Gripped By Drought Read online

  “Frank! Thank God, you have come!”

  “Ann! Haven’t they found him?”

  “No. We have only just got here,” Ann Shelley cried. “The car broke down. It would. But I brought Aunty Joe and Abie and Larry. They’ve gone in. So has Cameron and several of his men.’“

  “How long ago?”

  Mayne’s voice was quite steady, but Ann Shelley knew that he fought hard to make it so in this crisis. The light revealed his livid face, and the blood where a splinter from the wind-screen had struck him. It was the face of an old man, and almost she cried out.

  “Ten minutes,” she managed to say, unaware, like those two scarecrows of men, that Ethel hovered behind them.

  “We’ve got to reach the road before the others,” Mayne said sharply. “We’ve got to stop them messing up the boy’s tracks if he crossed the road.”

  He meant the main track from Atlas to Menindee, that track which passed through the Poison Belt over a causeway of logs half a mile back from the river. Its surface was deep with silt, and it would be impossible for the child to cross the road without leaving imprints of his feet for the veriest new-chum to see. If Little Frankie had not crossed the road, the search for the child would be comparatively easy, for it would then be confined to the lantana between road and river, or the clear flats on either side. If the boy had crossed the road and entered the lantana westward of it, covering many square miles, the search would be much more difficult and probably take longer.

  With a heart of lead Mayne preceded Todd Gray and the two women through the maze of lantana straight to the road, where they found men and lights. Above the wind they heard guttural shouting. The lights converged to one point. Mayne raced towards it.

  “Hallo, Mayne! Look! The lad crossed here,” Alldyce Cameron shouted. “Now then, men, spread out, and into the bush after the boy.”

  Here was the he-man in action, even in such a crisis posing before the women and men used to accepting commands. His magnificent figure was arrayed in immaculate duck. On his head a pith-helmet: on his feet white canvas shoes. Towering above the others, he personally dominated those around him. Every crisis produces a leader, as this crisis produced Alldyce Cameron, the battalion commander, as a leader–until Frank Mayne asserted himself. “Stop!”

  The word seemed to strike on the ears of everyone as a jagged piece of ice. Moving men froze into immobility. Cameron opened his mouth to bark a contradictory order.

  “If any man leaves this road,” Mayne snarled, his face working,

  “I’ll follow him in and strangle him with my hands. Cameron, you are a fool! Would you have a crowd of men rush in there and trample out the child’s tracks? Hi, there! Aunty Joe! Abie! Larry! To me!”

  Aunty Joe and the two bucks ran to Mayne.

  “Abie, take a lamp. You take a lamp too, Larry. Aunty Joe, if you can’t track Little Frankie no one can. You three have got to find him quick. Here, Abie, take this box of matches in case the wind blows out the lamps.”

  Aunty Joe crouched over the line of distinct little boot impressions, a buck on either side of her, their lamps lowered close to the ground. Looking like grotesque, semi-human animals, the three ran off the road. The first lantana bush wiped out the lighted lamps and those three human bloodhounds from the vision of the small crowd. For a moment adjoining bushes were revealed in the lamplight. The lantana became a high, dense black wall.

  How long they were gone Mayne could not judge. He heard a woman quietly sobbing, and another woman’s voice consoling her. He saw the shape of a tall woman standing beside Cameron, but did not notice that Cameron held her hand. He knew that Ann Shelley stood on his left, and that Feng was standing on his right. Time had stopped.

  Presently he said:

  “How long have they been gone?”

  Feng answered him. “Twenty-five minutes. Take a grip of yourself, Frank, old man!…”

  At long last! After uncounted years! Some one shouted triumph. From the black wall of lantana, two hundred yards distant, lights winked out. Three forms were revealed coming along the road toward them. The witnesses rushed to meet Aunty Joe and her escort, Mayne foremost.

  He saw Aunty joe’s ebony face, saw with amaze the tears sliding down her round fat cheeks. She held Little Frankie in her arms. Ethel Mayne sped past him, outdistanced him and those with him. Aunty Joe held out the boy as though making an offering to her own pagan god.

  “Too plurry late, missus,” she cried fiercely. “Likkle Frankie, him dead with fear.”

  Ethel Mayne halted directly before the little body, to stand and look down upon it, motionless, unable to move.

  “I’m tinkit, missus, you all the same one big plurry fool,” Aunty Joe almost shouted. ‘You bin driven blackfellow from Atlas, and no stay here to run after Likkle Frankie. Aunty Joe never lose urn Likkle Frankie, my plurry oath! Him run and run and run in the dark, the banshee at his heels, and bimebi Likkle Frankie him see banshee and drop down dead. Good, eh? An’ Aunty Joe and blackfellow down on Tin Tin.”

  Voiceless, tearless, Ethel Mayne accepted her dead. She turned slowly from Aunty Joe, who burst into wailing sobs. She ignored Alldyce Cameron, who would have taken the body from her. And so she came face to face with her husband. For perhaps twenty seconds husband and wife stared stonily at each other. Mayne was unable to speak, unable to move. He was a man of ice. Only his brain was alive.

  The light from several lamps fell on them and on the dead child in Ethel’s arms. Strong she must have been during those terrible moments. Feng’s hands gripped Mayne’s left arm. On his other side came Eva, supported by Mary O’Doyle. Ethel, seeing Eva, took three steps towards the maid, holding out the body for her to see the more clearly.

  “You murderess!” she cried softly but distinctly.

  And Eva, looking down on the bloodstained, dust-stained little face, looking down at the wide and fixed blue eyes in which remained that last supreme terror, threw back her head and shrieked and shrieked.

  3

  Little Frankie was buried beside Old Man Mayne in the Atlas cemetery, which was situated a quarter of a mile up the creek, beyond the shearing shed. It was impossible to obtain the services of a minister, and the Police Sergeant, who came from Menindee, read the service. Apart from Aunty Joe, who watched from a distance, he was the only person present who cried. Ann Shelley, doubly shocked by Frank’s appearance and the tragedy, remained dry-eyed. Ethel moved and looked as a woman of marble.

  Mayne stayed three days at Atlas after the funeral. He had done no labour after making the tiny coffin for his son. He came to Feng in the office, a human travesty of what he had been.

  “I can’t stop here any longer,” he said dully. “Ethel does little else but curse Atlas, and Australia, and me for bringing the lad and her out here. She will not permit me to console her, nor does she think I need consoling. If only she would weep: if only I could weep! Todd and I are going back to White Well. Should she need me, ring me up.”

  Feng nodded sympathetic assent. At the doorway Mayne paused and looked up to say:

  “After all, Todd Gray was right. The bush is a jealous mistress. I deserted her for three years, and she has avenged herself by ruining Atlas and killing my boy.”

  And in that mood he had gone back to his sheep, to slave through the red-hot days, cutting scrub with an axe whose blade it was impossible to touch.

  Of Ethel Mayne Feng saw nothing during the following weeks. Since she had refused Eva entry to Government House, since Eva had no friends in Australia to whom she could go, and since she was verging on a nervous breakdown, Feng willingly consented that Mary O’Doyle should have the girl with her. It was the ninth day after Little Frankie’s death that Mary said to Feng, when she was clearing away the after-dinner coffee-things:

  “Will ye consent to see Eva, Misther Feng? The maid ’as bin arsting to have worrd with ye all this blessed day.”

  “Certainly, Mary: bring her here.”

  Not a little to his surpri
se, Eva appeared without sign of the hysteria which had so worried Mary, but her big hazel eyes were misty and red-rimmed through constant crying. Smiling cheerfully on her, Feng drew up a chair for her so that they sat almost knee to knee sideways to the table, on which Feng had just placed writing materials.

  “Eva,” he said softly, when the door had closed on Mary O’Doyle, who for the very first time knelt on the floor and held her ear to the keyhole, “Eva, you must try not to take this thing too much to heart. No one for a moment believes that you were wilfully neglectful. I am sure Mr. Mayne doesn’t, and Mrs. Mayne will not either when she has conquered her very natural grief.”

  In Eva’s eyes now burned a strange light. Her tragic face then was beautiful, despite the red-trimmed eyes.

  “Thank you for letting me speak to you, Mr. Feng,” she. said with obvious difficulty. “I wanted to talk to someone. I feel I must talk to someone who might understand, or I shall go mad. You have always been kind to me, and I–I must tell the truth. When you say that no one thinks I was wilfully neglectful, you may be right; but I was wilfully neglectful all the same. If I tell you about it, I-Imay not go on having the dreadful dreams.”

  “Tell me, by all means. Likely enough, I shall be a more impartial judge of you than you are yourself.”

  Subconsciously Feng drew towards him the blotter and picked up a pencil. Subconsciously, the moment he removed his gaze from her face, he began to draw meaningless figures on the blotter. And when Eva had spoken three sentences he began to make shorthand notes.

  “I read in a book once,” Eva said, her voice still flat, “hat if a woman loves a man she will never betray him, no matter what he does to her. Books are wrong. I am going to prove it, for I hate the man I once loved so much that I would have done anything to please him.

  “We were on our way, Mr. Feng, as you know, to lay flowers on Old John’s grave. Little Frankie was upset because Beelzebub had gone off hunting. He was still upset when we reached the Rest House, and found there Mr. Cameron sitting on the dead tree.

  “We had often met him there. He made love to me. I-I worshipped the ground he trod on. He told me that I was beautiful and–and desirable, and–and he made love to me. How could I think of Tom when Alldyce kissed me? It wasn’t because Alldyce is a gentleman, that he has plenty of money and Tom only has little, that I let him kiss me and love me. You see, I couldn’t help it. He is so handsome and gentle, and his voice thrilled me, and his touch almost made me faint.

  “That afternoon we didn’t have much time, for it was late. I told Alldyce so, but he laughed, and said the flowers could wait for another day, and he took Little Frankie from the push-cart because the boy wanted to get out. He kept calling for Beelzebub.

  “Let him play around for a bit, dear,” Alldyce said, and then he drew me down into his arms. Even as he kissed and kissed me I heard Little Frankie calling for the dog and–and I never thought he would run away to find him.

  “But he did. When Mr. Cameron released me, when I-I sort of came round, Little Frankie had vanished. It seemed only a few seconds before that I heard him shouting for Beelzebub. Mr. Cameron said: ‘Why, the little brat has gone off home!’ I jumped up and ran along the river path as far as the homestead end of the lantana, and couldn’t see him. From there I could see over clear ground right to the garden fence.

  “I flew back to the Rest House. Mr. Cameron then was down in the river bed crossing to his horse. I screamed at him to come back, and when he did I told him that Little Frankie hadn’t gone home.

  “‘Well, he cannot have gone far, Eva. I’ll look for him,’ he said crossly. ‘You stay here, or you’ll get lost too.’

  “He was away ever so long. I got so frightened. I didn’t know what to do. And presently he came back with a scared look in his face.

  “‘I can’t find him,’ he said. ‘You run home and tell Mrs. Mayne and everyone that you were sitting here and saw something moving about on the opposite side of the river which interested you, and when you looked round Little Frankie was nowhere to be seen.’

  “‘Very well,’ I agreed, and was going to run to the house when he stopped me, saying: ‘Now remember, Eva dear. Don’t tell anyone I was here with you. It will look bad. Remember that. Now, off you go as hard as you can run’.”

  Eva paused in her confession. Feng’s pencil stopped.

  When he looked at her he noted the hardness that had crept into her eyes. Her voice was stronger when she resumed.

  “You see, Mr. Feng, don’t you, how it was? While Little Frankie was running about crying for his mummy, while I was rushing to the homestead for help, Alldyce was slinking back to his home. If he had stopped to search he might have found Little Frankie. Don’t you think so?”

  “It is more than likely, Eva,” Feng confirmed in icy tones.

  “He said he loved me’“ the girl went on. “Yet in my trouble he hasn’t come forward to share the blame with me. No. He kept back.

  He’s left me to face it all by myself. It is not fair. What is the use of a man being a gentleman if he can’t do what–what Tom would have done? That’s all, Mr. Feng. Thank you for listening to me. I do hope those awful dreams won’t come again. Do you think they will, now I’ve confessed?”

  “No, Eva, I am sure of it,” he told her earnestly.. “You do not love Cameron any more?” “I-I hate him. And yet–and yet, if he called me, I mightn’t be able to stop going to him.”

  “He will not call you, Eva. Just wait a moment.”

  Feng hurriedly transcribed his notes and rang for Mary O’Doyle. Mary crept along the passage to her kitchen, thence to return with her usual heavy tread. On her entrance Feng said:

  “Just sign your name here, Eva.” And when she had done so without the slightest protest, though she wondered, Feng got Mary to scratch her signature to accompany his own in witness.

  “That will be all, Mary,” he said quietly, with a significant look. To Eva he said, when Mary had left:

  “You loved Tom Mace once, did you not?” “Yes.”

  “Deep down in your heart you love him still, don’t you?” “I–don’t know.”

  “But you really do, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Of course you do. You were merely infatuated with Cameron, that is all. That sort of love has no depth and doesn’t last. Now I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. To-morrow Miss Shelley will call and you will go with her to Tin Tin. Yesterday she rang me up, and among other things she told me that her companion had to leave to go to her sick mother. I suggested to Miss Shelley that you take her place. You will be happy again with Miss Shelley, because she is the most understanding woman on this earth. Wait, please! When Tom Mace comes in again, I’ll get him here and tell him about everything you have told me. I know Tom as well, if not better, than you do. I know he will forgive you. If I don’t tell him, you will have to some time. You cannot have it on your mind between you. And when the drought breaks you and he shall have a home. Mr. Mayne has promised. Now I give you my promise as well. You will agree?”

  “Oh, Mr. Feng, yes!” and Eva at last cried.

  Feng himself escorted Eva to Mary O’Doyle’s sitting-room. He waited then half an hour before ringing for his housekeeper, foster-mother, and slave.

  “Close the door, Mary, please.”

  She did so.

  “Mary,” he said, leaning back in his chair and looking up into her weather-beaten, likeable face, “Mary, you will do nothing to Mr. Alldyce Cameron. You will leave Mr. Alldyce Cameron to me. Woman, I read your mind as easily as I knew that you were listening at the keyhole. You would like to lay those capable hands on Mr. Alldyce Cameron and cause him acute suffering, wouldn’t you? But”–slowly–“you will have to leave him to me. I hope that is understood?”

  “Indade it is, Misther Feng. But it was the first time I listened. I had to. I knew the child ’ad somethin’ on her poor mind. The blackguard! Mr. Halldyce––”

  “You w
ill leave him to me, Mary. Good night!”

  Looking down into the black, blazing eyes, Mary O’Doyle received comfort. She was satisfied that she could leave Mr. Alldyce Cameron to Feng Ching-wei.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CAMERON’S GREATEST TRIUMPH

  I

  ALLDYCE CAMERON was able to leave Thuringah Station two days before Christmas. His company had given him a month’s notice to leave, or to accept a sixty per cent. cut in his salary of six hundred a year. And he had determined to do one of two things: accept the cut, or get away–with Ethel Mayne.

  The newly risen sun already was blazing hot when he drove a new car down-river to Atlas. He, being on the east side, secured no advantage from the long shadows cast westward by the river gums, but as usual he was cool, and exhilarated to the point of intoxication by the imminence of his greatest conquest. Woman, his god, was about to bestow on him her greatest favour. Opposite the homestead of Atlas he swung the car round, facing Menindee, and stopped it.

  Then his heart quickened, his lips parted to emit a sigh of utter satisfaction, his eyes shone with desire, when he saw hastening across the dry river-bed Ethel Mayne, carrying but one suitcase. Impulse seized him to shout exultantly when he dashed down the steep bank to meet her. He commanded the strength of a giant when he swept her off her feet into his arms and carried her up the bank to the car. His face flushed a deep red, he set her down in the seat beside the wheel, sprang in himself, slammed shut the door, geared in, and drove recklessly northward.

  Neither was conscious of hearing four kookaburras vying with one another in mocking laughter, nor did either of them see Feng Ching-wei standing behind his open bedroom window and smiling that suave smile of his.

  “Where was Mayne when you left, sweetheart?” Cameron murmured, with Ethel leaning against him.

  “Oh! He was out at some place with his wretched sheep. Must we discuss him this wonderful morning?” He laughed gaily.