Smoke and Flame
BONY CAME to the hut normally occupied by Dot’s old friend, situated on the north boundary of Freeman’s Station, shortly after noon. The occupant was not at home, and Bonyproceeded to water and feed his horse with chaff found in an outhouse and put the absent tenant’s billy on the fire he quickly made inside the hut. Whilst it was coming to the boil the half-caste interestedly glanced round to read what was to be read by all-observant eyes.
There were no blankets on the rough wooden stretcher. The ashes in the fireplace had been cold. There were no dogs chained up outside. Within remained the owner’s tucker-box and billy-cans; without there were no canvas water-bags. He had left after, and not before, Dot and Dash had called and gone on, for the tracks Bony had been following were obliterated about the hut by the other tracks of horses and men. Dot’s friend evidently was interested in sport and bushrangers, for lying on a shelf were several volumes of the late Nat Gould’s works, and quite a miniature library of Australian literature featuring Ned Kelly, Starlight, Morgan, and other eminent law-breakers.
After eating, Bony replenished the gelding’s feed-box and slept for four hours. Much refreshed, he ate another meal, watered his horse, placed sufficient chaff in a bag for twolight “feeds”, mounted a fence, set his horse in a wide arc, and picked up the partners’ tracks. It was then five o’clock, and he had left himself approximately three hours of daylight.
Now at a gallop, now at an easy canter, he followed after Dot and Dash with the sureness of a bloodhound. Placed at a disadvantage in that he could not follow tracks in the blackness of night, whereas the night would not prevent the quarry from travelling so long as Dot could see the stars, Bony determined to cover as much ground as possible before the daylight waned and vanished. Arrived at the northern boundary of this run he saw where a deep fire-break had been burned along the east-west fence. Ahead of him, to north and west, lay the vast region of “open country”, unsettled, unfenced, uninhabited. Into it had gone Dot and Dash in the middle of summer, when there had been no rain for four months, when even the seemingly permanent water-holes might, when reached, be dust-dry.
On this account the detective had no fear, though the country was strange to him. The partners would travel from water-hole to creek pot-hole, and hill range rock-hole. He would reach those watering-places by simply following their horses’ tracks. The possibility of the partners’ poisoning the water behind them did not occur to him, for that would be a crime no bushman would commit, no matter how great a felon and how hardly pressed.
That evening the sun sank into a bed of crimson down, sank deeper and deeper, whilst its colour changed rapidly from pale yellow to crimson, from dark red to dark amber before it vanished half an hour before it was timed to reach the horizon. Bony watched it disappear, noted the cloud low-hung in the west, noted, too, how the wind came from that quarter. For another hour he pressed on, and when night fell he had not come to a water-hole, and was obliged to tether Grey Cloud to a tree and offer him chaff slightly dampened from the canvas chest-bag, and the ration poured in a heap at the foot of the tree.
Over his little fire Bony boiled his quart pot and made tea, still taking it without sugar. After eating, he sat on the heels of his boots and smoked cigarette after cigarette, pushing together four sticks whilst the tiny fire consumed them. He sat and tended his fire in the way his mother had done-but not his father, who would have built a fire over which it would have been impossible to crouch.
For several hours he sat thus on his heels, his mind working on the rounding-off of this case he was engaged on. He fitted together the few pieces of the jig-saw puzzle given him by the sands of Windee, and added the remaining pieces fashioned by the magic of his imagination. He knew that his work had been good, that once more he had brilliantly succeeded, triumphed as never before had he triumphed; for had he not built a splendid mansion with a few bricks he had made without straw?
And the mansion he had built was never to be seen by men who expected to see it! He was to deny its very existence; further, he was to swear he never had erected it. He was to see men’s eyes cloud with cynicism, watch men’s lips curl in unuttered gibes, thinking they saw the great Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, the favourite of the men on top-the favourite, too, of the fickle god, Luck-brought down to their level by failure. And this was to be because of a woman’s beauty, both physical and spiritual, which acted on his scarred soul in a way no white man possibly could understand.
Even so, he did not repent his determination to follow his chosen path. Dereliction of duty, service to justice, was strangely absent from his reflections. He did not think, when he decided to hide his mansion, that he would frustrate the almost universal law of retribution, making himself thereby an accessory to murder, and the accomplice of a murderer.
He was thinking of Marion Stanton, and recalling the inward light that radiated from her, when he sank backward on the ground and fell asleep. The labour of the fire-fighting yet held its effects on his body and, for him, he slept soundly. He did not hear the slow-paced rhythmic thud-thud-thud whilst kangaroos sped by him in tireless twelve-foot jumps. He was unaware of the dingo that came and sniffed at him but a few yards distant, and then faded away in the eastern blackness. Grey Cloud both saw and heard kangaroos, dingo, and several foxes passing eastward, and he fidgeted because his eyes began to smart and his nostrils were tickled by smoke. The awakening fear animating the wild things, instinct making them flee rather than tangible evidence of the thing that reddened the western sky, became transferred to Grey Cloud. Several times he snorted and tested the neck-rope. Why did that man tarry when other living things ran? Why was it this two-legged god lay inert on the ground here in a land where Fear was stepping into its dread kingdom? At last Grey Cloud could bear it no longer: he whinnied long and loud.
Lying on his back, Bony awoke without other movement than opening his eyes. The stars he looked for were invisible, and sleepily he was wondering if this indicated rain, when his horse whinnied again. Bony sat up and, doing so, faced west. He could see the stark outlines of bush and tree, the trunks hidden, the branches forming a silhouette of domes and towers, spires and masts, and the filigree-work of giants, held against a background of vivid scarlet that gradually faded towards the zenith of the sky. The smoke-laden air was the colour of old port.
And the wind blew on his face direct from the west, a steady wind, stronger than it had been for many days.
Now on his feet, Bony examined the conflagration that he knew was sweeping towards him as fast as a horse could gallop. To his credit, he weighed his chances of escape whilst he drank the remainder of the tea in the quart pot and with long flexible fingers rolled a cigarette.
A probable twenty-five miles lay between him and the hut tenanted by Dot’s friend. There lay safety, for about the hut the land was free from grass, as to a greater extent it was free about the wells and tanks of Windee. It was quite possible for the fire to cut him off before he could reach it, and drive him eastward, where he would surely meet the slowly westward-creeping Windee fire.
On the other hand, somewhere north of him-indicated by the map in Jeff Stanton’s office-laya great gibber-stone plain where the sparse grasses and stunted bush would not feed the advancing fire. How far northwas that plain he did not precisely know, for when he examined the map he memorized chiefly the station watering-places. Anyway, Dot and Dash were riding north of him, and he had promised Marion Stanton to bring back Dash.
Two minutes later he was astride Grey Cloud, headed into the trackless, uncharted north lands. The fire-reflecting sky revealed the earth as though seen through dark-red tinted spectacles; it showed, too, the fleeing forms of many animals and sometimes the upright figure of a rabbit observingall this disturbance with wondering eyes which reflected the scarlet glow.
Unable now to follow the partners’ tracks, Bony rode a little east of north, rode at an easy loping canter, as though he were giving Grey Cloud gentle exercise. Even when the sting of the smoke noticeably increased he refrained from urging the horse to greater speed. Once they crossed a clay-pan measuring an acre in extent, and he was tempted for a moment to dismount on that area of bare ground and await the coming and the passage of the fire-demon. On foot he would gladly have availed himself of this slender chance; but the fiery onslaught, he was sure, would prove too much for Grey Cloud, who would become unmanageable, would bolt away and meet his doom.
When the dawn penetrated the smoke pall, paled its terrifying colour and painted it warship grey, Bony now and then could see between the trees the tips of high-flung flame in the far distance. The horse was going like a machine, but his breathing was taxed and the steady pace was beginning to tell at last.
Direction was no more ascertainable now than it had been in the starless darkness of early morning. Bony trusted implicitly to his bushman’s sixth sense, and when finally the sun penetrated the smoke pall, appearing in colour as it had done when last he had seen it, he found he was heading only a degree or two west of north.
He kept Grey Cloud’s head pointing in that direction, riding for a further half-hour, when the outward appearance of the gelding and the inward hint of sluggishness decided him on a “blow”. Pulling up his animal, he removed the saddle, rubbed the horse down with the saddle-cloth, and took a mouthful of water from the bag, at which Grey Cloud looked pertinently.
Within the bag was a little more than a gallon of water, and, observing how the horse regarded it and him, Bony hesitated, regretting he had not brought with him a hat. However, his shirt of stout calico served. Removing it, he first scooped out a hole in the ground, and, pushing the shirt over and into the hole, covering it, he emptied therein half the contents of the bag. It was barely sufficient to moisten Grey Cloud’s mouth, and Grey Cloud wanted more, but was refused.
Not now on the partners’ tracks, horse and man in strange unsettled country, the scarlet sun threatening to make the day unbearably hot, and a vast bush-fire racing on them, the unthinking might say that Bony did a very foolish thing, and the animal-worshipper pronounce it a noble deed. Bony was neither fool nor sentimentalist. He realized that he was in a most dangerous position, with the odds against him of getting out of it. His single hope of winning through lay in the stamina and speed of Grey Cloud. Of not lesser importance than the “blow”, taken whilst precious minutes went by, was the little drop of water given a horse that had not drunk its fill for more than eleven hours at a time of year when Central Australia is at its worst.
Man and horse delayed no longer than fifteen minutes. When again in the saddle, Bony could see on his left hand columns of smoke whirling upward against a background of dark grey. He started then to ride east of north, a slow loping gallop, and, whilst thus riding, numberless kangaroos, with an occasional fox, and, at lesser intervals, a dingo, raced across his path headed east, knowing not, as he did, that most probably the Windee fire spreading north awaited them.
The wind, fortunately, did not increase when the sun rose, changing in colour from crimson to deep yellow, yet in less than thirty minutes the oncoming fury compelled Bony to turn several degrees eastward. Anxiously he sought to peer through the drifting, stinging fog for some fortunate haven of refuge that might be presented in the form of broken clay-pan country or the gibber plain. After another twenty minutes he again was forced to alter his course farther to the east, with the racing fire less than a mile distant.
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 minutespassed, 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 becamean 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.