Bony - 28 - Madman's Bend

by Arthur W. Upfield

  From the cadaverous trunk of a leaning box-tree em­erged the shape of a man. He was a very tall man. He was dressed in old trousers and was wearing a tattered green overcoat. He was bearded, and his grey hair draggled be­neath the rim of his battered felt hat.

  Advancing towards Bony, who stood feeling the pins-and-needles in his feet and neck subsiding, the man placed his feet as though sleep-walking. Bony could not see his eyes: they were directed downward. In one hand this apparition carried a billycan, and resting on the rump of his buttocks was the usual cylindrical swag or blanket roll, the top of which was higher than the hat.

  “Bomb … Bomb … Bomb.”

  These repeated sounds coincided with the man’s tread. A few moments later they were repeated, and were fol­lowed by varying tones which ultimately made a tune or melody. The man was loudly humming a tune to which his feet kept time, and when he was fifty yards off Bony recognized the tune. It was the Dead March in ‘Saul’.

  Bony had encountered many characters, and had heard of many others: men who have tramped up and down the rivers, year in and year out, men who have begun as station hands and old-time blade-shearers, and gradually drifted into wanderers living on handouts from station kitchens. They have but one thing in common. They are always on the move, always going somewhere beyond the next bend, always on a journey without end.

  This one slowly advanced towards Bony, humming his tune, keeping his gaze to the ground. Eventually it be­came clear that he was unaware of Bony and was about to pass him by.

  “Good day!” Bony greeted him. The humming ceased. The character neither halted nor looked at Bony. Bony heard the phrase repeated several times as the character moved on beyond him: “I’m dead. I’m dead.”

  “I am beginning to think we both are,” Bony called after him, and then began to pity this human wreck. For sure he wouldn’t go far today at his present speed, and this thought led Bony to estimate the fellow’s course. He had come from the trees to the south-west, and was headed to the north-east: towards Mira homestead.

  The character might not know of the coming flood, the head of which was due at Mira about six o’clock. The sun said it was now close to eleven, giving five minutes either way. It was difficult to calculate the distance to the home­stead, for Bony had zigzagged so much; he could make only a rough guess that it was between one and a half and two miles. A smart walker can cover three miles per hour, but this old man at his present speed would cover only a quarter-mile in the hour, and, if he was two miles from Mira, then he would need eight hours to arrive there. And the flood was due in seven.

  It was not to be presumed that the flood water would come with a rush. It would be days before the water cov­ered this bend area, and hours before it began to flow into the gutters and deeper billabongs. The danger lay in being unable to cross to Mira, and in the water flow being too fast and too loaded with debris for a boat to be paddled over it to pick up the derelict.

  Bony decided to go after the man and hurry him along. He stood, and was about to snatch up his gunny-sack when he heard shouting beyond the point where he had first seen the hummer. The shouting halted him, and when again it reached him he was sure the shouter was coming from the south-west on the track of the hummer.

  Bony waited, and presently saw a man moving across in front of him, betraying the fact that he wasn’t track­ing the hummer but anticipating the hummer’s objective. Bony shouted. The second man saw him, and turned to meet him.

  He was short and rotund, and his face and everything about him suggested the curve, whereas the hummer sug­gested the perpendicular line. He also carried a swag and a billycan, and in the billycan a black and white kitten. His blue eyes were anxious as he said, “Good day-ee, mate! Happen to see a tall bloke?”

  “Yes. He just passed me. Humming the Dead March.”

  “Good-oh! We was having a bit of shut-eye, and when I woke up he’d skipped. Bloody rotten country to look for a looney in. ’Course he ain’t looney all the time, but when he is I got to look after him sort of. How far’s he ahead?”

  “See that tree?” Bony asked and pointed. “We could see him were it not for that tree.”

  The faded blue eyes in the whiskery face showed relief.

  “I’d better get going, mate. Old Dead March Harry and me been mates for ten-eleven years. Not a bad poor bastard, y’know, but he gets to worrying me sometimes. See you at Mira, perhaps.”

  “You are aware that the river is coming down a banker?”

  “Too right. It’s why we’re headed for Mira direct. The mail driver told us about the flood being due to hit Mira at six. Well, so long, mate. See you some time! Hooroo!”

  Chapter Ten

  A Set-Back for Bony

  THREE HOURS after the appearance of Dead March Harry and his buddy, Bony retreated from Madman’s Bend, satisfied that he could do no more, and happy to be out of it.

  As expected, he found the house locked and the home­stead stock removed. The wheelbarrow was not in its accustomed place, and, as even the woodheap axe had vanished, he was confident that it had been locked into the detached laundry. Its mark along the path to the killing-yard was partially wiped out by the boots of the evacua­tion party.

  While Bony sat on the river bank above the small holes of water, there was about him, beneath or beyond the occasional chortle of a kookaburra and the chattering of distant galahs, the silence of the deserted homestead. The absence of sound always to be associated with a home­stead prompted the thought: Why did a man build himself a house on land likely to be surrounded by water?

  An answer came readily enough. Why build a house away out on the wind-swept, sun-scorched western plain? Suffering isolation or being forced to retreat once in every decade was a small price to pay to live beside this river, insultingly named a gutter, a river infinitely more beauti­ful than Australia’s largest river, the Murray.

  Sitting here, relaxed and intentionally permitting his mind to wander, this product of two races felt the stirring of the urge to walkabout which often took his mother’s people from a river like this out on to the dry and hot plain, there to starve and thirst, and to return gaunt but glad to be back at home under the red-gums. Walkabout! What had he been doing since early morning? Ah, but then it was not the same as surrendering to the siren call luring a man to a sand dune merely to gaze over its far slopes.

  The stirring of the urge to walkabout was probably the result of his having actually achieved nothing throughout the four days he had been engaged on this Lush case. He had got nowhere, and he was now becoming impatient at having stood still so long.

  Abruptly realizing what was happening, he took him­self in hand, knowing quite well that his long list of successes was based on the rock-firm attribute of patience.

  Alive, William Lush might be apprehended; might even surrender to the police. Dead, it was only remotely likely that his body would ever be found, because for Lush the grave-digger would be this river, soon to flow and spread for miles either side, but slowly to recede, leaving for months a million stagnant little lakes and pools. If Lush were dead, if the river buried him for ever, there could be no proof that he was dead; the evidence proving that he had fallen over the cliff when enraged, or that he had been killed by another man, would also be taken care of by the river. Thus it was that this man of two races, this com­plex man who could admit to no failures as a man-hunter, could anticipate failure—the one thing that could destroy pride in himself and bring him down to the level of his maternal ancestors with their constant urge to go walk­about.

  Anticipation of failure, however, was the trap set for him now, as often it had been. Patience was the staff with which to prod the trap to harmless iron, and patience was the rapier with which to slay failure. He would cling to this case for years if necessary. He could hold to it like a tiger cat, and be deaf to the yells and screams of his superiors recalling him from it, superiors who thought he should be another Holmlock Shears and complete a case in five minutes
with a report of five thousand words.

  Bony suddenly burst into laughter at the thought of Holmlock Shears crawling about this river with its Mad­man’s Bends, and studying it with his glass. Still chuck­ling, the depression vanquished, he crossed the short distance from the killing-yard and the carcass gallows, and fell to studying the bank from it to the waterhole.

  He satisfied himself that no object, such as a body, had been dragged down the steep bank, but he could not be sure a body hadn’t been rolled down it like a log. There was a narrow path running diagonally down the bank from the yard to the waterhole, this having been used but seldom, and then for the probable purpose of attending to the pump. On this he found a print of a boot, but its details were insufficient to tell him the size of the boot which made it more than four days ago.

  Between the hole and base of the bank lay a flat-bottom boat. It had been so long out of water that its seams were parted. As it was bottom up, Bony turned it over, shrugged, and walked round the rocky lip of the hole.

  Into the hole went the wood skids down which to lower the pump. He could see the pump six feet below the sur­face. He could not see the bottom, but could see curving dark patches betraying heavy tree branches resting on others, if not on the bottom. He could find no sign that anyone had been to this hole since William Lush had abused his stepdaughter on being refused admittance to the house.

  Deciding to make yet another examination of the great hole below the mail-boxes, he sauntered along the dry bed, the avenue of gums standing high and trying to reach each other above him. The sun was westering and the trees to his right cast their shadows across the rock bars and the stones which the river had rolled and rolled for miles to make them round before laying them as cobbled ways. The crevices were filled with the red sand carried by the wind from the plains, but on reaching the bed at the boxes the river’s own sand was piled into a long thrust­ing spit, deep and loose and off-white, covered with un­recognizable tracks.

  Bony spent a full hour going over the ground already examined with the thoroughness that marked all his in­vestigations. He achieved nothing, but he saw something that made him stare intently up-river.

  The reach extended above the Madden homestead and turned sharply to the east. At this bend there appeared a disturbance similar to that made by a snake actively cross­ing a bed of long-dead leaves. Continuing to concentrate on the place, at least one-third of a mile distant, Bony watched the ‘bed of leaves’ grow thick and thicker still, and lengthen from bank to bank as it appeared to slide over the river bed towards him.

  Glancing at the sun, he found that time had sped, that it was almost five o’clock. The head of the flood was less than half a mile from him, and one hour before its esti­mated time.

  Tramping over the sand pit, he thought of Dead March Harry and the short fat man, and inwardly expressed the hope that they had not relied on the time estimate; then, climbing the bank opposite the boxes, he once again re­viewed his fruitless efforts to trace William Lush.

  Now on the bank he watched the head of the flood. There was nothing spectacular about it, merely a carpet of leaves and debris carried by a low water surge. Just below Madden’s homestead the carpet appeared rapidly to thicken, rumple, break into separate pieces; and these moved faster until they rejoined and the carpet was re-laid.

  When it had come to within a hundred yards of where Bony stood the front edge was halted—by what he could not determine—and from it water gushed in foam and came on free of debris. Behind it further debris was added to the mass, which again piled upon itself until the pressure broke it into smaller masses of leaves and bark streamers and small branches. Thus the river methodically built its dams and destroyed them, the water not deeper than fifteen inches.

  Bony watched the debris swept to the edge of the great hole and carried swiftly across it, portions being caught by the rock ledge, teased and torn away. The placid sheet of water vanished, and the broken masses moved round the bed into the reach above Mira, to rejoin and roll on to smother the dry, flat bed.

  The water was the colour of putty. For a time it carried merely light debris and the pronged branches which were rolled by the shallow water, over and endlessly over, like buckbush quickened by the wind. Bony was so interested that when again he gazed up-river he was astounded to see a wall built of heavier branches being thrust forward, rolled forward, branches which ceaselessly rose to lift high, sodden streamers of bark like a desperate man toss­ing up arms heavily loaded with seaweed.

  This barrier was at least twelve feet high, and a man caught in it would be mangled, crushed, and minced. It rolled past Bony into the once placid hole, sank as though in a quicksand, came up and floated on till caught by the shallow bed and again brought to its rolling move­ment.

  A tree fallen down the left bank and the protruding roots of another on the opposite bank caught both ends of the roller, bringing it to a halt. Behind it the water could actually be seen rising against it, and the free float­ing branches and tree trunks which moved relentlessly past Bony swiftly became lethargic and were gently pressed against the barrier, thickening it and apparently strengthening it.

  Before it passed Bony the water had been only knee-high; now behind it the water rose to the height of a man, and swiftly to the height of two men; and its height, which in passing had been but twelve feet, rose swiftly to fifteen, eighteen, twenty feet.

  Fascinated, Bony proceeded along the bank to look directly down upon it. From the lower face water gushed whitely as though through the valves of a man-built dam. He glanced up-river. The stream was rounding the bed ponderously, bearing further trunks and branches, and then he saw the result of the destruction of a similar barrier far up-river. That barrier had freed a great volume of imprisoned water, and the release now appeared in the form of a wave which Bony estimated to be five to six feet high. The wave hit the barrier. The barrier shivered, moaned like a beast in pain, began to scream, and sur­rendered. It sank, rose, was torn asunder, and torn again until on the racing water the arms of countless branches lifted high their loads of bark and went on racing to the Mira bend like a crowd of infuriated rioters.

  Bony sauntered along the bank, still absorbed by this phenomenon created by a rainstorm hundreds of miles away. Although the river would fall and rise and so on, it might be many years before it ceased to flow. Now with its burden of harvested debris it was sullenly alive, brown in colour, ugly in its triumph.

  On reaching the upper extremity of the Mira Station bend Bony could see the homestead, and he paused to regard it from the edge of a deep water gutter extending into a shapeless billabong. To the left was the fine house surrounded by the garden enclosed by a wooden fence. Opposite Bony stood the steam engine to power the pump raising water to the high tanks. To the right of this were the men’s quarters, and half a mile down-river were the shearing-shed and the woolshed.

  A sheep bleated. Magpies chortled and cockatoos cawed. They flew over him, and looking up he saw that they were black cockatoos, birds larger than a crow and as black, except for the under wings, which were blood-red. A dog barked. A man laughed. The cook came from his kitchen to twirl an iron bar round and round the inside of an iron triangle.

  It was the right time of day for a hungry man to visit Mira.

  Chapter Eleven

  Introduction to Mira

  ‘GOVERNMENT HOUSE’ at Mira Station was en­tirely fitted to be the governing centre of a million-acre property. It was built on a knoll well back from the billabong at which Bony had stopped to survey the entire homestead. Of Colonial design, it contained a dozen bed­rooms, a ballroom and a drawing-room almost as large. The verandas were twelve feet broad, and wire-netted against flies and mosquitoes. The surrounding garden guaranteed shelter from the cold winter easterlies, and cool protection from hot summer westerlies. It was the kind of home associated in literature with wealth, service, gracious living, security.

  Naturally, when Mira’s million acres and its eighty thousand she
ep were reduced by seventy-five per cent, the service staff as well as the employees had to be reduced, if not by seventy-five per cent, then by sixty. Mrs Cosgrove still maintained a house staff consisting of an excellent cook, two maids, a yardman, and a kitchen maid. To com­parative poverty she had conceded formal dinner dress, and this well pleased Bony, who was travelling light but managed a dark-blue lounge suit. Lastly, Mrs Cosgrove maintained all her old love of table appointments and ser­vice.

  Raymond Cosgrove occupied the head of the long table, his mother seated at his right with Mr MacCurdle next to her, and Bony on his left with Jill Madden next to him. Again naturally, the conversation was limited to the one topic of the flood.

  “I suppose, Mac, you had the boats brought up from the water,” Mrs Cosgrove said, with no hint of doubt in her rather hard voice.

  “I did that, Mrs Cosgrove,” replied the manager. His thin hair was as sandy as his moustache, clipped like a soldier’s. He had once been built like a soldier, too, but at fifty he was soft and inclined to paunchiness. “It could be months before the river will be well enough to put them back again.”

  “Not soon enough for me,” remarked Ray Cosgrove. “I’d prefer to row a boat to the mail-box than walk or ride. Tough going up, but drifting down a silvery river suits me. Besides, there’s always the chance of hooking a fish on a spinner.”

  His mother regarded him dotingly with eyes of dark grey, the most attractive feature of her broad face. To Bony she said, “Ray is always hopeful of beating Jill’s father, who hooked a twenty-pound bream.” Turning to her son, she added, “There won’t be any fishing now for many weeks, and you or someone will have to ride down to Murrimundi. And we’ll have to do with two mails a week, not three: it might even be one.”

  “Does the river rise fast?” asked Bony.