The Devil's Steps. Arthur W. Upfield
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and you. What a life!”
Bisker took the cups over to the wall bench, filled them and brought them back to the now-warming stove.
“How’d you sleep?” he enquired, now a little more cheerful.
“Better than if I’d had you beside me,” replied the cook. “And you be sure to shave early, or the missus will be roaring you up again. You’re a disgrace about the place. Thank ’eaven the winter won’t last much longer. Must’ve been another frost by the feel of it.”
“She froze ’ard but it isn’t so cold outside as I expected,” averred Bisker. “Wind musta shifted to the west just before I got up. Well, I s’pose I’d better get on with the blasted boots.”
“Yes, and you go quiet about it, too,” commanded Mrs. Parkes stubbing out her cigarette. “We don’t want the old cat in her tantrums three days running.”
Bisker stood before the cook, sliding the palms of his hands together and leering.
“One of these days,” he said slowly, “you’re gonna hold her while I cut ’er throat—slowly. The old——”
Mrs. Parkes feigned indignation. She snatched up her cup, glared at Bisker, and said a little shrilly:
“You cut out that murder stuff and get along with your work. You’ll be havin’ me in ‘Truth’ next, and then what’ll me husband say when he comes ’ome!”
“Stick yer teeth in,” Bisker replied, and swiftly retreated to the scullery, retreated backwards as though he were withdrawing from the presence of royalty.
From a box on a shelf he obtained a pencil of chalk and, again entering the kitchen, crossed it and passed through a doorway into a passage which led him to the public lounge. Here he switched on lights, passed through the lounge and so gained the passage which led to the bedrooms. Switching on more lights, he collected the footwear of the guests, marking on the soles the number of the room outside of which they awaited him. There were ten pairs of men’s boots, sixteen pairs of women’s shoes, and three pairs of children’s boots. All these he took back to the scullery, and then went on another journey to collect a pair of shoes from outside the door of the room occupied by Miss Eleanor Jade, the proprietress of Wideview Chalet.
Standing at a bench, Bisker began to work on the collected footwear. Every pair was of good quality, and every pair bespoke their utility for walking. This morning Bisker expected to find them dry, for the weather had been fine for the last four days. He was, therefore, easily provoked to profanity when he began work on a pair of men’s shoes, size eight and bearing on the sole the figure five.
“Musta been out walkin’ late last night, the blinkin’ foreign German,” he complained. “More work—as though a man ’asn’t got enough to do. Musta got ’em as wet as hell.”
These shoes took him three times as long to clean as any previous pair. Having done them, he began to whistle, and continued whistling till he came to the last pair. These were a woman’s shoes, size six, collected from the bedroom door of Miss Eleanor Jade. Like the shoes from Number Five, they were also damp.
“Ha! Ha!” chortled Bisker. “The old bird! The old cat! The old—old——” Ceasing his chortling he began to brush the shoes collected from the bedroom door behind which slept Miss Eleanor Jade. “Now, lemme see. Number Five goes for a walk late last night. In he comes, has a drink or two—I must ask George about that—then toddles off to ’is room, takes off ’is shoes and plants ’em outside his door for me to clean. Yes, that’s how it was. But that same argument can’t be applied to the old cat. She wouldn’t be out walkin’ late last night, and yet ’er shoes are wet same as Number Five’s. The old——Ah—yes, she could ’ave. A little bit of love, eh! Ho! Ho! Sherlock ’Olmes me!”
Having completed this task, Bisker placed the footwear on a large wooden tray and went back to the bedrooms. By the time he had replaced them where he had found them it was almost full daylight.
He left the house to return to his room, a hut built in a far corner of the spacious garden. On the way a magnificent panoramic view of valley and distant mountains was presented to his unappreciative eyes. From the wide, stone-balustraded veranda extending the full length of the house-front, a well-kept lawn tilted gently down to the distant wire fence bordering a main highway. The lawn, as well as the small shrubs in beds spaced upon it, was white with frost, a glittering white upon which lay the reflected light of the sun now rising above the far mountains, thirty-odd miles across the valley.
After shaving and washing in ice-cold water, Bisker returned to the kitchen where the aroma of cooking food and simmering coffee caused him to forget momentarily the agony of the first five minutes of his day following the ringing of the alarm clock. Outside, the air was milder. The bushman in Bisker was quick to note the remarkable rise in the temperature after the sun had risen.
A uniformed maid entered the kitchen with an empty tray on which she had taken early-morning tea to Miss Jade’s guests. George, the drinks steward and table waiter, was already at breakfast at a side table to which Bisker drifted. Another maid set down before him his breakfast of bacon and eggs, toast and coffee for Miss Jade fed her staff well.
“Mornin’, George!”
“Morning, Bisker,” replied George, a sleek man of about thirty, pale of face, dark of eyes and hair. “Nice day.”
“Yes. Gonna be a warm day after the frost. Wind’s gone round to the west. The frost’ll thaw off quick. Might get rain tonight. What time you get to bed?”
“About eleven,” replied George. “The men were tired and cleared off to bed early.”
“You tuck ’em all in nice and comfy?” Bisker enquired with his mouth full.
George smiled in his superior manner.
“All bar the bridegroom,” he admitted. “I left him to the bride.”
Bisker winked and leered. He glanced furtively over a shoulder observed that one of the maids and the cook were standing close, winked again at George and refrained from making an evil remark. The remark was never made, because George, having finished his breakfast, departed for the dining room.
Presently Bisker rose and shuffled out of the kitchen. He left the building by the scullery door and crossed the yard to the wood-stack where, sitting on a splitting-log in the warm sunshine, he fell to slicing chips from his tobacco plug. The slight problem of the wet shoes had vanished from his mind.
Having smoked for ten minutes, he put away his pipe and took up an axe with which he proceeded to split foot-length logs into billets for the cooking range. In addition to the kitchen and the boiler fires, there were the lounge and dining room fires to be fed, great blazing fires so much preferred to the cheerless gas and electric fires in the homes of the guests.
For half an hour, Bisker split wood and then took a broom and began the daily sweeping of the bitumened areas and the paths. And then, when he had worked round to the long front of the house, he heard Miss Jade’s voice.
“Bisker! Have you seen Mr. Grumman this morning?”
Bisker turned and looked upward to see his employer standing at the veranda balustrade, her bejewelled hands sparkling in the golden sunlight.
“No, marm,” he replied.
He stood staring at “the old cat,” the wonder in his mind, as it was always when he looked at her, that anyone could be so fortunate. Under forty, Miss Jade’s hair was as black as night, her eyes were dark and big and even now as she faced the sun her make-up was perfect. Her voice had the faultlessness of tone and accent which must have been acquired only by long practise.
“Very well. Continue your work, Bisker,” she commanded.
Bisker obeyed, but his thoughts were not gentlemanly. He was sweeping the path running parallel with the house-front. It crossed midway the wider path leading from the veranda through the lawn to the wicket gate in the bottom