Читать книгу Cake in the Hat Box - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 6

The Road Block

Sam Laidlaw had been driving transports over the Kimberley tracks for five years, and what he could do with fencing wire to effect running repairs to the huge vehicles he commanded would sound unbelievably fantastic to modern garage mechanics. Sam’s job was a fantastic one: the tracks were fantastically tortuous, the ranges were fantastic in shape and colouring, and throughout the night the sky was fantastically streaked with shooting stars.

Sam left the seaport of Wyndham on August 16th, his six-wheeler loaded with ten tons of stores for stations south of Agar’s Lagoon. For ten miles the track was almost level as it crossed the flats south of Wyndham, a ship sailing on a sea of grass as yellow and as tall as ripe wheat. Thereafter it proceeded up an ever-narrowing valley between flat-topped ranges sparsely covered with stunted scrub and armoured with red and grey granite. The ranges merged into a maze with walls a thousand feet high, and the surface of the track was of loose stone and slate, level at no place for more than ten feet.

Sam’s speed at most was twelve miles an hour and gear-changing was a continuous necessity. Narrow, deep, steep-sided creeks yawned like cracks opened by an earthquake, making it appear impossible for a vehicle having the length of Sam’s transport ever to cross them. Ridges of bare rock were like monstrous teeth gnashing at the tyres, causing the vehicle to roll and lurch and buck like a ship in a typhoon.

From Wyndham to Agar’s Lagoon is about 240 miles, and Sam usually covered this distance in two days.

When day broke on the morning of the 17th, Sam Laidlaw’s transport was approximately eighty miles from Wyndham. Sam had slept in the cabin, and to begin his day he had merely to leave his two blankets, thrust his feet into boots which were never laced, and go to ground to relight his camp fire and boil water for a brew of tea. He was large and fat and hard, and other than the boots he wore only a pair of astonishingly oily shorts. The skin of his arms and torso was the colour of a medlar, and that of his cropped hair and wiry beard akin to gingerbread.

Sam ate standing up, a three-inch sandwich of bread and meat in one paw and the billy-can from which he drank gripped in the other. He stood with his legs wide apart like a colossus frightening the Ogres now slinking into the mountain caverns.

Breakfast finished, he was ready for the day’s run, for the oiling and fuelling had been done the night before. He slung the tucker-box on to the loading, jamming it down between bagged flour, tossed the billy-can into the cabin, and swung the starting handle as easily as a woman employs flattery. And whilst the engine was warming, he loaded his pipe with tobacco chipped from a plug the colour of ebony.

Like a slug heaving over a rockery, the six-wheeled transport roared and whined and lurched and bumped southward. The sun was high when from the welter of ridges and peaks ahead there emerged to distinction a mighty tower of red granite, and with the passing of time the nearer hills sank downward to reveal in all its grandeur this dominating northern extremity of Black Range, the southern claws of which threatened Agar’s Lagoon.

McDonald’s Stand it was called, and the track approached it like a nervous snake, veering slightly towards it and often shying hard away. The truck roared on, Sam sucking at his empty pipe and gripping the wheel with both hands save when the left flashed to the gear stick.

He did not see the cattle. For one thing, he had to keep his gaze on the track, and, for another, the beasts were chameleon against the background of their precise colouring. They were opened out wide, and fed as they walked. When Sam did see the cattle, he halted the transport and fell to loading his pipe as he watched them.

The horseman on the nearer wing turned back when the cattle had passed the truck. Sam left the cabin and stood in the attitude of legs wide apart so familiar to many. The horseman rode without effort. A second rider left the herd. Sam completed the lighting of his pipe, and turned back to the cabin to procure several letters, and on again confronting the approaching horsemen; the nearer was within twenty yards.

The rider wore a wide-brimmed hat. A tunic shirt of rough material was belted into the top of rough cotton trousers, the bottoms of which were tucked into short leather leggings. The wide leather belt about the waist carried a holster containing a heavy revolver. A gauntleted hand held the reins, and the other a looped stock-whip. A man! Could have been until the distance dwindled to five yards.

Sam smiled broadly and called: “Good day-ee, Kim!”

Candid grey eyes gazed down at him. Off came the hat, and hair the tint of new copper gleamed in the sunlight. The voice was low and strong.

“Good day-ee, Sam! How’s things?”

“Pretty good, Kim,” replied Sam. “Heard up at Wyndham you was on the road. Usual mob?”

Kimberley Breen nodded. The second horseman arrived. He also greeted the transport driver with a “Good day-ee, Sam!” His eyes flawlessly matched those of the girl, and his voice was strong, vibrant. He came to ground and proceeded to roll a cigarette, the spurs to his boots clinking musically.

Six feet three, and twelve stone weight, dressed and accoutred like the girl, Ezra Breen dwarfed the transport man but was not in turn dwarfed by the girl atop the horse. He accepted the letters, pocketing them without comment, and lit his cigarette before saying:

“Where bound, Sam?”

“Whitchica. How’s Silas and Jasper? Ain’t seen ’em in months.”

“They’re all right. Us Breens is always all right.”

The eyes were pale grey disks in a face complexioned like Sam’s face ... and chest ... and legs. The shoulders were wide and the hips deceptively narrow, the long legs filling the trousers as though they were tights. By comparison Sam Laidlaw was a jellyfish.

“Sarah keeping well?” inquired Kimberley Breen, and Sam grinned, saying that his wife was in hospital with a new baby. The information caused her face to soften, and the sun-ruined complexion was banished by a kind of glory.

“I’ll go and see her,” she cried. “What is it ... a boy?”

“Baby gal,” replied Sam, spitting at and hitting an ant. “Born day ’fore yestiddy. Sarah, she says if it’s another boy I can go swim with the crocs in the estuary. Turning out to be a gal, I’m still driving this here truck. When d’you aim to get in, Ezra?”

“Tomorrow week. See any other cattle on the hoof?”

“No ... not on this track. Masterton’s sending in a mob ... nine hundred, I heard. Well, better get on, I suppose. Aim to reach Whitchica some time tonight.”

“See you later.”

“You bet.”

Ezra Breen swung into his saddle. His sister slipped her leg over her horse’s head and put on her man’s felt hat. She smiled at Sam before turning her mount towards the distant river of beef. Ezra nodded and did not smile. Throughout the meeting he had not once smiled, and that was no oddity to Sam Laidlaw, who had known the Breens most of his life.

He clambered into the cabin of the transport and drove on up and over and down the succession of minor hillocks.

The basaltic cliffs of McDonald’s Stand rose to the sky to dominate Sam’s world for a little while. The track to the Breens’ station branched away to skirt the western spurs of Black Range, leaving the main track to follow the eastern flanks all the way to Agar’s Lagoon. The Rockies, the Himalayas, the Andes, all are greater than these mountains, but none in all the world resemble them.

The air was dustless, as clear as distilled water. Black Range, now running roughly parallel with the track, might have been a mile to the westward and actually was something like twelve miles. Since leaving Wyndham, Sam had met with no travellers save the Breens. Wild donkeys watched him from the hillsides, and kangaroos languidly removed themselves. The eagles passed him from one to the next while he crawled through their territory, and the turkeys ran away on absurdly stiff legs.

At noon Sam stopped to brew tea and gnaw into bread and meat, and about an hour after that camp fire had been left behind, his little eyes glinted with swift interest. The transport was then crossing the summit of a ‘bump’, and before he could decide what the object was on the summit of another ‘bump’ two miles ahead, he was driving down to cross another of the interminable gullies. On his again seeing the object, it was much nearer and recognizable as an American jeep.

It was motionless and facing his way. There was movement about it, chiefly on its canvas top, and he realized it was the vehicle used by Constable Martin Stenhouse, stationed at Agar’s Lagoon. Again it vanished as the transport dipped for another gully, and as the engine roared and whined and the transport creaked and complained, Sam cogitated on the motionless police car and decided that the policeman had stopped to shoot a turkey or a kangaroo.

When next he saw the jeep it was just beyond the radiator of the transport as the huge vehicle groaned and belched its way up the stony slope as steep as a house roof. Sam braked to an abrupt halt and switched off the engine. The silence flung itself against the sides of the cabin and bashed his ears, and he sat still to watch an eagle and several crows rise from the canopy of the jeep.

It was the canopy which distinguished this jeep for Sam Laidlaw, for it had been added by the policeman and old Syl Williams the blacksmith at Agar’s Lagoon. The sunlight was reflected by the narrow windshield so that Sam could not see into the jeep, but the presence of the birds made him uneasy.

He left the transport and approached the vehicle standing squarely on the narrow track. Not until he came abreast of the compactly sturdy product of a global war was he able to defeat the sun-reflecting windshield, and then saw seated behind the steering-wheel the slumped figure of Constable Stenhouse.

Because Stenhouse might be ill or asleep, he said:

“Good day-ee, Mr Stenhouse!”

The policeman did not move. He was seated with his head bent forward. One hand rested on the steering-wheel, which, because of the left-hand drive, was on the side farthest from Sam, who had stepped to the right. He walked round the back of the jeep and so reached the constable.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, and gently shook the motionless figure. “Cripes! Dead as hell!”

He raised the head and noted the wide eyes and the fallen jaw, and gently he permitted the head to regain its former position and stood back to take in the entire picture. That the jeep had been here for some time was proved by the close interest of very wary and wily birds, as well as by the condition of the dead man’s face.

There were dark marks under the vehicle, and Sam crouched and determined these marks to be dried blood. He looked into the vehicle and saw that dried blood covered the floor about the dead man’s feet.

“Done in ... looks like,” he said, aloud. “By the tracker, too. ’S’ava look.”

He rummaged among the gear behind the seat, finding, with the extra tyres and the tool-box, a tucker-box and one swag of blankets. There was no need to investigate the swag, for the outer canvas of the roll was heavily marked with the constable’s name.

There should have been a second swag, a much poorer outfit, and Sam removed filled petrol drums and other gear to make sure. The tracker’s swag was not there.

“Tracker musta shot you and cleared out,” Sam remarked to the corpse. “Mighta been an accident sort of, and the tracker’s walked back to Agar’s to report. Mighta been that way, but somehow I don’t think so. Assumin’ you was shot accidental, and the tracker decides to get back to Agar’s, he wouldn’t have bothered to carry his swag. No fear ... if I know them blacks. He’d have taken all the cooked food, and got out of most of his clothes and his boots and travelled light.”

Sam squatted on his heels and cut tobacco chips. He wished someone would come along and share the responsibility, for something would have to be done about this business, and a feller doesn’t want to go and do anything wrong which would make the cops nag at him. This policeman was dead all right, and the blood proved he hadn’t died in his sleep or of heart failure. The tracker must have had a lot to do with it.

In the first place, because there was no black tracker’s swag in the jeep it didn’t prove that there was no tracker. Stenhouse wouldn’t be out this far without a tracker, any more than he’d travel around these Kimberleys without a couple or more spare tyres. In the second place, the vanished swag indicated that the black had cleared out, either because he had killed the policeman or because the death of the policeman had frightened hell into him. What remained was a dead man sitting in his jeep, and Sam squatted on his heels and smoked while wondering what to do about it.

This particular ‘bump’ was ninety-odd miles from Agar’s, and on by far the roughest section of the entire trip from Wyndham. Nothing could be done for Constable Stenhouse, but what ought to be done with the body?

Sam knocked the ashes from his pipe, scratched his naked body under the armpits and stood up, having decided to leave Constable Stenhouse in his jeep. He was then confronted with the task of moving the jeep off the track, for it was not possible to drive his heavy transport past either side of it.

He tried pushing it forward, and, failing to move it, attempted to push it backward. This he did manage to accomplish by exertion of his great strength plus much profanity. When he had cleared the track, the cries of the birds produced a paramount thought, and unrolling the policeman’s swag he draped a blanket about the dead man, being then satisfied he could do no more.

Feeling the urge to get away, he swung the crank-handle of his transport and the resultant roar provided distinct comfort. His mind was on that tracker who must have been with Constable Stenhouse, and all about this scene were low trees and tall boulders providing adequate cover for an aborigine armed with a rifle ... or a long throwing spear.