“It is all very strange. But how am I to get married when my—when Dash is being hunted? Oh, why all this mystery? We seem surrounded by mystery. There is mystery about you, too.”
“Well, well, it will not long remain so, Miss Stanton,” Bony cried. “I have already lifted the shadow a little. Mrs Thomas is leaving Mount Lion by the mail coach this morning. Sergeant Morris has discovered that, after all, he has no grounds for arresting Dot and Dash. And now I want you to loan me Grey Cloud.”
“Loan you Grey Cloud? Why?”
“Because he is the fastest horse in the western district of New South Wales.”
“Yes—but why?”
“Because the faster the horse I ride the quicker I shall catch up with Dot and Dash. And the sooner I catch up with Dot and Dash—well, the sooner you will be able to open that envelope.”
“Bony, what are you?”
He saw the trouble and the wonder in her steady, cool grey eyes; saw, too, how the corners of her mouth trembled a little. Her breathing was more rapid than normally, and her fingers played about the envelope they held as though she were lost in the darkness and sought for the light. Looking at her, Bony felt no qualms now at the hard path he had chosen to tread, for he knew then, as he had known all along, that she regarded him as of her own colour, and was not that a salve to his bruised soul?
“Bony, what are you?”
At the repetition of her question he chose, wilfully, to misunderstand her. His eyes clouded as ever they did when he remembered or was reminded of what he was.
“Just a poor half-caste, Miss Stanton—a breaker of horses and a builder of stockyards,” and, seeing the protest rush into her eyes, he added swiftly: “Have you any news this morning of the progress of the fire?”
“Very little, Bony. Father rang up this morning and said that it looked terrific, and that they all were engaged in burning a break, excepting the riders who are mustering the sheep in all the paddocks near it.”
“Have they seen anything of Dot and Dash?”
“Yes. They reached Carr’s Tank late last evening and took two of Ned Swallow’s horses, saying that Dad had sent them out. Ned Swallow said, too, that they went off south.”
“Ah! And what did old Jeff say about Bony?”
“I’d—I’d rather not repeat his words”—and Marion laughed for the first time that day.
“They would be forcible; they certainly would,” Bony chuckled. “Now where precisely is this Carr’s Tank ? Are there any maps of the country here?”
“Yes. This one on the wall is a large-scale map of the district.”
Side by side they stood examining the huge map. Marion pointed out Carr’s Tank, and, seeing a box of assorted coloured pins, Bony marked the place with a red one. Just for an instant he re-studied the map, then suddenly he emptied the pins out on a near-by table, and, in a tone of voice she never had heard him use before, he said:
“Pick me out all the red pins—quickly, please.”
As fast as she sorted and handed the pins asked for he stuck them here and there over the map, until at last he stopped and stood back.
“Here we have marked all the waters north, west and south of Carr’s Tank,” he murmured, so softly that the change in his tone was startling. He appeared lost in the maze of a problem of his own making. “Water, Miss Marion, is the source of all life. It is the main element that permits man to live; yes, and horses and sheep and rabbits, even the little wagtail birds. Now, of the two men, Dot is the experienced bushman. He was born in Arizona, a country of wild open spaces. He has spent years in Central Australia. He is an experienced gold-prospector, for the dolly-pot in the blacksmith’s shop is his. Probably, nay logically, he has prospected for gold in the Mount Brown district, and he knows the Rufus country, extending westwards from Mount Brown far out into South Australia. Yes. He would know the country. But, it is reported they went south from Carr’s Tank. Ah, foolish, foolish Mr Dot! Little mistakes lead to great falls. Had you told Swallow, for doubtless Swallow tells the tale, that you were heading to the north-east towards Mount Brown and the hilly scrub country thereabouts, you would have been wiser. In which case, had you truthfully desired to go there, you would have gone on to Nullawil. Instead, you turned south to Carr’s Tank from Range Hut. But from there you will go west—west and then north-west. For southward lies the more settled pastoral country. Well, well, well!”
For five long minutes he was silently engrossed by the map. Marion sought to read his thoughts, but failed. He stood there as a man of stone, but when presently he sighed and turned to her the whole of that vast region of sand and scrub, gibber plain and hill ranges was transferred to his brain like a photographic print.
“That map is of great help, Miss Stanton,” he said smoothly. “Permit me now to go out and catch Grey Cloud. In the interim, will you kindly ask Mrs Poulton to put up a little bread and meat, five or six pounds of flour, and small quantities of tea and sugar, into a sugar-sack? Get me also two tins of tobacco and a packet of cigarette papers.”
“You are going now?”
“At once. Every delay of a minute means the postponement of the day you open that envelope.”
Then he was gone, almost running, and for a little while she stood still, fear that had no foundation writhing in her heart.
Grey Cloud was in a horse-paddock, and it took Bony fully thirty minutes to find and saddle him. Preoccupied, he nodded his thanks for the filled sugar-bag, which he strapped to the pommel of the saddle whilst the gelding fidgeted his surprise at not receiving the usual caresses from the man he had come to trust and love.
A few seconds, and Bony was ready, the embodiment of human resource, dependability, and untiring stamina. Lithe of figure, dressed in white shirt, open-necked and sleeve-rolled, almost skintight grey moleskin trousers, elastic-sided high-heeled riding boots, and wearing on his head nothing but its natural covering, he but increased her wonder at him. And then she saw his dark face light up with his never-to-be-forgotten smile.
“To the west of Windee lies the station owned by Mr Freeman?” he questioned.
“Yes,” Marion answered.
“Did your father say if any of Mr Freeman’s hands were helping him at the fire?”
“He said he was expecting them. Wondered why they had not turned up, as he had telephoned via Mount Lion telling Mr Freeman about the fire.”
“Thank you! I think now I am fully conversant with the situation,” he told her gaily. “Do not worry any more. I shall easily catch up to Dot and Dash, and then we shall be able to put the fairy-tale ending to all this hurry and strife and mystery.” He seemed to float up into the air and come to rest on the gelding’s back with no more shock than a feather. He saw her looking up at him with misty eyes, and laughed down at her with dazzling teeth and gleaming blue orbs. “I saw Runta just now,” he cried. “She looked—well, she looked superb in her new yellow frock with the purple spots.” And then he was gone, wiped out of her vision by a cloud of red dust.
Chapter Forty-three
Bony Reaches Carr’s Tank
EXCEPTING TO dismount to tie down the wire of a fence with his belt to permit Grey Cloud to step over, horse and rider did not take a “blow” until they stood on the Range Hut track where it began to dip down and round a hill spur to the flat country where lay Carr’s Tank. There, in the shade of a stunted mulga tree, Bony dropped the reins on the ground, whereupon the gelding would not move, and, seating himself on a flat stone, smoked a cigarette.
Although the fire lay four miles from him at its nearest point, everything beyond two of those miles lay hidden by the smoke, which seemed only to thin into an even, motionless fog but half a mile from the hills. The sting of it made his eyes smart; the faintly sweet smell of it almost rivalled that of his dwindling cigarette.
Mounted again, he rode at a walking pace down the steep hill track, and continued this slow pace when he reached the plain and skirted the south fence of the horse-paddock
, which led in a straight line to the hut. Arrived there, he unsaddled, took the horse to one of the water-troughs near the mill, returned, hobbled the animal, and let him loose in the horse-paddock.
Within the hut he found confusion enthroned. The table was littered with used eating utensils, the fireplace contained a great mound of glowing white ash, with the ruddy gleam of red-hot embers peering through the cracks. A saddle was thrown into one corner, and a man’s rolled swag lay in another. Paper littered the earthen floor, and the story plainly to be read there was of the hurried visits of men for a meal and their hurried departure. Such a visitor came whilst Bony ate cold roast mutton and damper, and drank scalding hot tea.
“Cripes! It’s you, Bony!” Jack Withers exclaimed, wiping his face with a hairy forearm. “Where the ’ell ’ave you bin? Ole Jeff’s callin’ yous a double-damned quitter, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Very important business detained me,” the smiling Bony said in excuse.
For a seemingly long while Withers regarded the half-caste solemnly. Then slowly his left eyelid closed over the eye that looked out through the door, and his mouth widened in a grin. “ ’Ow’s Runta?” he asked.
“She looked stunning in her new dress,” replied Bony.
“She’d look stunning ’id be’ind a fig-leaf.”
“I believe she would,” Bony agreed blandly, inwardly wincing. “How is the fire going?”
“Oh, as well as can be expected, Bony. No worse nor better than other fires. We stopped ’er at the fence wot runs west of the well. Me and the Stormbird and Combo Joe is a-battling with it in the south-west corner, but it’s creeping west and north-west against the breeze. Orl the mob an’ Jeff is away north of here, burning breaks east of the roar. They tell me the Pardray is boiling the billies and orf-siding to Alf the Nark.” Withers cut himself a meal, and with it held in his smoke-grimed hands slid to the floor for a seat and began to eat ravenously. “Me,” he added gravely, “I ain’t never ’ad no religion, but if Father Ryan ever should lead a rescuin’ mob into ’ell, I’ll be game to foller ’em.”
For a while they ate in silence. Then:
“Dot and Dash get away?” inquired Bony.
Again the slow grin stretched Jack Withers’s mouth.
“Nobody ain’t put up no argument with ’em yet, and to all appearances nobody ain’t goin’ to. They left at eight sharp last night, and towards eleven last night the trooper and ole Moon-galliti and Warn shows up. The trooper came in this ’ut for a feed and the nigs ’ad theirs outside. Me and Combo Joe got together—happened to be ’ere for two hours’ sleep—and when I finds he never give orl his money to Bumpus, I borrowed two quid orf ’im and a pound of bacco orf Ned Swallow, and give the money and the bacco to the nigs to go along up to Father Ryan and tell ’im they was sent for a pannikin of tea. Out comes the trooper, and there’s no black trackers. He’s gorn man-hunting all on ’is own. Went south. If ’e keeps goin’ ’e’ll ’it Broken Nill.”
“Perhaps he will find Dot and Dash there.”
“He might their shadders, but they’ll be sunrise shadders stretching to Broken Nill from Darwin.”
“Any of Freeman’s men come along to lend a hand?”
“Nope. That is, only one bloke sent with a message to old Jeff saying as ’ow they ’ave got a nice little fire of their own.”
“Ah!”
“Yes. Seems to ’ave started beyond their north-west boundary, and orl Freeman’s men went out to burn a fire-break along there to save the run. If the wind freshens from the west to-morrow morning, their fire will sweep up against ours at its north end and give us a frontage to fight of fifty miles, maybe a ’undred miles, maybe two ’undred. There ain’t been a better year for a fire since nineteen-nine.”
“I suppose Dot and Dash didn’t say where they were making for?” Bony asked persuasively.
“No, they didn’t. Dot ’ud be too fly for that. ’E is a good bush-man, Dot. But I don’t envy ’em with these fires about. With a gale of wind to-morrow, starting from the north-west and endin’ in the south, they’ll be nipped unless mighty careful. What are you goin’ to do? Come out and give me an’ the Stormbird an’ Combo a ’and! Ron left us a tank of water and three bags of chaff.”
For a little while Bony was silent. He was acutely conscious of the fact that the partners then had some twenty hours’ start. But he had ridden far that day, and, since Grey Cloud would have many more days of hard riding, it was essential he should be rested and fed. A further point that induced Bony to decide to fall in with Withers’s suggestion was that there remained but an hour and a half of daylight. He could do nothing for six hours at least. By then it would be very dark, for the smoke would blot out the stars. He could not hope to find the partners’ tracks until next day. An hour later he and Withers were riding slowly to join the Stormbird and Combo Joe in the battle with the fire.
Chapter Forty-four
Dante’s Undreamed Inferno
TO RIDE ALONG the fence that marked the southern extremity of the Windee fire was as though they rode along the outskirts of a great city hidden by the darkness but pointed by its tens of thousands of lights and its flaming sky-signs. Just north of the fence and for some four miles’ distance the army of fire-fighters under the leadership of the indomitable Stanton had started little fires which were afterwards beaten out, so that a broad ribbon of grass was burned to ash and presented an impassable barrier to the main fire that a few hours later swept upon it.
Thousands of acres of knee-high grass had vanished, but the burning grass had fired twigs, sticks, and branches fallen from the parent trees during several years, and these, together with dead trees still standing, created a greater heat that fired the pine- and belar trees and scorched and shrivelled the hardy non-resinous mulgas. A hundred million torches, from the great pillars of flame consuming the pine-trees, down to the tiny last flares of dead and fallen branches, turned the steadily rising smoke into lurid horror. From this inferno came an incessant fusillade of reports in all degrees of volume and many qualities of tone. Uprising through the crimson pall, universe after universe of stars rushed into oblivion, as though the gods, stooping to gather handfuls of worlds flung them up in the delirium of their power. Thousands upon thousands, two hundred thousand acres of scrub and wheat-like grass, were disintegrating, turning into those upward-rushing, vanishing universes and the vast low-hanging crimson cloud.
Bony and his companion rode parallel with the fence, but some five hundred yards south of it, so great still was the heat of the fire. When four miles due west of the dam and mill, they came to a right-angle in the fire-break, and, seeing there that the fence was cut, they too made the angle and rode north.
Here the air was comparatively cool, the wind coming from a little north of west, a zephyr breeze that yet smelled of the incense sent up by grass and green leaves. The angle they traversed represented the south-west point where the fire had been stopped. For two miles the break, marked clearly by the edge of the knee-high grass, ran due north, but then it began to curve westward, and Bony saw that at this place the fire had met the fire-fighters, and thenceforward the fire-fighters had been forced slowly back.
So dry was the grass, so dry the air, that the fire moved slowly against the little wind there was. To east and north, seven or eight miles through and beyond the inferno, the main body of firefighters were burning long ribbons of fire-breaks, two men here, three and four north, one or two south, precisely as a battalion of infantry strung out in a long line and ordered to dig in, the isolated parties eventually to link up in one long line of entrenchments.
Under the generalship of old Jeff Stanton, already that line stretched to magical lengths. Truck-loads of men were rushed up and down, widening and lengthening it, striving to the limit of human endurance to make of it a great Hindenburg line, impregnable to the fire advancing on it then as fast as an athlete can run.
Man was forced to become elemental in a battle with the fierces
t element. At such moments the soul is glimpsed. Among this small body of men was no thought of wages, of strikes, of go-slowness. There was no thought of saving a vast area of land and many thousands of sheep for the master, even an admired master. Nor was there any thought of striving to preserve their jobs. The dominating motive was to win, to beat back the fire-devil; and they fought in exactly the same spirit that a university eight rows to win, succumbing to nothing short of sheer exhaustion at the end of the race.
We—in Britain and Australia—have been reproached for our love of sport. It was the elemental love of sport which urged on Jeff Stanton’s men until they dropped and were picked up by truck-drivers to be rushed to another place, there to work till they dropped once more. It may have been this spirit that made Father Ryan elect to remain in depopulated Mount Lion. Such a spirit may have actuated old Jeff Stanton to pay good wages and yet make a million. In their diverse ways both these men were deep, deep as the ocean, not raw students but experts in the study of human nature.
Knowing men, bushmen in particular, Bony was equally expert with the squatter and the priest. When he and Jack Withers came on the hundred-gallon galvanized tank and the miniature dump of chaff, and, leaving their horses to eat their fill at a bag trough slung between two trees to which they were tied, proceeded along the edge of the fire, he was by no means surprised to sec two devils direct from Dante’s Inferno running about purposefully with a flaming billet in one hand and an empty sack in the other.
To the uninitiated their actions would have been childish. It was as though they childishly lit little fires in make-believe imitation of the great fire. Then, seemingly afraid of their little fires, they proceeded to beat them out. Yet they worked with systematic thoroughness. Their little fires laid a swath of black ash twenty feet wide and a bare hundred yards from the main fire, there creeping against the wind as an old man may walk.
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