Читать книгу The Dark Highway - Arthur Gask - Страница 9

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FOR the ensuing two days the search party worked energetically, but with no success, along the Coorong track. Bad fortune met them at the very onset of their quest. A strong southerly wind sprang up in the early hours of the first morning, and, almost before light had come, sand was masking over everything on the track. Wherever sand could gather, every mark of every foot-fall and every wheel track was obliterated.

"There goes our greatest chance of marking any deviation from the track," said Harker, the detective ruefully. "If they have wandered from the track, we did at any rate stand some chance of finding from where they started, before this blarmed wind came to cover everything up."

Harker, the man whom the Chief Commissioner had spoken of as knowing the Coorong, was in charge of the expedition, and it annoyed young Barton that the detective from the very first expressed himself as being in no way sanguine as to the success of their search. Indeed, he seemed quite sceptical about the whole business.

"You see, Mr. Barton," he said, "although I certainly agree, after our inquiries on the spot last night in Meningie, that your uncle and his friend probably never reached the township, still I cannot bring myself to believe that they are now anywhere about the Coorong at all." He shook his head emphatically. "No, I've been over the Coorong scores and scores of times and, knowing it as I do, I can't possibly imagine how anyone could have lost his way here. With the track running close along the lake, you have only to keep alongside the water and you're bound to go right."

"I know all that, as well as you do," replied young Barton sharply, "but I know also that my uncle was seen definitely to enter the Coorong and there is no evidence that he ever left it. Between here and Kingston something happened to them, and I believe they are about the track still. Everything points to it."

"Well," remarked the detective argumentatively, "they can't have run into the lake, that's certain. There are no high, over- hanging banks anywhere, and the water is shallow wherever they could possibly have gone over, all the way along the sides. A car plunging in would be stopped dead by the mud long before it could get into water deep enough to be covered up from sight."

"I realise that," said Stanley. "It isn't on the lake side of the road that we must look for them. It's on the other side away from the water that they'll be."

The detective shrugged his shoulders. "And what chance do you think we stand there?" he asked dubiously. "How shall we know where their car first turned off the track into the sandhills or the Ninety-Mile Desert? We must have a starting point, remember, and think what a desolate place this is. Miles and miles of sandhills and behind them more sand, and then miles and miles of uninhabited bush. How are we to search a thousandth part of the place?—and yet, until every part is gone through, the search will be incomplete and we may anywhere be missing the car." He dropped his voice sympathetically. "I don't want for a moment to discourage you, sir, but I'm afraid you're building too much on the certainty of finding them if they are here, and I'm only pointing out the difficulties that face us."

But if the detective had only known it, there was nothing of certainty in young Barton's mind. He was in a state of great depression about everything now, although he was obsessed every moment, as he had been from the very first, that among the dark sandhills of the Coorong lay the secret of his uncle's fate.

For the first day, travelling very slowly, the search party made their way along the whole length of the Coorong, reaching Kingston only just as night had fallen. It had been a very tiring day for all. In accordance with a settled plan they had stopped continuously and had searched diligently for any sign of a car having left the track.

But no success had in any way rewarded their efforts, and the farther they proceeded the more apparent became the uncertainty of their quest.

As Harker had said, they had no definite starting point. If, for some unexplainable reason, the big Jehu had been deliberately driven off away from the track—then, until they were able to determine the exact point from where the car had started upon its clandestine journey, it was sheer madness to leave the track anywhere haphazard, on the million to one chance that the missing trail could be picked up in a blindfold and happy-go-lucky sort of way.

Young Barton had come to realise this fully before they had gone many miles upon their journey, and, by the time they reached Kingston, he frankly admitted to the detective that he was almost as pessimistic as the former himself as to the ultimate result of the search.

"But still," he went on doggedly, "they must be here. You heard what we were told at Meningie this morning—that night or day no car could pass through the township without its being seen, and you heard them say over and over again that no car came through after midnight on Thursday. Now you'll hear what the people tell us at Kingston and then make of the two stories what you can."

With the arrival of the party at the hotel of the Broken Bough, the proprietor was put through a most searching cross- examination by the detectives, but he was positive to the point of anger that Eli Barton had gone on the Meningie road, and he laughed to scorn any idea that the car could by any possibility have doubled back and returned towards Melbourne in the night.

"Impossible," he said roughly. "Why, everyone sleeps outside on these hot nights, and I and all the family are out on the front verandah here, right over the road. Not even a dog could go by without some of us hearing him, let alone a big Jehu car," and he snorted in disgust.

"Tell me, Mr. Helling," asked Harker presently, when for a moment he had got the proprietor alone. "What do you make of this business? I tell you honestly I didn't think much of it yesterday when we left the city, but after what I've heard, first at Meningie and now here from you. I admit I'm beginning to feel a bit puzzled. What could have happened to them, do you think?"

The landlord regarded his questioner with troubled eyes. He looked round to make sure that they were alone, and then put his mouth close near to the detective's ear.

"I don't like it at all," he whispered, "but I haven't told young Barton so. I believe some evil's happened to them. I had a long talk with the Meningie people over the 'phone to-day. Menzies, the landlord there, is a friend of mine and a very shrewd fellow. He'll stake his life the car never reached Meningie, and upon my soul I believe him. He was out on his front verandah, just like I was all night long, and he swears the car couldn't possibly have gone by."

"Then what the devil has happened?" asked the detective with a frown—"if they're still on the Coorong, where are they?"

The landlord shook his head. "I believe they're dead," he said seriously. "I can think of nothing else."

"And why?" said the detective brusquely. "Who'd want to kill them?"