Now mounted on a spirited black filly, Roy was made thankful that the saddle he bestrode was older than that in which he had ridden from the homestead, softer and much more comfortable. He was not used to riding as he might have been had not motor cars been invented. Even the short rest after a mere ten miles canter-cum-gallop revealed his softness.
We’ll being following the road for the first four miles,’ the stockman explained whilst the three horses cantered abreast. After that you’ll ’ave to foller me ’cos I’ll be winding about orl over the scenery to reach easy crossings over about two thousand and seven ’undred cricks. You in a ’urry to see your mother-in-law planted or what?’
‘No,’ Roy replied, laughingly. ‘No. I’m in a hurry to stop my trainer from selling one of my horses which I have decided to run for the Melbourne Cup.’
‘Oh—what’s ’is chances? Wot’s ’is name?’
‘His name is Olary Boy and his chances are nil.’
‘You don’t say. Lemme think,’ Jack fell to thinking with one eye closed tight. ‘He won the Mentone Welter Handicap, First Divi, last year, didn’t he?
‘Yes.’
‘Yairs. Lemme think again. Yairs. I backed Fairy Queen both ways that race and dropped a fiver.’
And incessantly talking about horses they reached that point on the journey where they were to lose the road.
‘Now yer foller me,’ Jack directed. ‘We’ll keep ’em goin’ hard for another mile and they’ll get a breather for a coupler miles.’
Abruptly the country changed from yielding sand to more yielding grey flats on which grew stunted, warped and shrivelled looking box timber. Roy was obliged to ease his mount further back in order to escape the rain of mud thrown up by the two horses in front. They crossed places covered with thin sheets of water in great plunging strides; over other places as slippery as grease on which the animals slithered badly.
The wind was losing its boisterousness, and the rain was becoming less heavy the further the wind veered southward. A line of bigger timber ahead presently introduced them to a creek in which was ugly foaming water, water flowing as beer might flow from a bombarded brewery.
‘Let ’em take their time, Mr. Masters,’ shouted Jack. ‘They’ve all crested it before and they will again.’
As was quite evident when the three animals faced that raging stream without hesitation. But shallow storm-water always is ugly in comparison to the deep and placid and smooth water in which milling currents lie concealed. The water at this crossing barely reached to the horses’ girths.
As Jack had intimated, for two miles they were compelled to walk their mounts, winding about between deep gutter and deeper creeks in which water had not run for many months.
A veritable maze, Jack led the way without fault across this wide strip of flood country, the horses being taxed to their utmost by glutinous mud compelling frequent halts to remove hardening balls of mud from hoofs.
‘Orstralia! Well—when they says it’s sunny, they’re liars, and when they say it’s dry, they’re liars,’ was Jack’s comment offered more than once.
‘Let’s push on,’ Roy constantly urged.
‘Oh, yairs, and blow out these animiles before we hit Red Crick. Leave it ter me. Another mile or thereabouts and we come ter sand country again.’
The enforced slowness of the pace was irksome to the younger man, now desperately anxious to save his horse from sale. The wind was less boisterous, but the rain continued. Saturated with water, their clothes clung to them with the chill touch of snakes. Their hands were blue with the cold. Roy was finding it the most wretched journey he ever had undertaken, but Jack maintained unquenchable cheerfulness.
At last! The dunes of the sand country could be seen between the trunks of the weird box trees appearing like animate objects convulsed in final death struggles; and, arriving on the clean land, for the last time they removed the caked mud from the twelve equine feet.
‘Give ’em a blow; they’ll pay it back,’ Jack urged. ‘I’m makin’ a cigarette anyway; I can’t breathe for want of a gasper. Have one?’
Roy nodded and fell to swinging his arms to create bodily warmth.
‘She’s a corker this rain,’ Jack gabbled on whilst crouched in the lee of a cotton bush to protect papers and matches and tobacco he carried in an air-tight tin. Blue eyes contrasted vividly in a face blackened by sun and wind. ‘It reminds me of the time me and Tom Pink got on the drunk at Bourke back in twenty-two. The more we drank the higher Tom’s voice got, and the more he stuttered. The police give us the oil to get out of town, and we buys a boat so’s we could have a quiet holiday floatin’ down the river. We anchors one night two miles above Menindie, and swore we wouldn’t go ashore there ’cos we’d decided to visit Tom’s uncle wot owns a grape plot at Mildura. But during the night the boat anchor come unstuck or somethink. We’re sleepin’ in the boat, and when we wakes there’s the ole boat trying to get into the back door of the Menindie Hotel, the tide was that high. Come on—we’ll be goin’.’
Now at a hard gallop they bore southward over a wide rib of sand-covered country where the wind had fashioned grotesque pillars and cliffs and houses from the harder lumps. Roy saw that once more they were on the road, and presently cresting a rise saw, too, beyond a strip of claypan country, a line of red gums which evidently marked the course of Red Creek.
They arrived at Red Creek at twenty to eleven.
And above the hiss of the wind through the red gums they heard a man crying desperately for help.
Roy Masters
6
A Man And Three Horses
Blood! Bright fresh blood, sixty yards in width, sliding by. Against the banks, against trees, which have fallen inward from the banks, and against an island of debris almost in the middle of the stream and higher than the normal crossing, blood-tinged foam clung, as though this channel drained the blood of some vast battlefield, not the red flats westward.
And on the island of debris composed of ancient tree snags and gnarled branches, a man submerged to his neck in this river of blood.
‘Hey! Wa’cher doin’ there, Tom?’ Jack shouted, then to add to Roy: ‘Why it’s ole Tom Pink.’
‘Help me—I can’t hang on much longer. I can’t feel nothing. I bin ’ere for hours. I can’t swim—I can’t swim.’
‘Cripes! First time I ever ’eard him not stutterin’ offn a ’orse. What are we gonna do, mister?’ casually inquired the stockman.
‘Get him out. We must do something,’ Roy said rapidly, the urgent necessity of quickly reaching Mount Lion temporarily forgotten. ‘Can you swim?’
‘No, curse it, I can’t.’
Roy began to tear off his sodden clothes, and Jack, seeing his purpose, shouted to Tom encouragingly:
‘It’ll be orl right, Tom. Here’s a gent comin’ in for you. ’Ow did you git there? Jew fly, or was you paddling a tree trunk acrost?’
‘I was ridin’ me ’orse further up an’ we got tangled in a snag under water. I got throwed off and I’d a drownded if I adn’t come against this snag ’ere.’
Roy ran upstream, observing the glassy surface of this dreadful water, to ascertain where hidden snags might lie. He saw two patches of troubled surface, and saw how he must swim to avoid the jagged teeth of wood below them.
With a prayer to Dame Fortune, he jumped feet first into the flood. No dim light of translucent water welcomed him in the depths. An inky blackness enveloped him, and when again he met the blessed light of day, his eyes and mouth were level with an ice-cold crimson sheet. The trees on either bank were rushing by. Momentarily he glimpsed Jack dancing like an idiot The island of debris was rushing towards him to pass him, and to it he struggled, his limbs already lethargic from chill. A protruding stick darted at him as though it were the fin of a shark, and with mighty effort he struck forward to miss it by a few inches.
Then he was at the ‘island’, and wisely ceased all movement save with his hands to grasp at a bough above the su
rface. The current swept his body against a submerged log and against the log he braced his body. Tom Pink’s blue face was three yards from him.
‘Can’t you swim, Tom?’ he called to the jockey, who was staring with eyes as glassy as the water.
‘I can’t swim—I can’t swim,’ Tom said with natural articulation.
‘Well, you will have to do exactly what I tell you. Do you understand?’
‘What is it I’se got ter do? I’ll do anythink to get outer this.’
‘When I tell you to, you have got to let go that branch.’
‘Let go. I daren’t! I’ll sink and drown.’
‘You won’t be able to hang on much longer. And very soon I’ll be that numbed that when you are forced to let go I’ll not be able to save myself. Wait! I’ll see if I can get nearer to you.’
Cautiously Roy felt with his feet the exact position of the log against which the current held his body. Were there no snags between it and the bough to which Pink tenaciously held, he might reach the same bough, but if he missed it he would be swept past the man and then unable to render assistance if Tom maintained his hold.
‘Let go, Tom. Do you hear? I’m with you.’
‘I daren’t. I can’t swim. I’ll drown,’ Tom wailed. His voice rose to a scream. ‘I’ll drown—I’ll drown. I’m slippin’! I can’t hold on. I’m slippin’!’
Roy Masters risked much when he swung his body over the submerged trunk and let go his hold. Fortunately the few yards between Tom and him were clear. With two powerful strokes and one great kick off from the under-water log, he succeeded in reaching the jockey. And then, risking no further delay in fruitless urgings, he struck at Tom’s hands clenched on the bough and cried at him to let loose.
The man screamed dreadfully whilst Roy beat his hands with one free fist. He screamed again when one hand was forced off the bough. Wildly that hand clutched for fresh hold, but numbness had paralysed the fingers. Again Tom screamed a moment before his remaining hand was forced off the bough, and down he sank.
It was, perhaps, fortunate for Roy that Tom Pink’s body was too numb to enable him to struggle. When they came to the surface Roy managed to get behind the jockey and turn both Tom and himself on their backs.
To his vision was presented the grey sky. The clean rain, now almost stopped, caressed his face as with all the power of his legs he struck out for the bank. A seeming hour went by before tree tops began to obscure the sky, the branches of living trees growing along the bank, branches which slid by over him with unceasing velocity.
A snag grazed his back, and, offering a wild prayer that it was not many branched, he ceased movement to allow the current to sweep them over it. They were free. Tom began screaming again, yet was incapable of bodily movement. Another seeming hour loitered by, when a soft yielding substance rubbed against Roy’s shoulders, and turning his head, he saw that it was the creek bank. And a dozen yards further down, swooping towards them, the gnarled outstretching arms of a semi-submerged tree.
Where the devil was Jack? Why wasn’t he there to render much needed help? A root projecting from the bank offered hold, gave it. Roy then was able to clutch Tom by one arm and glance up for a foothold.
‘I’m coming,’ he heard Jack shouting, as from a great distance.
And then it was he discovered that he had taken Tom Pink to the opposite bank, the bank nearest to Mount Lion. Jack and the horses were on the far bank in consequence.
‘Hang on—I’m coming,’ the stockman yelled again.
How could the fool come over when he couldn’t swim? There was no bridge.
What was he shouting about now? Was he gone mad, or was it at someone coming? No. There he was galloping up stream on a horse and leading two others on his offside. Now what? Jack and horses had vanished when they turned back from the creek. Yet Roy still could hear the man bellowing his hardest.
Tom Pink had not spoken since they had reached the bank. His body was limp. And Roy was now so numbed by the chill of this river of blood, that alone he could not have pulled his weight clear of the water.
The growing volume of Jack’s shouting drew his attention to the opposite bank far up stream. There the bank was hardly a foot above the water level. Over that bank appeared the heads of three horses, the head of the solitary rider. Magically the bodies of the horses appeared, their outstretched legs, their flying hoofs. Ye Gods! They were jumping! Like three horses taking a steeple jump! Up and out. Then down with a mighty upflung spume of blood-flecked spray.
They were in—three horses and a man who couldn’t swim. The fool—the reckless, dauntless fool. Three horses, heads in line, whilst above and behind them the shoulders and the head of a yelling devil who drove them.
‘Kam up, Skinflint! Yo ho! I’m a-comin’ there! Hang on! Now-now, Flossie, old tart. No drownding ’ere. There ain’t time. Kam on, Skinflint. We’re orl enjoying ourselves, so you got no argument. We’re comin’, Mister, we’re comin’!’
As man and horses were swept by Roy and the dead, or unconscious jockey, the astounding stockman waved his battered felt hat as though he were a charioteer saluting his emperor, two thousand years ago. Deliberately he pulled back his horses to escape the tree below Roy, and, as many of its leaves still remained adhered to its twigs, the tree soon hid man and horses from the anxious owner of Olary Boy.
All that which followed appeared to Roy much as a disjointed dream. He remembered, afterwards, climbing up the bank, dragging Tom Pink with the assistance of the talkative Jack. Then he was astride a horse, a horse galloping madly across a gibber plain, on which the horizon was flung back to thirty and forty miles.
As he rode the horse without conscious feeling, so the demon of nightmare rode him. To Mount Lion—yes, to Mount Lion. A telegram—a telegram to Nat Sparks to stop him selling Olary Boy. Why sell Olary Boy? Stupid of him. He’d have to run in the Williamstown August Handicap and later at Caulfield in the Heatherlie Handicap. Then perhaps at Moonee Valley some time in September. Flemington—the Weight-for-Age would try Olary Boy, for he would be in good company. Of course! He might prove himself in that race and would then come on well at Caulfield. But not too well there, or he would carry too much later on. Then at Flemington again, and finally in the Melbourne Cup.
That was his race—Olary Boy’s. With careful and strict training, Olary Boy might win. Why not? What if he had a Roman nose? Didn’t wall-eyed cattle dogs lick any other dog in a fight?
Houses! What’s this? Mount Lion? Surely not. Couldn’t be. A pub! A post office! The telegram! He could wire Nat Sparks from here:
‘Excuse me. Write a telegram for me, please. My hands are too cold. Yes, an urgent wire, quick. What’s that? What do you say?’
‘Sorry, sir, but all our wires are down,’ the postmaster said—to add:
‘Look out—catch him, Evans.’
7
The Doctor
It so happened that Mount Lion was fortunate in its bush nurse, and for Roy Masters it was fortunate, too, that she was home when Evans, the postal employee, went for her assistance. She ordered that he be put to bed at once, and, as there was no hospital at Mount Lion, it was into Mrs Bumpus’s best bedroom that he was placed between blankets.
Beer was what Mr. Bumpus advised—hot beer heated with a red-hot poker, but Mrs. Bumpus named brandy, and in this she was supported by the nurse. So it was that Roy opened his eyes to find himself in a strange room with unfamiliar faces peering at him. His body was warm, when he had thought it never would be warm again, whilst the two women were comforting in their matronliness.
‘What is the time?’ was his first question. ‘Where am I?’ was his second. When informed that he was at Mount Lion and that it was half-past two, or thereabouts, he sighed resignedly over the sure sale of Olary Boy—and suddenly remembered Tom Pink and Jack, the stockman.
‘You must send a car at once to Red Creek,’ he said imperatively. ‘I left a man there named Tom Pink in charge of a stockman called Jack. Pink
was almost drowned in the creek, and when I left them, the stockman had managed to get a fire going, but Pink was in a bad way. You’ll send that car off at once?’
‘I’ll send Bumpus,’ decided Mrs. Bumpus.
‘And get him to take some brandy with him. I’ll pay all the expenses, of course.’
‘There won’t be any need to tell Bumpus to take brandy with him,’ declared the publican’s wife.
A few minutes later, Roy heard the hotel car move off. He was feeling fit enough to get up, but could not see his clothes. As there was no bell with which to summon service, he called. To Mrs. Bumpus, who came, he said: ‘Bring my clothes, please. I will get up.’
‘You’ll stay where you are until Nurse comes to look at you again at five o’clock.’
As he had resigned himself to losing his horse, so did he resign himself to the fate dictated by this shrewd but kindly woman, who had so much practice in obtaining obedience from her husband that she had little difficulty in commanding obedience of other men. And, in any case, Roy Masters found the role of invalid by no means irksome. His body ached from the unaccustomed hard riding; the brandy given him had created a soothing lethargy which created the desire for sleep.
When he awoke it was dark and the room was illuminated by an oil lamp. Mrs. Bumpus answered his call, carrying a large tray of supper things.
‘It will be a mercy if you don’t all die of pneumonia,’ she said, fussing about him and the tray at the same time. ‘Tom Pink’s pretty crook, but Fred is all right. An’ you look all right, but in bed you stays till tomorrow.’
‘Is Pink very ill?’
‘Not so ill as Nurse thinks he’s going to be.’
‘No doctor here?’
No. We ’ad one once but the drink got him.’
‘Telegraphic communication restored yet?’
Mrs. Bumpus shook her head.
‘Where is the nearest doctor?’
‘There’s one at Milparinka.’
‘Then he must be sent for.’
The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery Page 4