Bushranger of the Skies

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Chapter Twenty

  Intrusion

  “LIE still,” hissed Burning Water.

  His big black body appeared to hover over the slighter man. Seizing the ankle of the bitten foot, he dragged Bony from under the fallen tree and into the clear light of early evening. From his dillybag he snatched his blade razor and opened it with his teeth as his left hand remained fast to the ankle to stop the circulation. He cut twice, deeply. No more than four seconds had passed.

  The dusk was deepening, the walls and floor of the gutter becoming a pasty, shadowless grey. Bony lay passive, fear of death submerged by the greater fear of being unable to go on to Flora’s rescue. Burning Water crouched over the foot and sucked and sucked till the muscles of his mouth ached.

  “Give me the handkerchief,” he urged. He knotted the handkerchief with his free hand and his teeth, then twisted a stick in it to tighten it. “The snake missed biting a vein by the width of a finger nail. How do you feel?”

  “All right. The poison is very rapid.”

  “A few minutes at longest if not conquered.”

  Slowly he raised himself and peered across the flat expanse of the plain and upward at the land slope. The colour of the world now was the uniform pale purple of the great patches of the tiny creeper-flower. The only living things he saw were two eagles floating like sand-grains in the green sky and the rabbits in the vicinity of their burrow. Then he ducked down into the gutter.

  Beyond the nearest angle of the gutter a black head had begun to rise above ground level. Round that corner was at least one Illprinka man. Burning Water bent over Bony to whisper.

  “Illprinka man just round the corner. He must have come along the gutter from the middle of the valley. He saw the aeroplane drop the message, or rather he saw something drop from it, and he’s been watching it and waiting for dark to get it. Lie still. You’ve got your pistol. I’m going to see how many there are.”

  “All right. No shooting if possible.”

  On his hands and knees Burning Water crept along the gutter. When he reached the corner he rose on bent legs and crept slowly forward round the angle. Inch by inch he negotiated that angle until he saw two naked aborigines both standing with bent legs and staring over the ground towards the message in the bag of sand. Beyond them the gutter ran straight for thirty odd yards. There were only the two Illprinka men.

  It was probable there were no others in the gutter beyond the next angle, but, as it was possible there were others, Burning Water did not delay. When he leaped forward he disappeared from Bony’s sight, and this moment was the termination of Bony’s inactivity. With the ligature about his right ankle his foot was “dead” and useless. He moved fast, however, on his hands and knees, looking not unlike an ungainly spider. Beyond the angle he saw a writhing man on the ground and two others in desperate struggle beyond him. The writhing man lurched to his knees, clawed his way to a standing position against one of the gutter walls, and then began to struggle to climb out. He certainly had received serious injury, and his mind was made up to escape injury even more serious.

  Bony grasped his legs and hauled him back. He snarled like a dog as he fell on the half-caste, and then proceeded to try to gouge out Bony’s eyes before Bony’s fingers choked him. His breathing was a harsh rasping noise. His eyes were small black discs swimming in seas of white. And then something thudded, and he collapsed on the fighting Bony, to be dragged off by the panting Chief of the Wantella Tribe.

  “There’s no others,” asserted Burning Water. “If there were others this fellow would have shouted. His companion didn’t get the chance to shout. I’ll get the plane message.”

  It had now become so dark that he had no fear of being observed from an appreciable distance. Back in three seconds with the message, he proceeded to drag Bony under the tree roof.

  “I have it,” he announced. “As you said, it is a small bag filled with sand and will certainly contain a message.”

  “Block up the gutter entrances to this hiding hole,” Bony suggested. “I’ll have to use the torch to read the message.”

  “And I’ll want a fire—for your foot,” added Burning Water.

  Lying on his side, Bony saw his companion fill the quart-pot with water and then place the utensil on a foundation of burning sticks. That done, Burning Water continued the blocking of the two entrances with leafy branches from the roof. Within the bag Bony found the sheet of paper and read, slowly, his lips bloodless, pain indicated on his face:

  DEAR GROUND PARTY:

  This is the eighteenth of the month. Loveacre arrived this morning, having been delayed by that windstorm. McPherson got back today, too, after having a lot trouble with the Illprinka. He was half way to Duck Lake when Rex flew over them and dropped word to say he had got Flora and would hold her in exchange for the station until six p.m. on the OMth. If by then McPherson has not sent up his surrender smoke, Rex threatens to take Flora blackfellow fashion.

  McPherson wanted to do this, but Loveacre and I dissuaded him. If you get this we will, of course, know your position today. We have two days to locate Rex’s headquarters and rescue Flora. The old man says we’re a couple of fools because, not knowing Rex like he does, Flora won’t be safe from him, station or no station. But we felt we must give you and ourselves a chance to rescue Flora and defeat him. Remember what you promised me if he harms my girl, so don’t be hasty and kill the blackguard. It’ll be my right to stamp out that dangerous fire.

  PS: Adding this whilst in the air. Have been over the cane-grass swamp. It’s terrific. Big enough to hide a million men. Saw no indications of any camp. Three smoke signals away to the north-west where that Duck Lake must be. We’ll come out again tomorrow, but won’t communicate without urgent reason. If you want us to pick you up you know what to do. Loveacre sends regards. He’s got the tat-tat mounted and I’m the gunner. Feels like old times. Good luck.

  “Two days, eh,” exclaimed Burning Water, evidently impatient. “Better make yourself a cigarette. Lie back. I want your foot. If Rex harms Miss McPherson, the doctor will certainly be given the chance to stamp him out. Come on, now, you’ll want the cigarette.”

  “I’m going to wait,” Bony decided.

  “Quiet. Too much time lost as it is. Lie still.”

  Burning Water pulled Bony’s naked feet close to the fire. Then he crammed his mouth with young gum leaves. Bony bit back a cry of agony. A sizzling sound opening the lips of the wound made by the razor. Into the wound he poured cold water from the canvas bag to cleanse it. Then with the finger and thumb of one hand holding open the wound as much as was possible, with the fingers of his left hand he picked up a red-hot wood coal and dropped it squarely upon the open red flesh.

  Before the pain was registered by Bony’s brain, he had grasped the ankles of both feet to hold them immovable, his jaws working on the mastication of the gum-leaves. Bony bit back a cry of agony. A sizzling sound came from the living coal, and a smell of burning flesh began to fill the chamber. Bony groaned. The agony seemed eternal and too much for his will to remain passive.

  Then with a forefinger Burning Water flicked away the blackening wood coal, and with his tongue and lips pressed the mushed gum-leaves hard into the wound. Off came the handkerchief to bandage the foot. Off came Nevin’s black shirt to add to the bandage, and then, whilst returning circulation increased the pain, he pushed Bony’s feet into the Kurdaitcha boots.

  “How d’you feel now?” he asked.

  “Give me a drink.”

  “I’ll make the tea. The water’s boiling.”

  The tea was made. Sand was thrown over the fire. In the darkness Burning Water squatted beside Bony and blew upon the tea to cool it.

  “Here. Take the cup and sip it. It won’t taste too nice. I’ve put in half a handful of box-tree seeds. They’ll act like a double dose of painkiller. Where’s your tobacco.”

  “I don’t want to smoke,” Bony asserted, his voice weak and filled with pain.

  “
You will smoke a cigarette. And you will drink my medicine. Then I’ll bring in the dead men and clean up. We have twenty miles to travel before daybreak.”

  “I don’t know which is worse, the pain of my heart or the pain of my foot.”

  “Are you drinking the medicine?” insisted Burning Water.

  “Yes. It doesn’t taste badly. It’s warming my stomach.”

  “Good! Here’s the cigarette. I’ll strike a match. Ready?”

  “Thank you, enigma,” Bony said.

  Burning Water tore down the screen of branches from the lower side entrance and passed out to bring in the two dead Illprinka men. The doctored tea was pleasurably warming Bony’s stomach. He felt this heat attacking the constricting pain about his heart. The pain in the foot was subsiding, the searing burning being submerged by a pleasant glow.

  “That’s done,” Burning Water said. “How now?”

  “Better.”

  “I thought that would be so. A little of the poison did get into the blood stream. I was too slow, and then those Illprinka men coming when they did delayed me more. I’m not as good a doctor as Jack Johnson, but you’re lucky after all. The medicine man bites the bitten part right out.”

  “Like chopping off a man’s head to cure his headache.”

  “Nearly as bad. Now, I’m taking you out of the gutter before cleaning up.”

  Burning Water assisted Bony from the shelter and to the level land, and then with a switch of twigs he smoothed away from the gutter floor all trace of their presence there.

  Bony could place his injured foot to ground only at the expense of additional pain. A strong black arm was round his waist, helping him forward on a tramp of twenty miles, to be accomplished before the next day lightened the sky.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Flora’s Awakening

  WHEN Flora McPherson regained consciousness she found herself lying between cool and clean sheets on a soft mattress supported by a brass-mounted bedstead. The bed was flanked by a table on which burned a petrol lamp, and by a dressing-table bearing a large mirror, and which obviously was a wood packing case covered with pale blue cretonne.

  The same coloured material draped the walls, being stretched from the ground of termite nests to the ceiling of what appeared to be stretched white canvas. On the floor beside the bed were blue grass mats. In a part of one wall the cretonne was raised to reveal a wide doorway and no door.

  Flora could hear distant voices but could not understand the language being used. A nearer sound, and one more persistent, was a continuous high-pitched whine which originated in the walls of the room. It was not sufficiently loud to be irritating, but was omnipresent and not to be shut away.

  Behind her eyes was a dull ache, and she closed them to find relief from the pain and so slept again. She dreamed fearfully of Rex McPherson standing over her, and of an enormous lubra dressed in scarlet, who was wearing a crown of white marble. It was when she awoke free of pain and normally refreshed that she knew she had been lying in the bed for a long time.

  The room was exactly the same. The walls were singing a little more loudly than she remembered them to have done. Nothing was altered, but there was an addition in the person of the enormous lubra sitting on the chair. She was dressed not in scarlet but in vivid green material which appeared to be wrapped about her huge body. Her crown of marble was her white and frizzy hair.

  On observing Flora looking at her, she rose with much difficulty and panting breath, and trotted out of the room, giving Flora a glimpse of another room beyond the curtained entrance.

  Rex McPherson! If the lubra had become real then Rex could become as real here in this very room. Flora’s heart began to pound, and that terrible fear, reborn, hurt her pounding heart. Her world of unreality was invaded by a cawing crow that came and passed on, sounding to her as it would had she been sitting on the south veranda at home.

  Then her mouth opened wide to scream, and her right hand flew to her mouth to stifle the scream. In the doorway stood Rex McPherson. Sight of him raised the girl high on the pillows. She rested on an arm in an attitude clearly indicating the urge to escape.

  He was dressed in a suit of white duck cut in military style. He was wearing white tennis shoes and he was hatless. His straight black hair was immaculate, in keeping with his immaculate clothes. There was no ignoring his undoubted good looks. Six feet tall and yet not lanky, he carried himself with the grace of his maternal forebears.

  Seen in the light produced by the petrol lamp, his eyes were black beads resting on beds of white velvet. His mouth was revealed by the white teeth bared in a smile. His nose was long and straight and his forehead was broad and high. There was strength in his chin. By comparison Bonaparte would appear nondescript, but Rex McPherson’s skin was much darker and appeared like chocolate laid on a base of crimson.

  “Well, my beautiful cousin, how are you this afternoon?” he said in tones like velvet.

  Flora’s heart was beating so rapidly she felt she was stifling. No longer wildly longing to scream, recognizing the futility of trying to escape, she drew the clothes higher about her and regarded Rex with that McPherson chin of hers most prominent.

  “Where am I?” was naturally her first question.

  “You are in the house of Rex McPherson,” he replied, continuing to smile at her. “I am delighted to see that you have recovered from the effects of the nasty blow given you by that scoundrel Itcheroo. I told him not to treat you roughly, and I regret not having taken him aloft before rapping his knuckles as he clung to the side of the cockpit. Would you like a cup of tea and something to eat?”

  Without waiting for her reply he clapped his hands and a moment later the enormous lubra entered, bearing a tray of tea and biscuits. Rex lifted the table and lamp to the side of the bed and told the woman to set down the tray. He whisked the chair to the opposite side of the table and sat down in it. Then he poured tea with the elegance of a lounge lizard. Rising to his feet, he leaned towards Flora, placed a filled cup near her and the boat of biscuits beside it.

  “I remember you like sugar,” he told her. “Two spoonfuls, isn’t it? Dinner won’t be ready for two hours and so we must satisfy ourselves with the biscuits.”

  Laughing, he sat down. When he laughed his face changed to emphasize, or rather to take on, distinctly aboriginal features. While sipping his tea, he said:

  “Now compose yourself, Flora, and don’t have hysterics. Drink the tea. Perhaps you would like a couple of aspirin.”

  He produced a packet and offered her two tablets, saying:

  “Three are too much for sober young women.”

  Without comment the girl accepted the tablets and swallowed them with a draught of tea. Her left arm pressed to her side, informed her that the pistol in the soft leather holster was gone. Her eyes were big and round despite her effort to control her beating heart, and between herself and Rex appeared the ghost of Itcheroo. His face was awful and he held high a mulga waddy. She saw her own ghostly hand and knew that the automatic pistol had been knocked away from it. Then the ghost vanished and in its place was the smiling face of a black devil. As though someone else was speaking, she heard herself ask for a cigarette.

  “Pardon!” her bedside visitor murmured and, again on his feet, he was offering an opened cigarette case and a burning match. “I did what I could for your head,” he went on conversationally. “I was obliged to cut the hair from the contused part of the scalp to place on it a salve in which I have great faith. You certainly received a nasty crack.”

  “I don’t understand,” she told him. “I can’t remember how I came to be about to shoot Itcheroo when he clubbed me.”

  “Oh—it will all come back, Flora, my dear. I sent Itcheroo to tell you that the dad urgently wanted you. In fact, I wrote a letter in the dad’s handwriting. My women found it in your blouse, where you must have put it after reading it. In the letter I—or rather the dad—asked you to accompany Itcheroo to Big Cape, where he and the bla
cks were camped, as he wanted you to carry out an important plan which would reconcile us. This plan would exclude further action by that detective fellow, who was to know of it only when it succeeded. It was quite a long letter. I’ll read it to you sometime.”

  “Don’t!” Flora snapped. “I don’t want you to remind me I’ve been taken in by such a simple little trick. I should have had sense enough to remember that forgery is second nature with you.”

  “Yes, dear Flora,” he said, purringly, “I am delighted to feast my eyes on you again. Your beauty is breath-taking, and it hasn’t reached its zenith. Damn it, I’m sorry I made you a pawn in my grand game with the old man. Still, even yet I may raise you from a pawn to be a partner, for the dad may continue to be obstinate.”

  “And if he is?”

  “Oh—I don’t think he will be.”

  “But if he is?”

  “If he is obstinate, if he does not send up a smoke signal announcing he will give me my inheritance now by six o’clock on the evening of the twentieth, I am going to make you my wife. I told him so in a note I dropped to him.”

  “And where was he then?”

  “About half way to Duck Lake. I tricked him with smoke signals, indicating that the Illprinka were about to hold a corroboree at Duck Lake. He fell for the trick even after I held him up on the road and tried to persuade him to call you on the telephone.”

  “That was the time you tortured him?”

  “That was the occasion,” Rex answered. “If father was only as wise as he is courageous, everything would be right in this very bad world.”

  “And you are going to marry me? Supposing I refuse.”

  “A lubra doesn’t refuse. She may resist—but not for long.”

  “A lubra! Me a lubra!” exclaimed Flora.

  Rex smiled and blew a smoke ring.

  “The word lubra translated is woman,” he said. “All women, black, white, and er—brindle, are lubras. As a matter of fact, my father and mother were married blackfellow’s way when they were children and when neither of them participated in the ceremony. Having foreseen the possibility of your uncle being obstinate, the Illprinka blacks were persuaded by me to marry us some weeks ago.”