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.
Guided Tour
by William Garvin
Somewhere in that house a dead lady waited. Waited impatiently — for the next one to die...
At first sight the house did not look frightening at all. Anyone could see it was just another forlorn old structure of oak and stone, with a central turret, a slate roof and crumbling, moss-streaked terraces. In appearance at least, it seemed to be as prosaic and peaceful as a dozen other uninhabited country houses they’d passed on the drive from London. And seeing this at the very beginning, they were reassured.
When the wheezing relic of a Rolls finally panted to a halt squarely before the front entrance, there were audible sighs of relief from a couple of the passengers, as if both were thinking the same thing: this isn’t going to be so bad after all.
Even Mr. Norton, their driver-guide, contributed to the easing of tension with his first words.
“There she be, folks,” he said cheerfully, holding the limousine door open. “Endrayde House herself, and she never claimed no victims yet from her visitors, so don’t be scared before we even get inside.”
Two of the male passengers smiled dutifully as they stepped out — Randall, the American tire company executive, and the paunchy little professor from Canada named Wilkes — although the latter might have been amused only by Norton’s pronunciation.
The third passenger to emerge did not smile. His name was Mr. Sebastian, and he was a tall, startlingly thin man in his mid-thirties with dark eyes and an odd, elusive accent the others had not been able to identify.