Breakaway House

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “For you to understand that I’ll have to go back in history. Old man Tonger had two sons, Morris and John. He made his sons equal beneficiaries under his will. A stern puritan of a man, his sons trod the broad and winding road. Old Mrs Tonger having died long before her husband, the two sons experienced no benefit of restraint. They both married good women, and all sympathy is to be extended to Amy Markham who married Morris.

  “John married a Perth girl who died when Frances was only three years old, and he himself arranged it so that he died in delirium tremens when he had but one shilling of his fortune left.

  “Amy Tonger rescued the baby, Frances, and the child was brought to Breakaway House, where she lived and was taught by a governess. On Mrs Tonger’s elopement, Morris sent Frances to schools in Perth, and, after her education was complete, continued to support her in Perth with an allowance which did not compel her to earn a living. But then, some two years ago, he abruptly announced that he no longer afford to make her the allowance, and asked her to come and keep house for him. And she thought that better than starving in Perth. Met her?”

  Tremayne nodded, and described in detail his encounter with Frances and her uncle. “My! She’s a peach, Brett,” he exclaimed fervently. “Engaged?”

  “I think not.”

  “Then I’m going to hang my hat up on her.”

  “It doesn’t appear that you’ve made a very good first impression,” was Brett’s dry opinion.

  “Never thought of making an impression, good or bad,” Tremayne said with obvious regret at the lost opportunity. “I own I was a little rattled by her manner, but I didn’t mean to be offensive.”

  “You’ll have an opportunity to apologise at the Breakaway House Ball. It’s…”

  The door opened to admit Mug Williams who inquired: “Have you them beasts ready for me to take away in the morning, Mr Filson?”

  “Sit down, Williams, and let’s talk. This is my overseer, Mr Tremayne. This, Harry, is Mr Williams. He’s a butcher in Myme, and rumour has it that he duffs cattle, although I find that hard to believe.” Filson was now smiling grimly.

  The little fat man’s eyes had lost their twinkle of good humour. “Glad to meet you,” he said, nodding to Tremayne. “This is a ’ard world and a man gets accused of things he never dreams of doing. Why, it’s because I’m so soft that they calls me Mug. Any wideawake fellow can do me down. Even Mr Filson, ’ere, always beats me in a deal. What about them cattle, Mr Filson?”

  “There’s seven in the yard.”

  “Seven! Phew! That’s more than I really wanted,” the cattle buyer said, regret in his voice. “Trade ain’t as good as it was. What them miners is doing with their money beats me. Their wives don’t get it, that’s certain. And the pubs don’t get it either. Must be the ’orses. None of the favourites have won lately.”

  “How many beasts do you want now?” asked Brett patiently. “Will you take two?”

  “Well, I was thinking of taking more than two. What were you thinking of asking for them beasts?” Mug Williams spoke with vocal tones indicating that the subject of cattle bored him almost to prostration.

  “Fourteen pounds, five shillings a head.”

  “You must be thinking of our last deal when the market was high.”

  “No. I’m thinking of this one.”

  “But I want to take more than two of ’em.”

  “There are seven in the yard. My lads will help drove them off the place in the morning.”

  “But I can manage them meself, Mr Filson.”

  “You’d better have my boys’ help,” Filson insisted, a shadow of an amused smile about his lips. “You see they may break back on you, become boxed with other cattle, and then you might forget the number you really bought.”

  “Well, if I buys only two, and them two I can’t manage – I’m not admitting it – it ain’t likely I’d forget how many I bought, and go on with only one.”

  “I agree, Williams. You most certainly would not go on with only one. Will you have a snifter?”

  “When we’ve finished the argument, Mr Filson. I’ll not be too proud then.”

  “What argument?” Brett asked blandly.

  “What? Why, about the cattle. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, quick, ’cos I’m thirsty. I’ll take the seven off your hands at a tenner a piece.”

  “Better have the drink. You’re likely to get a sore throat arguing.”

  “But I ain’t got the money. Trade’s bad, I tell you. It must be the ’orses.”

  Brett shook his head. Tremayne was grinning behind a weekly journal.

  “What you really want is poor stuff, Williams. Try longer,” advised the squatter.

  Mug Williams’ good humour vanished and into his grey eyes leapt a cold, hard light. His voice was metallic when he said: “That swine! I ain’t dealing with him since he chased me off into the breakaways for nothing. You ’eard about it?”

  “I did hear that he accused you of taking four extra beasts,”

  Brett admitted, chuckling. “He’s a tough nut.”

  “He’s worse than a tough nut, Mr Filson. He’s at the back of a pretty queer… He’s gonna end up sudden like.” Tremayne’s eyes were peering over the top of his paper, veiled by drooping lids. “Perhaps a spear will run through his tummy one of these days. A man who messes about with black women always ends up that way. There was Alwin and Messingham who looked for and found black trouble. Well, I’ll give you eleven pounds each for them beasts.”

  “Better have a drink. You must be getting dry.”

  “Hard! You’re as hard as those breakaway rocks. I’ll give you me limit – me limit, mind – twelve pounds each for the seven.”

  “Have you ever known me budge, Williams?”

  Mug Williams sighed in despair. “Give us that drink, Mr Filson. A double nobbler, please. I’d as soon talk to a black about ’is corroboree rites than to you about cattle.”

  “Help yourself, Williams. You’ll find those beasts well over the seven-hundred pound weight I set.”

  “I ain’t arguing no more,” Williams stated sadly. “Your bringing up Tonger ’as spoilt the argument. The lousy dog! A nice crowd over there for a young innocent tart to mix with.”

  “What kind of a crowd?”

  Keen, shrewd eyes regarded Tremayne, who had spoken. They examined him very carefully. Then: “Oh…a bit loose like. Well,” Mr Williams rose, “I’ll be getting across to the men’s ’ut for a game of poker. Here, Mr Filson, take the money till the morning please.”

  From a hip pocket the cattle buyer extracted a roll of ten-pound notes and a small wad of one-pound notes. From the latter he “lifted” one pound.

  “You’ll find a hundred and forty-three pounds there,” he said solemnly. “Lock it away safe, and if I should come back for a pound or two, don’t you let me have it at any price. Poker’s my cross. And don’t trouble about assistance in the morning. I can manage ’em.”

  “You’ll be escorted off the place,” Brett said decisively.

  “All right! Have it your own way. Good night!”

  Once more cheerfully grinning, the little rotund man gaily waved a pudgy hand and vanished.

  “There goes a modern Robin Hood,” Brett said, with low laughter as he locked up the money in the safe in the corner. “Ten years ago he and his brother started the butchery in Myme. Everyone thought him a bit simple, but suspicions of cattle duffing are becoming strong against him. And yet he’s that honest that it’s not necessary to count his money or to give him a receipt for it. He’s got just that one mental kink for duffing cattle.”

  CHAPTER VI

  A FOX HUNT

  THE Myme mail was dispatched from Mount Magnet every Tuesday and Friday, and this particular day in late September Harry Tremayne, in Brett’s absence, took the Bowgada bag from old Hool-’em-up Dick.

  Among his own letters was a report submitted by the police at Mount Magnet in which was the statement that no one recollected seeing a young s
wagman with a bicycle on or subsequent to August tenth. Further inquiries at Kyle station, situated midway between Breakaway House and Mount Magnet, produced information to the effect that such a swagman was not remembered to have visited that place either.

  There had also arrived by the mail a parcel addressed to him by a Mount Magnet storekeeper, and with this parcel, as well as his lunch and quart pot, strapped to the saddle, Harry Tremayne rode away from the Bowgada homestead astride Major, his own intelligent horse.

  At a leisurely walk the horse carried him down the south track from the house for about half a mile, where they abruptly skirted the precipitous face of a breakaway “bay” similar to that above which Tremayne had first met Filson, and on the far side of this sea-less bay the road turned westward and fell in steep gradients down the side of a headland to the flats below.

  Near to the bottom, at the extremity of the headland, the road wound in and out among huge granite boulders sundered from a stratum of rock near the summit, whilst in several places a conglomeration of such boulders made small hillocks of rock. Here was a position which the war veteran Filson knew could be defended against a battalion by a single machine-gun.

  But on this clear, warm and brilliant late morning Harry Tremayne was singularly unappreciative of scenic beauties and unconcerned with military strategy. Even at the foot of the headland the higher ground level permitted him, when once clear of the rock debris, to observe the sun-reflecting roof of the hut at Acacia Well and those roofs grouped into Breakaway House homestead farther westward.

  More than likely, at that very moment, Brett Filson was at that distant homestead, lunching there, on his way to Mount Magnet where he would catch a train to Perth to undergo his periodical medical examination – still a necessity after all those years.

  From Breakaway House he would ring Tremayne, and if then he should order that English be sent out to overlook certain beasts in an east paddock, it was to be understood that the swagman had not been seen to arrive at Breakaway House; whilst if he directed Fred Ellis to be set special work it indicated the opposite.

  To concur with Tremayne’s ostensible presence at Bowgada, it would not have done for him to make inquiries concerning a man who had disappeared some time before his arrival. Brett, however, would say that he had been asked to make inquiries by the man’s aunt who had received his last letter from Bowgada.

  From the first, Harry Tremayne regarded the occupants of Breakaway House with suspicion. He had not told Filson, but in his brother’s last letter, his brother had said that he had obtained information, the implications of which demanded an examination of the breakaways west of Myme.

  At Acacia Well, both Ellis and Ned remembered the swagman with the bicycle. They were crutching sheep in the adjacent yards that day and the swagman had taken his lunch with them. There was no doubt then, that Tremayne’s brother had left Acacia Well for Breakaway House, but it appeared likely that at some point between these two places he had vanished.

  The information that Tremayne gathered concerning Breakaway House indicated that as a small pastoral community it was not normal. Its owner was a loose liver. He was so partial to black and half-caste workers that there were but two white men on his books, the men’s cook and the boss stockman. Of the cook, Tremayne had learned little, but the boss stockman was legally married to an Aboriginal woman, he having been given and accepted that way out by the police.

  All this was not extraordinary to a man with Tremayne’s experience of the Kimberleys, but it was not a set of normal conditions on the Murchison where squattocracy is older. Here at Breakaway House the number of Aborigines and half-castes was much higher than a view of its area would require to work it. Yet despite this fact, the condition of Tonger’s fences, his cattle and his sheep emphatically indicated neglect. Both as a stockman and a policeman, Harry Tremayne’s interest was captured by Breakaway House.

  He was boiling the quart pot at the foot of an outcrop of ironstone some two miles from Acacia Well when he observed near the east breakaway, and about three miles to the north-east of his then position, two columns of smoke rising into the still air.

  This signal indicated that one Aborigine desired another to come to him without delay. Likely enough, it was either Ned or Miss Hazit signalling to his or her conjugal partner then at Acacia Well. Whichever one it was, there at the base of those smoke columns presently would be Ned, whom Tremayne wanted to see that day.

  And between two islands of rubble, beside a watercourse bordered by flats covered with small chips of snow-white quartz, reminding one of a well-kept graveyard, he found Ned and Miss Hazit crouched over a small fire on which they were cooking short lengths of goanna.

  “Good day, Mr Tremayne!” Ned shouted, springing to his feet to welcome the second boss.

  “Day, Ned!” Tremayne replied cheerfully. “I was boiling my quart when I saw your smoke, so I emptied it and came on to boil it here.” Having refilled the utensil from the canvas bag slung from his horse’s neck, he added: “Which one of you signalled?”

  “Ned did. I was at Acacia Well,” replied Miss Hazit, demurely refraining to look up from her task of cooking. “You must have ridden fast.”

  “Yes – I came along. I brought Fred’s shotgun. Ned wanted it.”

  “You bet. Over in that burrow is two or three foxes,” Tremayne was informed with a frank smile. “I seen them tracks. Then I gathers wood and leaves for the fires way over there in that acacia and…” Ned paused to yell his mirth, “up one of those trees went this bungarra. Cripes! I had him cooking when Nora got here.”

  “Oh! And what about the foxes?”

  “They’re orl right. They keep shut-eye. Bime-by me and Nora get ’em out. You wait!”

  Miss Hazit was dressed precisely as she had been when she shamelessly flirted with the overseer at Acacia Well. To be sure, there was a hole in her right stocking, and a bad ladder on the calf of the other, but she was as clean and as fresh as on their first meeting.

  Later, Tremayne watched these two at work fox hunting. In other parts of the world foxes are hunted with expensive hounds by people mounted on more expensive hacks. In other parts of Australia men go to enormous labour in laying poisoned baits and setting traps. These two Aborigines, ignorant of foxes and their habits until quite recent years, revealed a cunning cleverness truly surprising.

  Miss Hazit softly circled the burrow, marked amid the white quartz chips by the brown earth of the excavations below, and expertly examined the “run-outs” for tracks, finally silently indicating a particular hole.

  Twenty odd yards from this hole Ned squatted down, made sure the double-barrelled gun was full cocked, and waited immobile after waving to Tremayne, still near the fire, to sit down.

  Miss Hazit then brought her head close to the mouth of the hole and coughed loudly several times. Continuing to cough louder at short intervals, she walked back to Tremayne, shuffling her feet as she went.

  Nothing happened. Ned, seated like a carved Buddha, rested his cheek against the gun-stock. Miss Hazit then proceeded to throw quartz chips much like a boy skimming a stone over water, each piece of quartz bounding from the burrow to fall some distance beyond.

  A fox leisurely appeared out of the hole selected by Miss Hazit, the strange sounds having mastered its curiosity. Blinded by the sunlight, it sat down blinking its eyes, waiting for them to become accustomed to the light in order to ascertain just what caused these most curious noises. And then a second fox appeared. The standing Miss Hazit presently was seen by the first fox which rose on all feet ready to dash below, but Ned fired twice rapidly and the two foxes fell dead.

  A third fox appeared, to run blindly across the quartz chips, and because Ned was fumbling to reload the gun, Miss Hazit with screams of delight snatched up a stick and gave chase. Ned began yelling orders and curses, and Tremayne found himself joining in the hunt. He and Miss Hazit tore after the fox, which now could see and dodged this way and that with deceptive casualness. Miss Haz
it’s high-pitched excited laughter and Ned’s roared orders to get out of the way, so confused the animal that it never had a real sporting chance.

  “Take that – and that and that,” shouted Miss Hazit, gleefully battering the fox, which was wholly unnecessary as her first blow had killed it. Her black eyes were little flames, her white teeth revealed by the widely parted lips. She was a living picture of the huntress when the world was young: straight, finely moulded, and with a figure to be envied by any woman.

  “Good, eh?” Ned cried on reaching her and Tremayne. “Plenty tobacco now. Plenty new clothes for you, Nora. Mr Filson give order on Magnet storekeeper when he come back from Perth. Now you scalp ’em, Nora, and get back to camp. I gotta go see to White’s Mill. Fred says so.”

  He set the gun down on the body of the fox and proceeded to cut tobacco for a cigarette before giving the knife to his woman. She could do the skinning and take the skins and the heavy gun back to Acacia Well. He had work – real work – to do.

  “I’ll be going with you,” Tremayne told him. “So long, Nora!”

  “Goo’ bye!” she replied and, because Ned was not looking in her direction, the minx pursed her lips at the overseer, with her eyes almost hidden by the lowered lashes.

  At White’s Mill he worked on the loose nuts of the mill-head and the giant fan, while Ned let out the water in the long line of troughing and scraped away the green weed growing on it. And the job done, Tremayne brought out the parcel he had received that morning from Mount Magnet and opened it in front of Ned’s fascinated eyes.

  “Remember the other day that ribbon you took from Nora and I burned,” he said, looking up at his tattered companion.

  Ned nodded assent, his enraptured gaze still centred on the mysterious parcel.

  “Do you know why I burned it?”

  This time Ned did look at his questioner, to shake his head.

  “Nora being your woman, she had no right to that ribbon. And the man who gave it to her had no right to give it to her either,” Tremayne patiently explained, in his voice a hardness which diminished Ned’s curiosity in the still unopened parcel. “Nora fine woman, eh? You love Nora, eh? You going to keep Nora, eh?”