Bony - 01 - The Barrakee Mystery

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “Good morning, Martha,” Knowles said, without the faintest shadow of a smile on his brick-red face.

  “Mornin’, Sergeant,” was the gin’s simple answer, but her eyes rolled and she seemed ill at ease. Kate soon joined them. She said:

  “I hope, Sergeant Knowles, that your jail doesn’t want whitewashing. I’m sure Uncle would not like to lose Blair until his work is finished.”

  The trooper chuckled. The sergeant laughed right out.

  “So you have heard of Blair’s complaint?” he said. “No, we have not come to arrest Blair, this time.”

  “You appear to hint that you have come to arrest someone,” ventured Mrs Thornton lightly.

  “Where is Mr Thornton?” countered the sergeant.

  “Good gracious! You are not going to arrest him, surely?”

  “Oh, no! But I should like to see him presently.”

  “Then you will find him with Mr Mortimore and the carpenter down in the shearing-shed,” the mistress of Barrakee told him, adding in a coaxing voice: “But really now, whom have you come to arrest? Tell us. We are always hungry for news and gossip.”

  The steely blue eyes of the sergeant twinkled genially. He saw that both women were burning with curiosity. Kate, he thought, looked pale and her eyes as though they required sleep.

  “Won’t you guess?” he teased.

  “No,” said Mrs Thornton firmly.

  “Martha?” Kate guessed with a strained laugh.

  “Quite wrong, Miss Flinders,” interjected the trooper. “Well, you may as well know now as in a few hours’ time. We have come to apprehend William Clair for the murder of King Henry.”

  For a moment the women were silent. Kate frowned. Mrs Thornton’s breath was caught sharply and her eyes became veiled.

  “Do you mean to tell me,” she said, “that you are still worrying about the killing of that black fellow?”

  “I don’t worry about it, Mrs Thornton,” replied the sergeant, well satisfied with the effect of his bomb. “The law does, however. The law never ceases to worry about an unpunished crime. The official memory is infinite. Now we must go along and see Mr Thornton. We want his cooperation.”

  “Then you will be going out to the Basin?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’ll stay and have lunch before you go?”

  “Thank you, we will.”

  “Certainly you will. I’ll see about it at once. You know your way to the shearing-shed?”

  “Oh yes! Thank you for the cup of tea.”

  The women of Barrakee watched the two uniformed men go out through the double garden gates, and climb into their car to drive the half-mile to the big shed.

  “Well, what do you think of that, Kate?” questioned Mrs Thornton.

  “It seems difficult to believe that Clair did it. But then, I suppose, it would be as difficult to believe it of anyone else one knows,” replied Kate.

  For thirty seconds the Little Lady gazed pensively across the lawn. Then, turning again to Kate, she said:

  “If you’ll tell Martha about the visitors staying for lunch, I’ll go along to the store and get a few tins of ox-tongues. Martha is short of meat, I think.”

  Down in the shearing-shed, the squatter was planning some alteration in view of the coming shearing, and the policemen found him detailing to Mortimore the timber and iron necessary.

  “Hallo, Sergeant!” he said. “More trouble?”

  “For someone, yes. And a little for you, too.”

  “Oh!”

  “From information received,” this with a meaning look, “we hold a warrant for the arrest of Clair, now I believe at a place called the Basin.”

  “Yes, he is at the Basin. What’s he done?”

  “We have enough evidence to charge him with the murder of King Henry.”

  “Have you, now?”

  The sergeant regarded Mortimore, then jotting notes in his order book, motioned the squatter to follow him outside. On the river-bank he said:

  “What time do you reckon Clair will be home?”

  “He is home all day,” Thornton told him. “Clair is not boundary-riding. He’s pumping.”

  “Oh! that makes it easier. He has no riding-horse out there?”

  “No.”

  “How do you get to the Basin?”

  “D’you know the road to Thurlow Lake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, six miles from Old Hut Tank you will come to a gate,” explained the station-owner. “Go through the gate and immediately take a secondary track to the right. From that gate to the Basin is thirteen miles.”

  “Good,” replied the sergeant. “Mrs Thornton has kindly asked us to stay for lunch, and we have accepted. We’ll get away directly afterward. Did Bony tell you anything?”

  “Only that his suspicions rested equally on Clair and Martha and me.”

  The policeman chuckled. “Bony is a humorist,” he said. “He discovered a footprint outside the lower garden gate miraculously saved from the rain. He knew a size 9 boot made it, shortly after the rain began that night. It’s been established that Clair made that print. But the chief edifice of our prosecution is built from the material sent Bony in a letter from a pal of his in North-West Queensland. By the day of the trail we’ll have affidavits and witnesses in plenty.”

  “But why did Clair kill the abo?”

  “That we don’t know,” the sergeant admitted. “Bony appears sore on that point. Thinks that the arrest of Clair does not finish the case off artistically.”

  “Humph! If Clair is found guilty the case will be finished off all right,” asserted John Thornton. “I must send a man out to take his place.”

  “Let him come out with us. There’s room.”

  “No. I’ll take him out myself. We can travel together.”

  “All right. Will you take Bony as well? Look all right if he accompanies you. No one then will guess his identity. Besides, he may pick up something valuable to us.”

  “Very well, I’ll see him about it,” agreed the squatter thoughtfully. “You go along to the homestead and make yourselves nuisances with the women. I want to finish this job.”

  After an early lunch the sergeant and his companion left ten minutes before the squatter, who drove his own car, and was accompanied by Clair’s successor and Bony. Dugdale and Ralph were just riding in, and the latter waved to his foster-father.

  The last thirteen miles of the journey over the secondary road was covered in slow time, since the little-used track was rough and covered with blown sand. The police car reached the Basin at about five minutes past two.

  The Basin was situated on a wide circular flat, hemmed in by a mass of loose sand-hills. The hut was old, but weather-proof, and was built but a few yards from the sub-artesian bore, at which a small petrol-engine lifted the water into three large receiving tanks. Beyond the tanks ran two lines of troughing, each watering sheep in a paddock, a division fence separating the two troughs.

  The police car pulled up at the door of the hut. The sergeant and his companion got out, the former knocking on the door. His knock being unanswered, he glanced at the trooper and, the two having drawn their heavy revolvers, he unlatched the door, and threw it inward.

  “William Clair,” he called.

  There was no answer.

  With that the two men entered. It might well have been that Clair was armed and desperate, but little thought of personal safety was in their minds. Clair’s silence was ominous.

  The hut was empty.

  It contained no place for concealment. An iron cot at one end bore two hastily tossed blankets. On the table were parts of a carcass of mutton and grains of sugar mixed with tea-leaves. The open fireplace indicated that that day a fire had been lit, for smoke still curled upward from the almost consumed wood.

  “Outside, Smith,” snapped Knowles. “Look for tracks. Keep your eyes skinned. He may be hiding in the old shed over there. Search.”

  But Clair had vanished.
/>   Thornton with Bony and the new man arrived by the time the sergeant had decided that Clair was not in hiding anywhere near the hut. He was annoyed but not balked. For here was Bony, Australia’s King of Trackers. Mindful of the new pumper, Sergeant Knowles said, when he had explained the situation:

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Bony,” replied the half-caste innocently.

  “Can you track?”

  “A little bit,” admitted Bony.

  “All right. Get on this man Clair’s tracks. He’s wanted for killing an aboriginal called King Henry, so you ought to be interested.”

  “All right. Inside first. You all stay outside, please. And don’t move about.”

  At the doorway Bony surveyed the interior. He noted the tumbled blankets, the accumulation of foodstuffs on the table, the wisp of smoke arising from the dying fire. He noted also the absence of the usual canvas water-bag, and the small tea-billy. Near the bed he saw a litter of feathers.

  Entering the hut then, he removed the blankets from the bed. Beneath he found and examined what evidently had been a pillow. One end had been ripped open, and several downy feathers still adhered to the covering on the inside. From the bed he approached the table, observing the scattered tea and sugar. The meat had evidently been partly disjointed in a hurry, and the flesh was flabby, denoting that the ration sheep had been killed that day.

  Bony sighed and smiled, and called the others in.

  “Clair knows a thing or two which is going to make his capture difficult,” he said. “I’m looking for a dish or bucket which has recently contained blood. We have no time to waste. Look around, some of you, outside.”

  It was the new pumper who found, at the back of the hut, the wash-dish in which were traces of blood and many white feathers sticking to it. When Bony saw it he nodded slowly and then, pointing to the telephone, said:

  “Someone told him, Sergeant, that you were coming out to get him. Clair then took that dish down to the killing-pen, in which there happened to be a ration sheep, killed it, and caught its blood in the dish. The dish and the carcass he brought in here. He then cut off sufficient meat to take with him, filled his ration-bags with tea and sugar and flour, and put the full bags in a gunny-sack, with what cooked meat and damper he had by him.

  “Next he rolled one blanket into a swag. Finally he removed his boots and socks and bathed his feet in the blood before dipping them into his pillow-case filled with pelican feathers. Allowing the blood to congeal and harden, thereby firmly adhering the feathers, he repeated the process till his feet were thickly encased with the feathers.”

  “Old abo trick!” Thornton exclaimed.

  “Precisely! Clair knew that when a black fellow wants to avoid being tracked by an enemy he covers his feet with feathers,” Bony answered calmly. “Feathered feet leave no mark, turn no stone, break no twig, and damage no grass where there is any.”

  “Damn!” growled the senior policeman. “Now, who the devil rang up Clair and told him we were coming?”

  “Someone must have done so,” insisted Bony. “Clair didn’t just bolt when he saw your car coming through the sand-hills yonder. His preparations occupied quite two hours. He’s on foot. Had you been mounted you might have run into him.”

  “And you mean to tell me you can’t track him now?”

  “Yes. Clair adopted the only method that baffles even the best trackers. If you circle that ring of sand-hills this quiet afternoon, you might see a very faint impression on the loose sand. But Clair would know that, and would not leave his direction so evident. When on fairly hard ground again he would circle in the direction he proposes to go.”

  Chapter Twenty

  A Grain of Sugar

  SERGEANT KNOWLES seated himself at the table with the air of a man weighed down by exasperation. Producing a watch, he set it before him.

  “The time now is precisely twenty-one minutes to three,” he said crisply, anger and chagrin in his tone. “We arrived here at a little after two o’clock. We find our man gone. From the preparations for his flight, Bony, what time do you think he left?”

  “About midday,” replied the half-caste promptly; then seeing the interrogative rise of the policeman’s eyebrows, he added: “There are parts of blood in the dish not yet dry. The fly maggots on the meat left uncovered are about three hours old.”

  The uniformed man smiled acknowledgement of gifts greater than his. He said:

  “Assuming that he lost no time after receiving the warning how long do you think it would take him to make all these preparations for a bolt?”

  “From the way in which the sheep was skinned Clair didn’t make his preparations in a leisurely fashion. He could not, however, hasten the drying action of the blood when fixing the feathers to his feet. I should think it would be all of two hours.”

  “Say ten o’clock.” Sergeant Knowles was silent for a space. The others, standing about the table, watched him. Then: “At about ten o’clock this morning, you, Mr Thornton, and Mortimore, the trooper, and myself, were at the shearing-shed. Till then only two people knew that we were after Clair—your wife and your niece—and, according to Bony, Clair was warned about that precise time.”

  The squatter’s tanned face flushed. A hard light came into his eyes.

  “You are accusing either my wife or my niece?” he asked with surprising mildness.

  “I am accusing no one, Mr Thornton. I am merely stating a summary of facts. However, there is this to consider. The conversation between them and myself occurred on the house veranda, and could easily have been overheard by anyone in the rooms on the one side, or concealed among the grape-vines at either end. It will be necessary to question the servants. What do you think, Bony?”

  The detective-inspector smiled slightly.

  “There is no definite proof that Clair was warned over the telephone,” he said.

  “Then how else could he have been warned? Are there tracks of any recent visitor, on foot or on horse?”

  “No, Sergeant,” Bony replied sweetly. “But there are minor ways of conveying a warning, such as smoke signals. I am inclined, however, to believe that the telephone was the method used, but we must remember that we have no proof. With your permission, might I suggest that the country is in a very dry condition; that the only watering-places are the wells and tanks and bores; and that your man must visit a well, tank, or bore for water? As there are so few wells, tanks and bores, why not have them watched?”

  “What about the river?”

  “There is too much traffic on either side of the river to suit Clair,” replied Bony. “Clair will make for the safest place in the world—the Northern Territory. Whilst I take a walkabout around the place—for there’s always the chance that Clair may drop something which would indicate his travelling direction—Mr Thornton, I am sure, would not mind making you a plan showing all the watering places.” Turning in the doorway, he added: “If Clair has dropped so much as a hair of his head I shall find it. Don’t wait here for me.”

  Pausing at the big car to remove one of the waterbags to take with him, Bony set off on his walkabout. Noting the encircling windswept sand-hills, he struck southward till he gained the long line of ridges and miniature peaks, thence to follow the ridges. And whilst he walked he read and thought, and the thoughts were not allied to the readings.

  When he had completed the circle he seated himself upon the summit of a ridge, satisfied that so far he had followed Clair’s mind correctly, for exactly west of the tank he crossed Clair’s tracks, slight indentations here and there, as though a party of centipedes had held a dance on separated patches. Only upon that very soft sand would such faint indentations be left by feathered feet, and only then during a windless period.

  Again Bony completed a circle about the Basin, but this time keeping about a mile out from the sand-hills. He walked rapidly, his head thrust forward and down, but his gaze kept continually on a point ten or a dozen feet in front of him.

 
; A second circle two miles from the tank was completed, without result. The tracker kept moving with untiring effort, now and then stopping to make and light a cigarette and to take a single mouthful of water from the canvas bag. And whilst the walkabout was in course, whilst his eyes missed nothing of the passage of sheep, rabbits, kangaroos, cats, emus, birds and insects, his mind continually dwelt upon the mysterious warning given to Clair.

  Who had been Clair’s friend?

  Bony sighed audibly, a happy contented sigh. Supposing the friend proved to be one of the servants, say Martha, then the affair would doubtless be explained by admiration or love. But supposing the informer had been Mrs Thornton, or Kate Flinders. If so, that would mean that the Thorntons were mixed up in this sordid murder, or at least knew more of what lay behind it than they professed.

  What was Clair’s motive? Why had he tracked King Henry for nearly twenty years, for Bony now firmly believed that the gaunt man was the white man Pontius Pilate said had died. The feud or vendetta had started at Barrakee, and had ended there. What caused the feud? What was the feud?

  So far as the actual killing was concerned Bony had completely lost interest. He had indicated the killer to the police, and thus considered his work to be practically accomplished, for it must be remembered that the half-caste detective had strange ideas of the duties of a detective-inspector, and of an ordinary police-inspector, sergeant, or trooper. Where Bony’s interest had been inflamed and was kept inflamed was the mysterious motive actuating the crime, and compelling that long tracking, murderous, relentless, covering nigh twenty years.

  Until that day the whole affair appeared to be ranged outside Barrakee, the commission of the crime at Barrakee being merely a coincidence. But the warning to Clair was proof positive that someone at Barrakee had knowledge of the deed other than that elicited, and doubtless also knowledge of the motive. And if he or she possessed knowledge of the motive, even if no knowledge of the murder at the time of the act, that person was, likely enough, at Barrakee twenty years before.

  Out came Bony’s list of fish among which was a sting-ray. Producing a pencil, he placed a dot in front of all the names, bar three. For a while he closed his eyes and mused. Then suddenly he placed a dot before the name of Mrs Thornton. Five seconds later his pencil made a mark in front of the name of her husband, leaving then but one name unmarked.