Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Annual, No. 3, 1973

There was a- slight pause, then: “Hey, Lowry, you ain’t tippling this early in the morning?”

“You know me, Joe.”

“Yeah. Well, listen, you got to watch out for this King. He’s a nut. Maybe he ain’t certifiable, but he’s playing footsie with a bunch of kooks who’d like to see the UN sink into the East River, maybe help it along.”

“Yeah? No kidding, Joe!” I took another sip of tea. I felt pretty smug about things.

There was a second pause, longer than the first. “Lowry, you sure you’re okay? That ain’t the latest football scores I just read you. I mean, this guy could be dangerous. In my humble opinion, Kimosabe, you ought to do something about him.”

I said: “You read the morning papers yet, Joe?”

“No.”

“Okay, read them, then write me if you have any questions — care of Rasmussen, Thousand Islands!”

“You gone daft, Lowry?”

“Nope,” I said, “just gone fishing, Kimosabe.”

None for the Little Boy by Robert Edmond Alter

Somewhere out there in the wasteland a man was on his way to a fortune. But first he had a date with death!

* * *

The two outback men had been digging test holes up a dry Paleozoic stream bed for well over a fortnight, following a dipping gold-trace.

Now Wally Cord was in a five-foot hole which he figured must be the fountainhead of the old deposit, and Bill Huffer had returned to camp to refill the canteen. It was high time.

The Great Sandy Desert sprawled around the little scrub hills like a white and brown circle. Rains were weeks late in the back country of the Australian continent — only the rabbits and kangaroos could survive in that drouth-bitten world.

Cord’s pick grated on broken rock and he paused to examine the find. Broken quartz, he thought, and went at it with the pick again. Then he thrust his shovel into the loose mass. His eye caught a gleam of yellow and he dropped the shovel and hunkered down to rub the dirt from a piece of rotten quartz.

It was only half rock he held in his hand; the other half was virgin gold. Big chunk, too. And there were more and more of them. It was a rich pocket — a glory hole. Then Bill Huffer’s shadow fell over the pit.

“So we’ve struck it, eh?” Huffer’s voice was casual, mild, just as if they both hadn’t been ready to chuck it as a bad job.

It was one of the things about Huffer that rubbed Cord’s cross-grained: that smug, smiling complacency. And he was so damn fastidious, always trying to play the gentleman in his parlor. A hell of a man for a rough outback swaggy to tie up with!

Cord turned and looked up into Huffer’s calm, smiling, sunburned face, and he said, “That’s right, mate. We’re rich.” And it was right then the idea came into being.

You’re a dead man, mate, he thought.

The sun was smoldering over the red clay hills and murky haze of scrubby trees when the partners strolled down the trail to their camp in the runty eucalyptus. A ruddy wash spread out over the western sky and dust floated in the hot air like ashes.

“I knew it had to be there,” Huffer said nonchalantly.

Yes you did, you s.o.b. Cord thought. “That’s right,” he said aloud. “Something had to be up there with all the color we found down in the dry wash.” But his mind was on other things...

There were two ways of doing it. One, he emptied the Lister bag — their only source of water — and took off in the truck, leaving Huffer out there to die of thirst. Two, he emptied the spare gas cans in the truck and let Huffer run out of gas a couple hundred miles out in the desert. Either way you looked at it, nobody could say he had laid a hand on Huffer. Not technically.

Huffer’s pockets were blistered with nuggets and he had trouble fishing out a coin.

“Toss you to see who goes to file the claim,” he said,

“Righto,” Cord said. “Heads.”

The coin spun and Huffer caught it and slapped it on his wrist.

“Tails.” He smiled about it. “Looks like I get the beer.”

“You’ve got all the luck, mate,” Cord said. He smiled too.

So he would have to arrange to empty the spare gas cans...

Cord walked off into the scrub and returned a few minutes later with an armload of sandalwood sticks with which he built a fire to boil a billy can of water for tea while Huffer mixed a mess of damper dough from flour and water.

“Water’s getting fairly low in the Lister bag,” Huffer said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Cord said. “I’ll have enough to get by. You’ll be back within three days.”

That was the one chancy part about staying behind — the water. The Lister supply was low, and he was going to have to make it stretch for... Let’s see, he thought. Today is the first, and those two rabbiters who are trapping up north said they’d look in on us on their way back on the tenth. Ten long days then.