Bony - 27 - The Will of the Tribe

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Rose Brentner received a slight shock. She had heard of this man, and he wasn’t anything like the mental build-up she had done when she heard he was coming. The only trace of his Aboriginal ancestry was his colouring, a shade darker than that of her husband’s weathered features. He appeared slight as she shook hands with the cattleman, but then most men did so when near him. Then he was bending over her proffered hand and smiling.

  “You must be sick and tired of policemen, Mrs Brentner. I shall try hard not to be a nuisance.”

  “You are very welcome, Inspector,” Rose heard herself say. “People like us naturally welcome everyone.” She glanced at her small daughters. “We have been a little impatient too.”

  “Ah!” Bonaparte bent low to greet the girls. “You’ll be Rosie, and you will be Hilda. How-d’you-do? Mrs Leroy was telling me of you, and she sent her love to you.”

  “Mrs Leroy spoils both of ’em,” interjected Brentner.

  “I find that hard to believe,” countered Bonaparte. “No one could ever spoil these young ladies. Mrs Leroy told me they both know beautiful Aboriginal legends, and I hope to hear them sometime.”

  “You will,” Brentner said positively. “Did I see Tessa with afternoon tea?”

  The visitors could not have been more warmly welcomed had they been close relatives. They were conducted to the day-house which offered surprises by its roominess and furn­ishing. It was circular in shape and contained easy chairs, racks of books, a large dining-table, and several floor rugs. The young Aborigine turned from setting out the tea things, and her large black eyes slowly found Bonaparte after smil­ing at Constable Howard.

  “So you are Tessa! I am happy to meet you, Tessa.”

  “You are very kind, Inspector. How-do-you-do?”

  “Well, now we’re all here and comfortable, what about a cup of tea?” suggested Brentner, winking at Hilda. “Our friends must be as famished as I am, what with all the work I’ve done today.”

  “You’ve done nothing all day but read the pastoral journals,” accused his wife, and Brentner grinned and wanted to know if Inspector Bonaparte was married.

  Tessa poured the tea, and the children gravely conveyed it to the guests and their parents.

  “Would you all grant a favour?” Bonaparte asked, and waited for their assurance. “Actually it’s two favours. The first is that you try to forget I am a policeman. You could never forget that Constable Howard is one because he can­not help looking like one. The second favour is that you call me Bony. My wife does. My three sons do. I hope I can persuade you. I did persuade Mrs Leroy.”

  A small hand was rested on his knee, and Hilda said, “Can we call you Bony too, Inspector Bonaparte?”

  “Of course, Inspector Bonaparte is a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it?”

  Hilda gravely nodded agreement and joined her sister.

  It was Kurt Brentner who suggested that the visitors might like to talk business and that this office would be re­laxing. Bony expressed the hope that Mrs Brentner would join them later.

  The office also provided a surprise, being a commodious room with two pairs of french windows. The radio trans­ceiver, black-panelled with chromed fittings, first captured the attention. Apart from the roll-top American desk flanked by steel cabinets there was nothing of the office about this comfortably furnished apartment. Brentner invited his guests to sit and smoke and, having remarked that some cattlemen appeared to be most fortunate, Bony crossed to the french windows to gaze out over the desert to the gold brick lying on the horizon.

  “Mrs Leroy told us Mrs Brentner named it Lucifer’s Couch,” he said, “so much more picturesque than the official Wolf Creek Meteor Crater. D’you mind if I close the win­dows?”

  “Not at all. Chilly?”

  “No. The veranda could be accommodating.” Having closed both pairs of windows, Bony accepted the easy chair drawn to the low occasional table, on which were cigarettes and tobacco. He was smiling when he said, “Cops and robbers, you know. Nasty suspicious police­men.”

  “Stock in trade,” Brentner said good-humouredly.

  “We were trained to be suspicious,” Bony said, laughing softly. “Before Mrs Brentner joins us, I would like to know something of this local scene and the people. I’ve glanced at the Police Summary of the crime at the Crater, but only glanced. I understand you have been in this part of the continent all your life. You would be au fait with the Aborigines, meaning as knowledgeable as most. Is there a legend about Lucifer’s Couch?”

  “I haven’t heard of one,” replied Brentner. “Our Tessa could answer. She’s interested in legends.”

  “I must ask her. By the way, do please treat our subject confidentially. We must start on the premise that the man found in the Crater could not possibly have got there with­out the knowledge of the Aborigines. I refer to the Abori­gines here at Deep Creek, those at Beaudesert, the tribes either side of them, and the wild blacks down south on the desert. Do you agree?”

  “Yes. But …”

  “Pardon me. At this stage my mind is open. The murder could have been committed by the local Aborigines, the wild ones, or whites in this wide area. What I desire to pin down is this. The dead man could not have been put in the Crater without the knowledge of the Aborigines and, further, he could not, in the first instance, have entered this area of the Kimberleys in the north and desert in the south without it being a news item to all the tribes and sections. Do you agree?”

  “As you put it, yes.”

  “Then we have three suppositions. One, that the murder was done by the whites. Two, that it was done by the blacks. And three, that it was committed by the whites and the blacks in collusion. Thus white, black, black-white. Pity we cannot add yellow. I like my investigations most in­volved.”

  “You have an involved one here,” Howard dryly observed.

  “Mrs Leroy thinks that your Aborigines are allied with those at Beaudesert who are Kimberley blacks. How do your Aborigines get along with the wild men?”

  “There’s been no real trouble for many years. The tribal grounds belonging to our people extend to about forty miles to the south, and include the Crater.”

  “Tell me, do you think your Aborigines are assimilated with the whites as much as, say, the Beaudesert tribe?”

  Brentner was positive when he answered in the negative.

  “Forgive me for being boring. Can you say to whom your people are closer … the wild blacks or the Beaudesert blacks?”

  “It’s hard to be sure about that. I’d say they were nearer to the desert blacks. And you’re not being boring.”

  “Thank you. Tell me about Tessa, how you came to adopt her.”

  “Well, my wife and I were sitting in the day-house one evening nine years ago, when a child ran in and threw her­self at my wife’s feet, hugged her legs and begged to stay with us. She was to be married the next day tribal fashion to an Abo old enough to be her grandfather. The wife said I’d have to stop it. She was new up here and didn’t under­stand the problem. Not nearly like the kid did, and I did, too.

  “Anyway, Rose took her off to the bathroom, scrubbed her down, put her in her own bed, locked the door and left me sitting up expecting trouble. Trouble didn’t come, and early the next morning, Rose still determined, I went to the camp and yabbered to Chief Gup-Gup and Poppa, the Medicine Man. The upshot was I bought the kid for a few plugs of tobacco and, finally, we adopted her. She’s turned out well, as no doubt you noticed.”

  “I agree. How close is she to her people?”

  “Goes along now and then to visit her mother and the others, that’s all. Lives with us, of course. She’s one of the family. Calls me Kurt and the wife Rose. Rose educated her to the point that we had ambition to send her down to a teachers’ college. She’s teaching our kids now. She turned out well, and we are both proud of our Tessa. Shows what can be done if you get ’em early, and get ’em away from their elders.”

  “I think it shows, rather, what love can do. Wha
t of the man called Captain?”

  “My own kids called him that,” Brentner explained. “Le­roy managed the place before me, and he was married to a Salvation Army lass in Broome. You met her, of course. Tragedy she went blind. Anyway, she got the Abo children together and tried to give them something of Christianity. The lad we call Captain was fast at picking up ideas, but I think Mrs Leroy didn’t do much with the rest. She sent him to the padre at Derby who put him to school, and he got along real well until fifteen. Then he did what we all ex­pected. He just turned up. Get him serious and he’ll talk better than me. His handwriting is something to admire. But, well you know how it is.”

  “Please dig deeper.”

  “When he came back he was a real mixed up kid, as they say,” proceeded the cattleman. “We’d been here only a few months, and Rose tried hard to get him to continue his schooling under her. But no, he couldn’t be assimilated like our Tessa. It was too late. He belonged to the camp and, as he is the son of Gup-Gup’s son, I’ve always thought they influenced him. But they didn’t get him back a hundred per cent.

  “He got to like being with the cook, looking after the chooks, doing odd jobs without being asked. A few years after he came back from Derby I found him asleep in the saddlery shop, and he’d gone to sleep reading a book. We had a quiet talk, and the upshot of that was I let him have an out-house to himself. Rose got him books to read, and eventually he became a sort of overseer with the blacks. I want stockmen; he singles them out. He breaks in the horses. Comes running if Rose whistles. Eats most times with the cook. Plays tracking with my kids and tells ’em Abo legends, and is a damned good go-between with the tribe.”

  “How old, d’you think?”

  “About twenty-five.”

  “A lubra?”

  “Never took one that we know of.”

  “Now for the cook. His name is …” Bony stopped and rose to his feet when Mrs Brentner entered, “Welcome to our little conference.”

  Chapter Three

  The Honoured Guest

  ROSE BRENTNER’S business training had sharpened her perception of trifles, and she didn’t fail to note that Bony had conducted her to a chair to sit with her back to the strong light and that he faced the light. She wondered if this was due to purpose or to vanity. She noted, too, that his easy manner when in the day-house was replaced by restrained assertiveness, giving him a command of this con­ference which her husband and Constable Howard had already acknowledged. She had expected brashness, flam­boyancy and, in the day-house, she had met charm and ease; now she felt strength and the poise given by experi­ence.

  As her husband told of their cook, Jim Scolloti, of his long service and his dependability, so long as he did not smell alcohol, she noted that Bony was missing nothing although his blue eyes were almost lazily directed beyond the win­dows.

  “You have two white stockmen,” pressed Bony.

  “Just the two,” replied the cattleman. “As the kids named Captain, they have named them Old Ted and Young Col. You’ll meet them at dinner. Old Ted is twenty-six, and Young Col is twenty. Both are a cut above the old time bush-rider, being college-educated. Old Ted has money of his own, having inherited from his parents, who were killed in a road accident. Young Col’s father owns farming properties down in the Riverina, wants him to manage one but, like old Ted, he won’t leave these parts. Col’s been with us four years; Old Ted seven.”

  “And you have been here ten years, I understand, having taken over from Mr Leroy, who established the station eight­een years ago. There are your two white stockmen, your cook and yourself; four white men. Can you tell me just what your men did during six days prior to the discovery of the dead man in the Crater?”

  Brentner made as though to get up, and was waved back.

  “Wait, please. Be patient. The medical opinion is that the man was dead from three to six days. He was found three miles from this homestead, on the Deep Creek Pastoral Property and in this part of Australia three miles is reckoned as being just outside the back door.”

  Brentner took from one of the steel cabinets a normal business diary. Flicking open the pages his fingers betrayed impatience, and, in speaking, he tried without success to control his voice.

  “You want six days of work, Inspector. Well, here they are beginning at 21 April. That day Old Ted and four black stockmen from the local tribe were driving a mob of cattle to Beaudesert to be handed to a drover taking them to Derby. Young Col and one black stockman were looking over the grass country at Eddy’s Well. They were camped there. On this day, with Rose and the kids, I left at ten o’clock for Hall’s Creek.

  “On 22 April we came back as far as Beaudesert where we stayed the night. Old Ted arrived there with the cattle and Young Col was still at Eddy’s Well. On the 23rd we got home about eleven in the morning and Old Ted re­turned from Beaudesert about four. Young Col was still away at Eddy’s. He returned the next day, the 24th, and this day I worked here in the office and Old Ted repaired saddlery. We had a spell on the 25th. On the 26th we pre­pared to leave for the muster, and on the 27th we left at seven in the morning. It was this day that the plane people saw the body. Enough?”

  “During the period was there any unrest, any trouble with your Aborigines?”

  “They were quiet as usual,” replied Brentner, sitting down again.

  “Thank you. Now I’ll state my own position. I’ve been seconded by my Department to an instrumentality of the Federal Government to find answers to two questions. One question is how did the man found dead in the Crater pene­trate this far into the Kimberley Region without having been reported by the station homesteads? And the other is what was he doing prior to his death? It is known who he was, and thus the answers to these questions are important to the Federal Instrumentality, which is not interested particu­larly in how he met his death.”

  “Oh!” softly exclaimed Rose Brentner. “Who was he then?”

  “It was the question I asked, and I was not informed, it being thought extraneous to the purpose of my investigation. However, the Western Australian Police Department sought, and was granted, my seconding to investigate the killing of this, even to me, unknown man. It would appear that I am to serve two masters.”

  Rose Brentner watched the long brown fingers rolling a cigarette, and then she studied the dark brown face on which Aboriginal race moulding was absent. The face was neither round nor long. The nose was straight, the mouth flexible. The brows were not unlike a veranda to shadow the unusual blue eyes and, although the black hair was now greying at the temples, it was virile and well kept. Then he was looking at her and the features vanished before the power of the eyes.

  “It is agreed, I believe, that anyone travelling through the Kimberleys is reported, when arriving at or passing through a station, over the radio network. Such a person is news for everyone here and, because of the great distances between the station homesteads, the constantly known whereabouts of the traveller is almost vital for his own safety.”

  Bony now took Brentner into his confidence, and Howard leaned forward as though he thought he might miss some­thing.

  “Without doubt you are familiar with the geography of this north-west corner of Australia, but I will use the simile of the open fan to illustrate the circumstances about this case. We will place the handle of the opened fan at Lucifer’s Couch. Out along the left vane, or whatever it is, lie half a dozen homesteads on the track to Derby. Out along the centre are half a dozen homesteads, including the town of Hall’s Creek, on the track to Wyndham. And along the right vane other homesteads lie on the track to Darwin. The traveller enters these Kimberleys by one of those tracks, as there is no other. It is my opinion that the traveller could come here only across the desert to the south, from a point on its perimeter a thousand odd miles away.

  “He couldn’t cross that desert without the wild Aborigines knowing all about him, any more than a traveller can cross the Kimberleys without the station Aborigines knowing all about his m
ovements. You, Mr Brentner, and Constable Howard, will surely agree with me that the Aborigines still removed from long and close association with the whites also have a broadcasting system, developed through past centuries, and I think you will agree with me, too, that espionage organizations set up by outside governments are amateurish by comparison with the methods employed by these Australian Aborigines, who could make the cloak-and-dagger boys stand gaping at street corners.

  “Forgive me for being repetitious. I shall be asking for your co-operation and should be grateful did I receive it. Your own Aborigines know who killed that man and who put him in the Crater. They might not have had anything to do with the crime, but their elders surely know the details. Thus we proceed without taking into our confidence any Aborigine, including Captain and Tessa. Will you think about it?”

  Rose Brentner smiled and stood, saying, “Of course, Bony. Just look at the time! Dinner will be ready in an hour and I’ve to dress. Can we continue afterwards?”

  “I may have to test your hospitality for several weeks, and we must not permit ourselves to be bored by any one sub­ject.”

  Bony was assured that no subject could be boring to people starved for outside contacts and was conducted to a pleasant room facing across the compound to the creek trees. Having been given the hint by Howard, he changed into more formal clothes and, on hearing a triangle beaten with a bar, made his way to the dining-room. Here he found his host and Howard, with two young men, gathered before a sideboard, and was offered beer or sherry.

  A red-bearded, blue-eyed man was presented to him as Old Ted, and a boy looking no older than sixteen was pre­sented as Young Col. Young Col’s hair was fair and over-long, and his hazel eyes glinted with mischief. Both spoke with polished accents.