The Battling Prophet. Arthur W. Upfield
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table, on our knees, wherever they happened to appear and grow like roses on a bush. Following a spell on rum, the things appear suddenly and vanish suddenly after playing around like they wanted to bite you. The gin hoo-jahs is still different. You see them out of the corner of your eye. They always stalk you from behind, and when you turn to look at ’em, they aren’t there. Understand?”
“Partly. Go on,” Bony urged.
“Ben and me was drinkin’ gin that time he perished. He was laughing at things he was seeing on his legs and feet, pointing at them, and laughing so he couldn’t describe ’em to me. Them things wasn’t caused by the gin, and they wasn’t even the whisky hoo-jahs, ’cos you don’t laugh at them. For two days we’d been seeing the gin hoo-jahs—things that creep up behind you and vanish when you try to look straight at ’em. So it wasn’t the gin that tossed him.”
“Throughout the day before he died, your friend was seeing things from the corners of his eyes ... as you were doing?”
“That’s what I’m saying, Inspector.”
“What would he have been drinking to produce the effects on him which you saw that morning, when you found him sitting up and laughing and pointing to things on his legs?”
“General mixture of beer, spirits and sherry.”
Bony pondered, and Knocker Harris brought his chair to sit at the table.
“Last night in Adelaide,” Bony said, “I was introduced to several habitual drunks by a sergeant of the Vice Squad. One victim said that the hoo-jahs, to employ your name for them, always dropped on him from the ceiling. Another told us that the hoo-jahs came from nowhere and crawled all over him. Yet another victim said he had a pet hoo-jah with legs sticking up from its head and three eyes in its stomach. And so on. I have to admit that all these persons mixed their drinks, with the exception of a woman who invariably drank sherry. Have you ever had the hoo-jahs on wine?”
Mr. Luton shuddered.
“Once. A long time before I fell in with Ben. Never no more. They pulled my hair out in chunks, and then my whiskers. After that they nipped out all me body hairs, one at a time. And now and then they threw things at me—a bale of wool, a bullock, a planet. And never missed.”
“You take a point,” conceded Bony. And Knocker Harris cried triumphantly:
“There y’are, Inspector. Ben konked out on somethin’ not gin. You got to study this killing to find the lay of it.” His small eyes gleamed with sardonic humour. “Millions of people had no time for Ben and his weather-predictin’. And the politicians are in it, too. They were all agin Ben, like. He told us. The politicians would have their mothers murdered if they could hire someone to murder ’em for nineteen and elevenpence. As for the Jews . . .”
“You keep off the Jews, Knocker,” roared Mr. Luton. “I’ll have no sectarianism in my house. “You’ll be . . .”
“Tell me about this last drinking bout,” interposed Bony, and Knocker Harris was unabashed.
“Yes, tell him,” he urged, and Mr. Luton said:
“It’ll be easy. Ben hadn’t been along for about two weeks, when he came down from the big house one afternoon. He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask him, but he was soured by something or other, and when I seen how he was, I suggested a bender as we hadn’t had one going on for six months. First he says no, and then he says yes and to hell with everything, and so we got stuck into the gin.”
“You happened to have a supply of gin on hand?” Bony asked.
“I did, Inspector. Well, after a bit we didn’t want to eat no more. Now and then Knocker would call in and cook us a feed, but we didn’t want it. Then he tried us out with soup, and after that he gave us up.
“Mind you, this was all on the programme. Nothing unusual. We talked about the old days. We sang all the old songs we knew. Now and then we took the whips down and went outside and flogged the trees, pretending we was once more on the tracks with the bullock teams. It ended like it always did. One of us got thinking about his mother, and then we cried and called each other drunken sots and swore off the booze for ever. That was two days before he died.
“You got to understand that once we swore off the drink, we had to take on the cure and stick to it. We’d never been that weak-minded that any justice could have put us on the Blackfellers’ Act.1 The cure was a small dose of the same every four hours. Between doses you suffer hell and you watch the clock like it was going to spit at you.
“I got the hoo-jahs that night, and Ben got ’em first thing in the morning, the same as me. He didn’t tell me so. Had no need to, or me to tell him. I knew by the way he kept looking sideways and back over his shoulders that he was having the gin hoo-jahs all normal and proper.
“Towards evening that first day, I made a fire in the stove and got us a hot drink of meat extract. We couldn’t bear the stink of it. So we sat and called each other dirty names till med’cine time came round again. At midnight we had our doch-an’-doris. A real snorter for the night. I was a bit worse than Ben, so he seen me into bed, and, soon after, I heard him shout good-night from his stretcher in the front room.
“I had a cat-nap, but I was awake long before med’cine time at four in the morning. I waited till four to take the bottle in to Ben. He was sitting on the stretcher with his feet on the floor, and he was holding his head with both hands to stop himself looking backwards at them hoo-jahs. Y’see, after a day of doing that, your neck aches like hell. I gave him his snort, and had one myself. Then I covered him up after he got back on the stretcher, and went back to my own bunk.
I had another cat-nap, and was woke by hearing Ben roaring with laughter. I asked him what he was laughing at, and all he could do was to keep on laughing and point at his legs, him sitting up and the bedclothes on the floor. I wasn’t liking the way he was going on. I pushed him down and covered him up and left him, the time being just before half-past six, and one hour and a half off med’cine time.
“He stopped laughing as I was making a brew of tea, pouring as much water on the floor as in the pot. I was thinkin’ then that if Ben didn’t come out from them funny sort of hoo-jahs pretty quick, I’d break our rule and give him a stiffener to keep him going. It seemed that I needn’t have worried, because when I went to him with the tea and the bottle, he was asleep and snoring. So I came back here and had a cup of tea and resisted the gin, deciding I’d wait for Ben to join me in the eight o’clock dose.
“Come eight o’clock, I went in to see how he was faring. He must have sat up again, for the clothes were half off him. He wasn’t asleep then. He was dead. So I staggered up-river to tell Knocker to go for the quack.”
“And the quack roared hell outer me, like,” snarled Knocker. “Told me that Ben and his boozing mate oughta died a century back. And I oughta be ashamed of myself for associating with ’em. I told him to take a runnin’ jump at hisself, and I went to the policeman, and he said he’d a good mind to lock us all up, includin’ dead Ben.”
Mr. Luton took over once again.
“They got here in the doctor’s car about ten that morning. By then I’d done some tidying up, throwing the empties into the river, planting the full ones out of sight. I told the tale that Ben had brought the supply with him, and we’d run dry and was sobering up. We had a confab on the veranda after the quack had seen Ben and said he’d died of the booze. I told them about the right kind of hoo-jahs Ben had, and how he couldn’t have died of ’em. They told me not to be a damned old fool, and that I ought to be put away for my own good.”
“The quack said we both oughta be sent up to the Old Men’s Home,” supplemented Knocker Harris indignantly. “And the policeman backed him up. Ruddy bastards, both of ’em.”
“You’d better get back to your camp,” Mr. Luton suggested with some severity. “I got to fix us with a feed, and feed the fowls and the dogs. It’s almost dark.”
A smile of benign satisfaction