Arthur Upfield - Winds of Evil

Accustomed to the noises created by the wind, Bony failed to notice its increasing violence until a stronger gust came roaring along the creek. It was ominous. It came, this gust, like an express train, and like a train it roared its passage towards the Broken Hill road.

Continuing to press his body against the trunk of the tree, his head and his eyes incessantly moving, Bony listened and endeavoured to register sounds made by human agency. He could detect nothing moving save the smaller branches of the tree above him.

One thing was obvious. Hang-dog Jack at least would return to the homestead, having come from it, and it was more than probable that he would follow the creek track again rather than return by another way unmarked by track or pad. If the unknown watcher was on his trail Bony determined, at the least, to see his shape.

The only way of seeing an object on a particularly dark night is to get it silhouetted against the sky, and so Bony sank to the ground, and like a stalking fox he crawled from the tree to the edge of the creek-bank, at this place five feet above the creek-bed and sharply steep.

Employing extreme caution not to get too near the edge of the bank, where he might be precipitated with noise to the gravelly bed, he worked his way towards the Broken Hill road, still on hands and knees, for some fifty to sixty yards, when he reached a point midway in the break of the bordering trees. Now he could look towards the plain and see clearly the line it cut against the lighter tinted sky. Between that line andhimself passed the creek track, and no living thing could use the track and not be seen silhouetted against the sky.

The detective knew this place well. He was lying along the edge of the creek-bank, and an attack could not be delivered from that side, nor could it come from a tree, because the sky above him was clear of branches. For the first time since leaving the stately leopardwood-tree he felt safe.

A lightning mind was probing for the reason of the cook’s midnight walk. Hang-dog Jack’s destination was as mysterious as the open manner of his going to it. This latter argued that he was not the Strangler, but opposed to it was the assumption that were he the Strangler he would have nothing to fear. If met and questioned, he could say that being unable to sleep he had chosen to take a walk. There was no law in existence to forbid it. He was even keeping to a semi-public road.

The wind gusts were appreciably stronger when, an hour later, Hang-dog Jack returned. He was actually humming, and the sound reached the tensed Bony before the fall of the cook’s boots in the soft sand of the track. As he passed across Bony’s skyline there was no possibility of mistaking his squat, powerful figure and the long, swinging arms. He was walking at a comfortable pace, like one to whom time and circumstance are of no moment.

The ugly figure disappeared towards Wirragatta. Still tensed, Bony waited as motionless as a blue-tongued lizard waiting to trap a fly. As distinctly as he had seen Hang-dog Jack he saw the second man run along his skyline, following, not the track, but the tree-line and passing the detective within less than five yards. He ran crouching so that he appeared not unlike a giant crab. Only during a space of four seconds was Bony able to watch him, and, although he was Quite unable to determine the fellow’s identity, he did know that the cook was being stalked.

Who was this second man and why was he stalking the cook? Always suspicious of the obvious, Bony reasoned that he might be, like himself, merely an observer. That the stalker was not Constable Lee, Bony was sure. That he was not Donald Dreyton, he was much less sure. Had it been anyone else who walked the creek track save Hang-dog Jack, Bony might have hastened after him to render assistance if necessary. He scarcely felt uneasy, on the cook’s behalf, as it would have required much more than hand pressure on Hang-dog Jack’s throat even to inconvenience him.

What was of greater importance was the fact that the second man had walked across the break in the tree-line and therefore had left his tracksthere. Yet Bony continued to lie at the bank edge and wait. To see those tracks he must use his light, for by dawn they would certainly have been wiped out of existence by the wind, but to use the light would betray his presence if not his activity. And for the moment Bony knew this to be unwise. He waited fully thirty minutes, and he would have liked much to wait longer before he decided that if he further delayed in examining the tracks he would never see them at all. Up the creek was coming a heavy gust of wind with the roaring of a great waterfall.

And the wind beat him even as his light showed the line of tracks but a few feet distant.

Like a thousand devils the wind howled among the trees and plucked at their branches to tear many from the parent trunks and lay them violently on the ground. It threatened to throw the detective off his feet, and when it passed it left him gasping.

The line of tracks was still distinguishable, but each of the footprints was become blurred and almost filled in. It was quite impossible accurately to estimate the size of the boot or shoe worn by the unknown, although it was possible to establish that the size was six or seven or eight. The little, but important, tell-tale marks proving how the man walked and what part of his soles was given most work were gone, destroyed by the wind, perhaps before that last gust.

Bony had not time to feel to the full his disappointment when he made a discovery. Although he could quite clearly see his own tracks along the creek-bank, he could not discover the tracks made by the unknown after he left the tree to stalk the cook towards the Broken Hill road. There were his tracks running westward after the cook, but there were no tracks running eastward. An examination of the road revealed Hang-dog Jack’s double line of tracks, but no others. How, then, had the unknown man left the tree-trunk round which Bony had observed him watching the cook?

As silently as the stalker of the cook, so did Bony walk back towards the tree against which he had sat for so long. The absence of the stalker’s first line of tracks worried him, because there was suggested a further complexity. The double line of the cook’s tracks proved that the wind could not have erased from the earth the stalker’s first line of tracks. Yet the stalker had left but the one line, that of his passage towards Wirragatta. Was the stalker, therefore, not the unknown man who had watched the cook from behind Bony’stree. Had he been for a long time farther towards the Broken Hill road waiting the coming of the cook? If that were so, then it appeared that the stalker was not theunknown, that the unknown had not gone after the cook towards the Broken Hill road and was still between Bony and the homestead. Were, there four men along this creek tonight, not three-Bony, the unknown, the cook, and the stalker?

Thencame the attack-swift and silent and sure…

His caution overcome by chagrin and the problem set him by the tracks, Bony failed to keep watch on the branches beneath which he was walking. He heard the light impact of feet on the ground immediately behind him. Nervous tension having been relaxed, the communication between ear-drums and brain was lethargic. Before he could turn and defend himself, before he could begin the attempt, vice-like hands encircled his throat and neck.

Instantly his breathing was stopped. The primary pressure was terrific. It was a band formed by interlocked fingertips across his windpipe, hand-palms pressed to the sides of his neck, and two thumbs cruelly crushed against either side of a serial segment of the spinal column.

As the overwhelming horror flooded his brain before the air stoppage began to take effect, Bony abruptly went limp. He drew up his legs, but his body was held on its knees by the two hands at his throat. A throbbing hum was in his ears, but beneath this inner sound he heard distinctly one having an exterior origin. It was low, throaty laughter-a dreadful, gleeful chuckling telling unmistakably of the lust to kill. The power of the life-destroying hands was equalled by the power of the arms supporting his weight.