Sinister Stones b-19

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “These aborigines have many traits similar to dogs, Clifford. They’re full of knowledge and helpful in their own country, and are nervous and suspicious when away from it. We feed them and clothe them and we bring them to understand enough of our language to communicate. They smoke our tobacco and ride ourhorses, many of them drive our cars and trucks, and are able to repair windmills and pumps.

  “Nevertheless, they retain their tribal customs and cling to inherited instincts and convictions. They are loyal to white men living for a long time in their own locality, and suspicious of all others. It takes years of association and study to reach even the middle of the bridge spanning the gulf between them and us. Be patient. A thousand years are as nothing in this timeless land, and when the last aboriginal sinks down to die, despite the veneer imposed on him by our civilization, he will be the same man as were his forebears ten thousand years ago. Have you a pistol?”

  Clifford mentally blinked. He was young enough to flush, and sensible enough to accept sound advice.

  “Thank you, sir. Yes, I’ve a thirty-two automatic.”

  “I would like to borrow it. Cartridges?”

  “Half a box, sir.”

  “I would be obliged if you would transfer the weapon and the ammunition to my small suitcase on the seat of the utility… without the trackers observing what you are doing.”

  Clifford departed, and Bony strolled along the track, his hands pressed into the small of his back. He was finding it difficult to accept his own advice given Clifford in view of what he thought might result from those smoke signals. Irwin came to him to report.

  “Charlie says that those smokes this morning told him that the Musgrave blacks were coming north into this country. Larry… that’s the young feller… agrees with Charlie that the Musgrave fellers are either bent on finding Jacky or executing their justice on the bloke who killed him.”

  “How are they taking it… Charlie and Larry?”

  “All right. But they aren’t too easy about it. Reckon the Musgrave blacks won’t interfere with the mob up here. All they’ll be after is the feller who killed Jacky.”

  “Meaning the feller who killedStenhouse, Irwin.”

  Irwin chuckled.

  “Seems we’re to have competitors, don’t it?”

  “Very serious competitors, too. We must work, or they’ll beat us to it. Send the trackers back to Agar’s with Clifford. Get them going right away.”

  Irwin left Bony standing and facing Black Range, which he did not see, and when Clifford and the trackers had disappeared down the track, he sat in the utility and waited. He waited for fifteen minutes before Bony joined him.

  “Drive slowly to the turn-off,” he ordered. “We’ll call on theBreens… Silas and Kimberley… and listen politely to what they have to say, and their stockmen.”

  Irwin turned the vehicle.

  “What are you making of this business?” he asked.

  “It would appear thatStenhouse and his jeep were rolled on to a magic carpet and flown through the air to where Laidlaw found him. We have much travelling to do over these extraordinary mountains, and the speed having to be kept down to ten miles an hour causes me to feel like the nightmare victim trying to run in iron boots.”

  The turn-off track to theBreens ’ homestead was even worse than the Great Northern Highway. Irwin needed to concentrate on his driving and to employ his strength to fight the rebellious steering-wheel. Black Range advanced and thrust forward great buttresses sheathed in dark-red armour. The westering sun vanished, and presently they were negotiating the slope of a gully which became a gorge, and the surface of the supposed track was bare rock, mostly dull grey, sometimes rich chocolate, sometimes jade green.

  Bony gazed downward into this great cleft in the Range. It became no wider the higher they climbed, and the almost perpendicular opposite slope would have defeated a goat. The utility rolled over loose stones, and bucked over miniature ridges, running in low gear, and Bonywasn’t liking the experience. He was enormously thankful that the weather was clear and the rock dry to which the tyres could cling.

  That menhad driven this way half a hundred donkeys harnessed to a loaded wagon seemed utterly impossible. It was still harder to believe that Silas and Jasper had driven over this track in their truck at night. Here and there was the evidence of human labour which had made it possible.

  It was six o’clock when the rock wall gave up frustrating the little truck, and the evening sky was draped between pinnacles of red ironstone. The climb became less steep, and with remarkable abruptness they passed over the low rim of a shallow bowl where grew the singular baobab trees, their excessively gnarled limbs leafless at this time. Within the bowl grew ripening grass, and across it flowed a tiny stream to escape through a cleft in the western edge.

  “Whatd’yousay to camping here?” suggested Bony, and Irwin made no attempt to hide his satisfaction. He stopped the vehicle beneath one of the baobabs, then alighted and stretched his arms and grinned, saying:

  “It’ll be cold, but there’s plenty of wood.”

  They uprooted dead wait-a-bit and mulgas and dragged them close to replenish the camp fire. They brought water from the stream and brewed tea and ate of Mrs Ramsay’s provender. And the sun went down behind the lip of the bowl, and wallabies came to feed on the grass and drink at the stream. Apostle birds arrived with a rush of wings to create apparent uproar, but actually voicing their joy in living. They settled into their large nests, as many as couldcrowding into each, for there are no birds so imbued with the community spirit.

  “What lies on the other side?” Bony asked when they had eaten.

  “Space,” replied Irwin.

  They sauntered to the edge of the bowl, and Bony contemplated what was a vision rather than a vista. A wide valley lay between them and a distant purple range… the valley an eiderdown of apple-green ‘bumps’ and the gullies etched in black. Spanning the valley far to the north a ridge of bluish rock was fashioned to the sky-line of a great city of the Orient.

  “I camped here about five years ago,” Irwin said. “After dawn is when you see the colours. Beyond that line of blue rocks is theBreens ’ homestead.”

  “Whatd’youknow about theBreens?” asked Bony, and Irwin gave his peculiar chuckling laugh.

  “The sons are a tough lot,” he said, faint admiration in his voice. “The old people were even tougher… must have been. The old man and Mrs Breen came from Queensland, looking for land, and why they took up that land instead of going down south, beats me.

  “Anyway, they got over this range and down there, and took up a thousand square miles. Starting with nothingexceptin ’ the donkey wagon, a few cows and a dozen hens. They battled along, some say by stealing a bull and a few more cows, and living on ’roosand the smell of axle-grease.

  “They had three sons and the one daughter. There was no flying to hospital for Mrs Breen. Women were tough in those days… or passed out. Old Silas died in 1929. Fell ill… no doctor… no wireless… no death certificate… a grave marked with a hefty wooden cross. I never met either of the old people, but I’m told that after the old man went out, Mrs Breen bossed the boys as her husband had done… with a clenched fist in preference to an open hand. She died in 1934, when the girl was only seven years old, and Kimberley was reared by her three brothers.

  “Silas and Jasper had no education, and can only just read and write. Ezra did spend four years at the State School in Broome, and he got Kimberley through the Correspondence Course posted up by the Education Department. Did you happen to meet FatherO’Rory?”

  “No. Tell me about him.”

  “Grand old man. Been up here years. He read the service over old Silas and Mrs Breen when they’d been dead a long time, and he christened the kids when he called on his annual tour. Wanted Kimberley sent to a convent to be educated. Fought hard, too. The boys wouldn’t stand for it.”

  “They appear to have prospered,” Bony commented.

  “Up to a poi
nt,” agreed Irwin. “Manage to muster four hundred head for the Meat Works every season, but that’s a poor effort, for most of their country’s good beef land. TheBreens live rough, like their parents. Satisfied with little, and yet royalty to themselves. No one like theBreens… in their own estimation. Never gave any serious trouble, but we’ve heard of wild doings now and then.”

  Irwin fell silent and Bony did not speak. The quilt of the valley was sinking beneath a purple overlay. The sun stood on its edge on a ridge, promised to look at them again, and vanished. The purple darkened to indigo blue, and the summits of the Range about the two men brightened from red to gold, an iridescent gold. The red monoliths and the cross-barrier of rock sank into the blue of the valley, and soon the summits were like carved mahogany pillars supporting a diamond-studded roof.

  Two hours later, Bony and Irwin werelying in their blankets either side the fading camp fire. Bony tossed the end of his last cigarette for the day into the embers, and languidly he said:

  “A man shotStenhouse, and, almost certainly, shot Jacky Musgrave, too. Result… the white law represented by you and me is set in motion against him. A mighty force, the white law. He was a fool, that man who shotStenhouse. When he murderedStenhouse, he had to murder Jacky Musgrave, and then he brought into action against himself a second and even more powerful force… the black law. If we don’t apprehend the murderer, the representatives of the black law will.”

  Irwin gazed between the branches of the baobab tree above them, watching the endless procession of shooting stars. Bony murmured:

  “Remember that late evening we were travelling to theLangs, and thespinifex grass lying flat and ghostly white towards the desert? I can see passing over that white sheet a dark cloud, coming up from the Musgrave Range and the great desert, swift, silent, irresistible.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Kimberley Breen

  THERANGEShad withheld many things from Kimberley Breen, but they had lavishly bestowed upon her their colours. All that Bony had been told about her hair was fact. Her eyes were large and grey, flecked with blue. Her face was oval and vital with health.

  Three naked babies lay on their backs on a blanket spread in the sunlight. They were tiny babies and jet-black. Bead-black eyes were bright, and the soles of the little feet kicking at the sun were almost pink. One gurgled when Kimberley lightly pressed her finger on his tummy. Another industriously sucked her thumb, and the third yawned and resolutely strove to keep his eyes open.

  Around Kimberley and the babies stood several lubras, and twice their number of children and dogs. The women were vastly amused at Kimberley’s interest in their babies, and some of the younger children were solemnly jealous. They were as free of clothes as the babies; the older children and the women wearing shapeless dresses of coloured cotton.

  TheBreens ’ homestead waspise -built and iron-roofed. The walls were a yard thick, and such was its rambling shape it was not easy to estimate the number of rooms. High veranda roofing gave shade from the hot sun and shelter from the torrential summer rain, and upon the bare earth floor stood painted tubs in which grew vigorous ferns. A covered way connected the main house with the kitchen and other buildings, and beyond this covered way a garden extended to a low precipitous cliff of weathered limestone. On the cliff three wind-litescharged batteries to provide light and power. Two windmills beside the near-by creek raised water from an almost fathomless hole, and tubular piping built the masts for the wireless aerial. It was a picture of permanency and solidity.

  Over by the creek a man snouted, and instantly the lubras and the children were tensed and silent. They were like hens made abruptly immobile by the arrival of a noiseless hawk. Then the women sighed, and one cried:

  “Car bin come, Missus.”

  Kimberley rose from the blanket on which she had been kneeling beside the babies, and listened. She could hear nothing beyond the windmills. Then one of the dogs barked, and a score of others were quickly roused to frenzy, and the flock of some two hundred goats grazing on a distant ‘bump’ abruptly lifted their heads. The aborigine over by the creek had heard the oncoming vehicle seconds before the dogs heard it.

  The truck came on. The dogs barked louder. The lubras and the children faded into obscurity, and with them went the babies and the blanket.

  Constable Irwin stopped the utility, and slid from it to meet Kimberley, who had walked to the shelter of the front veranda. He slicked his fingers through his fair hair, hitched up his trousers, and laughed into Kimberley’s large grey-blue eyes.

  “Day-ee, Kim! How’s things?”

  “So-so, Mr Irwin. What are you doing over this way?”

  She saw the second man who remained by the truck, and noted the absence of trackers on the back of it. She smiled up at Irwin and Irwin realized it was indeed a beautiful day and a wonderful country.

  “Just touring around, Kim,” he said. “You hear about ConstableStenhouse?”

  “Yes. On the air last night and this morning. A dreadful thing to have happened. Are you going to stay a bit?”

  “Yes… like to. I’ve Inspector Bonaparte with me.”

  “Inspector Bonaparte!”Kimberleyechoed, emphasis on the rank. “Oh! Just look at me! Could he wait… while I change?”

  “He could, but why change?” Irwin chuckled. “You look good to me, Kim.”

  She was wearing a faded blue blouse belted into old blue trousers having a darker blue patch on the seat. She backed away to the house entrance, her face flushing, her eyes troubled, and saying:

  “Oh, I couldn’t meet an Inspector, Mr Irwin, not like this. You take him into the living-room and I’ll change and get the girls to make tea. I’ll not be long.”

  Continuing to back to the door and in through the doorway, she disappeared. Irwin heard her calling for Mary and Joan and Martha, and, smiling, he returned to the utility.

  “We’re invited in for afternoon tea,” he said to Bony.

  “We shall certainly appreciate that.”

  Irwin conducted Bony into the house and to a large room which might have been furnished by people now dead two hundred years, that is if one could shut out the modern radio transceiver and the two electrics suspended from the beamed ceiling.

  Bony sat on a carved mahogany chair stuffed with horsehair and weighing a hundredweight. In the centre of the room stood a teakwood table capable of seating twenty. On the bare earth floor, composed of termite hills packed to the hardness of cement, were dyed goat-skin rugs. The yawning mouth of a great open fireplace was filled with silver grass, and upon the three-inch-thick mantelshelf stood a Swiss cuckoo clock, several cracked ornaments, and racks of pipes. There were oleographs of Queen Victoria, a cardinal, a child in a tub reaching for a cake of soap, and another of an abbey, as well as two coloured portraits, of abewhiskered man, appearing uncomfortable in a choker collar and massive cravat, and a woman still beautiful, whom Bony guessed were the originalBreens.

  The rugged character of those two people was infused into this room. They dominated it and, through it, those who entered. The long horsehair sofa with the curling arms, the remaining chairs, the huge dining-table, belonged to them and to their era, and the setting made incongruous the sleek black radio panel and the shelf above it supporting a dozen or more expensive volumes.

  Irwin was nonchalantly rolling a cigarette when Bony stood up and crossed to look more closely at the transceiver.

  “Wonderful invention, Irwin,” he said. “No more isolation. No longer the feeling of being banished from the world. An accident, and you contact the base doctor, who tells you what to do, or will fly to attend the patient and, if necessary, fly the patient to hospital.”

  Among the books about the transceiver wasChemotherapy by R. M. Mallory: two volumes ofAcross Australia by Spencer and Gillen: and Harrison’sChemical Methods in Clinical Medicine. Bony was astonished by such books in a house like this, occupied by people two of whom had had no education, one a State School education and the fourth member
a State Educational Correspondence Course. He took down the volume of chemotherapy. Opening it to see how much it had been read, he found that a ragged hole had been gouged in the centre of the four hundred odd pages. When the covers were closed the hole was large enough to take a pound of rice.

  Bony glanced at Irwin, who had picked up a magazine which had lost its covers. He took down another volume, Vol. 1 by Spencer and Gillen, and found, too, a great hole gouged in its pages. The companion volume, and four others, had been similarly desecrated. Bony doubted that the books he opened had ever been studied. They were comparatively new.

  Hearing voices beyond the room he replaced the books and resumed his seat. Then, the books forgotten, he was on his feet again making his inimitablebow to Kimberley Breen. Impressions flowed over him like waves of colour; the loveliness of her hair; the sun-ruined complexion; the limpid grey eyes; the roughness of the hand he accepted. He heard her say she seldom received visitors and was glad to receive him and Constable Irwin.

  A lubra came in carrying a large tin tray supporting a chipped enamel teapot, an enamel milk jug, and a beaten silver sugar bowl. Placing the tray on the table she withdrew. Kimberley fell upon her knees and dragged two elaborate pigskin hat boxes from beneath the sofa. Saying nothing, she carried one box to the table, raised the lid and took from it the loveliest tea-set Bony had ever beheld. Eggshell-blue and lined with gold, each piece was wrapped in a square of silk, and, like a very proud little girl, Kimberley Breen set cups to saucers and arranged the plates on the table before her guests.

  Bony was fascinated by his hostess. It was mid-afternoon, and Kimberley Breen was wearing a bronze velvet ballerina dress, and high-heeled satin shoes encrusted with rhinestones. About her throat was a fine gold chain from which was suspended a huge black opal, a great red flame flickering within a black shadow.