Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Annual, No. 3, 1973

It was going to be a tight dry squeeze, but he could do it if he had to. He would stay relatively immobile in the shade and would ration his water as if each drop were a golden nugget.

Pungent blue smoke of the sandalwool rose in the air like incense and Cord pulled back from it. He stood up and scanned the landscape, his eyes moving along the path that led down to the truck parked in the she-oaks, then along the bush track that wandered on into the scrub and burning sand. It was going to be a cruel swollen-tongue death way out there.

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!