FRANCES drove away from Breakaway House after lunch on the Wednesday Tremayne had hoped to meet her at the balancing rock, accompanied by a hand who was to return with the car. She arrived at Mount Magnet, a distance of about one hundred and twenty miles, shortly before six o’clock, and there ate her dinner at the hotel, with plenty of time at her disposal to catch the 7.40 train to Perth.
While she was eating the hand approached her table to say that his employer had telephoned orders that he was to stay the night, and would Miss Frances be sure to ring Breakaway House as soon as convenient.
Evidently there was something her uncle had forgotten, so after dinner she telephoned him.
“Oh – that you, Frances?” Tonger said smoothly. “There isn’t now any necessity for you to go to Perth after all as I’ve received a telegram clinching that business. Come back tomorrow. See Reeves, please, and ask for a case of whisky and a dozen syphons of soda. And don’t forget to buy anything you may want for yourself.”
“Very well, Uncle,” she assented lightly.
“I hope you’re not disappointed at not going to the city?”
“Not very. It’s a long and hot journey just now.”
“Good! I’m scheming to get away before Christmas. You and I will take a holiday trip to New Zealand for a month or so. We’ve both earned it, you know.”
“That will be splendid,” she cried joyfully at the prospect of a dream coming true. “If we don’t go to New Zealand I shall be disappointed. All right, I’ll get back some time tomorrow.”
So it was about the time Nora drove a gig loaded with swags and hens and pups, and a family of cats, to Bowgada homestead, with Ned and Tremayne riding wide on the flanks in the hope of shooting eagles perched on solitary dead cork trees, that Frances sped back to Breakaway House.
The day having been windy, dusty, and unpleasantly hot, Frances was glad to be home to lounge away the rest of the day in the drawing room, writing up her diary and retiring early to bed, leaving her uncle at work on his books in the office.
The next day, Friday, was calm, brilliant, and cool, and at about two o’clock she ordered her horse to be brought in and saddled. Tonger being out, she had afternoon tea alone, and at four o’clock she left the homestead on one of those exploration trips which so delighted her.
For here at Breakaway House she was very lonely. Since leaving Perth she had missed the intimate society of youth. There were days together when she did not even see her uncle who never troubled to explain what he had done or where he had been. Since the scene, subsequent to her taking over the management of the house, a scene which had revealed her determination that the loose moral conditions she had found could not continue, the hands and servants showed little love for her, even if their respect was maintained. Of all the staff, only the girl who had conveyed the note to Tremayne was able to be admitted into her confidence. The rest treated her with an unfriendly reserve which conveyed their resentment of the altered conditions she had achieved.
Uncle Morris could manage his run and his men. His flirtations were no business of hers – provided they were not conducted under the same roof. His drinking bouts were horrid at first, but after she bravely bearded him concerning his behaviour to her, he conducted himself with greater circumspection, often confining himself to his office where he had had a stretcher bed fixed up.
Frances was no shrinking milk-and-water miss. She had inherited in full measure the stubbornness of the Tongers. It was this trait in her character to which Morris Tonger bowed with grace as his home comforts became vastly improved, more in accordance with that home governed so well many years ago by Amy, his much tried wife who had eventually eloped. Like the animal he was, he loved luxury; and never, even in his worst hours, did he fail to appreciate that his niece was a born housekeeper.
But affection, love! There was little on either side. Sober, Morris Tonger was bearable. There were even moments when he was the old Uncle Morris she had known as a child. And when sober he respected her for her self-assurance, her poise, and her stubbornness in the battles between them.
Yes, Frances was a lonely girl at Breakaway House, a girl starved of congenial company. Lonely evenings in the drawing room after lonely rides along the breakaways.
LEAVING the homestead, she set a course which would take her ship – a horse — to the point of the southern headland thrusting into the valley half a mile eastward of the house. The island off this point or headland appeared to be joined to it when viewed from the house, but on drawing close to the point a passage was revealed between it and the island, five hundred yards in width.
Less than half the height of the steeper rock-strewn headland and covering about ten acres, the island presented perpendicular rock walls supporting a crown of red earth covered in thick but stunted Bogota and mulga scrub. This crown now gleamed dully in the light of the westering sun.
The “strait” was carpeted with boulders set far apart over a mass of granite and quartz and ironstone splinters, a kaleidoscope of greys and whites and dull reds. Frances noted these colours with delight, and as usual was thrilled by the wildness of this sea-less coast. Her horse followed a stone-cleared cattle pad which brought her to within fifty yards of the island.
The sharp impact of one pebble against another distracted her attention from two magpies chasing a crow from the vicinity of their nest. It was not a natural sound, on this calm quiet afternoon, for it came from beyond her horse’s head and not from the island’s shore.
The second pebble she distinctly saw before it struck the ground. Strangely enough, it appeared to fall out of the sky, and on impact it smashed into tiny flakes. Interested by this peculiar phenomenon, she glanced upward to the island’s summit to see curving outward and downward from it what appeared to be a piece of white quartz. When it fell beside the horse, interest gave place to astonishment, for the white quartz turned into a slip of paper weighted by a small stone. Mastered by curiosity, she dismounted, picked up the paper, and read in hurried scrawl:
On the seaward side of this island there is an easy path to the summit. Come up. I badly want to talk with you. H.T.
Harry Tremayne! What on earth was he doing up there? Why ever did he not come down instead of dropping this intriguing note at her horse’s feet? Surely he was the most extraordinary man she had ever met! As though she did not know of the easy path to the top! Had she not often gone up there to see from its northern-most side the great sweep of country enclosing the homestead? Why the secrecy?
Again she read the note. With it crushed in her hand, she led the horse round to the south side of the island, gained its east side, and from there walked up the only slope, following a pad used more by kangaroos than cattle. When halfway up, dense scrub formed walls which almost met, but at the top she came out into a tiny clearing skirted by giant boulders among which the scrub trees grew. An Aborigine stepped quickly into sight and smiled at her. She recognised him as Ned, the Bowgada hand. He motioned her to follow him.
With increasing mystification, she obeyed, and presently saw through the thin tree trunks Harry Tremayne standing against the angle formed by two great rock slabs. Here, evidently, he and Ned were camped, for on the ground were two light swags, leaning against a rock were two rifles, beside a small smokeless fire was a billy-can, and hanging to tree branches were dilly bags and what appeared to be the skins of eagles.
“Welcome to my Cannibal Island, Miss Tonger,” Tremayne cried, when he had ordered Ned to take charge of the horse. His eyes were alight and dancing. Her two hands were taken for an instant into his strong brown ones, and when he released them, the note remained in one of his. “I saw you about to pass by and I simply had to invite you to accept our poor hospitality.”
Tossing the spill of paper into the fire, he addressed Ned: “When you’ve fixed Miss Tonger’s horse, put on the billy. Miss Frances – I thought you were on your way to Perth.”
“I would have been, only Uncle recalled me from Mount Magnet. But what are you doing here? What does all this mean?”
“It’s quite a story. Might I make you a cigarette?” he asked eagerly, his grey-blue eyes regarding her with strange fixity. “I can make a nice one when I want to.”
“Thank you!” she said, although in the pocket of her cord breeches reposed her case and matches.
Snatching up his swag of calico sheet and one blanket he unrolled it, folded it, and laid it over a low flat-topped rock. He then led her by the hand to this improvised seat from where she watched his slim fingers carefully roll the finest cigarette he had ever made.
From his hands her gaze rose to the top of his bent head, hatless, revealing to her the two-inch hairless scar of the bullet. “What happened to your head?” she asked, experiencing sudden tenderness despite the lightness of her soul.
When he looked up at her he was grinning in the old way. He proffered the cigarette, and when she took it there appeared with magical quickness a lighted match.
Ned, who had poured water into the billy from a canvas bag, squatted over the fire and carefully fed it with tinder-dry sticks. Smoke was absent. It was very quiet and peaceful up here. The sunlight filtering through the scrub trees tinged the daylight with green.
“Of course, I went to the balancing rock as I said I would do,” Tremayne said when he had lighted a cigarette for himself. “There was someone at the foot of the balancing rock. I thought it was you. That someone waved to me in greeting and I stopped Major and waved back. You see, I was so sure it was you that I suspected nothing. I made a fine target for that someone who deliberately shot me.”
“Shot you!” she echoed.
He nodded, looking up at her from where he carelessly lounged at her feet. In his eyes there was neither pain nor anger, just plain happiness that she was there. For a moment it was like that; then abruptly his mouth fell into lines of sternness, and into his eyes crept a cold gleam. “Whom did you tell I was to go to the balancing rock on Wednesday at three o’clock?” he demanded.
“Tell! I told no one.”
“But you must have told someone. Think!”
“I say I told no one. I’m positive.”
For a second or two he regarded her amazed face with pursed lips and half-shut eyes.
“It must have been a sheer coincidence, then, that that murderous beast was there, or perhaps he saw me when a long way off and took position there.”
“But I don’t understand, Mr Tremayne.”
“Well I do, and don’t.”
“Didn’t you see him afterwards? Didn’t he go to you to see what he’d done? Are you sure it wasn’t an accident?” Frances asked desperately.
“It was no accident,” he told her. “I saw the flash of the rifle. He waved to me hoping I would stop and present a motionless target, which was precisely what I did do. I was knocked off my horse, knocked unconscious. I lay there beside an old man saltbush for several hours, and he never came down to ascertain if I were dead or alive for fear of leaving tracks. Later on, your uncle and a stockman named Alec came riding from the south, and, seeing my horse grazing nearby, came over and found me. Your uncle thinks it was a ricochet bullet fired by one of two kangaroo hunters shooting away back from the breakaway edge.”
“But you told him about the man who waved to you; the flash of the rifle?”
“No. I didn’t tell him that.”
“But why not?” she pressed him, astonished.
“Because I didn’t want your uncle to know I knew it wasn’t a chance ricochet bullet which came to within half an inch of killing me.”
“But why not, why not?”
“Listen to what followed,” he urged, and proceeded to relate all the happenings of that day and night; the passing revellers, the methods they adopted in the attempt on his life. “Those men came from Breakaway House. They know I’m looking for John. They know I’m a policeman. Are you still sure that you didn’t tell anyone?”