The Barrakee Mystery

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Duty-and Common-Sense

THE BACKWATER into which Dugdale was swept was on that side of the creek nearer to Barrakee. The rushing waters of the main stream were invisible to horse and man, and a point of terror to the former. Hemmed in on all sides by the trees, it was impossible to see anything other than the brilliant stars; but Dugdale knew that the jutting point of ground that caused the backwater was a kind of sand bar and the only place where a horse would find a footing.

The Devil, fearful of the roaring stream, hugged the curving bank where its steepness gave him no possible chance of getting out. The man could have managed it, because the water was almost level with the bank lip; but the horse was much like a mouse in a bucket of water. Even when Dugdale got him at last on the inner side of the jutting sand bank, The Devil was forced to use all his tremendous strength to clamber up on dry land.

On the creek bank Dugdale dismounted, his mind centred upon the probable fate of Trooper Smith. That the rash policeman was drowned he thought more than probable; and, knowing of the mass of snags he and his horse had barely missed, Sinclair’s messenger estimated that nowhere else would it be possible to find Smith or his horse. If the snags had not caught their bodies, it would be useless to search for them till daylight came.

In the darkness, too, it was more than likely that he would pass the snags on his search upstream. Slowly and with great care he led the fidgeting Devil along the bank almost awash with the swirling, hissing torrent, and had proceeded a quarter of a mile before he heard Smith call within a dozen yards distance. Although the voice was so near, Dugdale could not see the owner of it; but he did see where the water was lashed with foam among the branches and snags of the fallen tree. And where the water was whitened, there was Smith.

“If you’re not drowned, you ought to be,” Dugdale shouted at him.

“What was good enough for you was good enough for me,”came the voice. “I suppose you’ll lend a hand to help me out?”

“What! For you to arrest me?” Dugdale inquired.

“You bet!”came the prompt reply. “But I’ve lost my gun and my horse; so you should not find it difficult to avoid arrest, should you?”

“I shall certainly object to your trying to arrest me till I’ve done a little job I promised I would do. Can’t you work your way to me along those snags?”

“No. Between you and me there is a three foot gap. If I let go I’ll be swept away-and I can’t swim.”

“You idiot! Do you mean to say you put your horse into the creek and can’t swim? Smithy! you’re game, but you’re mentally deficient. Hang on awhile.”

Dugdale fastened the reins of his horse to a tree trunk. Taking off his coat, he made sure of Sinclair’s wallet and the sodden letter in one of its pockets, and placed it at the foot of the tree to which The Devil was secured. Returning then to that point on the bank opposite the mass of snags, he examined the water very carefully. The tree that now formed the mass had been growing at the edge of the creek before a storm had uprooted it. Its roots were still high and dry, the trunk slanting downward into the foaming tide. Dugdale removed his boots.

“What are you doing, Dug?”

“I am coming in after you, Smithy,” the policeman was informed. “I am a fool to give you a chance to collar me, and you are a bigger fool to have taken that header.”

Dugdale worked his way along the tree trunk into the water, and when the tree disappeared he slipped down into it and, reaching for a footing of some sort, found none. His legs were swept up and outward by the strength of the rushing water, and only with his hand could he hold on and work farther out from the bank till he came to a branch lying about a foot above the surface and stretching horizontally.

At that time some dozen feet separated the two men.

“How are you enjoying yourself, Smithy?” Dugdale asked caustically.

“Goodo! Water’s a bit wet, though,”came the quiet but grim response.

“Ah, well! Let’s be thankful for small mercies. A man won’t die of thirst. Sure you can get no nearer to me?”

“Quite sure.”

Halfway along the branch Dugdale found another with his swinging body below the surface. It helped to steady him; helped him, too, to edge a further yard outward. A jagged point of wood jarred his kneecap, causing his teeth to clench with the numbing pain. The temperature of the water was equally numbing. Both men began to feel thatall the world’s wealth would be well spent on a fire.

After much manoeuvring, Dugdale decreased the distance between them to three feet, having come to that space where there were no supporting branches.

“Can you get your belt off?” asked Dugdale.

“I don’t know. I’ll try.”

“Well, don’t try so much as to let go of that branch.” Dugdale saw the dark head and shoulders of the policeman twist and turn, rise and sink, accompanying much hard breathing and chattering of teeth.

“Got it. What now?”

“Throw the buckle end over to me. Right! Now your only chance is to take a good hold of your end, and when you leave go the branch you are hanging to the force of the stream will sweep you down below me and over to my side, where there is a good snag sticking up out of the water. Perhaps you can see it?”

“Yes, I can.”

“Right. Well, let go and hang on.”

Trooper Smith let go. Unable to swim, he was facing the ordeal with extraordinary courage. To them both was need of coolness and calculating judgement, for a blow from one of the hideous unseen snags, or a failure of strength at a critical moment, meant certain death for Smith at least. The weight of the trooper’s body on the belt was terrific, and had not the strain been over quickly it would have been impossible for Dugdale to have maintained his one handed hold. Smith, as Dugdale foresaw, was swept down and against theupflung branch, to which he clung desperately. Their hands were blue and numbed with cold, and their bodies were reaching the state in which pain is not felt.

To Smith the five minutes which followed were a prolonged nightmare, full of noise, full of water demons clutching his limbs to destroy him. The tree branches tore his hands, and pointed sticks prodded his body and his face in a thousand places. Above the noise he heard Dugdale’s commands and forced himself to obey them with mechanical promptness. The noise, the demons, the reaching snags, came to be enemies attacking his body, which appeared to have been detached from his tired brain; so that the last half dozen yards were accomplished in a semi-conscious state, and the final struggle to the bank was a matter of unreality.

“What is it going to be? Peace or war?” he heard Dugdale ask.

“Peace for five minutes at least,” he managed to gasp.“God! I’m frozen.”

“Maybe. But you’re alive, which is something,” Dugdale pointed out. “Luckily, I’ve a watertight box of wax matches, so we’ll get a fire going. There’s a quart pot on my saddle, so we’ll get a drink of hot water, which, my dear Smithy, is a great luxury compared with cold.”

Five minutes later, two half naked men stood close to a roaring pillar of fire, taking turns in sipping from the quart pot. The heat stung their flesh, and from their clothesrose clouds of steam, and eventually, when Smith’s tobacco and papers were dried, they smoked cigarettes and talked about the future.

“Tell me-during the armistice-what your idea was to pinch Clair’s wallet,” inquired the policeman, breaking a long silence. “Duty andall that aside, Dugdale, you’re getting yourself into a dickens of a mess over it.”

Dugdale related the coming of Sinclair to his hut and the events leading up to and following his death. “You see,” he pointed out, “Clair particularly asked me to take and deliver his wallet to a certain person. In fact, he got my promise to do it, and, having promised to deliver the wallet, deliver it I must. Now, I am scared by the flood and the attitude of Knowles and you fellows towards me, and damned sorry I did promise. But all that can’t be helped now.”

“But did Clair, or Sinclair, say why the unnamed person has to have his wallet?” Smith pressed.

“No, he did not. Aside from that, I consider that he had a perfect right to dispose of his wallet as he liked, and I had no justification for refusing to take and do with it as he directed.”

“Humph! In one way you are right. You are wrong, however, legally, because Sinclair was a man wanted for murder. He was killed in escaping the law, and what property he possessed, as Sergeant Knowles said, belongs to the State till his assigns are established. Anyway, it’s a knotty point; too difficult for me. I’m only a policeman. I’ve got to obey orders, which are to arrest you and convey you to Wilcannia.”

“And you will, I suppose, carry out your orders?” asked Dugdale with his quiet smile.

“I shall.”

“You will, I should say, find it a little difficult, especially as you cannot swim.”

“I shall hold you here till they come with a boat or something.”

“And where do you suppose they are going to get the boat?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s up to them.”

“Of course-if they know we’re here. But by the time they find out we shall be fairly hungry.”

“That, of course, cannot be helped.”

“In fact, we shall become so hungry that we shall never want any food again-unless, of course, we are fed in the next world.”

The two men looked keenly at each other. Suddenly Smith grinned and burst into a guffaw of laughter. Dugdale laughed at, and with him. He looked so absurd in his underclothes, and he himself felt he must appear no less absurd. The Devil pawed the ground impatiently and attracted their attention.

“I am going to put on my clothes, as it is useless drying them,” Dugdale explained with the placidity of determination. “You see, I have to swim The Devil across two more creeks before I can get clear of the Washaways and send help to you.”

“But what about my orders?”

“You were not ordered to starve me todeath, or yourself either,” Dugdale observed whilst dressing. “When I pulled you out of the water you were unconscious, and when you came to you found yourself against a nice warm fire, with a quart pot of hot water beside you and no sign, absolutely no sign, of Frank Dugdale. Now isn’t that right?”

Trooper Smith, of the New South Wales Mounted Police, closed one eye.

“Now you recall it, Dugdale, I think it is about correct,” he said, adding, with sudden gravity: “But you are not going to attempt those two creeks, are you?”

“Of course. There is no other way of getting to the Darling, but across them, and the water won’t go down for a month.”

“Well, even at school you were an ass,” Smith reminded his prisoner.

“Better a live ass than a starved corpse. However, I would prefer not going till day comes. What about promising not to relieve me of the wallet, so that we could get a good warm and enjoy a sleep?”

“My dear chap, there is no wallet!” Smith rejoined cheerfully. “As a personality you don’t exist. I neither know nor see you. You have vanished, and I regain consciousness alone between these creeks. Let us camp. Let us heat more water and talk of the last dinner we had in the city.”

“Yes, let’s,” agreed Dugdale.