Limekiller!

“ ‘Acting upon information received' ” he said, “ ‘I went to the region called Crocodile Cove, accompanied by,' and so carry on from there, Sergeant Bickerstaff,” he said.

In life, if not in literature, there is always anticlimax. By rights — by dramatic right, that is — they should all have gone somewhere and talked it all over. Talked it all out. And so tied up all the loose ends. But in fact there was nowhere for them all to go and do this. The police were finished when the statement was finished. District Officer Pike, who had had a long, hard day, did not suggest further cups of tea. Tia Sani’s was closed. The Emerging Nation Bar and Club was closed, and in the other clubs and bars local usage and common custom held that the presence of “ladies” was contra-indicated: so did common sense.

Wherever Captain Sneed lived, Captain Sneed was clearly not about to offer open house. “Exhausted,” he said. And looked it. “Come along, ladies, I will walk along with you as far as the Guest House. Limekiller. Tomorrow.”

What should Limekiller do? Carry them off to his landing at the Grand Arawack? Hospitality at Government Guest House, that relic of days when visitors, gaunt and sore from mule transport, would arrive at an even smaller St. Michael’s, hospitality there was reported to be of a limited nature; but surely it was better than a place where the urinals were tied up in brown paper and string? (- Not that they’d use them anyway, the thought occurred.)

May said, “Well, if you get sick again, yell like Hell for us.”

Felix said, reaching out her slender hand, whose every freckle he had come to know and love, she said, “ Will you be all right, Jack?’ Will you be all right, Jack? Not, mind you, You’ll be all right, Jack. It was enough. (And if it wasn’t, this was not the time and place to say what would be.)

“I’ll be all right,” he assured her.

But, back on his absurdly sheeted bed, more than slightly fearful of falling asleep at all, the river, the moment he closed his eyes, the river began to unfold before him, mile after beautiful and haunted mile. But this was a fairly familiar effect of fatigue. He had known it to happen with the roads and the wheatfields, in the Prairie Provinces.

It was on awakening to the familiar cockeling chorus of, I make the sun to rise! that he realized that he had not dreamed at all.

St. Michael’s did not have a single bank; and, what was more — or less — it did not have a single lawyer. Attorneys for the Estate (alerted perhaps by the telephone’s phantom relay) arrived earlv. But they did not arrive early enough. early enough to delay the digging. By the time the first lawyeriferous automobile came spinning to a stop before the local courthouse, the expedition was already on its way. The attorney for the Estate requested a delay, the attorneys for the several groups of claimants requested a delay. But the Estate’s local agent had already given a consent, and the magistrate declined to set it aside. He did not, however, forbid them to attend.

Also in attendance was one old woman and one small girl. Limekiller thought that both of them looked familiar. And he was right. One was the same old woman who had urged him in out of the “fever rain.” The other was the child wdio had urged him to see “the beauty harse” and had next day made the meager purchases in Mikeloglu’s shop. whom the merchant had addressed as “Bet-ty me gyel,” and urged her (with questionable humor) not to forget him when she was rich.

The crocodile stayed unvexed in his lair beneath the roots of the old Garobo Tree, though, seemingly, half the dragons along the river had dived to alert him.

To walk five hundred feet, as a start, is no great feat if one is in reasonable health. To cut and hack and ax and slash one’s way through bush whose clearings require to be cleared twice a year if they are not to vanish: this is something else. However, the first five hundred feet proved to be the hardest (and hard enough to eliminate all but the hardiest of the lawyers). At the end of that first line they found their second marker: a lichen-studded rock growing right out of the primal bones of the earth. From there on, the task was easier. Clearly, though “the late Mr. Pike” had not intended it to be impossible, he had intended it to be difficult.

Sneed had discouraged, Marin had discouraged, others had discouraged May and Felix from coming: uselessly. Mere weight of male authority having proven to be obsolescent, Captain Sneed appealed to common sense. “My dear ladies,” he pleaded, “can either of you handle a machete? Can either of you use an ax? Can —”

“Can either of us carry food?” was May’s counter-question.

“And water?” asked Felix. “Both of us can,” she said.