Bushranger of the Skies

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Both men turned to stare at the apparition standing in the door frame.

  “McPherson!” exclaimed the doctor.

  The cattleman’s face was unshaven, dirty with grime. His eyes were bloodshot and singularly void of expression. His clothes were shapeless, torn and stained. On his left hand was a dirty bandage in tatters.

  “Hullo, Whyte!” he said, mechanically, whilst staring at the captain.

  “This is Captain Loveacre who has arrived this morning by air from Brisbane,” Whyte said in introduction. “Loveacre, this is Mr McPherson.”

  “Glad to meet you,” Loveacre said easily. “Take a pew. You look tucked up. Shall I go across to the house and bring you a drink?”

  “Nevin’s coming. He can go. What’s he doing here? Where’s Bony?”

  “You heard about Flora?” asked the doctor, and Loveacre went out to meet Nevin. McPherson nodded, and Whyte proceeded to tell him of the abduction, of Bony and Burning Water having gone to locate the abductor’s camp and rescue the girl from him, and of the preparations for Captain Loveacre’s operations. During the telling, the captain entered with Nevin and the drink, and the squatter was given a stiff glass of whisky.

  “So, Captain Loveacre, you are an airman?” McPherson said, having put down his empty glass. “Your trip will, I think, be for nothing. My son has won the game he’s been playing with me. I’ve no option but to surrender.”

  The flying doctor sat down on the corner of the table desk and lit his pipe. He foresaw the battle ahead.

  “Bony predicted that Rex would communicate with you. I assume that he did.”

  “He did. We were half way to Duck Lake when he flew over before we could take cover. He dropped a letter. He knew the moment we passed off the station land. He knew where we were from hour to hour, for his blacks dogged us. I lost three of my men and brought back two who were badly wounded. As the boys say, I’m getting old and done for.”

  “Not a bit of it sir,” Whyte said, roughly.

  “Well, anyway, Rex has got the upper hand with me, and with you too. If I don’t send up my surrender smoke before six o’clock the day after tomorrow he’ll marry Flora—blackfeller fashion. How does that strike you?”

  It seemed that already McPherson was sensing opposition to his determination to submit. Whyte accepted the letter offered him, and noted the fearful condition of the fingers of the right hand. Aloud, he read:

  DEAR FATHER:

  I have Flora. I admire her immensely. She is more beautiful than ever, but I am willing to exchange her for the station, lock, stock and barrel, as grandfather would say. If you send up the surrender smoke before six p.m., OM October, I will return her safe and sound. If not, then I marry her according to the somewhat casual custom of the blacks. What was good enough for my mother will be good enough for my cousin.

  Your affectionate son,

  REX.

  Loveacre lit a cigarette. He was the least depressed man there, and he said:

  “Well, there’s still two days left before the proposed marriage, Bony, and the black with him, will be within twenty miles of that cane-grass swamp. They ought to know by tomorrow morning if Rex is living about that swamp.”

  “What swamp are you talking about?” demanded McPherson.

  “The one at the western end of this valley, according to the map Bony drew and left with us. To me, as an airman, it seems the most likely place for Rex to have his headquarters. Bony must have his chance.”

  “Have his chance!” shouted McPherson. “He had his chance to stop Rex taking Flora, didn’t he? He knew what happened to me, because in spite of the wind my bucks read his tracks. He knew what happened to the doctor’s aeroplane. He knew that Rex was after Flora because I wrote a note and left it in the car at Watson’s Bore telling him so. And yet he goes to sleep and allows Rex to walk off with her.”

  “If there’s any blame to be handed out, I’m to take it,” rasped Whyte. “Bony was here that afternoon working on the map and plans. He thought Flora would be safe enough over in the house with me. She simply walked off with Itcheroo.”

  “And Itcheroo’s a corpse,” Nevin interjected.

  “More’s the pity,” McPherson ground out. “Anyway, matters being like they are, I’m going to send up the surrender signal.”

  Dr Whyte spun round in the doorway to shout passionately:

  “No you don’t. We’re not going to give in to that black devil. Flora’s my life, but as Loveacre points out we’ve got two days yet and Bony’s getting near that swamp.”

  “Two days’ grace,” the squatter said. “If you two knew Rex like I do you wouldn’t accept two minutes’ grace from him. The smoke signal is going up today, this morning. Rex wouldn’t expect to see it before this morning on account of the wind. He’s got to see it, or be told about it by his people, before tonight. Decent men don’t offer a baby to a tiger.”

  “You’ll wait two days before sending up that signal smoke,” the doctor said, levelly.

  McPherson lurched to his feet.

  “I’ll do what?” he shouted. “Who the devil are you to dictate to me in my own country?”

  “I’m O.C. Base Operations,” came the reply spoken with such steel coldness that McPherson winced despite his rage. “You blamed Bony for letting Rex take Flora. What kind of an ass are you to go off with a few blacks who were tricked by fake smoke signals? Your place was here keeping an eye wide open to counter just what did happen to Flora. You can’t accept terms laid down by an outlaw, a murderer, and possible madman. As Bony said, the only chance of getting Flora back is to employ subtlety. That’s what he’s doing. He and Burning Water are risking their lives. You are not going to act independently any more. If you even threaten to I’ll chain you to a tree.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Lizard and The Snake

  THE water gutter came down from the slope from the higher land, deep and sharp edged, passed beneath the massed top branches of a fallen gum-tree, thence zig-zagged wide and deep like a military trench far across the valley. It carried water only after heavy rain. The bed of coarse-grained sand now was dry and hot to the touch, for the sunlight fell directly upon it. Only beneath the fallen tree was there coolness and dark shadow. It was not unlike a war dugout, and there slept Burning Water and Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Now and then a blowfly droned in the shadow created by the compressed leaves of the fallen tree, clinging to the coolness, waiting until the evening to venture farther afield. Other flies, too, were grateful for the cool shadow, the little flies which are a torment to the new-chum. The only living thing appreciative of the heat of the open gutter was a small lizard no larger than a pencil and five inches in length. Down its back lay a bar of old silver. Its little legs and underside were clothed in the softest of dove-grey. Its eyes were pin heads of bright jet.

  It emerged from its hole in the side of the gutter, walked slowly down the side to the bottom and there halted and poised its head as though listening. It may not have been doing this, but undoubtedly it heard the occasional buzzing of a blowfly and the whirring of the wings of the smaller flies too faint to be within the scale of sound registered by human ears. The lizard ran along a straight course till it passed just inside the edge of the shadow made by the fallen tree.

  Much like a cat, the lizard began to stalk a fly. The distance between it and the fly gradually lessened until it was a bare three inches. Then the fly began to move its wings as though loosening muscles preparatory to instant flight. It still thought itself safe, remained grandly confident of its power to escape a thing that had to remain on the ground. And then the lizard jumped, and the fly was between its jaws.

  During the next hour it captured a dozen flies and made only two misses. It was a wonderful life, warm, crowded with good sport. Ah! There came another of the poor suckers to dance and mock. Down it came to alight on the earth. The lizard crouched and began to stalk, its attention concentrated on the victim. Eventually it leaped and caught the fly
, and in that same split second saw its own doom in the slate-coloured eyes of the thing which had been stalking it for an hour.

  The saltbush snake paralysed its victim with an injection of poison, just enough and no more to effect a paralysis. Then slowly the lizard disappeared down the snake’s gullet, to swell a little a short section of the eighteen-inches-long, light-grey body.

  It will be recalled that the great Alchuringa ancestor of this saltbush snake had been made by Pitti-pitti’s evil son. This specimen proceeded to investigate the interior of the dugout and those who inhabited it. The kangaroo hide dilly-bag suspended from Burning Water’s neck, and now lying on the ground, provided much interest for the snake. It put its head into the opening of the dillybag, thought better of it and passed on to investigate a partly filled sugar sack. The contents did not appeal, and anyway it was not so very hungry. It crossed the sandy floor to reach the huge Kurdaitcha boots removed from Bony’s feet. The smell of blood and musty aroma of emu’s feathers was truly delightful, and in and out among these boots the saltbush snake moved like a playful mouse.

  Of course everyone knows that a Kurdaitcha man is an evil spirit always wandering about the poor blackfellows’ camp at night. His evil is not very potent, but his presence is annoying and often has to be chased away. Sometimes he leaves behind one of his boots, the boots made of birds’ feathers and worn so that he will leave no tracks.

  Anthropologists tell us that the Kurdaitcha boots in the possession of the aborigines are too small for the ordinary man’s feet, and that in any case the wearing of them would not prevent another aborigine from easily tracking the wearer. This would be so were the wearer a white man, for a white man would walk like a bull buffalo and with about as much intelligence, treading down grass stems, turning over sticks and stones and so forth. Properly made Kurdaitcha boots will enable any wily aborigine to escape a tracking avenging party.

  The hours passed away into a cosmic silence broken only by the muttering of passing willi-willies until Burning Water yawned and stretched himself. He then had been awake fully three minutes, listening intently not for sign of hostile blacks for he would not hear such signs, but the alarm notes of birds. The birds were quiet or busy about their own affairs, and before he went outside he knew by their voices that the sun was going down.

  Quietly he rose and crawled on hands and knees down the gutter, passing from under the fallen tree roof, until he reached the butt of a solitary currant bush. Here he slowly raised his head above the rim of the gutter. First he examined with eagle eyes the flat expanse of the valley, and then regarded intently the scrubbed slopes rising to the high land east and west.

  He saw nothing of interest, no uneasy frightened birds telling of hidden aborigines, no smoke signals in the clear sky, no kangaroos running because they must. The hill range beyond the valley was painted with russets and purple. He could see no shadows, but shadows lurked in this bright world, shadows with flames in their hearts. The splashes of colour were vast. Away to the east ten thousand acres were covered with yellow buttercups stretching up the bordering slopes. The green buckbush covered thousands of acres lying towards the centre of the plain, and a tiny purple-flowering creeper lay like a magic carpet of old Arabia over the summit of one of the distant hills.

  When he returned to the dugout Burning Water was satisfied there were no enemies close to them, and certainly no enemy aware of their presence within twenty miles of the great cane-grass swamp. Carefully choosing his material, he made a fire which produced no smoke, confident that the hot air produced by the flames would be so diffused by the tree roof as to escape observation. On the fire he boiled water for tea in the only quart-pot they had with them.

  As Burning Water had done, Bony lay still, listening for a minute or two before finally sitting up. Suave and polished when in contact with white civilization, he was able when in his beloved bush to tense his senses to the acuteness of the aborigines, to see and hear and reason as they do, to be as close to their background as they themselves.

  This evening however his body was feeling the unusual strain of passing over eighty miles of bushland in three nights. He had been soft, he admitted freely to his companion, but he had not lagged. He had suffered much from the rigid rationing of his cigarettes, but he knew this rationing was doing his health enormous good. He had had to drink tea without milk or sugar, to eat flapjacks made only of plain flour and water, and once the roasted meat of an goanna, and even this spartan fare was not excessively distasteful to him because he dreaded a waistline.

  “Ah!” he murmured, and Burning Water glanced round at him and smiled in his solemn manner. “How does the world look to the birds and the ants, and the Illprinka men?”

  “It is a fine world and everything in it is peaceful,” the chief replied. “The sun will set in an hour. The land seems empty of Illprinka men, and the sky is empty of their smoke signals. How are the lungs?”

  Bony distended his chest before saying:

  “They feel as elastic as toy balloons. Phew! It has been a torture, the craving for tobacco smoke. I have tobacco sufficient only to make three cigarettes. If I cannot find friend Rex and obtain tobacco from him, if I have to go without cigarettes for, say, three days, I’ll be either fit for an asylum or able to run a three-mile race. Do you know exactly where we are?”

  “Yes. I came this way several years ago on a visit to the Illprinka. There was peace between us then. I should say we are not more than twenty miles from the cane-grass. When day breaks tomorrow we ought to be able to look down on it from one of the great sandhills bordering it along the south.”

  “Should there be much water in the swamp after the wet winter?”

  “Not as much as after some wet summers, but there will be plenty of water well inward from the outside. I have given much time to imagining I was Rex McPherson, as you told me to do, and the most likely place for a camp close to where he could hide his aeroplane. I think that where the hills end and the swamp curves to the south will be a likely place. There the cane-grass and lantana is thick and very high, and between it and the sandhills lies a wide claypan flat that would give plenty of room for the aeroplane.”

  “Good!” Bony said approvingly. “We’ll have a look at that place as day dawns tomorrow. What’s for dinner? Flapjack? I’m becoming meat hungry. That goanna was all right. It tasted like fish, but I want steak half done, with the blood dripping from it.”

  “We eat too much,” Burning Water said unsmilingly. “Our bodies get heavy with fat. It is good sometimes to live on the fat.”

  Bony accepted the cup of the quart-pot filled with tea, then broke the flapjack in two and proffered a part to his companion.

  “It is as well that we have good teeth,” he said, smilingly, adding: “Otherwise we’d want gizzards like the birds: I knew a man who once suffered fearfully with rheumatism. Do you know how he rid himself of it?”

  “By taking a gum-leaf oven bake.”

  “No, by fasting. He wasn’t a doctor, of course.”

  “What was he?”

  “A——Listen! I hear an aeroplane.”

  The chief froze. Presently he nodded affirmatively, saying:

  “It’s coming this way.”

  “We’ll go down the gutter,” Bony said. “It might be Captain Loveacre.”

  Crouchingly, they passed out of the shelter and down the winding natural gutter, careful not to raise their hatless heads above the level ground, peering upwards into the ribbon of sky their confined situation permitted. The machine was somewhere to the north-west beyond the edge of the high land towering above them two to three hundred feet. From that quarter they risked observation by Illprinka scouts, and, having gone a hundred yards beyond the fallen tree, they lay and covered themselves with the sand of the gutter floor. Until they saw the machine they could not be sure.

  Their problem was first to see possible scouts and not first to be seen by them, hence this clinging to the bed of a water gutter well below ground lev
el. If the plane proved to be Loveacre’s machine, then the problem was to disclose themselves to the airmen without betraying themselves to chance enemy scouts.

  “Look!” exclaimed Bony. “It’s Captain Loveacre flying one white streamer which means he wants to communicate to us important news. Lie down and wiggle about, comrade.”

  To ask a man like Chief Burning Water to lie and “wiggle” about at the bottom of a gutter would in other circumstances have sounded absurd. Burning Water “wiggled”, and Bony produced a white handkerchief and waved it energetically.

  Whyte saw the signal in time to drop a small calico bag filled with sand and containing a message. He made no sign whatever. His message fell within a hundred yards of the gutter. Continuing its course, the plane flew across the valley.

  “Mark the position of the bag of sand,” Bony urged, softly, bringing his eyes to the ground level. “We’ll wait till dark before we get it. Now watch for a possible scout who saw the bag and might be tempted to leave his cover.”

  They both guardedly watched the calico bag lying white on a grassy bed of everlasting flowers, and at the same time scanned the surrounding country for sign of an enemy. They watched for fifteen minutes before deciding that the message had been dropped unseen by others. The sun was then about to set, and Bony went back to the temporary camp and added dry wood to the small fire for the purpose of baking flapjacks. A few moments later Burning Water joined him.

  The flapjacks were baked hard just when the sun had vanished, and, with the quart-pot and the remainder of the flour, they were packed into the sugar sack which the chief would carry slung from his shoulders. With whisks of leafy twigs they smoothed out all signs on the ground betraying their presence there, and then Bony proceeded to put on his pair of the Kurdaitcha boots.

  He uttered a sharp exclamation.

  Burning Water looked up from lacing his own boots of emu feathers. He saw the saltbush snake fall from Bony’s right foot held high off the ground. He saw the snake glide swiftly away and enter its hole at the base of the gutter wall.