BECAUSE he was sure he would be shot if he offered resistance, because he was so sure, Harry Tremayne permitted himself to be tied in such a fashion that to escape was out of the question. Vigilantly menaced by Lawton’s pistol, he was compelled to sit on the floor with his back against one of the wooden pillars supporting the roof. Tonger then tied his hands behind the pillar, lashed his body to the pillar, too, and gagged him. Effective concealment was provided by a number of bales of wool-packs walling him about like the walls of a small room.
There was only one policy to adopt – obedience, with the knowledge in mind that dead men can no longer even hope.
“It’s unnecessary for Whitbread and his helpers, who will be shortly returning with more of the iron boxes, to know of your presence here,” explained the Colonel. “Even though you’re gagged you’re capable of making gurgling noises which would attract their attention. As it is not my wish that you should attract their attention. I shall strike you with this iron bar if you do so; and, because I’m not practised, it is possible that I might strike too hard and kill you. Being a thug is not my usual role, I assure you, and therefore I fear that my inexperience could produce results fatal to you.”
Harry Tremayne forced mocking amusement into his eyes, since the gag prevented his registering amusement in his face. Actually he considered his position to be extremely grave; for, seated opposite him, a long bar of iron across his knees, was one of those rare mortals not shackled by fear, emotion and selflessness, a man who could kill with much less feeling than the average man swats a march fly.
The first time they had met Lawton had effectively kept hidden the cold, passionless, ruthless facet of his nature; but now there was no necessity to retain such a veneer, which after all was a boring task. This was the truth forced on Tremayne. Seated opposite him was the natural man; on the former occasion, Colonel Lawton had been cramped and cabined like a small boy dressed in his Sunday clothes.
He had never before met a man like Lawton. His sergeant had once described to him a man he had taken for murder who perhaps belonged to Lawton’s type; the type of human being who kills without experiencing emotion, without feeling the lust to kill, who kills merely to remove an obstruction or a danger as the ordinary man might cut down a tree which blocks a splendid view.
The policeman found it difficult to understand why a man of Lawton’s calibre should traffic in cocaine. He was reputedly rich long before he engaged in it. He seemed to be a man without the human weaknesses which demand satiation by the power of money; the one possible reason behind his activities lay in the danger of the life, the excitement, such as had dominated his activities during the war. With the coming of peace tens of thousands had yawned their heads off with boredom.
Whitbread and his assistants returned on the truck and they could be heard re-baling the wool. The presses whirred and thumped for an hour or more, and the day was waning when at last Tonger ordered them to their quarters on the completion of their labours.
“How does the weather look?” he was asked when he entered the small space about the prisoner.
“Much like rain,” replied the squatter, glowering at Tremayne. “What are we going to do with him?”
“Nothing drastic, Morris, until it becomes certain when I can leave,” Lawton said, his brows knit in a frown of perplexity. Quite abruptly his face resumed its habitual expressionless placidity, and to the bound man he said: “You see, my dear fellow, you know so much it’s absolutely essential that you die in the near future. Dead, you’ll not feel the loss of a few years of life. Actually, the loss is imaginary, for the loss will be of the future. We cannot really lose what we’ve never had. If I’m a little hazy on the point, please forgive me.
“The last time I was here, a swagman calling himself Robbins proved to be an inconvenience. It appeared that he knew a little about a gold-stealing gang with which Mr Tonger is associated, and because he learned a little of my organisation, it was necessary to remove him.
“I left orders that Robbins – I’ve recently learned that he’s your brother – was to be put to sleep, but I find that he’s been employed by the gold thieves at their treatment plant. That’s a small matter for settlement between Buck Ross and me.
“My intention is to incapacitate you both – being brothers you will have no cause for jealousy – with expertly given injections of cocaine, and transport you in the charge of Buck Ross to my north-west station, tomorrow if the weather permits. You’ll then be taken to sea in my launch, still in the care of Buck Ross, and when a school of sharks has been attracted by the killing of a goat you’ll be passed overboard to them.
“A peculiar thing about sharks in Australian waters is that they’ll seldom take a dead man. As fish abound off the north-west coast they are rarely hungry. I’ve found that to effectually dispose of a man it’s necessary that he be given to them alive for his struggles in the water arouse the sharks. However I can assure you that a school of aroused sharks cause death much more quickly than drowning. It may be of some consolation to you to know that after Buck Ross has fed you to the sharks I’ll send him after you. I’ve no objection to you telling him that. In fact it will interest me to watch how he reacts for, although he won’t believe you, the idea will persist and make him cautious of me. He’ll use what little brain he has and it will amuse me to watch him use it. You see, I’m a strict disciplinarian.”
So John was alive! That was indeed good news. And he, Harry Tremayne, was not dead yet either. If it rained, Lawton’s departure would be delayed, and every moment added to his span of life would increase his chances of longevity. “Lucky Tremayne” it had been up in the Kimberleys. To date, “Lucky Tremayne” it had been on the Murchison. The news that John still lived was splendid. If only he could send off a telegram to his anxious mother!
Lawton was looking at him with calm but terrible eyes as he discoursed on the failings of men and women who killed without plan or foresight, and of the extraordinary efforts of some to destroy their victims’ bodies when there were to hand such simple methods.
No wonder they had tried to shoot him from the balancing rock, Harry Tremayne thought. Unaware of what Violet Winters had told Brett, Tremayne still thought that the treatment plant must be in the vicinity of that rock, and thus his brother must be there too, instead of it being seventeen miles north. In fact the midnight lights indicated the position of Lawton’s cocaine store.
So Buck Ross was due for a gruesome end. If the worst came he would not inform Ross of Lawton’s little plan. Tonger had gone to the office to telephone to Ross to come at once just before Whitbread came back with the truck, and Ross should be arriving at any moment. Frances, Ann, Violet and Brett would all be over at Bowgada, wondering why he did not turn up. It was a shame that they had to worry, but he could not have left the Breakaway House shearing shed until he learned why all these wool bales had been half emptied.
Of course, the wool had to be baled during the shearing. In the first place, nothing else could be done with it, and even were it possible to defer the baling – an unheard-of procedure – far too much suspicion would have been aroused among the shearers and shed hands. And the cocaine could not have been buried in the bales during the shearing operations. Clever – damned clever – to get cocaine into England via Australian imported wool. What Customs officer would think of that channel?
Left alone the prisoner’s optimism evaporated. It began to dawn on him just how desperate his position was, and the assertion that he and his brother were to be kept in a state of paralysis with cocaine injections was an even more horrible fate to contemplate than the awful death promised. Once his body was paralysed, even the hope of escape would be taken from him. He wished that he was not so confoundedly uncomfortable.
He heard the oncoming car long before it stopped – as far as he could judge – outside the office. Two minutes later it went on, humming up the long grade towards Mount Magnet, and, he supposed, the area of surface rock directly behind the promontory on which stood the balancing rock. Without doubt, that area of surface rock was used to turn a car or truck so as to leave no tracks to arouse curiosity. Now the silence was broken only by the petrol engine working the electric light dynamo. Tremayne waited patiently for the next development.
And it came from a quarter which astonished him. Round one of the walls of wool-packs slipped a well-built girl whom Tremayne recognised as the one who had given him the note from Frances. Her features were fixed by the temperature of fear, frozen despite the warmth of determination. With the fingers of one hand laid against her red mouth and a butcher’s knife held firmly in her right hand, she advanced upon him, and in a few seconds cut him free from gag and lashings.
“Don’t speak! Rub! Hurry!” she whispered swiftly gathering the rope and the gag into a heap.
She revealed intelligence above the ordinary when she said on her return from a short absence: “I’ve hidden all that. It’ll make them wonder if you were really tied to that particular pillar and it might give us a little time when wanted. Come with me. I know where we can hide. Go on, rub. I’ll watch at the door.”
She flitted beyond his range of vision, a winsome, graceful figure, and he fell to massaging his cramped legs and arms, fighting the exquisite pain of returning circulation, his wonder at her mingling with plans for the immediate future.
There was one thing of which he was certain. If discovered by Lawton, Tonger, or Ross, he would be shot down like a dingo. They would have to do it out of self-preservation, and the thought made Tremayne understand that devilish cunning and foresight of the Colonel. Make an enemy so dangerous that his death is inevitable and lesser men become ruthless. What a man! One to whom fear, repugnance and human frailties were unknown; a tyrant who played on fear, repugnance and frailties in others.
The pain in his arms and legs, and about his neck, was quickly easing beneath his fingers. Cocaine from Java! Of course! Along that two thousand miles of unguarded coast they could land anything. As the Colonel had said an army could invade unobserved. No wonder there had been agitation to have modern seaplanes stationed at Port Darwin.
He now managed to walk with little difficulty from his prison to the side wool-room door before which the girl was crouched. “Where do we hide?” he asked.
“We can both squeeze into the fire box of the steam engine which runs the machinery, or we can take a chance and get out of the building from the back and make for the breakaways,” she replied, glancing down at the Colonel’s bar of iron which Tremayne carried.
“How long have you been in the shed?”
“About two hours. I crept in from the back when they were taking those boxes from the flying machine. I wanted to know what they were doing so that I could tell Miss Frances.” Suddenly she smiled. “Miss Frances and me are friends,” she informed him proudly. “Miss Frances said so.”
Again she stooped to look through the crack between the door and the jamb below the heavy lock. Then she was up again – quick as a clock spring.
“Buck Ross is coming here from the house,” she breathed, her voice a soft hiss.
“Alone?”
When she nodded, he grinned and drew her away from the door. “Hide,” he commanded. “When I’ve fixed Ross you hunt around for rope and a piece of cloth. He shall take my place at the pillar.” When she hesitated, he added sternly: “Hide, do you hear? I want his gun.”
Running from him, she disappeared among the wool bales like a rabbit dashing down a burrow. Tremayne moved quietly back to the walls of wool-packs, his eyes flaming and his brain like ice.
They heard the door being opened and closed. Then came Buck’s dry chuckle. “So, my flash gentleman! I’m to nurse you for quite a time,” he said, before his hand left the door, eagerness in his voice and an underlying vindictiveness striking a dreadful note of triumph. “Gonna squirt cocaine into you presently, but before that a match or two held against your fingernails for old times’ sake.”
That threat brought him to the wool-packs, a great, strong-boned, evil brute of a man. He was again chuckling when he rounded an angle and so came to see the wooden pillar to which Tremayne had been tied. There he stopped short, triumph replaced by perplexity, and then a realisation that he must have come to the wrong place within the shed. Possibly it was intuition which made him look up to see Tremayne’s grinning face and the bar of iron then descending. It struck him across the forehead, and he collapsed as though shot. Tremayne jumped down from the position he had taken between two bales.
The interior of the shed was once again ruled by silence. The light was dim. The man lashed to the wooden pillar did not move. Anyway, his movement was restricted and his eyes were closed. He might have been dead, for the skin across his forehead was split open in a red-raw gash. Blood assisted the gag to mask his face.
Abruptly footsteps sounded beyond the side door. When the door was opened, yellow light silhouetted the tops of the wool bales against the roof. Men’s boots tramped across the wooden floor.
“You there, Ross?” Tonger called sharply. “Come on, dinner’s ready.”
He and Lawton came into the cleared space about the pillar and the bound man. They looked round for the figure of Ross, not yet having realised that it was he who sat motionless and made the gurgling sounds. Then swiftly Tonger stooped and thrust the lamp he carried close to Buck’s face.
“There’s Ross,” he said with remarkable calmness. “I told you to fix Tremayne when we had him. I objected to you telling him everything. Now if we don’t get him quick we’ll be done.”
When Ross was released, he grinned like an ape. “I don’t want no dinner,” he snarled. “I want a drink. Can’t you see that Tremayne downed me with a bar of iron. He’s got my gun for sure.”
“What a great pity it is that he didn’t kill you – you fool!” remarked the Colonel.