A Mountain of Fur
HAVING written his letter to the Chief Commissioner, in which he stated the blacks’ bone-pointing as a fact and not as a suspicion, Old Lacy considered that he had done his duty. He continued to worry about Bony, however, and Diana came to understand that her father had been captivated by the man in spite of the stigma of his birth. When Old Lacy suggested that she should spend the afternoon in the open air, she sought her brother and persuaded him to take her in the aeroplane to visit Bony and then-if it could be managed-theGordons at Meena.
At one o’clock brother and sister were in the air, at the girl’s feet a box of comforts specially ordered by Old Lacy. At four thousand feet the air was cool and invigorating, making her face glow, her eyes sparkle.
The sun-heated world so far below was bisected by the subdivision fence and the road to Opal Town that skirted it. The horizon was sharp against the cobalt sky and broken only in the north-west by the Meena Hills, lying like blue black rocks set upon a black sea.
Diana delighted in these air trips, and she adored her pilot brother, so different, immediately he left the ground from the seemingly carefree man whose laughing eyes so effectively concealed thwarted ambition. Never had her confidence in his flying skill been shaken, and up here, so high above the heated earth, she thrilled to the sense of freedom from material bonds.
Young Lacy turned round in his seat in the forward cockpit to draw her attention with a hand to something ahead of them. For nearly a minute she could not determine what it was he wanted her to notice. There was nasty lookingwhirlie staggering towards where Pine Hut was hidden by the timber-belt, and there were several eagles beyond the boundary fence. The edge of this timber, in which ran the boundary fence, momentarily revealed individual trees as the belt slid over the curve of the world to meet them. She saw the road running more plainly through the scrub to the white painted boundary gate which, from a pinhead, was growing magically into a perfect oblong.
Now she saw the abnormality to which Young Lacy had drawn her attention. Over the gate, and where the fence ran towards Green Swamp, hovered a tenuous red haze, so fine and so still that it could not have been made by sheep or cattle. Then she saw that this haze extended far back from the boundary fence, and her interest was increased to astonishment by the extraordinary number of eagles flying above it.
The road gate passed under them. The red haze was more dense at the gate, the road beyond was hidden by it and the usually sharp outlines of the trees were blurred. When over the border, Diana saw, partially obscured by the dust, what appeared to be a muddy stream of water.
Abruptly the earth swung upward on her right side. The engine roar almost died. The earth swung to for’ard and now there was the blur of the propeller between her and the scrub. The gate swung into her radius of vision, remained there for a little while, swung away and returned to appear ever so much bigger. Then the fence took position on her left side, and remained there with the tree tops only five hundred feet below. The ship rocked in the air pockets, but Diana did not notice this.
Down there against the fence the muddy water had resolved into animals. Rabbits! Rabbits running as close as sheep in a yard race. Outward from the fence the ground was alive with running rabbits, rabbits all running the same way. The rabbits had left Meena Lake!
The engine burst into its song of power, and now they were flying low along the road to Pine Hut and Opal Town. The girl could see beneath the red haze the army of rabbits crossing the road in the direction of Green Swamp, marching like an army without a van or a rear.
So absorbed was she by the animals on the ground that she failed to notice the birds until the machine almost collided with an eagle. There were hundreds and hundreds of eagles, like aeroplanes engaged in a titanic battle. Many came so close to the machine that she could see their unwinking agate eyes, and beyond the countless near ones could be seen countless others all the way to Meena Lake.
Young Lacy passed back to her a hastily scrawled note:
Too many eagles for my liking. They’re following the rabbit migration. Rabbits must be running into the Green Swamp fence angle. If the prop, isn’t smashed by an eagle you are going to see something that Hollywood can’t put on the screen.
The machine was now following one of the depressions. Like a main track it unwound to pass under them, and then Diana wanted to stand up the better to see that which opened her eyes to their widest. There was the fence angle up from which was rising a thick grey mist. The wings of the angle appeared to run into a dun-coloured quarter-circle. Then she saw the fence leaving the timber to cross the depression to the corner, and the river of fur flanking it, a river that poured like sluggishly moving mud towards and into a dun-coloured quarter-circle.
She saw the utility truck standing beside the campfire, and the men waving up to them. She saw John Gordon, and noted no one of the other three, before the world spun round and they were landing bumpily, rushing along the depression towards what appeared to be a great brown rock. Between this rock and the truck the plane stopped for a few seconds, while the pilot searched for a safe position in which to tie the machine. He taxied to the timber edge near the truck, close before a fallen box trunk to which a light line could be fastened to prevent awhirlie wrecking the machine.
In the silence so pronounced after the roar of the engine, Gordon’s voice was very small. He was looking up at Diana.
“Good day! Come to have a look at our rabbit drive?”
“Yes. It seems to be quite a successful one,” said Young Lacy. “Must be more than a dozen brace in the bag.”
“It-it’s terrific, John,” Diana exclaimed. “Why, look at the corner! They are piled in a solid mass!”
“A few birds about, too,” remarked the pilot.
“They have only just begun to arrive,” Gordon said, assisting the girl to the ground. “I brought Jimmy Partner and Malluc over with me, and the rabbits were then falling over the dead into Karwir like a waterfall. We’ve put up one line of netting above the fence netting, and it looks as though we’ll have to put a third line.”
Diana was so entranced by the spectacle that she failed to note the strained expression in her lover’s eyes. Speechless, as he seldom was, Young Lacy stood with the mooring rope in his hands, staring at the massed rodents and the mound surmounted by a frieze of living animals frenziedly searching for escape through the wire.
The task of mooring the machine was hastily accomplished, but Diana could not wait. She walked over the flat bottom of the channel to the fence, there to stand and stare and marvel. She heard Young Lacy talking to Bony and Gordon, but she was unable to turn to greet the detective so mastered was she by this drama of life gone mad.
There at Diana’s feet passed one of the endless streams of animals, hurrying, jostling, biting for space. They were flung from one kind of death to rush into another-the two arms of netted barrier. Farther out, tens of thousands milled and flowed like eddies in a steamer’s backwash. They completely covered the ground. They formed a cloth of fur, ridged here, humped there, reaching to the foot of the gigantic mound, crushed and suffocated at the apex of the angle where the topmost living layer was already nine feet from the earth.
Countless eyes glared upward at the girl and the two men standing on either side of her. Teeth worried at the wire. Teeth bit rumps and the bitten squealed. Mercilessly the sun beat down and heat generated by the massed bodies killed and killed. Like the plopping mud in the mud-lakes of New Zealand, units of the mass leapt high, screamed, and fell dead with heat apoplexy, to sink into the mass like stones. Death was busy among these animals so passionately desirous of life, and Diana felt strongly the urge to tear down the barrier, to give life with both hands.
“We’ll have to put up more topping, John,” Diana heard her brother say. “D’younotice any difference in the tide?”
“No,” replied Gordon.
“I don’t think the last of ’emhave left Meena Lake yet, according to the dust haze we could see from up above,” Young Lacy said. “That topping will have to go higher and be brought farther out on both sides of the corner post. Is there enough netting on the job?”
“I think not. We’d better get busy. Even if only half the rabbits from Meena run into this angle…”
Diana was conscious that the men left her, save one, but she did not look round. Something of the hypnotic condition of the rabbits seemed to be controlling her. There were other sounds besides the death shrieks of sunstruck rabbits. The whirring of giant wings was increasing. The excited cawing of countless crows created pandemonium. Even the wires of the fence on which she leaned vibrated from the constant shock of alighting birds.
The birds appeared to have no fear. Great eagles planed low to ground, their legs extended. Others stood upon the ground and thrust forward their cruel beaks at rabbits running past them. Others flew labouringly, low to the ground, their talons sunk deep into living rodents and chased by a brigade of crows blaring out their massed caws. The fence top was lined with birds. They strutted outside the angle, eagles surrounded by crows, eagles gorging, crows fighting in black masses for the crumbs left by the eagles.
The sky was etched in whirls, by the heavy bombers and the funeral-black fighters. And from the north-west still further fleets were coming to plane in great circles lower and lower to join the groundlings. When the utility truck was moved from pole to pole the sound of its engine did not reach the girl and Bony who stood beside her. Bony spoke and she did not hear him. He had to raise his voice.
“One would never think that Australia could stage such a marvel,” he said.
“No one would believe it unless he saw it. I wouldn’t.” Diana became aware of Bony, and her eyes tightened a little when she added: “Hullo, Inspector! Are you feeling better?”
“I am a little better, thank you, Miss Lacy,” he replied. “I am expecting Sergeant Blake at any hour, when I shall ask him to take me to Karwir for my things and to thank your father for his great kindness to me.”
The girl’s eyes did not so much as flicker.
“You are leaving? I think you are wise. Away from the bush you will be able to have proper treatment.”
“I have been receiving treatment from Dr Malluc,” Bony told her. “He has worked wonders with me. I am really going because there is no longer reason to stay. You see, I have completed my investigation.”
She stared at him, and in her violet eyes he saw tears. She spoke one word so softly that the birds’ uproar banished its sound.
“Indeed!”
Then she saw the aeroplane. She was standing westward of Bony and she saw it over his shoulder, a big twin-enginedmachine flying straight to land on the depression beyond the corner post. So loud were the birds that the noise of the engines did not reach them. Bony turned to gaze in the direction of her outflung hand. The machine rocked badly when about to make a landing, but the landing was effected with hardly a bump.
Now with their backs to the fence, they watched two men climb down its fuselage, and over Bony’s thin features spread a soft smile when he recognized the first as Sergeant Blake and the second as Superintendent Browne. There could be no mistaking either. A third man appeared, small and dapper, whose movements on the ground were sprightly. Bony recognized him. Captain Loveacre, one of Australia’s leading aces, had been associated with him on the Diamantina River.
The slight figure of Napoleon Bonaparte appeared to become a little more upright, a little taller. From watching the newcomers cross to the men at work with the netting, Diana turned to look at Bony. She was aroused by the look on his face, the look of a man seeing a vision.
So Colonel Spendor hadn’t deserted him because he dared to disobey orders! The all-powerful Superintendent Browne himself had come to Karwir to ascertain why he, Bony, had not reported for duty. They must want him badly down in Brisbane, for the Super to have come in Loveacre’s aeroplane.
They watched Young Lacy shake hands with Captain Loveacre and Superintendent Browne. They saw Young Lacy point to them, and then they watched the three men advance, Loveacre slightly in the lead. He had donned a straw panama, and now he was raising it to Diana although he continued to gaze at Bony.
“Good day, young feller-me-lad!” he cried to Bony before he could hold out his hand to grasp the one immediately offered. “Every time I happen to meet youyou manage to stage some kind of a wonder. Last time it was a flood of water and now it’s a flood of animals. And birds! I had to make a detour east, to prevent smashing a propeller. You are looking peaked.”
Bony smiled and the birdman was shocked.
“I have been indisposed, Captain. Allow me to present you to Miss Lacy.”
“Happy to meet Eric’s sister, Miss Lacy. Does Karwir often put on a show like this?”
“Only for Mr Bonaparte’s entertainment, Captain Loveacre,” the girl replied, laughing.
“Now, Miss Lacy, meet Superintendent Browne, my brother-in-law, who is having a flying holiday,” interposed Sergeant Blake.
Bony’s eyes went cold. He was, after all, not so important to the Criminal Investigation Branch. A flying holiday it was, not a special mission to plead with him to return to duty, the Commissioner giving him another chance.
Gruff and hearty, Browne acknowledged the introduction, nodded to Bony a little too casually, and then the party turned to watch the drama being played beyond the fence. And Bony was smiling, for he had recalled that Browne’s salary would not meet the expense of such a holiday and, moreover, that Browne was known to be a careful man married to a still more careful woman. He remembered his self-imposed task of acting camp cook, and, without a sign, he walked slowly and still falteringly across to the temporary camp where he filled the tea billies and set them on the fire. He was seated on Gordon’s tucker box waiting for the water to boil, when Browne detached himself from the group at the fence and came across on his tracks.
“Well, how’s things, Bony? Heard you were very ill.”
“I have been so, but I am round the corner and on the road to recovery. Why have you come?”
“That being a straight question, I’ll give a straight answer. The Old Man sent me.”
The large man, dressed in tussore silk, seated himself on the ground and rested his back against a tree up which ants were running. He began to fill a pipe. Bony smiled, wondering how long the ants would permit the Superintendent ease.
“Why did Colonel Spendor send you for me?”
“He reckons you would be of greater service to the Branch alive than here at Karwir under the ground. From information received we learned that you were desperately ill, that you were being boned by the local blacks, and the Old Man sent me to take you back. You coming quietly?”
The question was absurd. Browne weighed sixteen stone of bone and muscle, Bony weighed in the vicinity of eight stone and could not have resisted a child of twelve.
“And your informant-who was it?”
“In police practice the informant’s name is never divulged, as you well know,” Browne remarked casually. “When the Old Man heard about you he showed that he has a soft spot for you in his heart. If the Chief Sec objects to the expense of this plane trip the Old Man will be paying for it.” Browne knew how to deal with Mr Napoleon Bonaparte. “It’s going to be a wicked day for the Force when Colonel Spendor retires, Bony, and you and I will be losing a good friend.”
“I concur in that,” murmured Bony.
“Good! I didn’t doubt that you would. Now you pack up right now and we’ll start back. Loveacre says we can camp the night at Opal Town, using the Karwir private ’drome. You let up on this disappearance case. Not finishing it can’t be held against you. Then we’ll talk to the Old Man who will, I think, reinstate you without loss of pay.”
“You think he will?” asked Bony, his eyes shining.
“Sure to. Can’t do without you. Knows you’re a tiger once you begin an investigation, knows you haven’t any more respect for authority than a crow, but in his big heart he thinks a lot of you.”
Bony sighed. He was quite serious when he said:
“Very well. I’ll relinquish this investigation. You see. I am a sick man, and it is most difficult to work longer on it. I should like to write a line of thanks to Old Lacy for his great kindness to me. Have you writing materials?”
“Yes, on the plane.”
“And I have a few words to say to Miss Lacy and to Mr Gordon. After that we might wait here while Mr Gordon or Young Lacy goes to the homestead for my things. It is only twelve miles away and it will not take long. I shall be glad to leave Karwir.”
“D’youthink you were really boned by the blacks?” asked Browne, his grey eyes small.
“Oh, yes. But you will do nothing about it. The blacks have made me well by un-boning me. Their medicine man has done me a very great deal of good and I am infinitely better than I was yesterday morning. Now you get me the writing materials while I make the tea.”
From this task Bony looked up to observe the broad back of the Superintendent walking towards the big machine. He smiled, for there were several ants on that broad back. A minute or two later he beat an empty water tin with a stick, attracting the attention of Captain Loveacre and Diana, and the party working at the fence corner. When they had all come into the shade for afternoon tea he was busy writing his letter to Old Lacy. It ran:
Dear Mr Lacy-The Chief Commissioner has chartered an aeroplane and sent my superior officer to take me back to Brisbane. I should much like to have paid another visit to Karwir and thanked you in person for the great kindness you have shown me during this investigation into the disappearance of Jeffery Anderson. I owe more to you than you may appreciate, and I am happy to say that the Kalchut medicine man visited me yesterday and to-day and has begun to send me along the road to full health and strength.
Miss Lacy will inform you of the details of my investigation which will, I think, completely satisfy you as to the fate of Jeffery Anderson and the reasons why I intend taking no action against any persons. Anderson’s fate and the manner of it is better forgotten, and in this I am sure you will agree.
I have the honour to announce to you the engagement of your daughter to Mr John Gordon.
I am confident that you will be overjoyed by this announcement, for Gordon is a splendid young man and they are very much in love. I look forward to receiving notice of the wedding, when it is arranged, and to adding a piece of cake to my treasured collection of wedding cake. We are both getting old, and it is good for us to be sentimental sometimes.
And so, good-bye, or it may beaurevoir.
I have, indeed, the honour to be,
Most sincerely yours,
Napoleon Bonaparte, D.-I., C.J. B.
P.S.-I was nearly forgetting. During the course of the investigation, I learned that Jeffery Anderson was your son by a woman named Kate O’Malley. It puzzled me why you kept him at Karwir, why you treated him as you did. It was strange that his mother’s love for the Irish national colour was shown by your son in his choice of cable silk for his whip crackers. It is a sad chapter better closed. Remind Miss Lacy to send me a piece of the cake, won’t you? Hope you will be up and about long before the cake is cut.
This letter containing a hint at blackmail Bony placed in an envelope in his pocket-book with those five envelopes marked “Exhibits” from one to five. The men had finished lunch and were smoking, the girl was talking animatedly with them as she smoked a cigarette. Bony rose, saying to them all:
“I am going to ask Mr Lacy to fly to Karwir for my things, as Superintendent Browne wishes me to return with him and Captain Loveacre. While Mr Lacy is away, I should like to talk privately with you, Miss Lacy, and you, Mr Gordon. Please convey my thanks to Mr Lacy senior, and say that I am writing to him to express my gratitude for his kindness to me.”
“Righto! I’ll get going now. I’ll come back on the truck. We’ll want more netting out here and more men,” said Young Lacy cheerfully.
“We’ll go along and see him off,” suggested Bony.
Loveacre and Browne remained in camp. After Young Lacy’s machine disappeared over the scrub, they watched the girl, Gordon and Bony, walking towards the shade cast by a robust leopardwood-tree. Bony walked in the centre, each hand holding an arm.
“Looks like he’s taking ’emfor a little walk,” remarked the Superintendent.
“May be hanging on to them for support,” Blake said. “He’s worse than he looks. You can have no idea what he’s gone through.”
“He looks terrible to me,” asserted Captain Loveacre, “this boning must be a pretty dreadful business. What’s he doing now? Making a fire over there. Hang it, isn’t it hot enough without a fire?”
A spiral of smoke rose from the group of three. They could observe Bony inviting the girl and Gordon to be seated.
“I’d like to know what he’s up to,” growled Browne. “I feel that it was too easy persuading him to give up this case. You know anything about it, Sergeant?”
Despite the fact that the question was officially put, Sergeant Blake brazenly lied:
“Nothing, sir.”
Captain Loveacre rose to his feet, saying:
“Well, I’m going across to the fence. There’s much more of interest over there.”
Superintendent Browne frowned at the three seated about the little fire, then he grunted and followed the others to the netted barrier.
Hool-’Em-Upand Sool-’Em-Up stood regarding the retreating broad back, then they slowly walked along the depression’s bank to the party of three and went to ground close behind Bony.