Bony - 19 - Cake in a Hat Box

by Arthur W. Upfield

  The tracker was not liking this place, and, to maintain his confidence in human agency, Bony asked him how he knew the jeep had been here.

  “Smellum tyres,” replied Larry.

  “Findum tracks,” Bony said, and leaving the carcass they proceeded to prospect the ground about … until Bony came across the oil patch covered expertly with dry earth and leaves. This last discovery gave Larry great satisfaction, and Bony made a point of congratulating him on his bushcraft … which included his remarkable sense of smell.

  However, the story was not yet told, the picture not com­plete. That the dead policeman’s jeep had been here was not proven, but that a car or truck had been parked amid these trees was certain, and that a goat had had its throat cut for its blood was permissible assumption. Bony was immensely grati­fied … and tired.

  There yet being an hour of daylight, they circled the dell in the hunt for tracks, then walked in a greater circle, and when on the point of camping for the night, they cut the tracks of men making to cross the Range. He and Larry agreed that the number of the party was five. They were all stockmen, for all wore riding boots, and, from the manner of their stride, one was a white man and four were aborigines. The reading was a commendable feat, the five men having walked in single file, the white man leading.

  “We’ll camp before it grows dark,” Bony said, and they built a fire which gave less smoke than a cigarette, made tea and ate, then smothered the fire and sought a place to sleep at the base of a great boulder providing a roof against the dew.

  The night was long and, towards dawn, made cold by a wind from the south. Larry, wearing his military overcoat and the blanket wrapped over that, managed to sleep, fitfully and uneasily. Bony, who had only a blanket for coverage, fared worse, and he sat with his back to the rock and smoked cigarettes until his tongue was a chip.

  Having eaten and packed their scanty equipment, they fol­lowed the tracks made by the five men, walking in single file, and Larry quite happy that with Bony behind him he was protected from attack, for the wild man loves to set an ambush and permit the quarry to pass through it before throwing his long spear.

  Where a naked shoulder of the Range rested on a wide ledge of grey sand, Larry halted. The shoulder extended steeply towards the sky, dull red and smooth save for small patches of rock loosened by the weather. They had reached the ledge by one of three small gullies, and it was clear that the party whose footsteps they were following had taken one of the other gullies when making their descent to the camp where the goat had had its throat cut.

  Having come down from the top of the Range, the party had halted on this sandy ledge, and no attempt had been made to smother the evidence that here the men had rested. They had been carrying a burden on two poles, stretcher fashion. The goats had been led by a man who followed the stretcher.

  Had his mind not been so crowded, Bony would have been enthralled by the astonishing colours of the unclothed shoulders partially concealed by nets of spinifex. They were now two thousand feet or more above Dead Goat Camp, and the higher summits of the Range appeared to be yet another thousand feet. There were no signs of cattle, and very few of kangaroos. Bird life, excepting the omnipresent eagles, was entirely absent.

  When the sun said it was half past ten, Bony decided to halt at the foot of a precipitous cliff of purple ironstone and watch the eagles, for the eagles were now telling the story.

  Under normal circumstances, eagles work in their individual areas, singly or in pairs when nesting, and the eagles now seen by the shrewd Larry and the no less perspicacious Bony were drawn into the wide limits of a circle immediately westward. The height maintained by the birds told of their interest in something on the ground … and their suspicion of it.

  There was no necessity for Bony to urge Larry to still greater caution when they proceeded.

  They crossed the bare back of the Range between two mighty red-gold crowns of pillared rock, and, with many halts for Larry to probe ahead, they began the westward descent.

  Having crept about the base of a shoulder pimpled by Devil’s Marbles, poised to tempt any boy to push them to flight like falling meteors, they came to a cut through the back of a great hump. The cut was level, a hundred yards long, ten feet in width all the way from the floor to the top at seven to eight hundred feet. The light was green, the translucent green of the jungle floor.

  The floor was sandy. It was trampled by men’s boots, and when Larry saw the imprints of naked feet, he stopped, point­ing and saying nothing. Bony smiled, nodded forward, and Larry went on. And at the far end of the gigantic sword-cut, he halted.

  “They got-um Jacky Musgrave,” he whispered. “They find-um who kill Jacky Musgrave.”

  Bony edged round the left-hand corner of the cut. A shallow depression of several acres in extent was walled on three sides by iron slopes and on the fourth by space in which lay the Breens’ valley. In the centre of the shallow bowl was a plat­form on poles twelve feet high. Something was lying on the platform, and now and then the wind fluttered the torn cloth of a military greatcoat similar to that worn by Larry.

  Chapter Twenty

  Different Methods, Same Results

  A CROW WAS PERCHED at one corner of the ramshackle platform, only its head moving. Several others were strutting on the ground, not yet daring to intrude beneath the platform. High in the sky sailed the eagles, watchful, cautious, all-seeing. The crows indicated that no human being was near; the eagles were still suspicious.

  With a motion of his hand, Bony ordered Larry to follow, and together they approached the platform, keeping to wind­ward. All about it were the imprints of naked feet, and be­neath it a disturbed pavement of flat stones.

  Down through the ages man has murdered man, and human society from cave dwellers to city inhabitants has banded to­gether in execration of the crime. Modern society fights a killer with scientific aids in the hands of experts, and primitive men still depend on natural phenomena and methods of de­tection which appear ridiculously chancy. Primitive men must often err, resulting in the innocent being executed; but, strangely enough, the complex machinery of civilized justice, assisted by science, has also been known to execute a man for a crime he did not commit.

  When the Musgrave aborigines heard about Jacky Musgrave being murdered and his body pushed into the carcass of a horse, they proceeded to prove who killed him in accordance with rules and rites which, to them, had been proved efficacious for thousands of years.

  Having located the dead horse, they had brought the body to this place where they built the rickety platform. They stripped the body of clothes and, placing it on the platform, employed the clothes instead of brushwood to keep the birds from it. Decomposition being advanced, they had not long to wait to learn who was the killer. Under the platform they built a pave­ment of flat stones, and on each stone was marked the name of a man who could have killed Jacky Musgrave.

  Until the murderer was executed the spirit of the dead man would know no rest within the peace of a boulder, a tree, or a hill built by termites, and it would hover about the body it had inhabited, and blow the drops of grease falling from it to the stone marked with the name of the murderer. Fantastic—or was it?

  The south wind had ‘pushed’ the grease-drops to fall on two stones, and, these having been removed from the pave­ment, the magic man had crouched over them and proclaimed the names they bore.

  Looking upon those two stones, Bony was both pensive and apprehensive. He could not read the marks placed on them by the magic man of the Musgrave tribe, and therefore was unable to take any measures to warn the two objects of their justice. He was at one with the Privy Council and the Supreme Court in that this method of proving who committed a murder is apt to bring about a miscarriage of justice, but he was one up on all learned judges in knowledge of the inevitability of the violent death of the two men whose names were on those stones.

  “Which feller these stones say kill Jacky Musgrave?” he asked, and Larry looked eve
rywhere but at the stones and shook his head, evincing dislike of the entire set-up. Super­ficially, it was a foolish question, for Larry wouldn’t know, and it was asked to put the tracker at ease. Bony removed his attention from the stones to the rock cliffs and steep slopes and could see no signs of human watchers. Now that the spirit of Jacky Musgrave had dropped his grease on the stones of his killers, Bony inclined to the belief that the Musgrave men would no longer have any interest in his body.

  “You pick-up tracks white feller and goat,” he requested Larry, and, with undisguised relief, the aborigine trotted away to encircle the platform and then wave Bony forward to the rim of the hollow.

  Naked feet had left a trail winding downward and Larry pointed out the goat’s tracks where that animal had rebelliously pulled to one side. From this point could be seen the Nine Mile Yards down on the comparative plain, and the windmill above Black Well immediately beneath them.

  The trail, clear enough for a semi-blind man to follow, skirted the shoulder and twisted across steep watercourses.

  To the north was Black Well and beyond it the gutter where lay the dead horse. The blacks had come from that point carrying the body of Jacky Musgrave to the natural bowl high in the Range where they thought they would be undisturbed. On descending again to the plain, they had gone southward keeping in extended order of march.

  To the south was situated the homestead owned by the Breens, in direct line distant some ten miles. The Musgrave men might have gone southward intending to visit that home­stead and extract from it one or both killers of Jacky in accord­ance with the names on those two significant stones. That would mean trouble to be met only by Kimberley Breen with the problematical assistance of her stockmen under Patrick O’Grady.

  There was still the scene of the murder of Constable Sten­house and Jacky Musgrave to be located, and only the suc­cessful back-tracking of that white man and the four booted aborigines would lead to it.

  It was now after three o’clock, and Bony asked Larry to make a smokeless fire and boil water for a brew of tea while he scouted. He found the tracks of the white man and the blacks carrying what he was convinced was the dead police­man.

  Refreshed by the hastily eaten meal, Bony and Larry back­tracked the five men, walking with extreme circumspection. They had proceeded barely a mile when the trail turned in to the Range where huge slabs of red rock had crashed to the plain, and on coming to these little mountains they ‘edged’ their way round, making sure of unobserved movement before leaving the shelter they provided. Thus, eventually, they came to an open space where was a grass-roofed shed similar to that beside Black Well.

  A shaft was sunk near by, but not for water. There was a windlass over it, and the bucket attached to the wire rope had been used to bring mullock to the surface, whitish in colour and flaky with gypsum. A heap of mullock containing many square yards proved that the shaft was very deep or drives from it were long. And about the shaft were the imprints of naked feet and the circular holes made by the butt-ends of spears.

  They lowered the bucket and Bony estimated the depth to be about forty feet. He examined the mullock, taking up hand­fuls for close inspection, and could see no trace of gold, which, however, did not prove there was none.

  “Stay here, Larry,” he said, and proceeded to circle the shaft. On rejoining Larry, he sat on the mullock heap rolling a cigarette, now confident that the body of Stenhouse had been carried away from this place.

  He re-examined the site of the fire used for cooking, and turned over the little pile of empty food tins, deciding that the last had been tossed there less than a month before.

  Although this mine shaft was on Breens’ country it did not follow that the Breens had sunk it, for any man having paid for a Miner’s Right may sink a shaft where he will. Its near­ness to the homestead almost certainly proved that the Breens knew of the mining being conducted there. To the Breens, therefore, must he apply for further information.

  “Musgrave fellers they clear away to Breens’ homestead,” he told Larry, who nodded instant agreement. “You go back over Range find-um Constable Irwin and Charlie camped near where we find-um Constable Stenhouse?”

  With a short laugh Larry assented, and an expression of relief shone for an instant in his eyes. Bony tore a page from a notebook and wrote Irwin that he was going to Breens’ home­stead and to come there as quickly as possible. He watched Larry stow the note in the pocket of his greatcoat, and would have suggested that, minus the coat and the boots, travelling would be much easier, had he not been aware of Larry’s enormous pride in that uniform.

  Larry glanced at the sun, laughed, said he would make it all right, and walked northward, leaving Bony seated on the mullock heap and rolling another cigarette. It was now four o’clock, and it would occupy three hours walking across country to the homestead, which he hoped to reach before dark. Abandoning his equipment, he began the journey.

  Half an hour later, he was certain that the wild men had headed for the homestead, intent on ferreting out the men whose marks were on those stones, and equally certain that, as his own mark could not be on either stone, he would be ignored by them unless he interfered.

  He came to the road from the cattle yards to the home­stead, when the sun was westering and when the birds were flying to and from hidden waters, and he followed the track over the interminable ‘bumps’ and down and across the end­less gullies separating them. Unaccustomed to such exertion, made soft by car and aircraft, he was exceedingly tired, and on arriving at every ridge looked expectantly to see the home­stead.

  From the summit of one such ridge he saw between it and the next a wide flat covered with ripe sugar grass and pocked with red termite hills. It was a full mile to the next ridge, and he was giving himself a spell when he saw a horseman top it and come galloping down to the flat.

  Bony hastened along the track on which were still the im­prints of Irwin’s truck tyres. The horseman was riding hard. He was crouched low to the animal’s withers, and presently it could be seen that he was an aborigine. Distance dwindled, dwindled, till Bony ultimately could see the whites of his eyes and white teeth bared in a fixed grin.

  The sunlight gilded the spear as it gilds the thread of a spider’s web. The horse faltered. The rider shouted, lifted it on. Behind him appeared a black figure, which froze to im­mobility for a split second, and then appeared to bow as the spear was launched from the throwing-stick.

  Bony stepped into the concealment of the tall grass. He saw the horse again, much nearer. It was foundering, and its rider was shouting frenziedly and frantically trying to lift it up and on. The sunlight made of the spear protruding from its ribs a shimmering bar of gold.

  Neighing shrilly, despairingly, it halted, sank to its knees and fell forward. The rider sprang from the saddle and came on running … and behind him some twenty naked wild men appeared from the grass and gave chase.

  Bony sank into cover, instinctively, overawed by this exhibi­tion of primitive justice, which nothing could divert from its unerring course. The horseman raced past him even as he was about to lead up and confront the pursuers with his automatic pistol, and was gone even as he realized the deadly peril with which he would be confronted had he done so. The fleeing man was the Breens’ boss stockman, absurdly named Patrick O’Grady, and the men who appeared to Bony beyond the screen of tall grass were short and lithe, their hair plaited with human grease and skewered with human bones. Their beards were stiff and their teeth were bared, and the muscles of their naked thighs rippled. They passed like wraiths of black smoke, without apparent effort, without apparent limit of endurance.

  Patrick O’Grady was handicapped with boots and trousers, a heavy shirt, and soft living. He was just a fat old rabbit being hunted by lean and starving dingoes.

  The hunters passed, leaving with Bony the impression of confidence incarnate. He stepped on to the track, and looked back. He saw Patrick O’Grady labouring up the rise to the ridge, watched him disappear be
yond it, watched the dark forms ‘flow’ after him, the sunlight gleaming upon their bodies and their spears as they, too, topped the ridge.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Frightened People

  BELIEVING THAT ALL the Musgrave aborigines who had left their territory to investigate the death of Jacky were in that party which had ambushed the boss stockman, Bony doubted the soundness of his reasoning when, on walking another mile, he saw the imprints of naked feet.

  He recalled that on first sighting Patrick O’Grady, the boss stockman was beyond the wild men hidden in the tall grass. O’Grady did not then know they were there, and yet was riding hard as though himself ridden by fear. Now it was plain that O’Grady had passed through one ambush only to fall victim to the second, and that between Bony and the homestead was the first ambush.

  He plodded along the twisting track, head up, although his shoulders ached and his thigh muscles were hot wires. He was still confident of being of no concern to the wild men, whose single-track minds were now directed to those they thought had killed their relative. That the boss stockman was one of two men accused by the fall of human grease, and that by now he was dead, Bony was certain. The other had yet to meet his fate, and everything pointed to the belief of the wild men that this other man was at the Breens’ homestead.

  The sun was atop of Black Range. Two turkeys sailed grace­fully to land beyond a patch of grass, and, abruptly changing their intention, they flap-flapped upward and away. Four kangaroos loped across the track much too hurriedly for normal progress to and from water. And in addition to these signs the hair at the back of Bony’s head seemed to prickle his scalp, and there was a cold itch between his shoulders as though his very flesh shrieked warning of silent spears in flight.