Читать книгу Bony and the Black Virgin - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 5
ОглавлениеThe Dead
Due to a long career when rapid decisions had to be made, the metamorphosis of John Downer on returning to the truck was not remarkable. Here was crisis, and evidence of devotion to John Barleycorn was erased. The words came sharply.
“The stink of death is about the place, lad. Let’s prospect.”
Crisis now appeared to lie heavily on the younger man, and, without speaking, he nodded and backed down from the truck, to gaze stonily at the dog collapsed outside its kennel, and beyond it to the frightened house.
“Dog’s all in,” commented John. “Been there for days.”
A sob of profound commiseration broke from Eric, and he would have stopped had not his father said:
“Not now, lad. Must see what’s happened to Brandt. Come on.”
The house faced the wasteland of the lake. It was built of pine logs under an iron roof. It was commodious and along its front was a ten-feet-wide veranda reached by a flight of steps. The living-room was large and fairly well furnished—the kitchen range and wash-bench at one end, and beside the range the doorway leading to the wide space at the rear. There was evidence of a struggle, the dining table being slanted away from normal, the brass oil lamp lying on the floor, chairs overturned. Bric-à-brac massed on a side table, objects of utility on the mantel over the stove, crocks on the dresser—all were covered with a film of red dust.
The two bedrooms were undisturbed. The small off-room, used as an office, bore no sign of disturbance. In through the open back door came persistently the smell of death.
“Been a fight, looks like,” remarked John Downer. “Days back, too; like with the heeler, poor bastard. Brandt must be dead in his room, by the stink.” Looking intently at Eric, he noted the pallor greying the suntan, and added: “You stay here, lad. I’ll prospect out back.”
Eric, however, followed his father. As they stepped from the rear door to the sanded ground beside the almost empty house rain-tank, the scene confronting them comprised the well and its raised coping with the mill astride over it, the reservoir tank and the short drinking-trough. Beyond the well was the long, open-faced machinery-shed and workshop, flanked on the left by the hired hand’s room, and on the right by the harness room and store.
“Mill damaged by the wind ’cos it wasn’t braked,” John said, but his eyes were directed to the ground swept clean of prints by the wind. Away to the left was the fowl-house and netted yard, and near-by, under another box tree, two kennels with no dogs in evidence.
They proceeded to the room provided for the hired hand, when one was employed, which was supposed to be occupied now by Carl Brandt. It was empty. The mattress on the bed was denuded of Brandt’s blankets. The bedside table bore nothing but dust. The clothes-pegs were naked. On the floor was scattered a pack of cards.
They found the body on the earth floor of the machinery-shed and close to the rear wall. It was lying on its back, with one arm thrust outward, and the other by the side, one leg drawn up. Their own tracks to it were the only marks on the wind-levelled ground.
“It’s not Carl Brandt,” whispered Eric, his breath coming quickly.
“Stranger to me, lad. Don’t get it. Been dead for days, by the look of him. What’s that in his fist?”
“Don’t know. Looks to be ... It’s a lock of someone’s hair.”
“So it is. Could be he grasped it as he died, tore it from his killer’s head. Yes, could be. And that wouldn’t be Carl Brandt. Now where the hell is Brandt?”
Both were now anxious to be out of the shed, and, outside, they gazed about as men wholly undecided what next to do; until Eric proceeded to the dog kennels near the fowl-house.
The chains attached to them entered the dark interior. Eric fell to his knees to gaze into a kennel, then reached inside and withdrew the body of a half-grown kelpie. He withdrew from the second kennel another kelpie, also dead, and, standing again, knelt down at them, mute and frozen with horror.
It was not yet finished. Within the netted yard were the twenty-odd fowls, all dead of thirst.
The sun was low in the west, and the little wind had died. It was completely silent, as, the water trough being empty, there were no crows present.
“I don’t get it,” admitted old John, his lips trembling.
“I do,” Eric said, and there was hate in his eyes. “Carl Brandt killed that stranger, and then he cleared out and left the dogs chained up and the fowls without water. The dirty swine. The heeler ...”
He left, running to skirt the house to reach the blue heeler, tougher than the kelpies, and still alive. The old man trudged away to the shearing-shed, hoping to find tracks, and found nothing left by the wind to read. Weather-wise, he was convinced that the tragedy had occurred not less than a week previously. In that period the wind had often been wild and hot with early spring.
Now that he was familiar with the problem, the tension subsided in John Downer’s mind, and the physical stresses imposed by age and a month’s hard drinking returned. He found Eric at the back door. The heeler had been placed on the ground beneath the rain tank, and Eric was permitting the tap to drip water on the animal’s saliva and sand-caked grinning jaws. The dog’s eyes were partially open, and they, too, were caked with dust.
“Me and that dog’s alike, lad. We both need a snort,” rasped John. “Fetch the bottle.”
Eric left for the truck, and John knelt beside the heeler and carefully raised its head. There was no recognition, no response, and gently he laid it down and fought to master the trembling in his hands, which flowed upward through his arms and down to reach his heart. He accepted the whisky bottle from Eric and called for a pannikin.
The long swig of neat spirit coursed through him and banished the tremors. He half-filled the pannikin with water and added whisky, opened the dog’s jaw and dripped the diluted spirit into its mouth. At first it dribbled out, and then the body shuddered and the throat muscles worked to permit swallowing. Breathing came with the sound of a man sawing wood.
“Might save him,” said John, standing. “Here, take a nip, lad. Then we’ll get to hell out of here, boil the billy, and think what we have to do. Back to the truck. You bring the heeler.”
They drove half a mile to the junction of a track with that to L’Albert, where John made a fire and Eric filled the billy, and this common chore helped them both back to normality, the father ready to become subordinate to the son he had encouraged to lead.
“What d’you reckon?” he asked.
“We’ll have to go back to L’Albert and the telephone,” Eric replied. “Have to contact Mawby and report all this.”
“Yes, I suppose we ought, lad. What about the sheep, though? Have to see to them. Rudder’s Well might be broken down or something.”
“The sheep’ll have to wait. We have a murder on our hands, remember.”
John Downer felt disappointment as he watched his son toss half a handful of tea into the boiling water and lift the billy off the fire with a stick. Abruptly explosive, he shouted:
“Sheep wait, be damned! They’re all we got left of nine thousand. Lose them, and we walk off Lake Jane.”
“Our job is to report to the police as soon as possible. You know that,” argued the now stubborn Eric.
“To hell and gone with the police!” John continued to shout. “Our job’s to look out for the sheep. The feller in the shed ain’t dying for lack of water, and Brandt’ll be lying snug by this time. Damn him, damn him to hell! What a mess to come home to.”
Eric said, sipping hot tea and nibbling a biscuit:
“All right, then. We go out to Rudder’s. We unload at the shed there. You camp there for the night, and I’ll run back to Jim Pointer’s place and use their telephone. That suit?”
“Yes. Should of worked it out in the first place. You can plan things when you want.”
The heeler lying on the seat between them, they started on the four-mile journey to the paddock where existed the remnants of the sheep flocks they had built to nine thousand by the beginning of the drought. The entire stock watered at the well sunk by a contractor named Rudder.
The sun was gone, and the early evening light tended to magnify the passing scrub trees and the widely scattered bush, whilst the areas of bare sand were salmon-pink, or rippled like purple velvet.
“Can’t help wonderin’ who that dead feller is,” remarked John, determinedly puffing at a sick pipe. “Beats me. Must have come here by the back way, across country from a northern station, perhaps Mount Brown. Has a game of cards with Brandt. One of ’em cheats. There’s an argument. That stranger did look bashed to the side of the head, didn’t he?”
“Don’t let’s talk about it, Dad,” pleaded Eric. “What a day! What a heck of a day!”
“Can’t help talking about it, lad. Got to think of Carl Brandt, escaped murderer. He might be holding up out here at Rudder’s. Could be anywhere. We’ve a rifle on the truck, haven’t we?”
“The forty-four is under the seat. How’s Blue?”
“Got a hope. One eye open, anyway. And there’s a wriggle to his tail now you say his name.”
They were passing through a belt of spindly mulga when the old man cried cheerfully:
“The mill’s still working, lad.”
Three minutes later they came to the Rudder’s Well paddock, and John alighted to open the gate, and leave it open for Eric to shut on his return. From the gate it was less than half-a-mile to the well and its windmill, with the canegrass, open-fronted shed a couple of hundred yards their side of it.
“Any sign of Brandt?” asked Eric, concentrating on his driving.
“No, none. No smoke from the fireplace. Couple of crows perched on the roof. The sheep are in to water. Things seem to be all right.”
The waning light was steel, the vista of open plain was grey. Above the plain hung a grey dust-fog raised by the sheep, now drinking at the trough-line, or, having drunk, lying down a little distance from it.
The truck was stopped at the shed, and Eric volunteered to remove the load while his father took the rifle and went to the well to see by the marker that the reservoir tank was a third full. It was now too late to look over the sheep, or approach the few cows and a bull which once had been the pride of his heart.
Eric stowed the load within the shed, and set the tucker box and bread and vegetables on the rough table. It was ground-dark when John returned, and the crows were drawn into the silence of night, which seemed to hold apart from the world the plaintive baa-ings of the distant sheep.
“Don’t look to be that Brandt’s about,” John said. “We going to eat before you go?”
“Not me. I’ll wait to eat at L’Albert. Your swag’s here, and the tucker. The heeler’s on a bag by the petrol drums. He’s coming good. Could be all right by morning. Now I’d better get on back to the telephone and Mawby.”
“Of course, lad. Don’t worry about me and the dog. Camp with the Pointers if they ask you to. I left the gate open. You close it. Good luck!”
He watched the departing truck’s lights stop at the gateway, saw the vehicle go on into the night of trees beneath the dancing stars. Then, in the shed again, he put a match to a hurricane lamp, and stood eating slices of bread, and fish from a tin, and completed ‘dinner’ with a dose from the bottle.
Ah, to hell with town! It was good while it lasted but it couldn’t beat home and the sheep. He felt it strange, sitting on a case and smoking, that for the first time for what seemed many moons he was able to think, and to survey all the old problems of the drought that came crowding back for attention, plus the new problem of a dead man in his machinery-shed, and the hired hand gone on a long journey. Well, to see to the dog, and then for a real long sleep.
The heeler’s eyes were wide open to greet him in the lamplight. The tail wagged, although with effort. The nose was wet and cool, but the head was too heavy to lift.
John opened a jar of meat extract and made a strong broth with cold water. He had to support the dog so that it could drink, and in him was vast pity, for on two memorable occasions he himself had come nigh to death from thirst.
Afterwards he blew out the lamp, and, taking his swag of blankets to a distant bull-oak, unrolled them to fashion a mattress. Then he went back for the dog, and eventually he fell asleep with an arm about the heeler, and in his other hand the rifle.
