Читать книгу The Bone is Pointed - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 6

Suspense

History repeats itself!

It was dreadful how the phrase recurred in her mind, as though in it there dwelt an imp determined to torture her with its incessant repetition, as though the imp knew that this night would be one of tragedy as that other night had been twelve years ago.

Twelve years ago, almost on the same date of the year, Mary Gordon had walked about this pleasant room in the rambling homestead of Meena Station waiting for her husband to come home. The same clock on the mantelshelf was chiming out the quarter-hours as it had done that night twelve years before. The same calendar had then announced the date, the nineteenth of April, as to-night it announced the date, the eighteenth of April. It was raining this night as it had rained that other terrible night of suspense, and the sound of it on the iron roof annoyed her because it interfered with the sound she longed to hear—hoof beats on the sodden ground.

Eight times the hammer struck the gong within the clock.

The dinner table was set out for three persons. The spoiling dinner was being kept warm on the oven shelves and on either side of the stove. Eight o’clock, and the dinner had been waiting two hours!

Twelve years before, Mary’s husband had not come home. Was her son, John, not to come home this night?

Mary found it impossible to sit down, to read or sew. The rain maintained a steady thrumming on the roof, and within this major sound were others, the hiss of falling rain on the leaves of the two orange-trees, just beyond the veranda, on the roofs of more distant outhouses. The early darkness was accounted for by the low rain clouds that had begun their endless march from the north-west shortly after noon.

“What on earth’s keeping them?”

Standing at the open door of this large kitchen-living-room, Mary strained her hearing to catch the sound of hoof beats beyond the sound of the rain, but beyond the rain she could hear nothing. This rain coming after the hot and dry months of summer had filled her with a kind of ecstasy and, breathing the warm, moisture-laden air, she had stood often and long on the west veranda watching the rain falling upon the great empty bed of Meena Lake. The rain held no significance in the long-delayed appearance of her son, but its first music was now a noise preventing her hearing the sound of hoof beats.

History repeats itself!

Twelve years ago she had stood in this same doorway, listening for hoof beats and hearing only the rain on the roof, on the leaves of the orange-trees, then so small, and on the roofs of the distant, night-masked outbuildings. She had waited hour after hour till the dawn had paled the sky. There were four hands employed on the station then. She had wakened them, given them breakfast, and sent them with two of the blacks to find her husband. He was lying beneath the body of his horse that had broken a leg in a rabbit burrow, and they had brought him home all wet and cold and smeared with mud. Now no men were working on Meena save her son and Jimmy Partner, and this night they were both somewhere out in the darkness and the rain when they should have been with her.

Well, perhaps she was worrying herself unreasonably. Her husband had ridden out alone to look over the cattle in South Paddock. John had gone to look at the sheep in East Paddock, and with him had gone Jimmy Partner. If anything had happened to John, there was Jimmy Partner to help him. And it might be the other way round. Still, for all that, what on earth was keeping them out so late, especially when it was raining and had been raining ever since two o’clock?

Tall and gaunt and grey was this Mary Gordon, a woman ill-fitted to counter the hardships of her early life, hardships suffered with the dumb patience of animals. Like an old picture, her face was covered with tiny lines. Her hair was thin and almost white, but her eyes were big and grey, wells of expression.

Life had been particularly hard upon Mary Gordon, but it had given her the love of two men to compensate for the years of unnatural harshness when, as a teamster’s girl, she had accompanied her father on the tracks with his bullocks and the great table-top wagon, doing the cooking, often hunting the bullocks in the early morning, sometimes even driving the team when her father was too drunk and lay helpless atop the load. After he had died—beneath one of the wheels—she went into service at the station homesteads until John Gordon married her and took her to Meena, his leasehold property of three hundred thousand acres.

She had never become quite used to John Gordon’s affection, for when one is thirty-four, and has never known affection, affection never ceases to be strange. Of course, she had paid life for it, paid in anguish over years which had begun when they brought home the poor body and the minister from Opal Town consigned it to rest beside John the First in the little station cemetery.

John the Third was at school down in Adelaide, a mere boy of sixteen. He had at once returned home and demanded to stay at home to learn the management of sheep and the affairs of this small station property. Like his father in so many things, the son was like him in his steady affection for her.

History repeats itself! Time to pay again!

Ah, no! No, no, no! It won’t! It can’t! It mustn’t! Oh, why don’t they come home?

No longer could Mary support the intolerable inactivity. Turning back into the room, she slipped on an oilskin coat and lit a hurricane lamp, and with this small light to assist her she stepped off the veranda down to the wet ash path of the small garden and traversed it to the low gate in the wicket fence. Away from the iron veranda roof the night was less noisy and permitted the little sounds to reach her ears—the pattering of the rain on the gleaming coat, on the trees, on the ground. It thudded on her hands and on her face like the tips of nervous fingers urging her to go to him she loved. Besides those made by the rain there were no other sounds, no sound of creaking saddles, of hoof falls, of jangling bits in the mouths of horses eager to be home.

No longer hesitant, she walked across the open space to the out-buildings of which one was the men’s hut. In this there were two small rooms. In the outer room was a rough wood table, a form and several cases serving as chairs. On the table were weekly journals, a cribbage board, a hurricane lamp. Within the inner room stood two beds, one without a mattress, the other with a mattress and with blankets tossed in disorder on it. It was Jimmy Partner’s bed.

Mary’s mind seemed partitioned to-night and one part of it noted that the interior of this room smelled clean despite the fact that its tenant was an aboriginal. But then Jimmy Partner was an unusual aboriginal.

Again in the rain and hemmed by the menacing darkness, Mary walked to the wire gate in the low wire fence enclosing the whole of Meena homestead. She was unable to see it, but to her right stretched away the great bed of the lake that she had seen thrice filled with fifteen feet of water, giving life to countless water birds and heavy blackfish. Passing through the wire gateway, she began to follow a path winding away beneath the wide ribbon of box-trees bordering the lake’s shore, and now into the lamplight came wide-eyed rabbits to stare at her approach and vanish to either side. The rain was to give the rodents another lease of life.

Without a flicker the light went out; unexpectedly, because there was no wind. The night’s blackness struck her eyes like a velvety blow; and, her mind momentarily confused, she halted, the rain drops on the leaves and on the trees like the footsteps of gnomes.

But Mary knew exactly where she was on this path made by the naked feet of aborigines connecting their camp with the homestead, a path first formed more than sixty years ago. Gradually the blackness waned to become faintly luminous, and when her eyes became accustomed to the night light, she continued along the path she was unable to see but on which she was guided by the shapes of familiar trees.

She had walked slowly for five minutes when a ruddy glow illuminating the trees ahead indicated the camp. Presently she was able to see the red eyes of several banked fires and one that burned brightly before a humpy constructed with bags and canegrass. On either side of this fire stood an aboriginal. Its roseate light revealed further rough humpies but no other inhabitants of the camp.

He who stood with his back to the humpy was short of stature. His body was thick with good living, but his legs were astonishingly thin. His hair and straggly beard were white, and the look of him belied the power he held over the entire Kalchut tribe. Nero was an autocrat.

The other man Mary also instantly recognized. In his elastic-sided riding boots he stood six feet in height, with his arms folded across his white cotton shirt, now all steaming from the heat of the fire. The sight of him made Mary Gordon falter in her slow walking. He was Jimmy Partner for whose return with her son she had been waiting.

In heaven’s name why was he talking to Nero at this hour? Nine o’clock is a very late hour for aborigines to be outside their humpies. To be sure, only Nero was outside now in the rain, but something most unusual must have happened for Jimmy Partner to have come to the camp at nine o’clock at night, and in the pouring rain, and to have got Nero to come out of his humpy to talk with him in the light of a replenished fire.

It is doubtful if any woman in all this wide district of western Queensland knew the aborigines better than did Mary Gordon. To her they were not children; nor were they semi-idiots or mere savages. Why, she had raised Jimmy Partner in her own home, and Jimmy Partner had grown up to be a brother to John in all save birth and race. He was a member of this Kalchut tribe, fully initiated, and still he was apart from it, electing to live in the men’s hut, to eat with John and herself in the kitchen-living-room, to work for wages and to be always loyal and trustworthy. Early that morning he and John had left to ride the fences of East Paddock, and now, at nine o’clock at night, he was here talking to old Nero and John was not yet home.

Her mind accepted the extraordinary situation even whilst she made nine steps forward towards the fire. Then its possible significance burst in her mind like a bomb exploding. Jimmy Partner had come to seek Nero’s aid—as she had come to do—to find and bring in her son—alive, perhaps dead.

History repeats itself!

She began to run, her gaze directed to the face of Jimmy Partner, and the face of Jimmy Partner showed alarm. He was speaking rapidly but softly, and he was emphasizing points with the index finger of his right hand. Nero was relegated to an inferior position in this conference. She could not see Nero’s face, for his back was towards her, but she did see his round head constantly nod in assent to what Jimmy Partner was saying.

Now the camp dogs heard her flying feet and set up their chorus of barking. The men on either side of the fire drew farther apart and stared about, becoming tense in attitudes of listening. She saw then that Jimmy Partner saw her. He came swiftly to meet her.

“John! What has happened to John?” she demanded, pantingly.

Now the firelight was behind Jimmy Partner and she was unable to read his face although she did see the white of his eyes when he drew close to her.

“Ah—Johnny Boss is all right, missus,” he replied, his voice deeper than the average aboriginal voice and even more musical. “He left me to put a mob of sheep out of East Paddock ’cos of the rain makin’ the Channels boggy. He sent me on home. He’s all right, missus.”

Relief surged like a tide from her heart to her weary mind, to banish the numbing terror. Yet it seemed to draw strength from her legs and she swayed forward and would have fallen had not Jimmy Partner quickly placed his great hands beneath her elbows.

“I tell you Johnny Boss is all right, missus,” he said, now more confidently. “He’ll be back home any minute. We been droving small mobs of sheep away off the Channels all afternoon.”

“Yes, yes!” Mary cried. “But why didn’t you come home and tell me, Jimmy? What are you doing here when you know the dinner’s getting cold and I’m so anxious?”

“Well, missus, I didn’t think. True. This morning we found over beside Black Gate a sign message for Nero from Mitterloo saying he wanted the tribe to go across to Deep Well where poor old Sarah is very crook and looks like dying. So I rode this way home to tell Nero about it, and the tribe’s going off on walkabout first thing in the morning. Better go home, missus. I’m coming now. Perhaps Johnny Boss is there already. Here, let me light the lamp.”

Thank God that that imp was a liar to keep shouting that history repeats itself. Consciously now she noted Jimmy Partner’s flimsy shirt again drenched by the rain.

“You hurry home,” she said with her old time authority over two boys who would regard their bodies as though they were made of wood or iron. “No hat on your head, as usual. No coat; just a cotton shirt over a vest. And standing here in the cold rain.”

“I’m all right, missus. I’ll get me horse and be home before you.”

Nero had vanished inside his humpy and now the dogs were quiet. With the lamplight to give her feet confidence, Mary hurried back along the natural path, feeling the urge to laugh and knowing the emotion for hysteria. Back again at the wire gate she was joined by two dogs as she was fastening it, and she then wanted to cry out her joy, for they were John’s dogs. Over by the harness shed she heard the clink of stirrup-irons and, with the dogs escorting her, she ran across to the dark form of a horse.

“John! Oh, John!” she cried. “I’ve been so worried about you. I—I thought you were lying out hurt.”

She saw his slim form beside the greater bulk of the horse, halted when the animal moved between them, shaking itself, to trot to the trough beside the windmill. Then she was clinging to her son, and he was saying, the school-given accent still in evidence: “I’m all right, mother. I wanted to get the sheep away from the Channels. What a rain, dear! We must have had an inch already. Let’s hope it’ll rain six inches and fill the lake.”

A dull tattoo of hoofs preceded the arrival of Jimmy Partner who ground his feet before his horse could stop. Quick fingers began their work of removing the saddle.

“I told Nero about the message at Black Gate,” he said.

“Oh!” responded John Gordon a trifle vaguely, then hastened to add: “Oh, the message! Yes, that’s right, Jimmy. The tribe will start off for Deep Well first thing in the morning. Old Sarah is due to pass out. She must be the oldest lubra of the Kalchut. Now hurry along and get washed and change those clothes. Have you got clean shirt and vest and pants?”

“Too right, Johnny Boss.”

Mother and son began the walk across to the house, marked in the void by the light in the kitchen-living-room.

“I’m sorry we’re so late,” John Gordon said, slipping an arm about the gaunt figure. “Didn’t think this rain was coming when we left this morning, and I would have worried all night had I left the sheep on the Channel country.”

“But I’ve been so anxious, dear, so terribly anxious,” she complained. “I couldn’t help thinking of that night twelve years ago.”

The arm about her increased its pressure.

“I know,” he said, tenderly. “You are a bit of an old worry pot, aren’t you? The fact is that you have been too closely associated with the blacks, especially the lubras, and have borrowed much of their belief in the supernatural. Because poor dad failed to come home one night, you needs must imagine that I won’t turn up. It’s piffle when you come to think of it, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m home safe and sound, and it’s raining good and hard and looks like raining all night, and perhaps it will rain for a week and we’ll have feed and water for years. I don’t see anything to worry about, but everything to dance about.”

He opened the wicket gate for her and she hurried on into the house to look to the dinner, the fire, and then to take up airing underclothes and lay them on his bed beside his second best trousers and coat. She was humming a little tune as she passed back again to the kitchen, but the humming gave place to a cry of concern when she saw on John’s throat a wide bluish mark.

“It’s nothing, and it doesn’t hurt,” he quickly told her. “I was riding under a mulga-tree in the dark when a low branch gave me a knock. There’s no damage done, so don’t worry about it or I’ll have to take you in hand and talk to you seriously for being a bad woman. Now, what’s for dinner? I’m hungry. And here’s Jimmy Partner.”

The cloud in her big eyes passed, but she followed him with a bottle of embrocation, to fuss about him until he applied some of it to the bluish mark.

When they sat down to dinner it was still raining.