LITMIR.BIZ

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Casement had said.

      Who had rung the warning bell, and from where had it been rung? Bony reflected on the journey he had made by truck from the white house on the ridge. He estimated the time taken from the white house to the settlement, minus the period spent on replacing the damaged tyre, and was convinced that unless the warning had been delayed at the white house, it hadn’t been given there.

      It was as well he was not outside the shed entrance, for the headlights suddenly illuminated the entire settlement, causing him to withdraw farther inside, and enabling him to see three men crossing the roadway diagonally to meet the oncoming vehicle. When it stopped outside the general store, they converged on the car, and Bony saw for a second the figures of Mike Conway and Joe Flanagan before the headlights were snapped off.

      There was no talk. The slamming of doors told him that the men had entered the car, and it passed the shed and went on down the roadway with its lights out. Bony waited to hear it stop at the cheese factory. But he heard it pass the factory and fell to pondering on its destination. Beyond the factory there were no houses, nothing but the large piggery. The car went on beyond the piggery.

      As immobile as the corner post of the shed, Bony listened to the sound of the car dwindling into the distance. He watched the mast rising from the opposite house against the starry sky. He watched another rising from a house farther along the row. Still without lights, the car pressed on in the same direction, moving slowly, but not stopping. It was obvious that the driver knew the way, every yard of it.

      The visitors were not police, and Bony wondered if Mike Conway was aware of their identity before their arrival. It was unlikely because the television masts had been lowered before their arrival, and raised again shortly after they had gone on, when it was known who they were.

      The now faint noise of the car abruptly ceased. In the silence he could hear music coming from a house, the gurgling of the small river beyond the settlement, and fancied he could detect among the night sounds that of the far away waterfall.

      How long he stood there resting his back against the corner post didn’t bother him until he heard the car returning. Its headlights were still not operating when it passed the shed and stopped outside the store. Again the doors were slammed, and then the track was brilliantly lit by the headlights, and within the side glow he counted the three men who had come from the neighbouring house, and the two from the Conway place. When the car drove off, he thought it time for discretion, and slipped down into his cellar where he lit the lamp and pretended to be interested in a paperback autobiography.

      He was left undisturbed and the following morning his day began as usual. The settlement was still in shadow. The first milking was almost done, the milked cows waiting in the yard at the rear of the shed and the last batch waiting in a side yard to take their places under the machines. Passing along the roadway he saw a woman shaking a mat outside her front door, two others gossiping and a gaffer pottering in a garden. The scene was normal. A beagle came and wagged his tail, and Bony paused to pat him.

      Dogs! He recalled that the previous night scene had been incomplete, for no dogs voiced hostility or welcome to the night visitors. How had they been controlled? Quite a mystery to think about while digging potatoes.

      There can be no two opinions about the Australian autumn, when the days are softly warm and the nights are cool and placid; the heat and the dust and hot winds of summer are irritants easily forgotten. This was another perfect autumn day in Cork Valley. At the end of the houses, Bony turned off the road and followed a path into low scrub, which soon gave place to open gums, and beyond them he entered a wide lane between wire fences. The path skirted the river, now merely a stream running over polished granite stones and washing against the larger boulders. Magpies warbled and one dive-bombed him and then gave it up. He crossed the river by a narrow bridge, where the path junctioned with a wider track on which were the marks of motor tyres and horses hooves.

      Half a mile on, he had to leave the track and follow another across the grass paddocks to reach his bagged potatoes and digging fork, and place his lunch bag and billy on a large stone fallen from the old dividing wall.

      The wall reminded him of a part of Victoria where the stones had been gathered and built to serve as fences. This one appeared to have neither beginning nor end. It came up over a rise to the north, passed him by and ended amid the trees marking the river to the south. Where he was working was its highest point. Here it had weathered best, being four feet high and four feet wide. The stones comprising it had obviously been gathered from the adjacent land, so that old Mrs Kelly had really achieved a dual purpose when she ordered its erection ... peace and improvement of the land.

      He, too, was now at the highest point of the valley floor. The track from the house on the ridge down to the settlement was like a crayon mark. The settlement shone like a white mausoleum on green velvet. The waterfall beyond was molten silver. Beyond the wall the great house occupied by the Kellys stared suspiciously with its many eyes at him.

      He could see the children running and playing in the only street of the settlement, on their way to the school building. Two men were working near the cream factory, and two others were driving the cows to pasture. Another was riding a horse in a distant paddock on the Kelly side of the wall. Crows cawed about the yard, which, by the skins drying on racks, must have been the slaughtering place, and a blue wren danced on top of one of his potato bags.

      It was a pastoral scene, to engage the enthusiasm of an artist. All about him vistas of peace and beauty. Children going to school; houses where people lived unaware of the joys of television ... by day. A liqueur at the end of dinner strong enough to choke any damned Englishman. Cars going about without headlights and engaged in mysterious business. This Cork Valley had slumbered for centuries, disturbed now and then by domestic arguments among the aborigines, had swooned beneath the summer sun, and was cosily wrapped about from the winter cold.

      Until the Kellys came. They stirred the stuffing out of it. They built the big house, built the wall and cleaned the land of stones. They said it was their land, and it was so. Had Sean Kelly ridden up that track gashing the slopes to find himself a wife? Had he ridden down that track with a wife on the saddle behind him? By which road had his sister Nora gone forth to seek a husband, to return with a man of derring-do, and two priests to make sure of subsequent respectability? Where, just where, had the husbands met with pistols blazing, and left their widows and children to carry on a tradition of violence until an old woman with a last will and testament cried: “Peace or else”? And the wall was built, and peace of a kind came to Cork Valley.

      That tough old woman had been born again in the strong-willed old woman even now pointing her telescope at the spud digger. She could pipe the eye on hearing ‘Danny Boy’ played on a gum leaf, but it was on record that she had used an axe handle for a purpose not intended, when she had laid out a stranger caught stealing her cattle.

      “Superficially they’re all quiet and peaceful,” Superintendent Casement had told Bony. “But, privately, I’m game to bet my rabbit burrow is down there.”

      A kookaburra came to rest on the bag next to the one where the blue wren had danced. Another came to perch on the edge of the wall. Silently Bony welcomed them, and hoped they would repeat their previous performances. He dug on and on, action methodical and now tireless, and with the appearance of the potatoes, there also appeared large and fat worms. The kookaburras chortled softly at each other, and then one after the other flew to land within a yard of his implement and gobble the worms. Finally they waited within inches of the fork for the worms to be uncovered.

      Bony talked to them. Their beady eyes divided attention between him and the earth, and when he paused both looked at him and waited as though plainly asking why the heck he had stopped digging. He was thus engaged when he heard the thudding hooves of an approaching horse. He straightened up when a cheerful voice called:

      “Day to you! How’s the crop?”

      “Good day,” responded Bony. The birds flew away, and he strolled to the wall where he had put his coat, and from a pocket produced tobacco and papers. The man on the horse was in his middle twenties, and there was no need to ask his name for he was of the same mould as the red giant who had rushed Bony into the

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