Arthur Upfield: Sands of Windee

And the mansion he had built was never to be seen by men who expected to see it! He was to deny its very existence; further, he was to swear he never had erected it. He was to see men’s eyes cloud with cynicism, watch men’s lips curl in unuttered gibes, thinking they saw the great Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, the favourite of the men on top-the favourite, too, of the fickle god, Luck-brought down to their level by failure. And this was to be because of a woman’s beauty, both physical and spiritual, which acted on his scarred soul in a way no white man possibly could understand.

Even so, he did not repent his determination to follow his chosen path. Dereliction of duty, service to justice, was strangely absent from his reflections. He did not think, when he decided to hide his mansion, that he would frustrate the almost universal law of retribution, making himself thereby an accessory to murder, and the accomplice of a murderer.

He was thinking of Marion Stanton, and recalling the inward light that radiated from her, when he sank backward on the ground and fell asleep. The labour of the fire-fighting yet held its effects on his body and, for him, he slept soundly. He did not hear the slow-paced rhythmic thud-thud-thud whilst kangaroos sped by him in tireless twelve-foot jumps. He was unaware of the dingo that came and sniffed at him but a few yards distant, and then faded away in the eastern blackness. Grey Cloud both saw and heard kangaroos, dingo, and several foxes passing eastward, and he fidgeted because his eyes began to smart and his nostrils were tickled by smoke. The awakening fear animating the wild things, instinct making them flee rather than tangible evidence of the thing that reddened the western sky, became transferred to Grey Cloud. Several times he snorted and tested the neck-rope. Why did that man tarry when other living things ran? Why was it this two-legged god lay inert on the ground here in a land where Fear was stepping into its dread kingdom? At last Grey Cloud could bear it no longer: he whinnied long and loud.

Lying on his back, Bony awoke without other movement than opening his eyes. The stars he looked for were invisible, and sleepily he was wondering if this indicated rain, when his horse whinnied again. Bony sat up and, doing so, faced west. He could see the stark outlines of bush and tree, the trunks hidden, the branches forming a silhouette of domes and towers, spires and masts, and the filigree-work of giants, held against a background of vivid scarlet that gradually faded towards the zenith of the sky. The smoke-laden air was the colour of old port.

And the wind blew on his face direct from the west, a steady wind, stronger than it had been for many days.

Now on his feet, Bony examined the conflagration that he knew was sweeping towards him as fast as a horse could gallop. To his credit, he weighed his chances of escape whilst he drank the remainder of the tea in the quart pot and with long flexible fingers rolled a cigarette.

A probable twenty-five miles lay between him and the hut tenanted by Dot’s friend. There lay safety, for about the hut the land was free from grass, as to a greater extent it was free about the wells and tanks of Windee. It was quite possible for the fire to cut him off before he could reach it, and drive him eastward, where he would surely meet the slowly westward-creeping Windee fire.

On the other hand, somewhere north of him-indicated by the map in Jeff Stanton’s office-laya great gibber-stone plain where the sparse grasses and stunted bush would not feed the advancing fire. How far northwas that plain he did not precisely know, for when he examined the map he memorized chiefly the station watering-places. Anyway, Dot and Dash were riding north of him, and he had promised Marion Stanton to bring back Dash.

Two minutes later he was astride Grey Cloud, headed into the trackless, uncharted north lands. The fire-reflecting sky revealed the earth as though seen through dark-red tinted spectacles; it showed, too, the fleeing forms of many animals and sometimes the upright figure of a rabbit observingall this disturbance with wondering eyes which reflected the scarlet glow.

Unable now to follow the partners’ tracks, Bony rode a little east of north, rode at an easy loping canter, as though he were giving Grey Cloud gentle exercise. Even when the sting of the smoke noticeably increased he refrained from urging the horse to greater speed. Once they crossed a clay-pan measuring an acre in extent, and he was tempted for a moment to dismount on that area of bare ground and await the coming and the passage of the fire-demon. On foot he would gladly have availed himself of this slender chance; but the fiery onslaught, he was sure, would prove too much for Grey Cloud, who would become unmanageable, would bolt away and meet his doom.

When the dawn penetrated the smoke pall, paled its terrifying colour and painted it warship grey, Bony now and then could see between the trees the tips of high-flung flame in the far distance. The horse was going like a machine, but his breathing was taxed and the steady pace was beginning to tell at last.

Direction was no more ascertainable now than it had been in the starless darkness of early morning. Bony trusted implicitly to his bushman’s sixth sense, and when finally the sun penetrated the smoke pall, appearing in colour as it had done when last he had seen it, he found he was heading only a degree or two west of north.

He kept Grey Cloud’s head pointing in that direction, riding for a further half-hour, when the outward appearance of the gelding and the inward hint of sluggishness decided him on a “blow”. Pulling up his animal, he removed the saddle, rubbed the horse down with the saddle-cloth, and took a mouthful of water from the bag, at which Grey Cloud looked pertinently.

Within the bag was a little more than a gallon of water, and, observing how the horse regarded it and him, Bony hesitated, regretting he had not brought with him a hat. However, his shirt of stout calico served. Removing it, he first scooped out a hole in the ground, and, pushing the shirt over and into the hole, covering it, he emptied therein half the contents of the bag. It was barely sufficient to moisten Grey Cloud’s mouth, and Grey Cloud wanted more, but was refused.

Not now on the partners’ tracks, horse and man in strange unsettled country, the scarlet sun threatening to make the day unbearably hot, and a vast bush-fire racing on them, the unthinking might say that Bony did a very foolish thing, and the animal-worshipper pronounce it a noble deed. Bony was neither fool nor sentimentalist. He realized that he was in a most dangerous position, with the odds against him of getting out of it. His single hope of winning through lay in the stamina and speed of Grey Cloud. Of not lesser importance than the “blow”, taken whilst precious minutes went by, was the little drop of water given a horse that had not drunk its fill for more than eleven hours at a time of year when Central Australia is at its worst.

Man and horse delayed no longer than fifteen minutes. When again in the saddle, Bony could see on his left hand columns of smoke whirling upward against a background of dark grey. He started then to ride east of north, a slow loping gallop, and, whilst thus riding, numberless kangaroos, with an occasional fox, and, at lesser intervals, a dingo, raced across his path headed east, knowing not, as he did, that most probably the Windee fire spreading north awaited them.

The wind, fortunately, did not increase when the sun rose, changing in colour from crimson to deep yellow, yet in less than thirty minutes the oncoming fury compelled Bony to turn several degrees eastward. Anxiously he sought to peer through the drifting, stinging fog for some fortunate haven of refuge that might be presented in the form of broken clay-pan country or the gibber plain. After another twenty minutes he again was forced to alter his course farther to the east, with the racing fire less than a mile distant.