Smoke on the Bluff
ANYTHINGMOREBEENsaid about the gun going off?” Barbyasked, when they were eating lunch.
“Not a word,” Bony replied. “You make a good curry, George.”
A bag nailed to the window-frame of the hut would have darkened its interior against the flies, but the heat within was unbearable. They defeated the flies by making a smoke fire in the shade cast by the hut and squatting on their heels either side this small fire to envelop their heads and the meal within smoke.
“Only tucker worth eating this weather,” Barby said. “I beenthinking about that gun, and where it went off, and what wasworkin ’ up. Something or other will bust before long. You got any idea where that money couldof been hid?”
“Afraid not. It wasn’t buried among those dead shags.”
Had Bony been able to forget he was a horse-breaker, Barby quite unconsciously would have repeatedly reminded him, for deep inside the English Barby was ever the superiority towards the ‘native’. It wasBarby’s opinion that his own intelligence and powers of reasoning were far higher than that of the heathen, and this attitude amused and gratified Bony because it cloaked his work as a criminal investigator.
“I see you are going to trap the Channel,” he said, casually.
“Yair. I done a bit to the fence along one side and the trap, and I’ll finish this evening and start. What about coming in with me?”
“I’d like to. Seems to me you could do with twenty assistants.”
“I could do with fifty.” Barby tossed his tin plate to the ground and groped for the pannikin of tea. “You and me together can’t deal with the mob of rabbits round here. We couldn’t trap ’emand skin ’emfast enough to beat the sun. Then there’s millions right round the Lake what’ll be headed this way tonight for water. All we can do is skin what we can.”
“The ’roosare going to be a nuisance to your fence,” Bony reminded him.“Any guns with your gear?”
“Couple of Winchesters and a twelve-bore shot-gun. We’ll have to sit up most of the night to keep ’emoff the fence. Got plenty of ammo, fortunately. Blast! It’s hot, ain’tit. Don’t remember being so hot for years.”
Bony washed the utensils and Barby crossed to the trough and let water gush into it from the reservoir tank. The dogs loped over to him and plunged into the trough. He brought a bucket of water back to the hut shade, scooped a hole, splashed water into it, and the two cats lay in the water and rolled in the wet sand after the water had soaked away. The galah demanded attention and was given a wet hole all to itself.
Bony sat with Barby, their backs to the hut wall and with gum-tips whisked the flies fromthe their faces. Barby explored the possibilities of generating power from the sun’s heat, and climaxed the subject by asserting that the capitalists would never allow it.
“D’youthinkthe scientists will ever make rain when they want to?” he asked.
“Quite likely,” replied Bony.
“If they do, they’ll ruin Australia,” predicted the trapper. “What keeps the rabbits down, and the foxes, and the blowflies, and thekangas? Whatd’you reckon?”
“The droughts.”
“Course. If it wasn’t for the ruddy droughts no white man could live in the country, and theremainin ’ blacks would migrate to Blighty. Myxotitis! Rot! Just as well spray the rabbits with hair oil.”
“It seems you wouldn’t like the rabbits to be wiped out,” dryly observed Bony.
“Because why? There’s hundreds of blokes making a good livingouta rabbits and the fur, and while rabbits run there’s no excuse for any man to be out of work in Australia. I know trappers what take live rabbits into country where thereain’t any, just to let ’embreed up. Why not? Done itmeself, but don’t you ever tell the Boss.”
Bony laughed.
“The Boss would be annoyed?”
“He’d drop dead,” Barby agreed and chuckled. The mood passed, and the note of indignation crept back into his voice.
“Fancy wiping out all the rabbits what give rich women albino fox furs and coats, and Kohinoor mink and Alaskan capes and things. Fancy killing all the rabbits what could give cheap meat to the working people who got to pay four bob for a pound of measly mutton chops. And just to let farmers buy more cars and crash-bang boxes for the kids. And dirty politicians putting more and more racket money down south in wads we couldn’t lift off the ground.”
Bony thought it was hot enough without becoming worked up over a mixture of economics and politics, but the wads neither Barby nor he could lift off the ground spurred imagination, and imagination did help to make the heat bearable. Lucky politicians.
“Yair,” continued Barby. “Somethingwrong somewhere. Old age pensioners freezing all winter in their one rooms down in thestinkin ’ cities, and the politicians rushing round the world on holiday trips we pay for. Theycalls it the March of Science. What’s science done for us, anyhow? Me andyou’s still stuck here in this flaming joint, and millions of workers still got to toil day and night for a crust. Australia! Look, Australia would be the finest country in the world if it wasn’t for the morons running it.”
“Agreed, George, agreed,” murmured Bony. “Do you happen to see what I see?”
Bony pointed to the low dune barring the Lake from the creek. Beyond the dune a stark pillar of smoke appeared like a fire-blackened tree supporting a snow-white cloud. Together they stood, and without speaking walked to the dune, oblivious of the sun on exposed arms and the heat striking up from the ground through their boots.
The base of the smoke column was shot with crimson.
“Don’t remember seeing any fire alarm, I suppose?” queried Barby, his voice thin. “Better hop into theute and light our fags at the last ember.”
They shifted unnecessarydunnage from the utility. The dogs were chained. The galah was thrust into its cage. The horse was left in the shadow of the cabbage tree. Without undue speed, Barby drove the oven-hot vehicle over the sandy track to the homestead.
“Who was there when you left?” he asked.
“Lester and the two women.”
“Would’ve made no difference if there’d been a hundred men about the place,” Barby said. “All pretty old buildings. Bit of a spark… pouf… few ashes… all in two minutes… day like this.”
They passed through low scrub and over ragged ridges and the worldwas utterly still and strangely stereoscopic, the only movement being the twisting column ahead. They saw that the quarters were safe, and the tops of the pepper trees were thrashing in the updraught created by the red remains of the large house. The machinery shed and the store and other buildings were warped but not ignited.
Lester they found bending over someone sitting in the armchair on the veranda of the quarters. He didn’t notice the arrival of theutility, or of the travellers until they stepped up to the veranda and Barby said:
“You beentryin ’ to singe the flies, Bob?”
Lester straightened, and they saw the occupant of the chair was Joan. Lester’s face was drawn by obvious shock, and he forgot to sniffle.
“Yair,” he said. “Ma got caught.”
The girl stared at the smouldering ruin, her hands pressed between her knees. As though whimpering she said:
“I couldn’t get her out. I tried… I couldn’t.”
“I was sitting here having a cat-nap,” Lester put in. “I hear a roar and I thinks it’s a willi passing by, till Joan run over and woke me up. Then the ruddy house was going up swoosh, and there wasn’t a chance to get near it. Burned faster than deadbuckbush in hell.”
“It would in a shade temperature of 117 degrees,” agreed Bony, and Lester snorted without sniffling.
“Hundred and seventeen!” he echoed. “A hundred and twenty-one when I came back from lunch.”
“No one else home?” asked Bony, who had unconsciously taken command of the situation.
Lester shook his head. Joan repeated her whispered statement, then she sat upright and looked dazedly at Bony.
“I was reading in my room, and Mum was lying down in her room. All of a sudden I was surrounded by smoke and flames. I ran to Mum’s room, but she had fainted or something, and I dragged her off the bed, but I had to leave her. The house was crashing… I couldn’t stop with her.”
Smoke stains and ash streaked her face and arms. As she continued to stare at the ruins, Bony turned her chair from the picture of desolation. Her hands remained clasped between her knees as though to control theirtrembling, and he left her to procure aspirin and water.
“Take these,” he said, his voice hard in an effort to defeat possible hysteria. “Bob, boil a billy and brew some tea. Make it strong.” The girl swallowed the tablets obediently. Gently Bony patted her shoulder. “Cry if you can, Joan. It’ll help.”
He left Barby with her. Lester was making a fire behind the building. He crossed to the machinery shed, noted how close it and the store had come to destruction. The smoke column was now a thin spiral, and high in the sky the smoke had solidified to a huge white cloud. Wherever the overseer was, he must see that cloud.
Of the house nothing remained bar the roof iron now lying upon the grey ash. Even the three chimneys had collapsed. He was able to draw close enough to see the remains of the iron bedsteads and their wire mattresses, the cooking range and several iron pots and boilers, the piping carrying the power lines, the steel safe where the office had been.
Joan Fowler was fortunate to have escaped, for certainly she would have been given no more than a few seconds to get out of the inferno.
It occurred to him that the heat of the ruin was barely higher than the heat of the sun. There was no doubt concerning the abnormal heat of the early afternoon, and he could imagine the temperature within the house before the fire started. Even the bedrooms would be like fired ovens, and to lie on a bed, fully dressed, would be an ordeal. Joan had said she was reading in her room when smoke and flame surrounded her, and that her mother was lying in her bedroom.
That worried him as he sauntered about the huge oblong of grey ruin which had been a house.
On the far side of the site the few citrus trees were beyond salvation, and the garden was destroyed. At the bottom of the garden stood the fowl-house, intact, and within the netted yard were the bodies of several hens. Their white shapes drew Bony. He wondered if they had been killed by the heat of the sun or the heat of the fire. His own throat was already stiff with thirst.
Farther on beyond the garden fence grew an ancient red gum. It stood on the slope of the bluff and when Bony went on to the fence he was out of sight of those on the veranda of the men’s quarters. There was a gate in the fence, and he wasn’t mistaken by that which had drawn him to it. On the red ground was a gold ring set with sapphires. It lay in the half-moon depression made by the heel of a woman’s shoe, and because, as always, he had noted and memorized the tracks of everyone living here, he knew that the impression had been made by Joan when returning through the garden to the house, from one of the two house lavatories.
These structures were farther down the slope and fifty yards apart. The imprints on the path leading to each revealed which of these was used solely by the women.
He retrieved the sapphire ring, and remembered having seen this ring worn by Mrs Fowler. He recalled that Joan was now wearing her lounge clothes, a jewelled bow in her hair. Also that she was wearing the wristlet watch given her by Lester, and an opal bracelet thought byWitlow to have been subscribed by Martyr.
He followed the path to the lavatory visited by the women.
Behind the door, suspended from a hook, was an old and shabby handbag, and as he examined the contents his eyes were hard and his mouth grim. There was a lipstick in a studded holder; a gold-etched compact and cigarette-case; a few bobby pins; a bank-book in Joan Fowler’s name showing a credit of?426 6s.; and a roll of treasury notes bound with darning wool. And a gold brooch set with opals, an emerald ring, and a wristlet watch.
The jewellery belonged to the late Mrs Fowler.