Bony sighed his satisfaction. He was now sure that he knew the site of the trysting place.
“Great is the mind, my undertaking friend,” he told the crow. “A wonderful servant but a tricky master. Now to establish if my mind has served or tricked me.”
He walked direct to a mulga-tree growing several yards beyond the bloodwood and nearer the road gate. The ground about the base of this tree was smooth and empty of tracks. A centipede would have left its writing on this page of the Book of the Bush. Bony searched the ground about the tree next in the same direction. Here, too, the ground was smooth, but on it lay several long, needle-pointed, curled and dead mulga leaves. There were tracks made by a small bird and a medium sized scorpion. Back again at the first tree, Bony again searched the ground, his eyes pin points of blue as they contracted the better to magnify. No page in the Book of the Bush is entirely devoid of writing. This page had been cleaned, and cleaned within forty-eight hours.
A blowfly buzzed and Bony spun about to search for it. He did not see it in flight, but he saw it when it alighted on the ground some ten or twelve feet out from the tree trunk. The half-caste stepped to the place, went to ground and sniffed. He smelled horse. The white horse ridden by Diana Lacy had stood here in the shade cast by this tree. No evidence of its stand here remained. The ground was smooth-too smooth.
With those all-seeing eyes of his he examined the surrounding scrub. Only along the fence line could he see for any appreciable distance. Either side of the fence line the trees crowded upon him, presenting a mass formation that could be penetrated only for a hundred yards at most. He could not be sure that he was unobserved. He could be watched by a thousand unseen spies.
On the far side of the fence, he established to his entire satisfaction that the brownish bruise on a tree trunk had been produced by the rubbing of a rope-a horse’sneckrope. About this tree, too, the ground was smooth and empty of tracks when surrounding ground was littered with the scrub’s debris and imprinted by the scrub’s life. He could smell no horse at this place, nor could he find any foreign material caught by the barbs of the fence wire. He spent a full hour trotting on his toes around and wide of the bloodwood, and although he found small areas where the ground was too smooth and too clean, he saw not a fractional part of one track left by hoof or boot, or naked foot.
An object of peculiar and significant interest was a small grey feather with a dark-red stain along one edge.
Throughout his examination of this locality the crow had been an interested and a constant spectator. Now and then it cawed with rude defiance, sometimes with puzzled annoyance. Bony’s lack of interest in the bird was only apparent. While he worked he was ever conscious of its proximity and, from its behaviour, he concluded that he was not spied upon. A spy, black, white or yellow, would not have remained concealed from that crow.
The half-caste hummed a lilting tune as he walked to the now cold fire and made another with which to boil the quart-pot for tea with lunch. He was experiencing mental exhilaration, based not on achievements but on crowding difficulties. The greater the number of “whys” that rushed at him to demand answers the happier he became. He now was living when normally he existed. The blood was tingling his scalp and the balls of his fingers and toes.
Why! Why! Why!
Ah well! Let him attend to these pestering whys.
Why had Diana Lacy ridden to this place, dismounted from her white horse and neck-roped it to a mulga-tree growing only a few yards from Meena country? Why had a person-sex not proved-ridden over Meena country to dismount on the far side of the fence and there to neck-rope his horse to a mulga-tree? Had that meeting taken place through design or accident? Why had someone come to this place after Diana had left it, and probably after the other person had also left, for the express purpose of efficiently wiping away all traces of it? The wind had not accomplished the effacement. There had been no wind of sufficient velocity to have wiped out the marks left by a naked foot, let alone by the hoofs of a horse. And if the wind had accomplished so much it would not have left small areas of groundunlittered by the scrub debris.
The human eraser of the tracks first bathed his naked feet in blood and then dipped them into bird’s feathers until the blood dried and stuck fast the feathers to the feet, aware that feet so treated leave no faintest mark on the ground. That an aboriginal had carried out this effacement was reasonably certain. A lubra would have scattered leaves over the ground after she had smoothed it. However, the methods used by the person doing the effacement, as well as the actual effacement itself, were of less importance at the moment than the why behind it all.
No one knew when he, Bony, was to arrive at Opal Town, and, when Sergeant Blake had arranged with Old Lacy for his transportation to the Karwir homestead, Diana Lacy had been out riding her white mare. Unless Young Lacy flew over her and dropped a note stating the reason for his flight to Opal Town, she could have known nothing of his arrival.
The person whom she met had evidently come from Meena, and he-assuming it had been a man-would not know of Bony’s arrival at Opal Town and his subsequent flight to Karwir. It was, of course, possible that she had informed him of it, having herself been informed by Young Lacy, but it was not probable because Young Lacy would fly direct to the township, passing over Green Swamp several miles to the east of the main road from Karwir. It was a point demanding proof.
What most likely had happened was that the person who had met Diana Lacy knew nothing of Bony’s arrival until informed of it by Wandin late that day Sergeant Blake had dismissed him.
Anyway, it was of less importance-how this person had been informed and by whom-than the reason behind his decision to prevent an investigating detective officer coming to know of his meeting with Diana Lacy. Why was it considered so essential that he, Bony, should not know of it? Neither the girl nor the person she met was to know that he had seen their horses at the trysting place, but he-still assuming it was a man-had sufficient imagination to know that traces of the meeting would be found and read, if not obliterated.
Yes, there were plenty of whys, and yet another came to demand answer. Was the meeting in any manner connected with the disappearance of Jeffery Anderson? Hardly, after the lapse of five months. Was it a chance meeting, resulting in a period of harmless gossip? No, because the traces of such a chance meeting would not have demanded effacement. What appeared to be most likely was that Diana Lacy had met beneath the bloodwood-tree a man who was her lover, and because he came from Meena it was more than probable that he was John Gordon. And Gordon being comparatively poor, and Old Lacy ambitious for his daughter, and Diana not yet being of age, the lovers feared that their secret would be revealed. That must be the reason for the meeting and for its effacement.
A smile flitted across Bony’s clean-cut features and lit his eyes. Lovers had nothing to fear from him, he who was at heart a romantic sentimentalist.
However, the whys were not quite so easily appeased.
The many whys raised significant possibilities and probabilities between which there was a gulf. There was no proof that this bloodwood-tree had shyly witnessed a meeting of lovers. It might have been a meeting of confederates. Nothing could be taken for granted until proved-and the effacement of all traces of the meeting by a person or persons whose naked feet were covered with blood and feathers gave that meeting a sinister air.
Then there was the matter of that smoke signal made so soon after Bony’s appearance in Green Swamp Paddock. That more than hinted at urgency. It strongly pointed to an interest in him much deeper than casual curiosity, and the fact that the fence work had certainly not been begun until the morning following his arrival at Karwir seemed to harden the supposition that the person who had met Diana Lacy had, when informed of his (Bony’s) arrival, instructed the blacks immediately to undertake the fence work in order to be near the investigator and at once to report on his work.
“If Bill the Better were here I’d bet him a level fiver that that’s how
it is,” Bony remarked to his horse as he untied her neck-rope from about the tree and proceeded neatly to knot it under her throat. He mounted easily, and then, removing his hat, he bowed mockingly at the crow, which cawed derisively. Turning the horse’s head towards the road, he said to her:
“This is going to be a most interesting case, Katie dear. As the fortune teller says: there is a dark man, in fact many dark men in your life, Mr Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. There is at least as much black as white in this disappearance case. And such a case! It is almost made for me. Five months have gone since the man vanished in a paddock eighty square miles in area. There’s no body to give me a start, no pistol, no false wig, no finger-prints, no informers without whom my esteemed colleagues are almost helpless. I shall have to dig from the Field of Time five solid months, and turn them over to see what lies beneath them in this world of sand and mulgas, plain and sand-dune, water-gutter and claypan.”
They had almost reached the gate in the plain wire fence when the half-caste said to his horse-and she turned round her ears the better to hear him-in excellent imitation of the irate Chief Commissioner:
“ ‘Damn and blast you, Bony! As I’ve told you a hundred times, you’re not a cursed policeman’s shadow…’ Too true, my dear Colonel, too true. But I’m going to prove once again that I’m a cursed good detective.”
Chapter Nine
Progress
THOSE at Karwir did not see Napoleon Bonaparte again until the afternoon of the seventh of October. The weather was clear and warm, but the first heat wave of the summer had not yet come.
Old Lacy, working at his table in the office, saw Bony arrive at the stockyards, and ceased his labours to watch the half-caste unsaddle the horse, take her to the night paddock and there free her. His mind occupied by speculation on what this remarkable man had achieved, the squatter of Karwir found himself mentally unable to continue his work after Bony had disappeared beyond the garden gate. For an hour Bony remained beyond that gate, and when he reappeared he was shaved, showered and arrayed in a light-grey suit. The old man watched him crossing to the office, and wondered. Bony’s sartorial taste was as impeccable as that of a fashionable white man.
“I am glad to find you here, Mr Lacy,” the detective said on entering the office. “I hope, however, I am not interrupting important work.”
Like many poorly educated men, Old Lacy found pleasure in a well-spoken man provided that person attempted to take no advantage-should he attempt it Old Lacy quickly proved that education was nothing.
“Not at all, Bony,” he said with hearty assurance. “I’m finishing up, and what I leave the lad can fix. Can’t get along without him, y’unnerstand. Takes after his mother. Neat and particular.” A rumbling chuckle issued from the lips framed with white hair. “He takes down my letters in shorthand and then types ’emout in his own language. I say: ‘Sir-Why the devil haven’t you sent me that windmill part as ordered a month ago?’ The lad writes: ‘Dear Sir-We regret to have to inform you that at date the windmill part ordered on the 20th is not yet to hand.’
“Only this morning I’m sitting here and the telephone bell goes off. The lad answers it. The call’s from Phil Whiting, the storekeeper and postmaster at Opal Town, and from what I can make out the fool is explaining to the lad why our mail-bag was put on the Birdsville mail car by mistake. The lad hums and haws and says the mistake is to be regretted, and that it has caused us great inconvenience. So I grabs the telephone and I says: ‘That you, Whiting? Good! What the so-so do you mean making that mistake with our mail-bag? Sorry? What the so-so’sthe use of being sorry? If you do it again you’ll lose the Karwir custom for a year, and that’s flat.’ Now, which is the best way to deal with ’em?”
“Your way, of course,” instantly replied Bony smiling. “You know, if all the polite phrasing were to be cut out of business and official letters some two or three million light years would be saved. Colonel Spendor says often: ‘Give me the guts not the trimmings.’ The idea may be vulgarly expressed but it is sound.”
“Ah, I’ll remember that,” chortled the old man, and from a drawer he produced a bundle of letters. “These came for you yesterday. Should have been here days ago. Hullo! That’s the afternoon tucker gong. Come on! Diana’s a stickler for being prompt on the job. How’s the investigation going?”
Bony followed Old Lacy outside the building before answering.
“Not fast, but it has progressed.”
Now as they crossed to the garden gate the old man kept half a pace ahead of the detective, walking firmly, his body carried straight, his white-crowned head held high, his hands white in places that once had been scarred with hard work.
“You married?” he asked.
“Yes. I have been married a little more than twenty years,” Bony replied. “I have a son attending the university and the youngest is going to the State School at Banyo where I live with my wife and children-sometimes.”
“Humph!” grunted Old Lacy, slightly increasing the pace. “This flash education has its points, I admit, but I don’t know that it makes people any more content with life. Young people of to-day stand four-square, but I much doubt that they are any better than the young people of my day. That they are not worse is a blessing.”
They discovered Diana standing beside the tea table set on the cool south veranda. She smiled at her advancing father, and to Bony she gave the slightest of cool nods. That she was thoroughly interested in him he suspected, and that she now experienced slight astonishment at his taste in dress she admitted afterwards to her father. But she kept herself at a distance from Bony, and he knew it. Yet, undaunted, he said to her:
“Coming to a homestead cannot be unlike coming to an oasis in the Arabian desert. Outside the house the birds are ever numerous, and inside almost invariably are to be found wickedly luxurious lounge chairs.”
Diana inclined her head towards a wonderful wicker-work affair.
“Let me recommend you to that super-wicked luxury chair,” she said, still unsmiling.
“Thank you.” Bony sighed after he had taken the chair, which was not until the girl had sat down to pour out the tea. He wasn’t to be tricked too easily into making a social mistake. “Why cannot some inventive genius evolve a saddle to give the standard comfort set by even an ordinary chair?”
“Look funny, wouldn’t it, to see a chair like the one you’re sitting in lashed to the back of a horse?” remarked Young Lacy as he approached them.
“They fix luxurious seats in motor-cars these days,” persisted Bony.
“And comfortable seats in aeroplanes,” Diana added. “The passenger’s seat in your ship, Eric, is the acme of comfort.”
“My contention,” asserted Bony. “Twenty years of air and motor travel have evolved comfortable seats. Saddles to-day are not more comfortable, or rather, not less uncomfortable, than they were hundreds of years ago.”
“Comfort! Luxury! Softness!” exploded Old Lacy, settling himself into a leather affair with foot-wide arm rests and a velvety soft bulge to take the neck. “In my young days there was no softness, no luxury chairs.”
“Which was your great misfortune, father,” countered Diana. “Now take this cup made in England by Grafton, and please don’t say you would prefer to drink tea out of a tin pannikin.”
“Hur! Thanks, my gal. In your hearts you young people think you’re a sight smarter than the old people, but the old people don’t think, they know they’re smarter than the young folk. And now, as we seem to have settled the family argument, perhaps we can persuade Inspector Bonaparte to tell us something of what he’s been doing.”
“A real policeman never tells anything to anyone,” Bony said sadly, and theLacys regarded him sharply for the sudden change of mood. “Of course, I’m not a real policeman, as I have told you, but you make me feel like one when you call me Inspector.”
“Good for you, Bony! I forgot,” almost shouted Old Lacy.
“Ah-that’s better. Now I
feel more like myself,” Bony said with a quick smile. “Progress has been slow, but I am not disappointed because I expected it to be slow. However, the case is proving to be of great interest, and if you, Miss Lacy, will permit me to talk shop-?”
Diana inclined her head. She refused to be drawn, but Bony’s penetrating eyes detected her eagerness to hear what he had accomplished.
“Well, then. I have discovered clues which satisfy me that Jeffery Anderson parted from his horse somewhere in the northern half of Green Swamp Paddock. I know that he camped for lunch, that day he left here, at the foot of the sand-dunes where the paddock’s east fence rises from the plain country. You see, Mr Lacy, we were right in our reasoning. He camped for the lunch hour at the foot of the sand-dunes, and before he left it began to rain, and he decided it was not necessary to ride over to the swamp and the hut.
“From this point I cannot definitely establish Anderson’s movements, but I incline to the supposition that he continued to ride northward along the east fence as far as its junction with the netted boundary fence. There, he turned westward along the boundary fence, which forms the north fence of Green Swamp, and so eventually rode down from the sand-dunes on to flat country bordering the Channels.
“I say that I incline to that supposition. Anderson, when the rain began, might well have decided to take a short cut home by striking due westward from his lunch camp and so come to that corner post on the southernmost depression and continue along the fence to the road gate.
The Bone is Pointed b-6 Page 9