As Bonnay, he did not know the name of the truck driver, or the people at the house on the rim. He had not been informed, and in his assumed character he would be expected to ask, otherwise it would be presumed that he knew, and how could he explain knowing names when he ought not to know them. A small point, but one powerful enough to slay a ferret. Casually he said:
“Who am I working for?”
“The name’s Mike Conway. I’m the Cork Valley carrier and storekeeper. My wife is the post-mistress. All right with you?”
“What d’you mean: all right with me?” Bony retorted. “I got a right to know who I’m working for, haven’t I?”
“Yes, you have that,” admitted the driver. “Why the heat?”
“Blast it! You asked me if it’s all right with me to know. Why shouldn’t I know?”
“No answer, Nat, no answer,” came the quietly spoken words. “You go to a good school?”
“Why the hell not?” Bony almost snarled. “Think because my mother was an aborigine I’m a sort of wild animal? ’Course I went to school. I passed my Intermediate. Then what? Back to the land. Anyway, what d’you want me to do? Dig spuds or teach at school?”
“Pipe down, Nat, pipe down. I didn’t mean to rile you.” Bony continued to sit half turned to the driver. “Life is what you get out of it, not what it likes to give you, I’m going to pay you seven bob a bag to lift spuds, and the wife will charge you three pounds a week for board and keep. And when the crop’s lifted, there’s other work you can do if you care to stay on.”
“Expect I’ll be staying. The Valley looks good to me,” conceded Bony.
“Good on you. Winter can be cold, and there’s plenty of fogs, but the quarters are snug enough. And another thing, Nat, us Conways and the Kellys don’t stand for foreign interference. Get it?”
“Bit by bit, Mike. We’ll get along.”
“Sure we will. It’s a deal?”
“Well, I’m not walking back, and I’m liking that word ‘snug’.”
Fifteen minutes later and five hundred feet lower, the offside front tyre blew out, and the driver had to proceed on a flat to the next inside bend and relax the vehicle against the bank. The new man evidently knew what to do; he disengaged the spare from its rack and had it ready for Conway before the wheel was jacked. The change occupied them twenty minutes.
“You aren’t exactly useless,” commented the driver when they were moving again. “Two miles to go, and then a cup of tea.”
“That inner tube could be chewed to ribbons,” surmised Bony, thoughtfully adding the twenty minutes occupied by the change to the twenty odd minutes spent at the white house. Forty minutes might cause a bad hitch in a time-table.
“Could be so,” was the cheerful agreement. “Still it’ll come off the income tax.”
“The skin off my hands digging spuds won’t come off my tax,” complained Bony.
“Don’t worry, Nat. You’ll be paid in hard cash.”
The next bridge they came to crossed a gully which looked a mile deep. It was narrow and had no side walls or rails, and the man accustomed to the level square miles of the inland shrank back. Soon afterwards they arrived at the valley bed, and here the track was better as it wound over low bald hills on which cattle grazed in knee-high grass.
Cork Valley! There was not a valley like this in County Cork, Ireland. The man known to all his friends as Bony, and now in Cork Valley as Nat Bonnay, a horse thief and partaker of stolen fowls, was entranced by its beauty: the autumnal tints; the soft blues of the shadows and the jet black gaping jaws of the surrounding mountain slopes and cliffs. From a rise he saw the houses of Cork Valley, pure white against the green wall of trees divided by the living silver of a high waterfall.
They approached the settlement. Bony counted seven houses: three on one side and four on the other of a wide unmade street. Beyond the houses stood a large shed-like building he guessed to be a dairy and creamery, and as they drew near he noted people gathering in the short street, and Mike Conway exclaimed:
“What the hell’s up now!”
The first house on the left was combined with the general store, and just beyond the store was what might be a garage. At this building Conway stopped the truck, and it was instantly surrounded by half a dozen men who offered no sign either of welcome or hostility. A huge man, with flame-red hair, small, intensely blue eyes, and a full beard as thick and as red as his hair, jerked open the door of the truck.
“Come on, you,” he ordered, the need for haste plain in voice and eyes.
Bony lowered himself from the high cabin, dragging his old suitcase with him. He was seized by two men and urged, with no possibility of successful resistance, off the street and into the garage-like building. It contained farm equipment, and stacks of potatoes and pie melons. At the far end a grinning boy held up a trap door in the floor. The man with the great red beard said:
“Down quick, me lad. The police are right on your tail.”
Wooden steps descended to a cellar. A hurricane lamp burned on a small table. There was a bed bearing a small pile of folded blankets. He sat on the chair beside the table, and laughed silently as he rolled a cigarette.
His underground room was nine by nine feet, and the ceiling, the floor of the shed above, was not more than seven feet high. It smelled fresh and dry, and there was a bed and table and chair offering mute proof that he wasn’t the first occupant.
The twenty minutes’ delay due to the blow-out had almost wrecked the plan to introduce Inspector Bonaparte into Cork Valley. Had the pursuing police caught up with him they would have had to arrest him, and to arrest him was not the purpose of the pursuit. They merely wanted to confirm his story.
Bony could hear the murmur of voices, and presently he heard an approaching car. He mounted the steps to bring his ear close to the shed floor, and he heard the car arrive, its engine stopped, the doors slammed shut. He ventured to raise the trap an inch, and heard clearly the conversation outside the open-fronted shed. Sergeant O’Leary, of Wollongong, was saying:
“We are looking for a feller calling himself Bonnay. He’s got a record, and we believe he’s concerned with thefts on the outskirts of Wollongong. He was last seen at the turn-off from the Hume Highway, and a couple of blackberry-pickers at the foot of the pass think he was in your truck.”
“That’s so, Sarge,” came the quiet even voice of Mike Conway. “Half abo, I think. I picked him up a couple of miles in from the Highway. Said he was making for Bowral way and he asked me if there was any work going over there. What’s he done?”
“No matter,” growled the sergeant. “Exceptin’ he’s got a record as long as your arm. You bring him here?”
“No. Not in the habit of bringing waifs and strays to Cork Valley. I put him down at the turn-off on the mountain road. You call on my brother?”
“Your brother said he didn’t notice him with you.” Sergeant O’Leary’s voice was distinctly chilly. “You haven’t unloaded yet, I see.”
“What of it?” softly asked Conway.
“Well, get along. Unload. The feller might have hopped up into the load as you moved off from the mountain road.”
“Unload yourself,” a man shouted, and Bony thought he must be the red-headed giant.
“That’ll do you, Red Kelly,” snapped the sergeant, and again the quiet tones of Conway reached the enthralled Bony.
“Cut it out, Red. Give us a hand, you fellers, to unload for the sergeant. Wire into the shed, cased stuff into the store.”
Through the chink between the floor and the trap, Bony could see the activity outside. A man came into the shed rolling fencing wire, and Bony closed the trap and climbed down the steps. The wire was placed on the trap, and a moment later another coil was stacked on top of the first. Up the steps once again, Bony listened and heard some of the conversation above.
“Have a look behind those stacked spuds, constable,” a man said, giving a deep chuckle. “The feller could be among ’em.” A
nother man added: “Give it a go, constable. Them aborigines are slippery bastards. What about trying the rafters?”
Another coil of wire was dropped on the stack over the trap door, and then sounds of activity abated, and the voices became distant and the words blurred. Bony descended again to sit on the chair beside the table and roll another cigarette, complacently satisfied that the plan had succeeded in its dual purpose.
The story he had told Conway of being imprisoned for stealing horses, and associating with a fowl-stealing hobo was now substantiated by the police. It was proved that he was a person of ill repute. And further, it was now proved that these Cork Valley people weren’t above harbouring a wanted man, and the suspicion was strengthened that they had been closely associated with crimes for several years. They were an anachronism in an orderly country. They owned this rich land pocket amid mountains extending south of Sydney to the Alps, and farther still into the mountainous maze of Gippsland having its western extremity but a few miles north of Melbourne. And on one side of the Highlands the rich coastal belt and on the other the farms and grazing properties and thriving towns and railways.
Superintendent Casement’s analogical rabbit burrow included a region much larger than Cork Valley. The dead and mangled ferrets had not been found in Cork Valley itself but miles from it, and no member of the community had been charged with a serious crime for the past forty years.
“They’re a stubborn crowd, Bony, and mighty cunning,” he had explained. “Try to evade paying licence fees for anything, just for the hell of it. Fought and beat the Education Department about sending the children to school by bus outside the Valley. Now they run their own school. Customs people are convinced they’ve operated stills for many years but could never locate one. Farmers right outside the area have repeatedly lost cattle and horses, and shortly before petrol rationing was terminated, a semi-trailer truck broke down on the pass up the mountains, and, when the driver was away telephoning for assistance, fifty forty-gallon drums of juice disappeared.
“Seven years ago, a party of Customs investigators made a raid and when returning, their car fell through a bridge. Cork Valley never pays rates until compelled to, so the road in doesn’t concern the local council. We sent in a man last year. Went in as a potato digger. Two weeks later they delivered him at the Bowral Hospital, swearing he’d started a brawl. He couldn’t admit he was police, and he couldn’t prove the brawl was staged for his benefit. Nine years ago the body of a man was found in a tidal creek south of Kiama. Never identified. Dentures found in a pocket didn’t fit his mouth. Nothing to prove that he was murdered by anyone at Cork Valley. But back of the creek are the mountains and in the mountains is Cork Valley.
“This recent crime is nearer Cork Valley, and the victim was an excise officer of the Customs Department. On December 21 last year the body of a man was found on the road three miles from Bowral by a milk-collecting truck driver. Road marks as well as the condition of the body pointed to a hit-and-run affair, but the pathologist’s report says that the man had been dead for several hours before being deliberately run over.
“The body was dressed in worn working clothes and boots, but the hands proved he wasn’t a working man. It has taken us four months to identify him, and that because of unusual circumstances.
“Excise Officer Eric Torby was granted three months’ leave, as from the beginning of December; was single, no relatives, lived in lodgings in Sydney. Told his landlady he was going bushwalking in the Southern Highlands, and anticipated being away for weeks. She states he left wearing plus-fours and a tweed coat, and carried in his rucksack extra underwear. Says further, that he was interested in geology, and took with him a geologist’s hammer. Cork Valley would interest a geologist, Bony?”
“And a still would interest an excise officer,” Bony had said. “I’ll study that wall map again, and we’ll think up a plan to get me into Cork Valley.”
The opening phase of the plan had succeeded, and Inspector Bonaparte, alias Nathaniel Bonnay, now listened to the departure of the police car. The ensuing silence continued for half an hour, when he heard the sound of rolls of wire being removed from the trap door.
The trap was raised and down the steps came Mike Conway and the huge red-bearded man called Kelly. Conway sat on the bed and fingered the old suitcase. Redbeard stood with fists clamped to his hips and stared down at the seated Bony.
Chapter Three
Dinner with the Family
“SO YOU’RE on the run eh? Stealing horses and thieving a poor widder-woman’s fowls.” In the lamplight the big man’s eyes were almost black, and Bony remembered them to be fiercely blue. “If you would be after stealin’ fowls at Cork Valley, or borrowing a horse or two, be carshous.”
“I didn’t rob the widow although I ate her chook,” Bony particularised. “The horses I took belonged to a squatter.”
Red Kelly made the first of his many mistakes, saying:
“Stand up when you speak to an Irish gintleman.”
Bony stood; and Red Kelly observed the metamorphosis Bony could achieve. The slightly drooping, shifty-eyed descendant of two races became a blazing-eyed spitting panther as he took the three steps necessary to stand chest to chest with the man a foot taller and a foot wider than himself.
“Are you a squatter to give me orders?” he shouted. “Are you a rubber-necked warder, having been in gaol yourself and knowing their ways?”
“Now now, me lad, now now,” soothed Red Kelly, a grin beginning to part the red whiskers. His great head nodded with approbation. “You’ll do, Nat. Got to be sure. Got to check. Mike here wants his spuds lifted. You want to lift ’em. After that there’s work and good livin’ for them as likes both to come at the same time.”
Bony nonchalantly strode back to his chair. The two men watched the fire in him die out, both a little startled by the unexpected outburst. Conway said, in his quiet voice:
“We just want to be sure you’re not a no-hoper, Nat. That’s all. You don’t mind us checking, now, do you?”
“Go ahead.”
“Open your case, Nat.”
“You open it. It’s beside you.”
They examined every article from a spare shirt to a new hairbrush and comb. They were interested in a stockwhip and a pair of worn spurs with rowels of twin sixpences to make the ring. They glanced at each other when one passed over the kangaroo-hide riding-boots.
“If you’re looking for proof that I’m not the premier of New South Wales, take a looksee through this,” Bony said, tossing his wallet beside the oddments emptied on the bed.
“If you were even related to that renegade I’d ring your neck,” snarled Red Kelly. He withdrew the papers from the wallet: a soiled driver’s licence bearing the name Nathaniel Bonnay, a letter addressed to ‘Dear Nat’ bearing a Tenterfield address, asking for money, and signed ‘Your Old Father’, and a Parole Card bearing Bonnay’s name and particulars.
The big man returned the papers, sighed, tossed the wallet back to Bony.
“Clean, Mike. Take him on.”
“I intended to,” Mike Conway said, and Redbeard came back with:
“I know you did, but it’s me being carshous what’s kept the peace in Cork Valley.” He turned to Bony. “All right, Nat. We’ll see how you shape. We’ll be startin’ off on that foot, and you can call me Red. Every blessed soul here calls me that to me face.”
He mounted the steps to the shed above, and Conway asked: “These quarters suit you, Nat?”
“Why not? Dry and ... and snug, as just now proved.”
“That was the police. Right on your tailboard. Seemed anxious about you.” In view of his declared occupation and his clothes, Conway’s enunciation could be ascribed only to an education at a church school. Low in tone, his voice was always soft and seldom betrayed emotion, but in him were depths which Bony could sense, and even now his judgment of the new hand was delayed.
“I could hear, even when the trap was closed down,” Bony admit
ted, and again gave evidence of the assumed trait of touchiness by asking: “You getting nervous about me?”
“Not yet, Nat.” Conway smiled. “Hungry men are prone to temper. Come on up and have a wash and meet the family at dinner.”
He led the way up the steps. Bony now took stock of the world above floorboards. Outside the open fronted store shed the unmade ‘street’ was deserted. The sun had set, and all the northern sky was green where it rested on the rim of the great amphitheatre. Red Kelly rode at a gallop down the road towards the waterfall, and Bony saw him turn off to enter a wall of scrub connecting the end house with the factory building beyond. Obviously he was returning to the large stone mansion of the many windows which stood boldly against the wall of mountain covering its rear.
Bony was taken to the laundry behind the general storecum-residence occupied by Mike Conway and his family, where he was provided with a clean towel and given hot water and soap. Conway washed at another basin, slicked his dark hair with water, and didn’t fail to note that Nat Bonnay produced a comb from a pocket and gave his own hair particular attention. This new man was no slouch.
The Conways’ large kitchen-living-room surprised Bony. In one wall there were two fireplaces, one an open hearth and the other occupied by a large cooking range. Electric light streamed upon the white cloth, covering a large dining-table with massive legs, and a grandfather clock, at least two hundred years old judging by its carved ornamentation. There were three huge paintings in heavy gilt frames, and cedarwood cabinets flanked by chairs of such an antiquity and exquisite carving that a dealer would dance with envy.
“New man, Mate,” Conway said to his wife who turned from the cooking range at their entry. “The name is Nat.” She was tall and angular, with the imprint of Ireland on her face, and the soul of Ireland looked shyly from the depth of her large brown eyes. She contented herself by nodding, and turned again to the range.
“Who’s that, did you say, Mike?”
The voice came from the high-back chair set before the leaping open fire, and Conway nodded to Bony to follow him and be presented to a tiny woman wearing a white lace cap, a high-necked black bodice and white lace cuffs about her wrists.
Bony and the Kelly Gang Page 2