Читать книгу Bony and the Kelly Gang - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 5

Where Foxes Lived with Rabbits

The secondary road was ruler-straight across the narrow coastal lowlands to the base of the Southern Mountains of New South Wales. It was bituminised, and on either side extended paddocks of grass, green with life and studded with fat cattle. Behind the man walking this road was the highway from Sydney, and beyond it lazed the Pacific. Before him rose tree-covered slopes to support the granite faces of the uplands high to three thousand feet above sea level.

This was certainly not Inspector Bonaparte’s country of mulga forest, rolling sand dunes and saltbush plains, of barren residuals and ironstone ridges. This country was no less beautiful, no less mysterious, but it wasn’t his own. The faces of the mountains frowned at him.

Superintendent Casement had said, turning from a wall map to his littered desk:

“I remember when I was a small kid on the farm at home, and had to leave for a city boarding-school. The problem was what to do with my three ferrets. The old man couldn’t be bothered, and my mother disliked having anything to do with them. The night before I left, I took them to the largest rabbit burrow on the place and let ’em loose, knowing they wouldn’t starve for rabbits. And next morning I ran out to say goodbye to them, and found them all dead on the roof of the burrow. You see, I didn’t count on foxes living with the rabbits.”

Inspector Bonaparte remembered glancing up from his long brown fingers which were rolling a cigarette, and saying:

“And your two-legged ferrets have been found dead on or near a burrow in the Southern Highlands.”

“One dead and several badly mangled. The burrow is near this cross I’ve just made on the map. Perhaps I should say the burrow is thought to be near the cross.”

Bonaparte recalled lighting the cigarette and being elated by the challenge in the Superintendent’s small brown eyes. That was the moment of decision, and he had made it, with complete knowledge of the official data in mind, and all details of that wall map as clear as when he had turned from it to roll his cigarette.

This was certainly not his country, with its wide grass paddocks ending against walls of rock thrown up probably a million years ago. Take an aborigine from this country and put him down in the ‘Back of Beyond’, and he would die of thirst if he didn’t die of fright. Reverse the transfer, and the Outbacker would thrust his head into a wombat hole and howl with cold misery. Everything is relative with the aborigines, even with Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, now travelling under the name of Nathaniel Bonnay.

Now and then a car overtook him, but he made no effort to thumb a ride. He was waiting for a truck bearing the registration plates 101-PXA, and knew that somewhere behind it a police car would be keeping discreetly out of the driver’s rear-vision mirror. Travelling by truck to the suspected burrow would be preferable to walking all the way, and even when he did reach it there were sporting odds that it would house no foxes.

Much preparation had been done prior to putting Nat Bonnay on this road to the Southern Highlands, and much detailed work had gone into the plan to introduce him to Cork Valley where its people had long been suspected of unlawful activities. Superintendent Casement’s allegorical rabbit burrow was probably no larger than a six-room house, but the Cork Valley locale was something like four square miles in area.

It was now early April; the sun was pleasantly warm and the maples and other ornamental trees about the occasional homestead were beginning to be coloured by autumn. The usually nattily dressed Inspector Bonaparte was walking with a loping spring, but nothing else remained of him in the character of Nat Bonnay. His clothes were old and far from neat. His boots were elastic-sided riding boots. His trousers were of rough gaberdine, tight about the thighs and full in the seat. The jacket was made of a cheaper cloth, and the blue shirt collar was frayed slightly and dirty. He carried a small battered suitcase, and with his felt hat he waved away the occasional fly.

The truck crept up behind him like a stalking fox, and Bony sprang guiltily back when he saw it two hundred yards behind him. He started to run off the road, stopped indecisively, turned as though seeking cover, finally stood and raised a hand for a lift.

It was a three-ton truck, with gleaming bumper bars and newly painted red cabin. The driver slowed down slightly, then accelerated as though he didn’t like the look of the wayfarer. But he stopped the truck fifty yards on, obviously still uneasy in his mind when Bony settled himself on the seat beside him.

Neither spoke for sixty seconds. During this time the truck driver became conscious of the other’s interest in his rear-vision mirror.

“Thanks,” said the wayfarer. “Good sort of day.”

“Last of the summer,” agreed the driver. “Where are you headed?”

“Nowhere in particular so long’s it’s away from Sydney. How far are you going?”

“I turn off into the hills twenty miles this side of Bowral. What’s wrong with Sydney?”

The fingers of Bony’s left hand drummed on the suitcase resting on his knees. The sign of nervousness was not lost on the driver who waited for the answer.

“Plenty,” admitted the wayfarer. “Sydney’s getting too cold to sleep out in. Besides”—he permitted the drone of the vehicle to drown out his voice before adding—“I’m not popular in Sydney.” The farms and the colourful farm homesteads drifted past, but the granite faces of the uplands remained distantly aloof. “Bowral! What sort of place is it? Big or small?”

“Smallish. Four-pub town. Three policemen. Five hundred yapping dogs.”

“Oh!” The traveller appeared to be shocked by the information. The driver waited for the shock to subside, and, with an elbow, assured himself that the spare tyre lever was positioned in the door pocket and available for instant use. The traveller said: “I’ve no money for the pubs, and no time for the cops. I did hear there was spud digging out this way. And dairy farms and such.”

“That’s so.”

The front of the great range revealed a dent, and soon the dent became a bay and the wings of the bay came out to meet and take the truck as though it were a ship seeking shelter. Now the bare rock cliffs towered high above the precipitous tree-armoured slopes.

“You were saying?” prompted the driver.

“That I wouldn’t mind taking a job.”

“So you did. And something about not being popular with the police. Trouble behind you?”

“Trouble behind me. Where I want it to stay.”

“Don’t we all.”

The truck slid round a bend and buried its nose in a mountain. Thereafter the bends were many and sharp, and the engine growled as it dragged the vehicle up the steep gradient skirted by the great gums and the lesser scrub so envious of their height. Now at a greatly reduced speed, the driver had time to talk, and his quiet voice, devoid of noticeable accent, hadn’t to be raised.

“I have troubles, too. Taxes, Death and Damnation. I’ve a patch of spuds itching to be lifted to a good market. We’re isolated somewhat. No pub nearer than Bowral, and no policeman. Still, we live pretty comfortable. What kind of trouble are you aiming to keep behind you?”

Bony slowly rolled a cigarette, hesitating to provide personal information. He glanced beyond the window, through a break in the forest trees to the breathtaking vista of space built over the lowlands. Having lit the cigarette, he glanced the other way at the driver, noting again the rough, but good, working suit indicative of the farmer-employer, and the voice quiet without accent. He was well under fifty, of medium height and weight. His eyes were dark and his hair almost as black as Bony’s. Bony’s hair was straight and slicked down, the driver’s hair was curly and thick.

“Trouble behind me could be my business,” Bony said, easily. “But that plot of spuds waiting to be lifted ... Well, my main trouble’s two years behind me. Did time for a horse deal, but the police don’t choose to forget it. Couple of weeks back, came down to Sydney to spend a bit of a cheque. Went broke. Had to sleep in the Domain. Got to be recognised, and told to get out of town, or else. No money. So walked out. As I said, there could be something in that spud lifting.”

“Main trouble!” echoed the driver. “What’s the lesser?”

“Tossed into my lap. Last night I camped just off the highway. A hobo saw my fire and camped with me. He had a chook; I had a fire. We grilled the chook, and the hobo was careful to burn all the feathers. He told me about this road and where it went, and all that. Then he told me he’d pinched the chook, and suggested we could pinch another for breakfast. I sweated a bit until I got away from him. I’ve pinched a horse or two, but I’m not aiming to be taken for pinching a fowl. Get jugged for lifting one fowl, and the police’ll make it twenty fowls.”

“Any difference between horses and fowls?” asked the driver, laughingly.

“Different weights for one thing. Different values, too. Besides, I didn’t pinch the chook, and didn’t know it was pinched until half of it was inside me.”

“But you had the goods on you, or rather in you. Where did the hobo steal the fowl?”

A casual question. A question expected and the answer provided.

“I wasn’t that interested. He told me he was making south, and so he must have lifted the bird up towards Wollongong. The police don’t have different values. All the same to them if it’s a horse or a fowl or an elephant.”

“Huh! How many horses set against the elephant?”

“Three. Cost me two years, less remissions. Need we talk about it? You have spuds to lift, not horses. And, I’ll tell you again, chooks aren’t in my line.”

Miniature waterfalls came sliding down from the heights, to slip across the road and begin again as waterfalls. The country was a paradise of green growth, of up-and-down land slopes, of sparkling, leaping water, of bitumen roads and wheel traffic.

At one sharp bend there was a turn-off track, and here the driver stopped his truck and switched off the ignition. The heated engine sighed, and silently the driver leaned forward to take tobacco and papers from the dash cupboard.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Bonnay. Nat Bonnay.”

“Tell me more, Nat; where you come from, and why you don’t make back to where you come from.”

“Easy, though I can’t see it’s your business. Actually, I’m a Queenslander, and I came south to work on a property out from Tenterfield. The boss thinks he can breed racehorses and train ’em. You being so interested, his name is Marsdon. I got three of his year-old fillies fourteen miles out of his back paddock and into a horse float between sundown and sun-up. The feller with the float took them ninety miles that day to his place, and when he’s taking them out of the float, a policeman rides up and says: ‘Ha!’ Where we slipped, I don’t know, but we got two years each. When I was inside, the wife goes to live with her folk, and they threaten to shoot me if I ever turn up there. Now d’you think we could forget it and talk about spuds?”

The driver switched on the ignition and started the truck up the less steep grade of the side track and Bony was pleased that so far the deep-laid plan evolved by Superintendent casement was proceeding well.

Eventually the truck gained the table-top of a wide and open ridge and here was a white-painted house. The situation was ideal. Behind the house grew tall ironbarks which provided shelter from the cold westerlies of winter, and no matter how the southerlies blew, it would be cosily protected within the semi-vacuum provided by the cliff faces fronting over the coastal lowlands.

“My mother lives here with a brother of mine,” the driver told Bony. “Brother was tossed off a motor bike years ago, and never walked since. I have some stuff to deliver. You stay here. I’ll talk to him about the spuds.”

He stopped the truck at the gate in the white-painted picket fence, and from the rear took a case which he carried to the house veranda. On the veranda was a bed, and propped up with pillows was a man with unruly iron-grey hair. Beside the bed, and within reach of his hands stood a large telescope on a tripod, and through this glass he could watch ships passing at sea, and gaze into the great bowl of the valley on the far side of the ridge. It was down there that Superintendent Casement thought his rabbit burrow might be.

A small woman came from the house to join in the conversation. Hens strutted outside the fence. Blue smoke rose from one of the two chimneys, and kookaburras blasted the quiet scene with guffaws of satanic laughter. A moment or two later, the driver beckoned to Bony.

Standing at the foot of the bed, Bony immediately saw that these three people were related. The bed-ridden man was older than the truck driver. Despite his immobility, his complexion was weathered, due to the fact that he lived always on this open veranda, his only protection being the movable screens. For a long moment he gazed at Nat Bonnay, eyes hard and brilliant, and when he spoke his voice was low and pleasant.

“There’s a job for you down in the valley,” he said. “We’re peaceful in these parts. You lift the spuds, and you live peaceful, and you’ll be looked after and paid good rates. As long as you don’t claim to come from Ulster you won’t have a war on your hands.”

A humorous quirk appeared at the corners of his mouth, and brought a smile to Bony’s eyes when the latter asked:

“Think I could claim to come from Northern Ireland?”

“Where could your father claim to come from?”

“I don’t know. My mother never told, that I recall.”

“Like that, eh!”

“Like that. Any harm in saying he might have come out from County Mayo?”

Both men chuckled, and the invalid said:

“Better stick to the truth, perhaps. All right, Nat. The job’s yours.”