Arthur Upfield - Sinister Stones

Sam left the seaport of Wyndham on August 16th, his six-wheeler loaded with ten tons of stores for stations south of Agar’s Lagoon. For ten miles the track was almost level as it crossed the flats south of Wyndham, a ship sailing on a sea of grass as yellow and as tall as ripe wheat. Thereafter it proceeded up an ever-narrowing valley between flat-topped ranges sparsely covered with stunted scrub and armoured with red and grey granite. The ranges merged into a maze with walls a thousand feet high, and the surface of the track was of loose stone and slate, level at no place for more than ten feet.

Sam’s speed at most was twelve miles an hour and gear-changing was a continuous necessity. Narrow, deep, steep-sided creeks yawned like cracks opened by an earthquake, making it appear impossible for a vehicle having the length of Sam’s transport ever to cross them. Ridges of bare rock were like monstrous teeth gnashing at the tyres, causing the vehicle to roll and lurch and buck like a ship in a typhoon.

From Wyndham to Agar’s Lagoon is about 240 miles, and Sam usually covered this distance in two days.

When day broke on the morning of the 17th, Sam Laidlaw’s transport was approximately eighty miles from Wyndham. Sam had slept in the cabin, and to begin his day he had merely to leave his two blankets, thrust his feet into boots which were never laced, and go to ground to relight his camp fire and boil water for a brew of tea. He was large and fat and hard, and other than the boots he wore only a pair of astonishingly oily shorts. The skin of his arms and torso was the colour of amedlar, and that of his cropped hair and wiry beard akin to gingerbread.

Sam ate standing up, a three-inch sandwich of bread and meat in one paw and the billy-can from which he drank gripped in the other. He stood with his legs wide apart like a colossus frightening the Ogres now slinking into the mountain caverns.

Breakfast finished, he was ready for the day’s run, for the oiling and fuelling had been done the night before. He slung the tucker-box on to the loading, jamming it down between bagged flour, tossed the billy-can into the cabin, and swung the starting handle as easily as a woman employs flattery. And whilst the engine was warming, he loaded his pipe with tobacco chipped from a plug the colour of ebony.

Like a slug heaving over a rockery, the six-wheeled transport roared and whined and lurched and bumped southward. The sun was high when from the welter of ridges and peaks ahead there emerged to distinction a mighty tower of red granite, and with the passing of time the nearer hills sank downward to reveal in all its grandeur this dominating northern extremity of Black Range, the southern claws of which threatened Agar’s Lagoon.

McDonald’s Stand it wascalled, and the track approached it like a nervous snake, veering slightly towards it and often shying hard away. The truck roared on, Sam sucking at his empty pipe and gripping the wheel with both hands save when the left flashed to the gear stick.

He did not see the cattle. For one thing, he had to keep his gaze on the track, and, for another, the beasts were chameleon against the background of their precise colouring. They were opened out wide, and fed as they walked. When Sam did see the cattle, he halted the transport and fell to loading his pipe as he watched them.

The horseman on the nearer wing turned back when the cattle had passed the truck. Sam left the cabin and stood in the attitude of legs wide apart so familiar to many. The horseman rode without effort. A second rider left the herd. Sam completed the lighting of his pipe, and turned back to the cabin to procure several letters, and on again confronting the approaching horsemen; the nearer was within twenty yards.

The rider wore a wide-brimmed hat. A tunic shirt of rough material was belted into the top of rough cotton trousers, the bottoms of which were tucked into short leather leggings. The wide leather belt about the waist carried a holster containing a heavy revolver. A gauntleted hand held the reins, and the other a looped stock-whip. A man! Could have been until the distance dwindled to five yards.

Sam smiled broadly and called: “Good day-ee, Kim!”

Candid grey eyes gazed down at him. Off came the hat, and hair the tint of new copper gleamed in the sunlight. The voice was low and strong.

“Good day-ee, Sam! How’s things?”

“Pretty good, Kim,” replied Sam. “Heard up at Wyndham youwas on the road. Usual mob?”

Kimberley Breen nodded. The second horseman arrived. He also greeted the transport driver with a “Good day-ee, Sam!” His eyes flawlessly matched those of the girl, and his voice was strong, vibrant. He came to ground and proceeded to roll a cigarette, the spurs to his boots clinking musically.

Six feet three, and twelve stoneweight, dressed and accoutred like the girl, Ezra Breen dwarfed the transport man but was not in turn dwarfed by the girl atop the horse. He accepted the letters, pocketing them without comment, and lit his cigarette before saying:

“Where bound, Sam?”

“Whitchica. How’s Silas and Jasper? Ain’tseen ’emin months.”

“They’re all right. UsBreens is always all right.”

The eyes were pale grey disks in a face complexioned like Sam’s face… and chest… and legs. The shoulders were wide and the hips deceptively narrow, the long legs filling the trousers as though they were tights. By comparison Sam Laidlaw was a jellyfish.

“Sarah keeping well?” inquired Kimberley Breen, and Sam grinned, saying that his wife was in hospital with a new baby. The information caused her face to soften, and the sun-ruined complexion was banished by a kind of glory.

“I’ll go and see her,” she cried. “What is it… a boy?”

“Baby gal,” replied Sam, spitting at and hitting an ant.“Born day ’foreyestiddy. Sarah, she says if it’s another boy I can go swim with the crocs in the estuary. Turning out to be a gal, I’m still driving this here truck. Whend’you aim to get in, Ezra?”

“Tomorrow week. See any other cattle on the hoof?”

“No… not on this track. Masterton’s sending in a mob… nine hundred, I heard. Well, better get on, I suppose. Aim to reachWhitchica some time tonight.”

“See you later.”

“You bet.”

Ezra Breen swung into his saddle. His sister slipped her leg over her horse’s head and put on her man’s felt hat. She smiled at Sam before turning her mount towards the distant river of beef. Ezra nodded and did not smile. Throughout the meeting he had not once smiled, and that was no oddity to Sam Laidlaw, who had known theBreens most of his life.

He clambered into the cabin of the transport and drove on up and over and down the succession of minor hillocks.

The basaltic cliffs of McDonald’s Stand rose to the sky to dominate Sam’s world for a little while. The track to theBreens ’ station branched away to skirt the western spurs of Black Range, leaving the main track to follow the eastern flanks all the way to Agar’s Lagoon. The Rockies, the Himalayas, the Andes, all are greater than these mountains, but none inall the world resemble them.

The air was dustless, as clear as distilled water. Black Range, now running roughly parallel with the track, might have been a mile to the westward and actually was something like twelve miles. Since leaving Wyndham, Sam had met with no travellers save theBreens. Wild donkeys watched him from the hillsides, and kangaroos languidly removed themselves. The eagles passed him from one to the next while he crawled through their territory, and the turkeys ran away on absurdly stiff legs.

At noon Sam stopped to brew tea and gnaw into bread and meat, and about an hour after that camp fire had been left behind, his little eyes glinted with swift interest. The transport was then crossing the summit of a ‘bump’, and before he could decide what the object was on the summit of another ‘bump’ two miles ahead, he was driving down to cross another of the interminable gullies. On his again seeing the object, it was much nearer and recognizable as an American jeep.