THE Myme mail was dispatched from Mount Magnet every Tuesday and Friday, and this particular day in late September Harry Tremayne, in Brett’s absence, took the Bowgada bag from old Hool-’em-up Dick.
Among his own letters was a report submitted by the police at Mount Magnet in which was the statement that no one recollected seeing a young swagman with a bicycle on or subsequent to August tenth. Further inquiries at Kyle station, situated midway between Breakaway House and Mount Magnet, produced information to the effect that such a swagman was not remembered to have visited that place either.
There had also arrived by the mail a parcel addressed to him by a Mount Magnet storekeeper, and with this parcel, as well as his lunch and quart pot, strapped to the saddle, Harry Tremayne rode away from the Bowgada homestead astride Major, his own intelligent horse.
At a leisurely walk the horse carried him down the south track from the house for about half a mile, where they abruptly skirted the precipitous face of a breakaway “bay” similar to that above which Tremayne had first met Filson, and on the far side of this sea-less bay the road turned westward and fell in steep gradients down the side of a headland to the flats below.
Near to the bottom, at the extremity of the headland, the road wound in and out among huge granite boulders sundered from a stratum of rock near the summit, whilst in several places a conglomeration of such boulders made small hillocks of rock. Here was a position which the war veteran Filson knew could be defended against a battalion by a single machine-gun.
But on this clear, warm and brilliant late morning Harry Tremayne was singularly unappreciative of scenic beauties and unconcerned with military strategy. Even at the foot of the headland the higher ground level permitted him, when once clear of the rock debris, to observe the sun-reflecting roof of the hut at Acacia Well and those roofs grouped into Breakaway House homestead farther westward.
More than likely, at that very moment, Brett Filson was at that distant homestead, lunching there, on his way to Mount Magnet where he would catch a train to Perth to undergo his periodical medical examination – still a necessity after all those years.
From Breakaway House he would ring Tremayne, and if then he should order that English be sent out to overlook certain beasts in an east paddock, it was to be understood that the swagman had not been seen to arrive at Breakaway House; whilst if he directed Fred Ellis to be set special work it indicated the opposite.
To concur with Tremayne’s ostensible presence at Bowgada, it would not have done for him to make inquiries concerning a man who had disappeared some time before his arrival. Brett, however, would say that he had been asked to make inquiries by the man’s aunt who had received his last letter from Bowgada.
From the first, Harry Tremayne regarded the occupants of Breakaway House with suspicion. He had not told Filson, but in his brother’s last letter, his brother had said that he had obtained information, the implications of which demanded an examination of the breakaways west of Myme.
At Acacia Well, both Ellis and Ned remembered the swagman with the bicycle. They were crutching sheep in the adjacent yards that day and the swagman had taken his lunch with them. There was no doubt then, that Tremayne’s brother had left Acacia Well for Breakaway House, but it appeared likely that at some point between these two places he had vanished.
The information that Tremayne gathered concerning Breakaway House indicated that as a small pastoral community it was not normal. Its owner was a loose liver. He was so partial to black and half-caste workers that there were but two white men on his books, the men’s cook and the boss stockman. Of the cook, Tremayne had learned little, but the boss stockman was legally married to an Aboriginal woman, he having been given and accepted that way out by the police.
All this was not extraordinary to a man with Tremayne’s experience of the Kimberleys, but it was not a set of normal conditions on the Murchison where squattocracy is older. Here at Breakaway House the number of Aborigines and half-castes was much higher than a view of its area would require to work it. Yet despite this fact, the condition of Tonger’s fences, his cattle and his sheep emphatically indicated neglect. Both as a stockman and a policeman, Harry Tremayne’s interest was captured by Breakaway House.
He was boiling the quart pot at the foot of an outcrop of ironstone some two miles from Acacia Well when he observed near the east breakaway, and about three miles to the north-east of his then position, two columns of smoke rising into the still air.
This signal indicated that one Aborigine desired another to come to him without delay. Likely enough, it was either Ned or Miss Hazit signalling to his or her conjugal partner then at Acacia Well. Whichever one it was, there at the base of those smoke columns presently would be Ned, whom Tremayne wanted to see that day.
And between two islands of rubble, beside a watercourse bordered by flats covered with small chips of snow-white quartz, reminding one of a well-kept graveyard, he found Ned and Miss Hazit crouched over a small fire on which they were cooking short lengths of goanna.
“Good day, Mr Tremayne!” Ned shouted, springing to his feet to welcome the second boss.
“Day, Ned!” Tremayne replied cheerfully. “I was boiling my quart when I saw your smoke, so I emptied it and came on to boil it here.” Having refilled the utensil from the canvas bag slung from his horse’s neck, he added: “Which one of you signalled?”
“Ned did. I was at Acacia Well,” replied Miss Hazit, demurely refraining to look up from her task of cooking. “You must have ridden fast.”
“Yes – I came along. I brought Fred’s shotgun. Ned wanted it.”
“You bet. Over in that burrow is two or three foxes,” Tremayne was informed with a frank smile. “I seen them tracks. Then I gathers wood and leaves for the fires way over there in that acacia and…” Ned paused to yell his mirth, “up one of those trees went this bungarra. Cripes! I had him cooking when Nora got here.”
“Oh! And what about the foxes?”
“They’re orl right. They keep shut-eye. Bime-by me and Nora get ’em out. You wait!”
Miss Hazit was dressed precisely as she had been when she shamelessly flirted with the overseer at Acacia Well. To be sure, there was a hole in her right stocking, and a bad ladder on the calf of the other, but she was as clean and as fresh as on their first meeting.
Later, Tremayne watched these two at work fox hunting. In other parts of the world foxes are hunted with expensive hounds by people mounted on more expensive hacks. In other parts of Australia men go to enormous labour in laying poisoned baits and setting traps. These two Aborigines, ignorant of foxes and their habits until quite recent years, revealed a cunning cleverness truly surprising.
Miss Hazit softly circled the burrow, marked amid the white quartz chips by the brown earth of the excavations below, and expertly examined the “run-outs” for tracks, finally silently indicating a particular hole.
Twenty odd yards from this hole Ned squatted down, made sure the double-barrelled gun was full cocked, and waited immobile after waving to Tremayne, still near the fire, to sit down.
Miss Hazit then brought her head close to the mouth of the hole and coughed loudly several times. Continuing to cough louder at short intervals, she walked back to Tremayne, shuffling her feet as she went.
Nothing happened. Ned, seated like a carved Buddha, rested his cheek against the gun-stock. Miss Hazit then proceeded to throw quartz chips much like a boy skimming a stone over water, each piece of quartz bounding from the burrow to fall some distance beyond.
A fox leisurely appeared out of the hole selected by Miss Hazit, the strange sounds having mastered its curiosity. Blinded by the sunlight, it sat down blinking its eyes, waiting for them to become accustomed to the light in order to ascertain just what caused these most curious noises. And then a second fox appeared. The standing Miss Hazit presently was seen by the first fox which rose on all feet ready to dash below, but Ned fired twice rapidly and the two foxes fell dead.
A third fox appeared, to run blindly across the quartz chips, and because Ned was fumbling to reload the gun, Miss Hazit with screams of delight snatched up a stick and gave chase. Ned began yelling orders and curses, and Tremayne found himself joining in the hunt. He and Miss Hazit tore after the fox, which now could see and dodged this way and that with deceptive casualness. Miss Hazit’s high-pitched excited laughter and Ned’s roared orders to get out of the way, so confused the animal that it never had a real sporting chance.
“Take that – and that and that,” shouted Miss Hazit, gleefully battering the fox, which was wholly unnecessary as her first blow had killed it. Her black eyes were little flames, her white teeth revealed by the widely parted lips. She was a living picture of the huntress when the world was young: straight, finely moulded, and with a figure to be envied by any woman.
“Good, eh?” Ned cried on reaching her and Tremayne. “Plenty tobacco now. Plenty new clothes for you, Nora. Mr Filson give order on Magnet storekeeper when he come back from Perth. Now you scalp ’em, Nora, and get back to camp. I gotta go see to White’s Mill. Fred says so.”
He set the gun down on the body of the fox and proceeded to cut tobacco for a cigarette before giving the knife to his woman. She could do the skinning and take the skins and the heavy gun back to Acacia Well. He had work – real work – to do.
“I’ll be going with you,” Tremayne told him. “So long, Nora!”
“Goo’ bye!” she replied and, because Ned was not looking in her direction, the minx pursed her lips at the overseer, with her eyes almost hidden by the lowered lashes.
At White’s Mill he worked on the loose nuts of the mill-head and the giant fan, while Ned let out the water in the long line of troughing and scraped away the green weed growing on it. And the job done, Tremayne brought out the parcel he had received that morning from Mount Magnet and opened it in front of Ned’s fascinated eyes.
“Remember the other day that ribbon you took from Nora and I burned,” he said, looking up at his tattered companion.
Ned nodded assent, his enraptured gaze still centred on the mysterious parcel.
“Do you know why I burned it?”
This time Ned did look at his questioner, to shake his head.
“Nora being your woman, she had no right to that ribbon. And the man who gave it to her had no right to give it to her either,” Tremayne patiently explained, in his voice a hardness which diminished Ned’s curiosity in the still unopened parcel. “Nora fine woman, eh? You love Nora, eh? You going to keep Nora, eh?”
“Cripes! You’ve said it, boss,” Ned assented vigorously, using a common Americanism.
Tremayne pressed on in his task of imparting wise philosophy, tugging at Ned’s ripped and soiled trouser-leg: “You find fella for Nora to love, eh? She clean in white woman’s clothes, you like wild black. You wear ragged trousers, no shirt, no hat. You look like mangy camel.”
“Yes, boss,” agreed the crestfallen Ned. “You said a mouthful.”
Tremayne could not restrain a smile. Quickly he laid open the contents of the parcel. “You put these on now,” he ordered sternly, presenting the astonished Aborigine with a pair of white moleskin trousers and a sky-blue shirt. “And you give these to Nora and tell her you bought them off me.” A pair of grey silk stockings and a yard of wide pink ribbon were also presented.
Without looking up, Ned finally said after a pregnant silence: “You good fella, boss. I bin a damn fool.”