Australian Hauntings: A Second Anthology of Australian Colonial Supernatural Fiction (6 page)

A STRANGE OCCURRENCE ON HUCKEY’S CREEK, by Ernest Favence

The Bulletin
, 11 December 1897

The heat haze hung like a mist over the plain. Everything seen through it appeared to palpitate and quiver, although not a breath of air was stirring. The three men, sitting under the iron-roofed verandah of the little roadside inn, at which they had halted and turned out their horses for a mid-day spell, were drenched with perspiration and tormented to the verge of insanity by flies. The horses, finding it too hot to keep up even the pretence of eating, had sought what shade they could find, and stood there in pairs, head to tail.

“Blessed if there isn’t a loony of some kind coming across the plain,” said one of the men suddenly.

The others looked, and could make out an object that was coming along the road that led across the open, but the quivering of the atmosphere prevented them distinguishing the figure properly until within half-a-mile of the place.

“Hanged if I don’t believe it’s a woman!” said the man who had first spoken, whose name was Tom Devlin.

“It is so,” said the other two, after a pause.

Devlin walked to where the waterbags had been hung to cool, and, taking one down, went out into the glaring sunshine to meet the approaching figure.

It
was
a woman. Weary, worn-out, and holding in her hand a dry and empty waterbag. Although only middle-aged, she had that tanned and weather-beaten appearance that all women get, sooner or later, in North Queensland.

With a sigh of gratitude she took the waterbag from Tom’s hand and put the bottle-mouth to her lips, bush fashion. There is no more satisfactory drink in the world for a thirst person than that to be obtained straight from the nozzle of a waterbag.

Tom regarded the woman pityingly. She was dressed in common print and a coarse straw hat, and looked like the wife of a teamster.

“Where have you come from, missus, and what brought you here?”

“We were camped on Huckey’s Creek, and my husband died last night. I couldn’t find the horses this morning, so I started back here.”

“Fifteen miles from here,” said Devlin. “We are going to camp there tonight, and will see after it. You come in and rest.”

He took her back to the little inn, where she could get something to eat and a room to lie down in. Then they caught their horses and started, promising to look up the strayed animals and attend to everything, according to the directions the woman gave them.

The three men arrived at Huckey’s Creek about an hour before sundown. They examined the place thoroughly, but neither dray, horses, nor anything else was visible. The marks of a camp and the tracks bore out the woman’s story, but that was all.

“Deuced strange!” said Devlin. “Somebody must have come along and shook the things, but what did they do with the man’s body? They wouldn’t hawk that about with them.”

“Here’s the mailman coming,” said one of the others, as a man coming towards them with a packhorse hove in sight.

They awaited his approach, standing dismounted on the bank of the creek. The mailman’s thirsty horses plunged their noses deep in the water and drank greedily.

“I say, you fellows,” he called out, “you didn’t see a woman on foot about
anywhere, did you?”

“Yes,” replied Tom, “she is back at the shanty.”

“Wait ’til I come up,” said the mailman. When his horses had finished he rode the bank to the others.

“Such a queer go,” he said. “About five or six miles from here I met a tilted dray with horses, driven by a man who looked downright awful. He pulled up, and so did I. Then he said, staring straight before him, and not looking at me, ‘You didn’t meet a woman on foot, mate, did you?’

“I told him no, and asked him where he was going. ‘Oh,’ he said, just in the same queer way, ‘I’m going on until I overtake her.’

“‘You’d best turn back,’ I said. ‘It’s twenty-five miles to the next water; and I tell you I’d have been bound to see her.’ He shook his head and drove on, and you say the woman’s back at the shanty?”

“Yes; it’s about the rummiest story I ever come across. The woman turned up at Britten’s today, about 1 o’clock, on foot, and said that her husband died during the night; that she could not find the horses, and had come in on foot for help.”

“I suppose he wasn’t dead, after all, and when the horses came in for water he harnessed up and went ahead, looking for his wife, in a dazed, stupid sort of a way.”

“I suppose that is it,” said Devlin. “Are you going on to Britten’s tonight?” he asked the mailman.

“Yes.”

“You might tell the woman that her husband has come-to, and started on with the dray. After we have had a spell, we’ll go after him. He can’t be far.”

“No,” replied the mailman, as he prepared to ride off. “He looked like a death’s-head when I saw him. So-long.”

The men turned their horses out and had a meal and a smoke; by this time they were talking about starting when the noise of an approaching dray attracted their attention.

“He’s coming back himself,” said Tom.

The dray crossed the creek and made for the old camp, where the driver pulled-up and got out. The full moon had risen, and it was fairly light.

“Don’t speak,” said Devlin; “let us see what he is going to do.”

The figure unharnessed the horses with much groaning, and hobbled them; then it took its blankets out of the dray and spread them underneath and lay down.

“Let’s see if we can do anything for him,” said Devlin, and they approached.

“Can we help you, mate?” he asked.

There was no answer.

He spoke again. Still silence.

“Strike a match, Bill,” he said; “it’s all shadow under the dray.” Bill did as desired, and Devlin peered in. He started back.

“Hell!” he cried, “the man
did
die when the woman said. He’s been dead forty-eight hours!”

THE WRAITH OF TOM IMRIE, by William Sylvester Walker

From the Land of the Wombat
(1899)

Alas for this grey shadow once a man!

—Tennyson

Yet this way was left,

And by this way I ’scaped them.

—
Ibid.

William Sylvester Walker (1846-1926) was born at Hartlands, Heidelberg, near Melbourne, on 16 May 1846. He wa
s educated at Sydney Grammar School, where he was a contemporary of Sir Edmund Barton, Australia’s first Prime Minister, and continued his studies in England at Wellesley House, Twickenham, and later at Worcester College, Oxford. As a university student he won the Worcester challenge skulls, played for the college first eleven cricket team, and was nominated for the University Trial Eights. He lived in New Zealand for fifteen years where he worked as a journalist and was editor of the
Marlborough Press
and later the
Blenheim Times
. It was in New Zealand that he began to write poems and short stories for popular periodicals of the time. Walker was the nephew of “Rolf Boldrewood” (whose real name was Thomas Alexander Browne), the great Australian colonial writer and author of
Robbery Under Arms
(1888), who evidently did not approve of his writing. He had three sons, two daughters and two step-daughters. In 1921 he took up residence with his family at Soroba House, Oban in Argyllshire, Scotland, and he died there at the age of eighty in 1926.

And so you don’t believe in ghosts, you fellows?” said Mcllwaine, the squatter, one night as we sat around the cheery pine-log fire at Yerilla. “I do, and I will tell you my reasons. It is not the first time in my life that I have seen one, and I’ve heard that ghost-seeing runs in our family.

“I saw the ghost of a man, a horse and a cattle dog one night as plain as I see each of you now, but the dog turned out to be real afterwards, and I don’t believe that he saw the ghost; anyway, he didn’t act as if he did. He was very serviceable to me, that dog. Twenty-five years ago, before some of you were born (you may well look, Jemmy, but it’s true), I was cattle-droving ‘store’ cattle from up north, and my chum was a man called Tom Imrie.

“We camped one night on the Lower Tarcoo, and Tom and I left our head man and the others with the cattle and rode on to a bush hotel to put in the evening. There were about a dozen fellows there, a rather mixed lot; and some one was playing a concertina awfully well as we rode up. I never got that imitation peal of bells out of my head. ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of Saint Clements,’ sort of thing. He played the different changes and triple bob majors, crashes and all the other thingummybobs nearly as well as George Cass himself, whoever he was. I did not know the player then, but I had cause to do so afterwards.

“There were two other drovers in a private room at the hotel, who had a mob of cattle ahead of ours. So we chummed up and had a game of whist.”

“McIlwaine plays whist everywhere, anywhere and where he can, so beware,” remarked Jemmy uproariously.

“You bide awee, ma fren, and I’ll knock spots out till ye,” rejoined Mcllwaine.

Jemmy made a pantomimic gesture, expressive of contempt, and Mcllwaine resumed:

“Well, as I was after saying, if that infant hadn’t interrupted a man of my age, the name of the place was Bylo. The usual far-back sort of a township, only the hotel and public stockyard. And the hotel was combined with an all-round store, where you could get a variation from a suit of clothes to a frying-pan, haberdashery and hardware mixed. The police had not yet arrived, though there were any amount of long, loafing crawlers in the district, the usual sort who stay about a place of this description, that promises to be a town some day. They usually get cleared out in time, before decent people come. And there is generally a death or two before that happens—innocent and guilty alike. The police were wanted. I tell you, and not very long after our arrival either. We tied our horses up to the verandah posts, along with a lot of others, on first arriving, and it was there I noticed the concertina. We stayed about an hour playing whist with the drovers, and taking an occasional glass together.

“You must know that in the big knock-about room, next to the one we were in, a lot of young fellows were
gambling, and drinking pretty freely also. Some of them I noticed were jackeroos, ‘jaast like ma young fren, Innocence, here,”’ laying a mighty paw upon Master Jemmy’s shrinking flesh and causing an awful hullabaloo, so that we had to wait until things assumed an aspect of order again.

“Well, these jackeroos that I was telling you about were mixed and various ‘poddies,’ ‘cleanskins,’ ‘two tooth,’ some of them ‘four,’ and maybe one or two just lambs unshorn, like Jemmy; knew just enough to say ‘baa’. It was a wild, Godforsaken sort of district, right out on the back blocks beyond the New South Wales border, and young fellows learn bad things quick enough, unless they stick to their work like men.

“One fellow amongst this lot who were gambling looked pretty ‘old in the horn’. I spotted him when I passed the door, for I went out once to look if the horses were all right. He was the concertina player. Sort of sharp, by his appearance. He might have been anything from a cattle-duffer to a horse thief, but he looked like a ‘spieler’. He was pretty hard bitten.

“All of a sudden, whilst we were going on with our game (I had the ace, four, five and three of hearts, trumps, I mind, in my hand, and it was my turn to play), there was a fearful shindy! Shouting, swearing, stamping, chairs and tables knocked down and a rush. We jumped up and, just as we got to the door, the very man I have been describing tore out like a maniac, took the first horse he came to and galloped off. The rush of the others coming out after him all of a heap frightened the other horses to such an extent that they all pulled back at once and broke every individual bridle in that crowd. My word, that fellow on the horse did scratch away past the pine ridge on the up-river road.

“Tom was a pretty hot-tempered fellow. He managed to catch his horse somehow, got a bridle from somewhere, and was away after the fugitive before I could say ‘Jack Robinson’. We had seen a still form lying in that other room as we came out, and some of the fellows were shouting ‘Murder!’

“At last I got my horse, and a fresh bridle out of the store, and one of the drovers, another young fellow and myself, started in pursuit. Off we went. The tracks kept on the road, and after a hard ride of about six miles we suddenly came upon two dead bodies—the spieler-looking concertina man and poor Tom! The first had a bullet through his head, as near the centre of the forehead as it well could be.

“Tom was a sure shot with a revolver, and always carried one. So did the other man it appeared, for we found the two pistols close by, just a little way off each body.

“But though there was only one barrel of the alleged murderer’s pistol discharged, Tom’s had two, and the wound Tom had died from was in the right temple. Apparently he had shot himself. I was terribly cut up. The whole affair was so awfully sudden and unexpected that I could scarcely collect my wits together. We had the bodies brought carefully back to the hotel, and despatched a special messenger for the police, 100 miles away. But we had to bury all the bodies next day on account of the heat. I stayed to give my evidence, of course, but I put on two more hands, and could trust my head cattleman to look after the ‘mob’.

“It came out that the man who had committed the murderous assault upon the poor young jackeroo was not well known. He was a stranger, but was named, according to his merits, ‘Flash Jack,’ and was reputed to be up to any blessed thing, from petty larceny to cattle-duffing, according to my informants. The story went that the jackeroo had several one-pound notes knocking about. One of them was a new one. They were all pretty well boozed, and Flash Jack had got hold of this new note somehow. The new chum accused him of stealing it, and threatened to strike him with a hunting crop he carried. The man swore horribly, and in the scuffle which ensued he wrenched the hunting crop from the young fellow, and hit him such an awful crack on the head with the heavy brass handle of it that he just collapsed to the floor and never spoke again. The heavy end of the whip had sunk right into his brain! The police came at last, a sergeant and a constable, and went carefully over every ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the case; after which they put all the witnesses who remained, and myself, upon our oaths before Mr Fielding, the police magistrate, and owner of Yankalilla station. (Good brand that—J. F. conjoined—was in those days.) Gone off colour since the old man died, and left the property to his son.
He’s
too fond of town, and leaves the station too much to others. Never knew
that
game pay, unless the manager is a partner, or the overseer is a real worthy man.

“Well, it was all finished fair and square, and what is left of those three bodies, whirled to their death in a sudden gust of passion, lies there to this day. I don’t suppose the bones would come out of the ground, even if their ghosts wanted to walk, and say a few things they hadn’t time for on this earth, eh? We buried them on the rise of the big pine ridge. There’s a much bigger cemetery there now, for I passed it only last year.

“Tom’s cattle dog, Joker, would not leave the grave until I led him away on a chain, but after a day or two I began to get the poor beggar to eat a little, but I had to keep him on the chain, or he would have gone straight back and most likely died there at the grave.

“When I had delivered the cattle all right I found myself down in Sydney for a spell. I of course made my first visit to Miss Imrie, as I was in duty bound to do. She was Tom’s sister, and used to keep a home for him all ready when he came down from the bush to town. She lived at the top of Woolloomooloo, in one of those quiet streets on the left going out to Pott’s Point. Nice comfortable little cottage, with a diminutive garden in front. I rang the street-door bell, and was shown into the drawing-room. Miss Imrie appeared. Nice lady-like girl. I had written the sad news to her myself from up country, so that she had had some considerable time to get over it, for I had been two months on the road with cattle since I wrote that letter. She was dressed in deep mourning, and knew me at once, and we commenced to talk over matters. I knew, of course, that her affairs would not be so comfortable for her after the loss of her brother. Sort of unprotected like. But she had many good friends in Sydney, and I knew that they thought a lot of her. She had a small legacy of her own, just enough to live on. I had brought all Tom’s money that was owing to him with me, having got it from our employers, and I handed it over to Miss Imrie then and there.

“‘And do you think my poor brother, Tom, shot himself?’ said she. I told her ‘yes,’ but that it might have been by accident (I did not think so myself). What could I say? But if he had, I couldn’t tell the reason, any more than the man in the moon.

“So ran my thoughts. I knew well enough that Tom meant to lake the man so as to hand him over to justice, fight or no fight. He was a most determined chap. But he would never have shot him unless the other had been so desperate as to fire at him first. And then perhaps he might have had to do so to save his own life. But the other shot, the one which killed him—a shot from his own weapon apparently—
that
was inexplicable. Miss Imrie broke in upon me at this point in my reflections.

“‘Will you describe the man who was supposed to be shot by my brother, Mr McIlwaine?’ she asked.

“I nodded, and described him exactly. She got paler and paler as I went on, but when I described what was undoubtedly a birthmark, which I had seen on his chest, and which bore an exact similarity to a fallen autumn leaf, she slid off her seat and fainted!

“I rang the bell at once, and the housemaid came, and between us we brought her back to consciousness. The girl, of course, had heard of Tom Imrie’s sudden death, though her mistress would naturally enough conceal the real facts. She (the housemaid) would probably think that we had been talking over the matter, and that that had been the cause of her mistress’ indisposition. She knew me, too, as I had been there on one occasion to tea during Tom’s lifetime. I took my hat and my departure, feeling that I could be of very little use, but I gave the girl a tip as I left, requesting her to give Miss Imrie a message, saying that I would call again if she wished, on hearing from her that she felt sufficiently well to receive me. I also asked the maid to express to Miss Imrie my very great sympathy for her in her sorrow, which I shared also.

“I went to my hotel, and two days afterwards received a letter from Miss Imrie telling me the most awful thing you can think of. I remember the words well enough. They burnt themselves into my brain!

* * * *

“That man you described was my other brother! We hadn’t heard of him for years. Poor Tom! Now I can see the reason for his own rash act. Please don’t call again. I can’t bear it. And may I ask you, on your honour as a gentleman, never to mention this subject to a living soul, for my sake, and for the sake of those who are gone?”

* * * *

“Of course, I complied with her wishes, but it was as equally plain to me now as it had been to Tom’s sister after the dread revelation of the fatal birthmark. The man’s shirt was open at the breast when we found the two bodies, and I saw the mark then and afterwards.

“Strange to say, the refrain of an old drinking song came into my head the moment I saw that fallen leaf mark, and there it droned away in my head, pathetically, in the presence of the dead:

Fades as the leaves do fade,

Fades as the leaves do fade,

Fades as the leaves do fade,

And dies in October.

“But the result had not been brought on by the ‘small beer,’ the prelude to this particular part of the chorus. It was strong liquor, and much of it, which had been the prominent cause of the whole thing. And that tune that droned in my head, the man himself, ‘Flash Jack,’ had played on the concertina in the hotel verandah, the others joining in the chorus, on the previous interlude to the ghastly tragedy.

“And there he lay himself, and another, both cut off like the leaf, and—Alas, poor Tom!

“Tom must have seen this mark in a far worse and more awful light than ever I did. His own brother! He must have opened his shirt to feel if the heart beat, after the first deadly shot in self-defence and in the heat of passion.

“He probably would know nothing at first. His brother would be altered with a long beard on. They had been parted for long. He had, at the time he started after him from the hotel, no knowledge of his whereabouts, or even existence. What ‘Flash Jack’s’ antecedents may have been, of course, I do not know, but it may be taken for granted that no idea of fratricide had ever entered Tom’s head. The man’s altered looks, after a long lapse of years, his unrecognised appearance, with long hair and bush clothes, his face twitching with evil passions, the wish to shoot Tom probably working in his mind. So the shots had been exchanged, Tom’s with sudden and deadly effect. Then can you fancy the awful reaction, the terrible conviction, and the dread confirmation of the appalling horror of the unwitting deed? Then the sudden despair and anguish, amounting to a passion, a fury, a morbid madness, and culminating at the last in a quick self-annihilation? God knows what he thought! I knew the poor fellow’s character pretty well—good ideas, kind heart, but stubborn and determined, moved too much by sudden impulse. A man who, once having decided his course, would carry it out unflinchingly, never thinking of the consequences. And he took his own life, after all! I thought he would have lasted for many happy and prosperous years.