Bony - 06 - The Bone is Pointed

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Such handicaps, however, to a man of Bony’s inherited tenacity and patience were, but a spur to sustained effort and the determination to succeed. The disappearance of the neck-rope, which was almost certain to have been attached to the animal, seemed to support the supposition that Anderson had been killed and his body carefully hidden. Had he merely been thrown the chances of his not being found were indeed small. Had he deliberately vanished, as so many men do every year in every city, without doubt he would have taken his hat, and, because he was such an expert with a stockwhip, he would have taken his precious whip. But why, supposing this were the case, should he have taken his horse’s neck-rope, but not the water-bag which, it was reasonable to expect, would have been indispensable to him?

  Bony’s spirits rose high as he considered these difficulties. He smiled when recalling the sternly given verbal order that on no account was he to spend longer than two weeks on this case, for he had been sent only to quieten a boisterous letter writer. If in the time assigned him he discovered a lead hint­ing at foul play, then he could return to Karwir at a later date more convenient for the department overloaded with work.

  As though he, Napoleon Bonaparte, cared twopence for orders once he began an investigation, and such an investiga­tion as this promised to be! As though he were a mere police­man to walk this beat or that according to the orders of a superior! Bah!

  Shortly after leaving the homestead gate the fence led him into the mulga where the ground was sandy and easily wind­blown, where grew buckbush and speargrass and rolypoly. The stockmen riding the fence over the years had left a plainly discernible horse pad, and this pad was followed by Bony’s horse. Here was a country into which the light wind failed to penetrate, a reddish-brown world pillared by short dark-green tree trunks, and canopied by a brilliant azure sky. At twelve o’clock Bony reached the first corner, eight miles due east of the homestead.

  Here he camped for an hour, boiling his quart-pot for tea and eating the lunch daintily prepared and enclosed in a serviette. So far, the country he had traversed could not pos­sibly offer a clue to Anderson’s passing. The ground was too soft and sandy to have left unburied any clue.

  From this first corner post the fence took a northward direction, and, after a further mile of the mulga forest, Bony emerged on to the plain that composed the southern half of the paddock. Now the sunlight was brighter and the wind could be felt. The horizon fled away for miles, cut here and there by cleanly ridged solitary sand-dunes and the tops of groves of trees raised into spires by the mirage. Five miles from the corner Bony came to an area of claypans across which his horse had to pass—and across which The Black Emperor must have passed when he carried Jeffery Anderson.

  At these claypans Bony dismounted and led the horse with the reins resting in the crook of an arm. Now he walked in giant curves and smaller circles. Now he crouched to look across a claypan at an oblique angle. Four times he lay flat on his chest in order to bring the cement-like surface to within an inch of his eyes.

  His examination of The Black Emperor’s tracks that morn­ing had revealed to the half-caste that the gelding pressed harder with the tip of his off-side fore hoof than with that of the near-side fore hoof, and, to make a balance, harder with the near-side hind hoof than with the off-side hind hoof. When he had cut the animal’s hoofs in the yards the evening before, he had been careful to note the faint colouration of the growth since April, when Anderson had last cut them, and he had cut them as closely as possible to their former shape.

  After five months it would have been stupid to expect to find The Black Emperor’s tracks on sandy ground, on loose surfaces such as composed most of the plain, or on surfaces scoured by the rainwater that followed Anderson’s disappear­ance. The claypans, however, always gave promise, for they could retain imprints for years, even if the imprints required the magnifying eyes of a Napoleon Bonaparte to see them. And, at irregular spaces across these claypans, Bony thought he could discern the faintest of indentations that could have been made by a horse before the last rain fell. He thought it, but he could not be sure.

  For nearly eight miles Bony rode northward, again to dis­mount at the edge of the maze of sand-dunes stretching away into Mount Lester Station from Green Swamp. Here, where the fence rose from the comparatively level plain to surmount the dunes like a switchback railway, Bony and Lacy surmised Anderson to have stopped for lunch. A little way back from the fence grew a solitary leopardwood-tree, to which The Black Emperor could have been conveniently roped for the lunch hour.

  Bony was now thrilling as might a bloodhound when in sight of the fugitive. He walked his horse to a tree distant from the leopardwood, neck-roped her to it, then returned to the leopardwood and began a careful examination of its trunk at about the height of the black gelding.

  Now the bark of this tree is soft and spotted and green-grey, and Bony hoped to find on it the mark made by rope friction caused by an impatient horse. He found no mark. The tree grew above ground covered with fine sand, and those of its roots exposed he examined inch by inch for signs of injury from contact with an impatient horse’s stamping hoof. He found no such injury. With the point of a stick he dug and prodded the soft surface, hoping to uncover spoor buried by wind-driven sand. He found no spoor, but he unearthed a layer of white ash, caked by the rain and covered by dry sand blown over it after the rain. Here Anderson had made his lunch fire.

  His blue eyes gleaming, Bony stood up and smiled as he made a cigarette and smoked it like a man knowing he de­served the luxury. Leaning against the smooth trunk of the tree, he faced to the east. To his right began the plain, to his left the sand-dunes, before him, some twenty yards distant, was the plain wire fence separating Karwir from Mount Lester Station.

  Here Anderson had stood or sat while he ate his lunch. He had observed the rain clouds approaching. Possibly it already had begun to rain. He had decided that to visit the swamp and the hut would be unnecessary. What had he done then? Had he mounted his horse and continued northward along the fence? Had he climbed over the fence into Mount Lester Station for any reason, any possible reason? Far away to the south-east Bony could see the revolving fans of a windmill and what might be an iron hut at its foot. It was two miles off the fence. Had Anderson walked over there, even strapped the wires together and induced The Black Emperor to step over the fence that he might ride there? It was a possibility that might yet have to be accepted and investigated.

  There were claypans all along the foot of the sand-dune country, but Bony did not stay to examine those near by, for Anderson would have crossed them before the rain fell and they would have provided him with a clue no more definite than those others had given him. Then, too, he was satisfied by the remains of the small fire that the man really had camped at this place for his lunch.

  Again mounted, he followed the fence into the sand-dunes, into a world of fantastically shaped monsters, gigantic curling waves, roofs of sand that smoked when the wind blew, cores of sand tightened with clay particles to be fashioned by the wind into pillars and roughly inverted pyramids, nightmarish figures and slim Grecian vases.

  For two miles Bony continued to ride over these dunes till he arrived at the second corner of the paddock. Here the plain wire fence joined a netted and barbed barrier, the northern fence of Green Swamp Paddock and the boundary fence of Karwir and Meena stations from this point to west­ward. To the eastward lay Meena and Mount Lester stations.

  From here Bony’s course lay to the west, continuing over the dunes to their westward edge and for another mile be­fore the third corner was reached; the fence then sent Bony southward to cross the wide and shallow depressions separ­ated by the narrow ridges of sand on which grew only the coolabahs. Over these depressions the netted barrier was in bad condition, the netting having rotted at ground level since the depressions had last carried water. Now the netting was curled upward from the ground and an army of rabbits would have found it no barrier at all.

  Where the fence
again angled to the west to reach its fifth corner just westward of the gate spanning the road to Opal Town, lay the southernmost of the depressions. The corner was almost dead centre of this depression, and from it could be seen the track from the main road to the hut at Green Swamp.

  Here Bony left the fence and rode eastward till he reached the road which took him into a wide belt of shady box-trees growing about the swamp. The hut was situated on the south side, erected on higher ground to be above possible flood level. For this reason, too, the well had been sunk and the mill erected over it. The place was well named Green Swamp, for a wall of green trees shut away the sand-dunes behind them.

  As the sun was pushing the tip of its orb above these trees the next morning, Bony was riding towards the corner of the fence he had left the evening before, and he was no little astonished to see how badly the netted barrier needed repairs along this further section of it.

  He had proceeded about a third of the distance to the main road gate when he saw ahead several men working on the fence. Then he saw the smoke of the campfire among the scrub trees and the tent twenty or thirty yards in Meena country. Approaching nearer the working party he saw that it consisted of three aboriginals. He passed the tent before reaching them, to observe the empty food tins littering the camp, indicating that it had been there several days. Coming to the workers, he cried:

  “Good day-ee!”

  “Good day-ee!” two of them replied to his greeting, the third continuing at work. They were footing the fence with new netting: digging out the old, attaching the new to the bottom of the main, above-ground wire and burying it, thus making it as proof against rabbits as when the barrier was first erected.

  “The fence here is in bad condition,” remarked Bony, tak­ing the opportunity of the halt to make a cigarette.

  “That’s so,” agreed the man who had not replied to the greeting. From Sergeant Blake’s description, Bony recognized him.

  His clear voice and reasonably good English, his powerful body and legs, tallied with Blake’s word picture of Jimmy Partner. He seemed to be a pleasant enough fellow and was obviously in charge of the party. Of the others, who ap­peared younger, one was shifty-eyed and spindle-legged, and the second, although more robust, had his face set in a stupid, uncomprehending grin.

  “Have you been working here long?” asked Bony.

  “Three days,” replied Jimmy Partner who, having leaned his long-handled shovel against the fence, drew nearer to Bony the better to examine him while he rolled a cigarette. “Haven’t seen you about before. You working for Karwir?”

  “Well, not exactly for Karwir. I am Detective-Inspector Bonaparte, and I’m looking into the disappearance of Jeffery Anderson. Was the condition of this fence then like it is now?”

  “No. It was bad, of course, but the April rain made it like this. Looking for Anderson, eh? I don’t like your chances. He was looked for good and proper five months back, and the wind has done a lot of work since then.”

  “Oh, I fancy my chances are good,” countered Bony airily. “All I want is time, and I have plenty of that. What’s your name?”

  The question was put sharply to the spindle-legged fellow and he goggled.

  “Me! I’m Abie.”

  “And what’s your name?”

  The grin on the face of the other had become a fixture, and Abie answered for him.

  “He’s Inky Boy,” he said.

  Bony’s brows rose a fraction.

  “Ah! You’re Inky Boy, eh! Sergeant Blake told me about you. You’re the feller that Anderson beat with his whip for letting the rams perish.”

  Inky Boy’s grin vanished, to be replaced with an expres­sion of furious hate. Jimmy Partner cut in with:

  “An ordinary belting would have been enough. It wasn’t cause enough to thrash Inky Boy till he took the count. Still,” and he tossed his big head and laughed, “Inky Boy won’t never go to sleep and let any more rams perish.”

  “I don’t suppose he will,” agreed Bony who did not fail to detect the absence of humour in Jimmy Partner’s eyes. “Well, I must get along. I may see you all again soon. Hooroo!”

  He clicked his tongue, and Kate woke up and began to walk on. Jimmy Partner fired a last shot.

  “You won’t find Anderson anywhere in Green Swamp Paddock,” he shouted. “If you do I’ll eat a rabbit, fur and all.”

  Bony reined his horse round and rode back to them.

  “Suppose I find him within ten miles of Green Swamp Paddock, what then?”

  “I’ll eat three rabbits, fur and all. You won’t find him ’cos he’s not here. We all made sure of that when he dis­appeared. No, he bolted clear away. Sick of Old Lacy and Karwir. Anyway, what with things he done the country was gettin’ sick of him.”

  “Well, well! It all has to be settled one way or the other, Jimmy, and I’m here to settle it. So long!”

  Now as he rode away towards the boundary gate, Bony examined the new earth piled against the new footing. The extremely faint difference of the colouring of the newly-moved earth plainly informed him that this party of aboriginals had not begun work here three days back but only the morning of the day before, the morning he had left the Karwir home­stead. He was aware, of course, that time is rarely accurately measured by an aboriginal, but it had been Jimmy Partner who had stated the period, and he was too intelligent, too well educated, inadvertently to have made such a mistake.

  Bony came to the gate spanning the road to Opal Town, and saw the west fence of Green Swamp Paddock coming from the south to join the netted barrier beyond the gate. In it, too, there was a gate, a roughly made wire gate. Beyond it ran back the cleared line cut through the mulga forest along which was erected the boundary netted fence, and Bony instantly understood that no one standing on this road, or riding in a car, could have seen the white horse tethered to a tree on the Karwir side and a brown horse similarly secured on the other side.

  To read the page of the Book of the Bush on which that meeting of Diana Lacy with an unknown had been printed, Bony opened the gate in the plain wire division fence, mounted again on its far side, and so rode the boundary fence in the Karwir North Paddock.

  From the plane he had estimated that the meeting place was a full half mile from the gate and the road, hidden from any passer-by on the road by a ground swell. He rode a full mile before turning back over his horse’s tracks, for he must have passed the meeting place. He spent a full hour looking for the tracks of horse and humans. He failed utterly to dis­cover them.

  Chapter Eight

  The Trysting Place

  THE frown drawing Bony’s narrow brows almost together was chased away by a quick smile. Then he frowned again, squinted rapidly at the sun, flashed a glance at his own shadow, thus judging the time to be a quarter after ten o’clock, and decided to boil water in his quart-pot for tea.

  “Delightful!” he cried softly as he neck-roped the mare to a shady cabbage-tree, then made a fire and set the filled quart-pot against the flame. “I believe I can guess correctly what has been done to bluff poor old Bony, as though poor old Bony, alias Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, could be bluffed. What a beautiful tree is that bloodwood! What a striking feature it makes in this most limited locality! How shady, how ideally situated amid this low scrub, to be a trysting place easy to remember. When I was young, and the world was young, and the girl I loved with me! Dear me, I must be careful.”

  It was almost a freak of nature, this tree growing away from a creek or billabong. Its foliage was brilliant and full, its wood beneath the bark as red as blood. In its symmetry, in its virile life, the bloodwood is the very king of all the gums.

  This tree was not difficult to climb, and Bony climbed it till he could climb no higher. Now the fence was dwarfed, and he could see along its cut line the white gate spanning the road, and far away over the tops of the lesser scrub. And there, a mile or two to the east, was rising, in interrupted lengths, a column of brown smoke that swelled into a mush�
�room-shaped cloud five thousand feet above the world. And Bony’s eyes blazed and his nostrils twitched with the excite­ment growing in his mind.

  It was a perfect day for this ancient method of conveying a signal, and the mind of Napoleon Bonaparte laboured to solve the meaning of this one. That it was merely a signal conveying an idea and not a message, Bony came to be con­fident. The spacing of the smoke bars was too ragged for the sending of a message which through naturally imposed limits had to be nothing more than a generality. And what the blacks working on the fence would have to tell their own people would be much more involved than a generality such as: “I’m coming home,” or, “You come over here.”

  So quiet the day amid these drowsing trees that, when the water in the quart-pot boiled over the rim, Bony heard the hiss of its sputtering on the hot embers of the small and smokeless fire. A crow came from the south, circled about the bloodwood, cawed thrice and alighted in a mulga-tree just beyond the fence, there to watch with its head cocked to one side this strangely behaving animal that could kill with a noise, and throw stones and sticks.

  For a little while longer Bony remained on his high bough, alternately gazing eastward along the fence towards the gate and the black fencers’ camp, and away to the north-west where were situated Meena Lake and Meena homestead. He hoped to see a smoke signal rise in that quarter, and when none did he was still more confident of the purpose of the signal made by Jimmy Partner and his friends.

  “Drama and a little comedy mixed with the spoon of tran­quillity give the cake of life,” he said to the watching crow. “Drama without comedy or comedy without drama produces the soddy dough of phantasmagoria. First the wager of eating rabbits, fur and all, and now the broadcasting of news by a method forgotten by the world save among the allegedly primitive peoples.”