A Night Out
WITHINBONY’SPHILOSOPHYof crime investigation was the conviction that if the criminal became static immediately following the unlawful act he had every chance of escaping retribution, and when this, rarely, happened in an investigation he was conducting, he countered by prodding the suspect to activity.
On his way back to the out-station, he decided on a little prodding, and the opportunity came at the afternoon smoko when again he met the two women, Lester, MacLennon and Carney, the men having returned early.
“Have a good time?” asked Carney, andMacLennon raised his dark brows and seemed to await the answer with unusual interest.
“Yes. Quite a change from horses,” Bony replied. “Helped George to trap and skin justunder two thousand. He netted the same number the night before.”
“My! What a big pie,” exclaimed Mrs Fowler, again vivaciously dark and off-setting her daughter’s vivid colouring.
“You wouldn’t believe how thick they are a bit away from here,” Lester put in. He sniffled before adding: “This side of Johnson’sWell they’re thicker than sheep beingdruve to the yards. And foxes!”
Bony, munching cake, was conscious of Joan’s eyes, but resisted looking at the girl in order to outwit the watchful Carney. MacLennon grumbled:
“And after what they said themyxotossis would do, too.”
“If the floods and droughts can’t wipe out the rabbits, the mosquitoes and germs haven’t a chance,” Lester said. “Look, four years ago there wasn’t a rabbit anywhere within a hundred and fifty miles of this place, and I hadn’t seen a rabbit for eighteen months. Then one day I saw a rabbit on a sandy ridge, and a month afterwards rabbits wereburrowin ’ andbreedin ’ like mad. Them city fellers can’t even imagine how big Australia is. They think the rest of Australia is another suburb or something.”
“And they won’t believe rabbits drink water, either,” declared Mrs Fowler. “When I said they did, I was called a liar.”
“Caw!”Lester sniffled twice. “Rabbits’lldrink water and they’ll climb trees and gnaw off the suckers and then go down to eat the leaves. When therean’t no grass, they’ll scratch up the roots. And wild ducks will lay their eggs a mile from water, and lay ’emup in trees, too. Won’t they, Bony?”
“Yes. And cormorants will fill a three-thousand-gallon water tank up to the brim.”
“Ah! You had a look in there?” asked Joan, and Bony now met her eyes and, while nodding assent, decided they were blue.
“George was telling me how it must have happened,” he said. “But what I don’t understand is why the topmost birds died there when they could have waddled to the side, stepped up to the rim and flown away.”
“But…” Carney began and trailed, and impulsively Lester asked:
“How far down from the rimd’you reckon them birds is?”
“Three inches. Not more than six.”
The almost colourless eyes dwindled, then flashed examination of the others.
“Them birds was down eighteen inches when I seen ’emlast.”
“When was that?”
“When? Yearago, could be. You tell George about that?”
“That the level of the birds was almost up to the rim? No.”
“I wonder what raised them,” murmured Joan, gazing steadily at Bony.
“Some chemical change which has gone on since Lester looked in the tank. The action of heat and the air and what not might have caused each carcass to expand a fraction.”
“Sounds likely,” supportedMacLennon. “I still can’t believe the yarn how they got there.”
“Give us a better one, Mac,” urged Mrs Fowler.
He shook his head, grinned and lurched to his feet. “I’m no good at inventing lies,” he said, and went out. There was silence for a space, broken by the girl.
“You sure, Bony, about the level of the birds?”
“Reasonably so, but I could be mistaken,” replied Bony. “I merely pulled myself up to look over the rim just to see what was inside. A few inches down from the rimwas the impression I received.”
“I expect the crows got at the carcasses and stirred them up,” Carney volunteered. “Say, Bony, did you ever see the sun suck a dam dry?”
“Only once,” recalled Bony, aware of the effort to change the subject. “It was one of those days when the sky is full of dusty-looking clouds that never pass under the sun to throw a shadow. I happened to be heading for a dam containing seven feet of water in a twelve-thousand yard excavation. It was 112 degrees in the shade, like today, and no wind. When I first saw it the water was being sucked up in a fine mist you could see through. The mist thickened to a light-brown rod, and then the roddensed and became dark brown, almost black, and suddenly it looked like a water spout upside down. At the top it formed a white cloud, and in two minutes the bottom of the rod was drawn up like those pelican chains we saw. When I reached the dam there wasn’t enough moisture, let alone water, to bog a fly.”
“It doesn’t often happen, then?” asked Mrs Fowler, keenly interested.
“So rarely that people who haven’t seen it won’t believe.”
“I believe it. I believe anything can happen in this country,” Mrs Fowler claimed, and Lester sniffled and told a story about fish coming up three thousand feet from an artesian bore. After that the ‘party’ dispersed, Bony satisfied with the initial effect of his prodding.
When darkness spread over the Lake he was sitting on his favourite dune well to the right of the bluff, and when the night was claiming the dunes, he caught sight of the figure stealing between the dunes and taking advantage of the low but sparse scrub trees. He thought it could be Lester.
It was dark when he moved. The light was on in the sitting-room, but the bedrooms were vacant. He drifted across to the house. There was a light in the annexe, but no one was there. On the side veranda the two women were listening to a radio play. He did not see Martyr.
In his room at the quarters, he stripped and put on sandshoes. Because the light in the sitting-room could reveal him leaving, he slid over the sill of the bedroom window at the back, and drifted down to the Lake to follow the flats to Johnson’sWell.
On arrival atPorchester Station, he was allInspector in an efficient police department, but quickly assuming the role of horse-breaker, he travelled far from that lofty appointment towards the normal occupation and status of the half-caste. When he started out for Johnson’s Well this early night on a mission of stealthy observation, he travelled beyond the half-caste to become all aborigine… save in the ability to assess the psychology and bushcraft of the white man.
The men at the out-station were expert in this bush of the Continent’s interior where open space separated the flat plane of earth and sky. They knew their stars, and were familiar with the importance of sky-lines… the shape of things against the sky… so that movement in the normal dark of night was barely less curtailed than by day. Set against the aborigine standard the bushmanship of these station men was poor, but none the less to be respected.
Bony followed the flats all the way till barred by the sheen of water he knew to be the Channel. This he swam and continued towardsBarby’s camp before turning ‘inland’ and so reaching Johnson’sWell.
Any tracks his sand-shoes might leave would be attributed to the trapper, and presently against a sky-line appeared the shapes of remembered trees, and then the short straight lines abhorred by Nature
… the shape of the hut.
Here he waited to prospect with his ears. He could detect the scurry of rabbits, now and then the warning signal made by a rabbit thumping a hind foot on the ground, and a methodical thudding as of wood on iron. This last came from the direction of the discarded tank, and he guessed correctly it was made by a fork or shovel being used in emptying the tank of dead birds.
He had to bring the tank to a sky-line, and because the man at work was almost certainly being watched, the watcher or watchers had to be located.
He moved in a wide arc to cut the drift of the faint air-current bearing the musty odour of the dead cormorants, and then moved up-wind, progressing on hands and toes to reduce the danger of crossing an enemy’s sky-line. Eventually he could see the level rim of the tank regularly broken when the worker tossed out carcasses.
In the air-line of the bird-odour lesser scents could not be registered. He moved to the right, and so was aware of the smell of a white man. The white man was lying against the steep bank of the creek, his head protruding above the bank, so that he had a clear night-view of the tank. He located the second white man positioned near the engine shed, and he also had a clear view.
Three men… one inside and two outside the tank… Lester, Carney, MacLennon. He doubted it was Lester among the carcasses because Lester hadn’t been carrying a fork or shovel when last seen among the dune scrub at dusk.
He returned over his course to cut again the odour of the dead birds, and then warilyproceeded up-wind to draw as close to the worker as possible in order to identify him on a skyline when he clambered out. And he had been in the selected position less than three minutes when he heard a suspicious sound… down-wind.
Bony brought his face close to the ground to obtain a skyline to see what made this sound, the air current passing from him making his nose useless. The place was alive with rabbits. He saw the skulking shape of a fox moving swiftly and with enviable silence, and was sure the fox hadn’t betrayed itself. Then he saw a shape without identifiable form, and knew it must be within a dozen feet ofhimself. It was advancing with extreme caution, slowly, silently, until its breathing identified it for Bony as a man. A fourth man.
Likean goanna Bony slid to one side, keeping that low-to-earth figure in view. It passed close by, continued towards the tank till it vanished in the complete darkness against it.
The fourth man? GeorgeBarby, or Richard Martyr?
The phrase “It’sgonna be good!” stirred in the well of his mind. He ordered memory to haul it to the surface while helay inert, vision strained to register any movement against his sky-line. The implement being used to empty the tank was a garden fork. He could see the load of carcasses lifted above the tank rim, see the fork shaken, hear the handle bumped against the iron to free it. The man laboured diligently, yet it was some time before Bony heard the tines scrape over the iron floor as though searching for something.
“It’sgonna be good!” Ah! An aborigine had said that nine years previously when he and Bony were about to witness, from the top of a tree, a brawl between two sections of a tribe. A dark bulge grew atop the tank. Before it became recognizable a greater mass rose between it and Bony… that fourth man… When the fourth man moved slightly to the side as he advanced, the shape on the tank rim was like an enormous spider walking its web. On dropping to the ground he vanished and the sound of his landing came clearly.
Other sounds reached Bony, soft and sinister noises culminating in a sound like a snake being slammed against a tree branch by a kookaburra. A man shouted the one word “You…” and then this same voice shouted “By…” Again the snake was slammed against the branch, and the man said softly this time “No!” as though saying it dreamily to himself.
There was a low scuffling in the black void against the tank. The man lying against the creek bed withdrew, rolling rubble down to the dry bed. Over by the hut, someone ploughed with devastating noise through the heap of tins and refuse. Then a shapeless thing loomed over Bony, and he slid to one side to avoid tripping the fourth man, who departed to the point from which he had first appeared. Thereafter there was nothing but the soft movements of the rabbits and the incessant conversation by the birds on the distant lake.
Bony retreated, covering a hundred yards without creating sound enough to upset the rabbits playing all about him. Now on his feet, he strode to the drafting yards, circled wide the horse yards and the hut and so arrived at the Lake onBarby’s side of the Channel. He sprinted to the Channel, swam it with least noise possible, and began the four-mile journey to the out-station at a lope.
He had to be in bed before the men returned to the quarters, and first must ascertain who was about. That Mac and Carney had followed Lester, Bony was sure, but it could be that neither was aware of the other having trailed Lester. It could be that Lester had been trailing either Carney orMacLennon. Who the fourth man was, was a further item to accompany Bony as he ran silently over the flats.
The morning would reveal who had been bashed when he left the tank, either by his appearance or by his absence. Werehis own absence from the quarters discovered, the guise of disinterested horse-breaker would be shot to pieces.