* * *
10. A Break With Tradition; and Shooting Up The Chook Yard
The next free weekend Father gave us permission to take some of the station horses and go riding for the afternoon. Contrary to long-standing practice – almost a tradition, really, for Gower Abbey boys – we did not accidentally-on-purpose end up in the vicinity of the Lannercost Hotel during the course of our ride. Instead we went in the opposite direction, toward the place where Doogle had seen whatever it was he’d seen behind the rocks in Short Gully Gorge.
Once there we tethered the horses in some shade, then climbed the few metres to the spot Doogle indicated – a lowish cliff with an eroded undercut. The undercut was barely evident as we stood on the narrow patch of level ground at the base of the rock-face, but crouching down revealed how it had been walled-up.
The first thing we did was remove a few stones, after which I had a go at looking inside. It was too dark to see anything at first but after a while my eyes started adjusting to the light. At the same time Sash was becoming impatient. “So what can you see in there?” he urged.
“Hang on a sec…” I replied. Soon I began to make out an object at the back of the little cave, a sort of longish bundle … lying side-on.
“Gees! It looks like a body!” I yelped. “—Like it’s been wrapped in old bags and tied up with rope or something!”
“…Yeah,” muttered Doogle. “That’s what I thought.”
“Gis a look,” said Sash, encouraging me with a vigorous shove.
“…Oh Gawd,” he said after a while. “It really does look like a body. I reckon we should get the police.”
“Let’s get the rocks away first,” Doogle said with some resolve. “If we agree it’s a body then that’s what we’ll do. Otherwise we’ll drag it out and find out what’s goin’ on.”
With a brief concerted effort we dismantled the remaining rock wall then had a second look inside the cave. Now we could see the object more clearly. It really was something wrapped in hessian bags and tied with rope and fencing wire.
“I don’t think it’s a body,” said Doogle.
“Nah,” said Sash. “It’s too skinny.”
I had to agree. Sash and I also agreed Doogle could be the first one to touch it. Not because of the body thing (of course not). Doogle was, after all, the one who’d found it, so naturally we felt the privilege should be his. Deep down, though, we were not absolutely one hundred percent certain about it not being a body. I mean, it could have been the body of a tall, really skinny kid.
We didn’t mention anything about this to Doogle, however. We just stepped back to give him plenty of room to work.
“Garn, what are you frightened of?” he chided as he got down on his hands and knees. He started to lie down so he could reach into the back of the hollow, then backed up and glared at us. “Wait up. You idiots still reckon it’s a body, ay.”
“Nah course not don’t be stupid what are you talkin’ about,” we replied all at once. Doogle just ignored us.
He lay down again, kicked in as far as he could and hooked his fingers in the wire at one end. Then he gave a tentative pull. The bundle didn’t move. He gave a second, harder pull. It shifted a few centimetres. After a pause he wriggled a little further into the hollow and got a better grip. All we could see sticking out from under the rock-face was a pair of legs. They kicked around spasmodically.
Muffled grunts and grumblings came from the direction of these legs. Then for a moment all was quiet.
“The poor bugger must’ve died of lead poisoning,” muttered a disembodied and strangely resonant voice. “Gis a bloody hand.”
I lay down and wormed my way in alongside him and together we dragged the bundle out into the daylight. Then Doogle rolled it over a couple of times as we inspected its wrappings. Being in the cave certainly hadn’t kept it dry; the tie-wire was all rusted and the rope was rotten.
So was the hessian covering. And there was no longer any suggestion it was someone’s mortal remains.
Sash and I took the smaller of the two ends and stood it up. It was as tall as we were. “It’s all falling to bits,” said Sash. “It must’ve been in there for years.”
We held it upright while Doogle undid the bindings and peeled away the crumbling cloth. Underneath was a layer of heavy canvas. This had been wound around the contents several times and the ends of the cylinder so formed folded back and tied. Some parts of the canvas were dry and some oily. The oily parts seemed sound but the drier patches were rotten like the hessian.
Then we lay it down again so we could unroll it. Doogle untied the smaller fold and knelt down to look in the end. Then, still in a kneeling position – and in unfeigned amazement – he toppled slowly onto his side. “It’s only a bloody great gun!” he said as he lay there, eyes goggling.
Sash looked as well. “Gees! No wonder it was so heavy! What do you think it is?”
Doog got back to his feet and dusted himself off. “It’s a gun, Sash,” he explained in a patronising manner. “That part there is the pointy end, see. It’s the place where all the bullets come out and...”
“I know it’s a gun, y’ bloody drongo! What sort of gun, I mean!”
“...A really big gun,” Doogle went on, digging into the tender spot he’d found. “One of them ones what goes, ‘bang’!”
Sash was about to blow a fuse. “It’s got to be a machine gun of some sort,” I said after a quick look. “Let’s get the wrappings off so we can have a decent squiz at the thing.”
In a state of high excitement we unrolled it on the small patch of level ground at the front of the hollow. Besides the gun there was a tripod field-mounting and three lengths of ammunition belt, each of which held about eighty rounds. After spreading everything out on the tarp we sat down to look it over, the enormity of our find suddenly leaving us all a bit shaken.
The gun was an air-cooled Browning fifty-calibre machine gun, as any right-minded high school boy should know, a weapon which could fire five hundred half-inch bullets a minute (or something over eight a second). It was a real fair-dinkum killing machine and the most lethal-looking thing I had ever touched.
The barrel and breech mechanism looked as if they were originally packed with grease, which explained the oily patches on the canvas. Where the grease had dried out the metal had become rusty. In general it appeared to be in reasonable condition, though, certainly given the length of time it must have lain in the cave.
“What are we supposed to do with something like this?” I asked tentatively.
“Take it back to school!” exclaimed Sash. “We could get it goin’ ay! And maybe fire a few rounds! But we’d have to hide it. We wouldn’t want the other kids to find out about it.”
“What?!! And spend the rest of our lives chained up in a military prison somewhere?” I said. “Are you ravin’ bloody mad?!!
“Think about it. We take this thing back to school and every kid there will know about it before tea time, even if we can hide it. Next letter home it’ll be, ‘...Nothin’ much happening here. Doogle and his mates found a machine gun last Sunday an’ slightly shot up the chook yard. We’ve had chicken for tea five days straight. (PS. Instead of pictures tomorrow night Father’s gunna crucify ‘em.)’ ...What d’you bloody reckon?”
“Don’t be stupid,” said Sash. “We don’t have to take the ammo back. We just hide it and say nothin’ about it, ay.”
Doogle had been thinking it through. “Casey’s right…” he replied cautiously. (These two had taken to calling me “Casey”, from my initials, “KC.) “—I’ll tell you what we have to do. First we have to hide the ammo, like Sash says. If they find out about that then it’s all over, they’ll rip the whole thing off us.
“Next, we take the gun back to school and ask Father if we can do it up – you know, as a metal-working project – like for a display or something. If he agrees it’ll all above board, ay, but if he don’t, then what’s he gunna do. Shoot us? ...I mean, we done the right th
ing.”
“Sure!” said Sash. “And if he don’t we could always give it to the Returned Soldiers or somebody.”
Doog glared at him angrily. “We ain’t givin’ it to no one,” he said. “They might take it off us but we ain’t just givin’ it up. And who knows, if we’re real lucky we might even get the chance to sneak it out one day an’ give it a coupla bursts.”
“Yeah! And we could make a sign,” Sash continued. “It could say, ‘This Browning fifty-calibre machine gun was completely restored by the pupils of Gower Abbey College metalworking class using only a hacksaw, a half-round file and a blunt potato peeler.’ ...or sump’n like that.”
“‘...The latter instrument being kept on hand solely for the purposes of discouraging our associate Ashley Saddlehead from exhibiting his alleged wit’,” Doogle finished for him. “Being the smart-arse around here is my job, Sash. Come on, let’s get this all sorted out.”
Doogle cut the canvas into three pieces with his pocket-knife, while Sash and I rolled up the ammunition-belts and packed them in the salvageable bits of hessian. We then re-wrapped the bullet bundle with the smallest of the canvas pieces and tied it with the remains of the wire.
When it was as secure as we could make it we carried the package it into the pound, as per Doogle’s master plan. There we selected another hollow in which to hide it, then pushed it right to the back with a dead sapling. After that it only required a few well-positioned rocks and our ammunition package was hidden from all but the most determined of searches.
“I wonder why they didn’t hide the machine gun in the pound?” I said as we walked back to the gully. “There’s lots of good hidey-holes in there.”
“Whoever it was, I reckon they were pretty smart,” Doogle replied. “See, if you heard there was some gold hidden around here someplace, where d’ you reckon you’d look first?”
“Why?” asked Sash. “Do you think there might be?”
“No, Sash. What I’m sayin’ is, it’s pretty clever hiding the gun in the gully, ay, cos anyone lookin’ for it around here would be drawn straight through the gully and into the pound. It’s a psychology thing, see.”
“Wait up, Doogle,” I said. “What if they’re psychologically lookin’ for fifty cal’ ammunition? We just hid about two hundred rounds in there.”
“Nah, that’s different, Casey. First they’d want to see where we found the machine gun, ay, so they’d be startin’ off from there. It kinda cancels out the business about the pound.”
“Pretty deep stuff.” I muttered.
Sash’s attention span could be amazingly brief on occasions and Doogle’s hypothetical gold comment had switched his thought processes from the reality of this time-line continuum to that of an alternative universe.
“Yeah, mate; sure,” he said eagerly. “But when are we gunna look for this gold?”
Doogle groaned in exasperation. “Just forget about the gold, Sash. There is No Gold.”