Bony and the White Savage

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “Well, come the time that Marvin was home from the Theological College on the long summer vacation. He was filled out, tall and big. He took the service at chapel on three Sundays, and he was good. I still remember him preaching on the life of Joseph, but never mind that. As I said he was good, and it was only afterwards that Emma said she and Rose didn’t think he was as good as us men thought. Women, Mr Bonnar, can think and look deeper then men.

  “Then comes the time he has to go back to college. Our Rose is a little poorly, and we think a spell in Perth would do her good. So it’s planned for her to spend a month with her aunt up there, and as it’s a long train journey everyone thinks it a good idea for her to travel up with Marvin. The train leaves at eight in the morning, and Luke is to take them to Timbertown.

  “When they call to pick up Rose who’s all ready, Luke says he’s forgotten papers Jeff wants put into the bank, and he says he’ll go back home on the timber truck what’s due to pass on to the Inlet, get the papers and go on the truck to Timbertown, and so, after doing the business, come back home with the car.

  “Off goes Rose with Marvin, luggage and all, all excited by the trip, looking her best in a blue dress and white hat and shoes. The driver of the truck and Luke found her on the track, on her hands and knees, groping about like she couldn’t see, the blue dress in shreds. I wasn’t handy when they brought her home. I didn’t see her till after Emma had tended to her, and Emma said she looked like she’d been passed through a chaff-cutting machine.

  “Looking over the years, me and Emma don’t know if we made a mistake at that time. We should have rung the policeman to stop the raging tiger, but we didn’t. We’re isolated here. We keep our troubles to ourselves. At one time Mrs Stark had been a hospital nurse, and so Ted went down for her. Luke went after Marvin, but Marvin had driven on through Timbertown, and it wasn’t till a fortnight later that the car was found at Kalgoorlie, left there by Marvin when he went through to the Eastern States.”

  Matt sighed his deep years-long anguish, was quiet for several minutes, and then asked the question he must have asked himself a thousand times:

  “Why? Tell me why? Tell me how come an upstanding young feller should of done that? He’s come of good stock. He’s reared by God-fearing parents. He’s loaded with gifts by the Almighty. And in a flash like, he turns from a human being into a bloody savage. You tell me how that can be.”

  Chapter Five

  The Door

  A CLOUD DRIFTED over the karri and changed the deep blue of the sky to white, and the changing of the colour appeared to cause two kookaburras amid the branches to exchange low and sleepy chucklings. The usual rooster crowed and flapped his wings, and a dog came to the garden gate to peer in at the three sitting on the bench. When Matt spoke, he was calmer.

  “Ted got the idea that Marvin arranged with Luke to forget the papers, and then take the milk truck back to get them, the truck being due at the time Rose left alone with Marvin. As I said, the truck came here from Timbertown, picked up Luke and went on down to Rhudder’s homestead. There it took on the cream and what-ever, and left in half an hour for the return, calling in here for our cream cans.

  “Seems that when Ted went down for Mrs Stark he had a word with Jeff, and it came out that the papers were supposed to be banked two days before. Ted said he thought Luke had forgotten them then, and made it the excuse for Marvin to travel alone with Rose that morning. They had a fight over it, did Ted and Luke, and a week later Luke went up to Perth and got himself a job there.”

  “And Rose? She recovered from her injuries, obviously,” commented Bony.

  “Yes, from her injuries but not from the other thing. Mrs Stark was mighty good to her, and so was Sarah, Jeff’s wife. When we told Sarah what had happened she almost told us we were liars, but she had to believe it later on. It took Rose a long time to get past having nightmares, to get past crying fits long after the wounds she’d got healed up.”

  “But she recovered, didn’t she?” pressed Bony. “She was courted and was married, and she had children and now is a happy woman, or I’m a duffer.”

  “That’s so, Mr Bonnar,” Emma agreed. “It was made up to her for all she suffered.”

  “Her husband doesn’t know what happened to her?”

  “No, no one does,” replied Emma.

  “Then how does Constable Sasoon and his wife know?”

  “Because they’ve been our friends for years.”

  “Very well,” Bony said, quickly. “Mr Jukes, you tell me what would be the result, other than being hanged, of you shooting Rhudder? No, I’ll tell you. Your motive would be discovered and published to the world, and all the world, including your son-in-law would then know what did happen. I’m sure your daughter wouldn’t want that.”

  “The world would never know the motive,” Matt sullenly asserted.

  “Yes, it would. The police or the prosecuting counsel would get it out of you. And besides, you continue to have warm regard for Jeff Rhudder, and how could you face him after shooting his son?”

  “He’s threatened to shoot him himself.”

  “Threatened, yes. Shoot him, I much doubt. Knock him down if physically able, yes. Order him from the house, yes. From what you tell me of this character, I feel sure he wouldn’t go to the ultimate. And from what I am able to judge of your character, I am sure you wouldn’t either. Had Marvin slain your Rose, it would have been quite different.

  “And now, both of you,” Bony continued in abruptly cheerful vein, “although you haven’t consented to put me up, I shall thank you in advance. Please call me Nat, and I shall call you Matt and Emma. I have never failed to conclude an assignment, never failed to reach the murderer. I shall not fail this time. If I don’t find Rhudder here, I shall catch up with him some other place. And then, for sure, he will be tried in Adelaide and hanged.”

  “That’s what Sam said, Marvin having murdered in South Australia and not in New South Wales.”

  “With his record prior to the murder of the bookmaker, hanging will be inevitable, and your hunger for justice will be assuaged. Don’t let it ride you any more, Matt. Think of those bonny grandchildren, and leave Marvin Rhudder to me and the judge. Look, is this your man, Karl Mueller, coming on the horse?”

  “Good heavens!” exclaimed Emma, impulsively squeezing Bony’s arm. “It must be twelve o’clock and no lunch ready.”

  “Remember I am Rose’s friend,” he reminded them. “As, in fact, I am.”

  Emma looked back at the visitor as she was about to pass into the house. She was smiling, for the weight of anxiety which had oppressed her since the return of Marvin Rhudder was lifted. Her husband continued moodily to look at the blaze of flowers in the strip of garden, and Bony watched the man and horse approaching from the cleared space beyond the mighty tree.

  “Could you let me have a horse?” he asked.

  “Any time. This afternoon? Karl’ll bring one in.”

  “Not this afternoon. I am thinking you might like to show me the coast. Go fishing perhaps.”

  “All right. The tide will suit. We can fish it up. I’ll check the gear.” The stocky Jukes stood to say, before turning away: “I’m glad you came, Nat.”

  The dogs off the chain raced to meet the horseman. The kookaburras chortled, and a magpie swooped on the rooster and made him shout defiance and clap his wings. One Tree Farm was alive again.

  Presently Karl Mueller came to sit with Bony, and with no more greeting than if they were fellow workers.

  “Nice day.”

  Bony agreed, glancing at the weathered face and then into the friendly grey eyes. The wind ruffled Karl’s blond hair streaked with grey at the temples.

  “You travellin’?” asked Karl after the appropriate pause.

  “No. I am visiting,” Bony replied. “I’m staying a few weeks. Friend of Rose and her husband. I come from the Murchison.”

  “Friend of Rose, eh!” A slow smile spread over the rugged face. “Good! How’s s
he? How’s the littlies?”

  Emma halted the lunch preparation to listen to Bony’s answers, and smiled again when he made no mistake about names and age and sex, even the children’s colouring. When she called them, Karl was warming to the visitor, and the conversation during the meal was almost gay.

  Rhudder’s Inlet was gradually revealed to Bony when Matt drove him in the utility over the undulating paddocks he farmed, where now and then the sheen of water appeared in the clefts of the changing horizon.

  “Is it far off the road where Marvin crossed the creek and left his tracks?” Bony asked, and Matt said they could get the ute to within five hundred yards.

  It was more than a creek. When in full flow in the rains it would be a turgid river a hundred yards wide here passing over flat country from the northern hills. After all the days since Marvin Rhudder splashed across its bordering flats, without troubling to remove his boots, some of the imprints on the caking mud were clear cut.

  “Nothing much to see,” remarked Matt as Bony stood and regarded the prints.

  “I want only to memorize them,” he was informed. “I see here where Sasoon took plaster casts, and his trackers did a good job concealing that operation. All right, Matt. We’ll get on.”

  They topped a rise eventually and there lay Rhudder’s Inlet displayed in all its beauty, and welcoming them with a drop in temperature of some ten or twelve degrees.

  “Four miles long and two miles wide, or thereabouts,” Matt said. “It’s fed by three creeks like the one we just seen, and presently I’ll show you it isn’t an inlet at all.”

  The scent of algae met them, and when they were running beside the narrow strip of sand the gulls rose before the vehicle in indignant protest, and then settled again. Far ahead were the many buildings comprising the Rhudder homestead, and it appeared to lie hard against the tree-less, brown and dark-green sand-dunes, protecting it and the Inlet from the ocean beyond. Eastward were the open paddocks where cattle grazed, and in one, five hundred sheep. The fences were well maintained, and presently the buildings could be assessed. There was a garden, and, backed by a green hedge, several fruit trees. In contra-distinction to Matt’s homestead, the place looked unprotected from the elements.

  “Prosperous looking,” commented Bony, and Matt said all the land was rich, adding:

  “Jeff’s grandfather settled here. Took up land both sides. Him and his wife and his sons slaved their guts out clearing and fencing with logs and brushwood, growing stuff to eat and living off the bandicoots and possums and the fish. There was always plenty of fish. There was never any money. They took produce on a bullock dray to Bunbury, nigh two hundred miles through the forests, and exchanged it for axes and saws and cloth to make clothes. Boots! They didn’t want boots.” Matt chuckled without mirth. “My old man came and took up our place, and slaved his guts out too, to get a start. In them days men was hardy.”

  The track skirted the garden-fence of posts and rails which probably had been erected a hundred years ago. Part of the house was built with tall six-feet-wide karri slabs, and part with modern machine timber, inset with modern windows, the whole now surmounted with corrugated iron painted red. On a wide and shadowed veranda appeared a man to wave to them, and Matt sounded his horn, saying:

  “That’s old Jeff. We might call in on the way home. Don’t know how it is I call him old. Only one year older then me.”

  Now the track was merely a mark on the hard ground, and soon they were being pinched between the Inlet and the inner walls of great sand dunes, until they could proceed no farther. Carrying short rods, and tackle in a gunny-sack with sandwiches and a thermos, they passed to the extremity of the dunes and so emerged on to a wide wall of sea sand stretching across the entrance to the rising upland behind sheer cliffs bordered by clumps of tea-tree. Matt halted on the sand barrier to face the Inlet, and said:

  “Used to be all clear here, and the river ran out through a deep cleft floored and walled with rock. Don’t know what happened to make things different and old Jeff can’t tell either. Anyway every so often the sea piles sand into this entrance like it is now, bottling back the river and creek water. Got to be a real big storm to do it. Time goes on and the water from the hills rises and rises to what you see it, and after more time another big storm will shift away all the sand and let the water out. I watched it happen once. Make a film you wouldn’t forget.”

  The summit of the sand wall was something like ten feet above the Inlet surface, and perhaps fifty feet above the sea at low tide. It was a hundred yards thick and four hundred yards long, and required no imagination to picture what would happen when next the Inlet water was released.

  The wind blew softly and almost coldly coming up from the far-away Antarctic. Crossing the sand bar they left its junction with the rising slope of earth and tea-tree, and went down to the narrow beach. This was steep and floored with shingle rocks the size of footballs, brown and grey and dark slate. The waves came in languidly, to rise abruptly into towering surf-free faces before leaning forward to smash down upon the giant shingle.

  “Not much of a place to bathe,” observed Bony. He stood watching for a few moments and then Matt saw him looking along the coast to the east. There were sand flats at the base of the dunes stretching for miles to terminate at a black headland. Off this section of coast stood rocks and rock-bars against which white water surged. There stood a large brownish rock and Bony asked what this was, as another farther on and farther seaward was grey.

  “It’s a mountain of seaweed,” he was informed. “It’s often about. The sea gathers the weed into a mound and then takes it away and builds it in another place. In my time I’ve never seen it anywhere but off the dunes. Never along these cliffs.”

  Bony turned in the indicated direction and was confronted by the picture of cliffs rising to four hundred feet, vast rocks isolated from the coast, great rock-bars extending into the ocean. It was an oddity how the dunes ended at the Inlet and the rock cliff-front began.

  “The dunes wouldn’t give a hiding-place to Marvin, but these cliffs certainly would,” Bony said. “Let’s have a look along there.”

  They trod water-logged sand, and climbed across rock-bars. They skirted vast towers of rock rising from the sandy areas. They crawled through rock tunnels where the sea swished and gurgled. They passed flat rock surfaces where there gaped great holes, Matt pointing out that to be knocked into one of them by a wave meant certain death. They came to a huge rock having seemingly sheer sides, and Matt said that there was only one way to the summit, and at the summit was a cave where a man could live in comfort.

  Against the facets of the cliff-front were countless black patches denoting the entrance to caves, and these patches were at all heights above the ribbon of rock or sand beaches, now extended as the tide was out.

  When Matt said that a large area of quiet water almost surrounded by a rock barrier was a good place to fish, Bony told him he wasn’t interested in fishing at this moment, and they went on, to cross over a low headland, to pass shallow bays, and be attracted by a vast rock mountain which was presently seen to lie athwart a bay of glistening sand.

  It was a spectacular monolith rising from the sea a thousand yards from the cliff. It stretched across the enclosed bay, stopping at both ends to admit a channel of water between itself and jutting rock-bars. The summit was comparatively level: the sides were sheer. The inner face presented to the cliff was also sheer, and between it and the edge of the sand, the channel appeared to be but fifty yards wide.

  “Tide’s about to turn,” Matt said. “You’ll see something when it does. We’d better take to this rock.”

  They climbed a rock at the cliff base, and while Bony was continuing to be awed by the vast rock slab as high as the cliff and all of half a mile wide. Matt spoke again.

  “Marvin wrote a poem about that. Wasn’t bad, either. He called it Australia’s Front Door. To each side you can see the ships passing, and he said they were bound for one of
Australia’s Tradesmen’s Entrances.”

  Chapter Six

  The Fishermen

  IT WAS strange that, after thirteen years, and his heart heavy with rancour towards Marvin Rhudder for despoiling his daughter, Matthew Jukes should be unable to speak of him without evincing early admiration of the youth.

  “Boy’s talk,” he went on. “Us two families were always proud of this place and that mighty rock out there. This coast belongs to us; every rock and stone and cliff and cave, the wind’s never stale, and it’s never hot like it can be inland. Either side that rock there’s room enough, and the water is deep enough, to take a liner. On the inner side of it two liners could pass each other and not touch. At the east entrance there’s a whirlpool what would sink a big ship. A door it is. Nothing afloat ever gets past that door: nothing afloat, no flotsam, no jetsam, nothing, ever comes ashore.

  “Marvin put it right when he called it Australia’s Front Door, shut for ever against the foreigners on ships what has to take ’em to Melbourne and Sydney, and other tradesmen’s entrances. You might see a ship passing to left or right of the door, and looking no bigger than one of those gulls on top of it.”

  “Could we get closer to it across the sand?” Bony asked, himself caught up by the allegory.

  “Too late, Nat. You’ll see in a minute. With the change of the tide there’s a sneaker what comes in with a rush. You’ll see the water to the right side suddenly rise, and know it’s coming. There’s other places where you never know when a sneaker will come, and once it takes you you’re finished. They said it was a sneaker what caught our Ted, but I think it must have been an earthquake-wave because Ted was too cunning to be caught. Pretty dangerous coast this. Which is why nobody comes here to fish. Now look!”