None for the Little Boy by Robert Edmond Alter

Somewhere out there in the wasteland a man was on his way to a fortune. But first he had a date with death!

The two outback men had been digging test holes up a dry Paleozoic stream bed for well over a fortnight, following a dipping gold-trace.

Now Wally Cord was in a five-foot hole which he figured must be the fountainhead of the old deposit, and Bill Huffer had returned to camp to refill the canteen. It was high time.

The Great Sandy Desert sprawled around the little scrub hills like a white and brown circle. Rains were weeks late in the back country of the Australian continent — only the rabbits and kangaroos could survive in that drouth-bitten world.

Cord’s pick grated on broken rock and he paused to examine the find. Broken quartz, he thought, and went at it with the pick again. Then he thrust his shovel into the loose mass. His eye caught a gleam of yellow and he dropped the shovel and hunkered down to rub the dirt from a piece of rotten quartz.

It was only half rock he held in his hand; the other half was virgin gold. Big chunk, too. And there were more and more of them. It was a rich pocket — a glory hole. Then Bill Huffer’s shadow fell over the pit.

“So we’ve struck it, eh?” Huffer’s voice was casual, mild, just as if they both hadn’t been ready to chuck it as a bad job.

It was one of the things about Huffer that rubbed Cord’s cross-grained: that smug, smiling complacency. And he was so damn fastidious, always trying to play the gentleman in his parlor. A hell of a man for a rough outback swaggy to tie up with!

Cord turned and looked up into Huffer’s calm, smiling, sunburned face, and he said, “That’s right, mate. We’re rich.” And it was right then the idea came into being.

You’re a dead man, mate, he thought.

The sun was smoldering over the red clay hills and murky haze of scrubby trees when the partners strolled down the trail to their camp in the runty eucalyptus. A ruddy wash spread out over the western sky and dust floated in the hot air like ashes.

“I knew it had to be there,” Huffer said nonchalantly.

Yes you did, you s.o.b. Cord thought. “That’s right,” he said aloud. “Something had to be up there with all the color we found down in the dry wash.” But his mind was on other things...

There were two ways of doing it. One, he emptied the Lister bag — their only source of water — and took off in the truck, leaving Huffer out there to die of thirst. Two, he emptied the spare gas cans in the truck and let Huffer run out of gas a couple hundred miles out in the desert. Either way you looked at it, nobody could say he had laid a hand on Huffer. Not technically.

Huffer’s pockets were blistered with nuggets and he had trouble fishing out a coin.

“Toss you to see who goes to file the claim,” he said,

“Righto,” Cord said. “Heads.”

The coin spun and Huffer caught it and slapped it on his wrist.

“Tails.” He smiled about it. “Looks like I get the beer.”

“You’ve got all the luck, mate,” Cord said. He smiled too.

So he would have to arrange to empty the spare gas cans...

Cord walked off into the scrub and returned a few minutes later with an armload of sandalwood sticks with which he built a fire to boil a billy can of water for tea while Huffer mixed a mess of damper dough from flour and water.

“Water’s getting fairly low in the Lister bag,” Huffer said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Cord said. “I’ll have enough to get by. You’ll be back within three days.”

That was the one chancy part about staying behind — the water. The Lister supply was low, and he was going to have to make it stretch for... Let’s see, he thought. Today is the first, and those two rabbiters who are trapping up north said they’d look in on us on their way back on the tenth. Ten long days then.

It was going to be a tight dry squeeze, but he could do it if he had to. He would stay relatively immobile in the shade and would ration his water as if each drop were a golden nugget.

Pungent blue smoke of the sandalwool rose in the air like incense and Cord pulled back from it. He stood up and scanned the landscape, his eyes moving along the path that led down to the truck parked in the she-oaks, then along the bush track that wandered on into the scrub and burning sand. It was going to be a cruel swollen-tongue death way out there.

Huffer dropped a portion of tea into the billy can as he removed it from the fire. He glanced up at his partner.

“No sign of rain,” he said.

“Nope,” Cord agreed. He hunkered down and looked at Huffer, hating him. Huffer came from a good family, once; never let you forget it either. He wasn’t like the other outback swaggies. He was always as neat as a pin, no matter how grubby the job; never lost his temper, never swore like a cobber, and Bill Huffer was always smiling that damn self-satisfied, complacent smile.

The desert will wipe it off your dial, mate, Cord thought. He almost laughed aloud at his sudden sense of secret power. Huffer’s death was going to make Cord one of the richest men in Australia.

Darkness settled over them as they completed their scant meal. The needle leafed she-oaks stood grim and ghastly with their barren broken branches. Strange shadows began darting to and fro, and squeals and squeaks sounded around the two men. Frantic rabbits were out there in the baked dark looking for water.

A kangaroo poked its head into the skyline to watch furtively, and a pair of emus came up like stalking brown ghosts and vanished. Foxes herded among the rabbits with tails in the dust, and the fluting whistle of a boobook owl came from the scrub.

They got their lantern going, emptied the nuggets from their pockets and started rubbing the dirt away from fragment after fragment, tossing them into their gold-pan. Smiling, Bill Huffer paraphrased one of Mother Goose’s nursery jingles:

“One for the master, one for the dame, and one for the little boy who’ll file the claim.”

Cord watched him, his eyes iridescent in the lantern light.

“You’ll set yourself up fancy now, eh mate?” he said. “You’ll likely go to England and play the swell.”

“Not a bit of it,” Huffer said. “I mean to stay here and buy a sheep station. I like it out here.”

Do you? Cord thought, and again he had to snap back his laughter. Well, I’ll see that you get all of it you like.

They rolled into their blankets and said good night and Huffer composed himself for sleep. Cord pretended sleep. The moon rose, a brimming red mask of a face peering over the horizon, and now and then a few dingoes yelped their wild dog cry in the distance.

Then it was midnight and Huffer was breathing soft fluttery sounds through his half-parted lips, and Cord rolled quietly from his blanket.

He slipped down the path to the she-oak stand and climbed into the back of the old truck that had been long ago retired from the army. They kept three five-gallon gas cans in a rack in there and Cord removed them one by one and hauled them out in the scrub and emptied them into the parched sand. No trace was left except a lingering pungent odor of gasoline.

He returned the empties to the rack in the truckbed and then paused to think of what else. The radiator. A man could live off the rusty water in a radiator if he had to. He went around to the front of the truck and eased up the hood, drew a penknife from his pocket and punched a slit in one of the water hoses. Should do it nicely.

Cord went back to camp and slid under his blanket. He smiled a complacent smile.

They woke with the first gleam of the never-never dawn. In a few minutes they had a fire licking around the billy can, and the sun was bristling over a ridge of red rocks in a china blue sky by the time they were done with breakfast.

“I might as well get an early start,” Huffer said. “It’s going to be another scorcher.”

“Best thing,” Cord agreed.

Huffer stood up to say, “Well, I’ll just take a minute to run the razor over my face. A rich man such as myself must make a good impression on the townies.” He smiled.

Wasn’t that just like him, Cord thought with disgust. Any other bush cobber would return to civilization looking like a regular dirtgrained swaggy, and worry about a tidy appearance after he got there. But not little Beau Geste. He had to go in with a fresh dial. But what the hell; it was a nice way to die — clean-shaven. Cord had to turn away to keep from laughing.

“I’ll fill the water bag and put it in the truck for you,” he said.

“Thanks, Wally.”

The poor sap actually thanked him!

Cord took the canvas waterbag over to the round-bottomed Lister bag which hung suspended from a needlewood tripod, and half filled it. He begrudged wasting even that much water. Couldn’t be helped though. Huffer might be watching from the tent. He went down the path to the truck and climbed up in back to suspend the waterbag to the gas-can rack. Then he punched a slit in the bottom seam.

Nobody — if there ever should be an investigation — would notice that any more than they would notice the slit in the water hose. The only possible question would concern the empty gas cans. But Cord could always claim he knew nothing about them. Maybe the truck had a gas leak.

Anything could happen to a man alone on a desert. Everyone knew that.

Huffer, his face as bright and clean as baby skin, met him on the path and put out his hand. “No more damper dough and tea for us, partner,” he said, smiling. “Caviar and champagne only.”

“That’s right, mate,” Cord said and he shook hands.

They parted and Cord went on up to camp. He had banged up and down the Back o’ Beyond for many years and had seen the remains of men who had died of thirst out there. It had never been pretty. Just thinking of what was shortly going to happen to Huffer gave him a need for a drink, and he went for the canteen.

It was empty. He knew it the moment he picked it up. He dropped the canteen and ran around to the back of the tent to the Lister bag. The last trickle of water was piddling into the thirsty sand.

That’s why he wanted to shave, Cord thought. Then he spun on the spot and started running back down the path, yelling.

“Bill! Bill, wait! You’re going to kill us both!”

But even as he screamed and ran he knew he was way too late. He could hear the choggity old motor of the truck carrying the complacently smiling Bill Huffer off into the salt bush stubs, as the burning morning sun settled into its fiery red sweep toward the west.