and approached Jeffrey Stanton for the sale outright of the forged copy of the document.