Bony and the Mouse

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Sunlight creates shadows. The cairn’s shadow stretched shortly to the east, topped with the shadow of this man. Vast cloud-shadows quilted the ground canopy of sparse scrub and browned glass plains. There were shadows about the great rocks at the feet of Bulow’s Range, where also were the aborigines’ hidden stores of water. Shades rather than shadows; soft light rather than shades. For in all this world there were no dark places, no black set against white, while the ruling tints of browns and greens were subject to the masses of amber and white diamonds tossed away by the great Being who first had possessed this land with eagerness to explore all its beauties.

  Had Bonaparte slewed on his rocky set, he would have seen just below the summit of the Range the red track leading upward from Dryblowers Flat to merge into the northern end of Daybreak. And he would have been confronted with that other part of his ego which, also like love itself, demanded so much of him, and from which too he had no desire to escape. No man can serve two masters; but two masters may own a slave.

  Of recent hours servitude to the one had been exacting, and his soul needed the balance of the other. Throughout the previous two nights he had flitted about Daybreak, watching, waiting for, and hoping to frustrate a further strike by the Daybreak murderer, before the return of the aborigines. Again the duality of his ego tortured him. The hunter instinct was an ogre smacking its lips at the prospect of fresh blood to bring a new scent of a quarry to run down; the civilised part of him dreaded a violence which could spring only from the hellish depth of a human mind.

  But the killing lust had lain quiescent throughout these two nights, for to what else could those three seemingly senseless murders be attributed? There was no pattern provided by the victims of this Daybreak murderer. The victims of such a one may be street walkers, or young girls attending colleges, or boys who have never shaved; or even elderly women and elderly men. They fall into a pattern from which the type of killer can be built into reasonable clarity.

  A young aboriginal woman, a middle-aged housewife, and an apprentice lad of white parents! How could such provide a pattern? The first killed with a blunt instrument; the second strangled; the third killed with a knife across the throat. There was no pattern in method. There was a pattern in the timing, which was not of the night, but of the absence of the local aboriginal tribe which could have provided tracking experts with a minimum loss of time. This pattern did indicate a killer of deep cunning, a killer who was over the borderline of sanity but far from complete mental derangement. He wore special footwear, indicative of forethought, of planning ability.

  It was this ability, allied with the unusual paucity of detail in the reports of the trackers, which created a stridently unusual problem for this man of two races who sat on a high stone and moodily peered over a world which had been withered by centuries of aridity, and yet had not died, and would never die.

  The weakness in the armour of the problem was in this local aboriginal tribe. It was a problem having roots delving deep into a land claimed by Melody Sam. It was a problem not to be attacked hopefully by the scientific minds of any police organisation. It could be likened to a giant boulder down there on the hillside, one of those boulders no man could upset to send crashing to the bottom, but which a colony of tiny ants could unseat, with their ceaseless burrowings.

  And there, beyond the boulders guarding the secret sources of life, came those who owned this land with a spiritual passion beyond the understanding of the white man who had dispossessed them. Bony could see them, a long straggling line lengthening across an open space so filled with the diamond specks of mica, and so distant, that it was like a growing crack extending across a golden salver.

  They were not coming home, those hundreds of beings. They had no home; they had never known the meaning of home nor needed to know its meaning. They owned nothing; everything—every tree and boulder, hill and creek-bed; every grain of sand and every mica speck—owned them. Only the dead possessed homes. They found their homes in tree-trunks, in boulders, in hillocks, in stony glades. They, the living, were journeying on, ever journeying from place to place within the borders of their tribal land, and pausing awhile to tidy here a ceremonial ground, and there a grave mound, and here beside a water hole to rest and take courage from the visiting birds and rodents to whose totems they belonged. In the secret places the young men had been initiated, and sealed into the tribe, and the young girls had been initiated into the duties of womanhood, and proudly these young members walked, and proudly bore the still smarting brands of initiation.

  Eventually the leaders of the human chain emerged from the low and spare scrub on to the open ground extending all about Bulow’s Range, and now Bony could see the individuals. The leaders and the initiated men carried spears, the hafts of which had been traded with far southern aborigines who live in the great forests where saplings grew straight and long. The men walked in groups; the women and the children came straggling in the rear, the women loaded like camels with firewood, others with infants slung to hips; the older children running and jumping, and in obvious anticipation of distended bellies.

  For over in the butcher’s yard young Tony Carr had just shot a beast and was honing his knives to skin and make ready to hand it over to the travellers.

  The leaders came up the slope, their eyes directed to the great boulders in which still lived the spirits of their ancestors, and higher still to note the man seated on the white-feller heap of stones, which Melody Sam had told them in the long ago they must not touch. At a distance from the boulders all but the leaders halted to gather into a waiting crowd. The leaders, four of them, came on up the slope and then parted to enter the maze of boulders, to see what had happened among them, if anything, during their absence.

  Satisfied that all was well, they mounted the slope towards the waiting Bonaparte, having refrained from drinking at the rock holes of cold water, and keeping their people waiting also, until etiquette had been observed. Bonaparte, aware that they would know all about him from Abie’s report, visually examined them. One was white of hair, thin, like his spears, of which he carried three, and possessed of a white beard looking as though one of the town goats had nibbled at it. He would be Chief Iriti. There was the medicine doctor, a tubby man of middle age, his black hair bunched high by a ribbon of human hair encircling his forehead. There was a very tall, lanky man of deceptive physical powers, and the late initiate, Abie the police tracker. Save for the pubic tassel and the small dilly-bag suspended from the neck by human hair string, they were entirely naked.

  Arrived to within a hundred feet, they paused to set their spears on the ground, advanced a further twenty feet, and squatted, stilled like four ebony Buddhas resting on grey slate. They had thus obeyed the rules of approaching a stranger’s camp without arms, indicating peaceful intent, and, by squatting politely, waited for invitation to enter the stranger’s camp.

  Etiquette! Practised for thousands of years. And behind it all the iron of tradition and the inelastic thongs of discipline. They had come to talk with the stranger, he who was one of them more than he could be one of the white-fellers. Should he be flash-feller, should he be white-feller-boss, they would talk to him and he would talk to them just the same, but without observance of etiquette.

  The hotel yardman-cum-barman, not the detective-inspector, slid himself down the trig to the ground, where he removed his shirt and undervest. From the saddle bag he took four two-ounce plugs of tobacco, which he placed on the ground and dropped his hat over them. Then, standing erect, he raised one arm in time honoured invitation.

  The visitors rose and slowly came forward. Of grave aspect, their dark eyes missed nothing, as their gaze moved over and about this stranger. Abie and the tall one remained a little behind the chief and the medicine man, and these slowly moved round Bony to inspect the cicatrices on his body. They hurrumphed without indicating satisfaction or otherwise, and then stood with the other two, and waited for the host to act. The host, with the toe of a boot, kicked t
he hat off the tobacco plugs, and gravely nodded to them to accept the gift. By common consent, host and visitors squatted on their heels.

  Each of the four faces opposed to Bony bore the expression of a judge waiting to hear evidence. On them was neither hostility nor welcome, neither chill nor warmth. This was the stranger’s camp, but the stranger was in their country. His initiation, plus the mark of the chief medicine-man of a faraway people, they had read in the cicatrices on his chest and back, and now they waited to learn his business in this their country, so distant from his own.

  Bony was prepared, having co-opted Melody Sam. He told them he had been passing through their country on his own affairs, when, arriving at Daybreak, the white-feller policeman wanted a horse broken to saddle, and that Melody Sam had wanted him to investigate the murders, as the white-feller policeman had fallen down on his chest. It was the truth, and plain for them to understand, but they were less amenable when he blamed them for having been away when the murders had been committed, and went on to scorn Abie’s tracking powers, and to mock the efforts of the trackers brought from distant places. Thus he became the judge, and they the defendants, without loss of poise and without hurt to their natural dignity.

  “You fellers know Melody Sam,” Bony went on with calm equal to their own. “Ole Melody Sam good white-feller. Time you come to Daybreak, he give you one big bullock feller, and then he give you plenty tobacco and plenty flour. You all situm down and eat and eat, and smoke and smoke. Ole Melody Sam good feller, he do this for you-all. Then killum-feller he come like Kurdaitcha and basham your lubra, and killum white woman and young white-feller. Old Melody Sam don’t like this killing. This killing plenty bad for Melody Sam and all white-feller living in Daybreak. Daybreak belonga Melody Sam. You have killings in your country, you no like that, eh? Too right, Melody Sam don’t like killings in his country.”

  No change of facial expression. But shutters lowered before the eyes, which remained open and hard and blank, shutters which shut themselves in the recesses of their minds, and barred him out.

  Bony told them that Melody Sam had given him a job in his hotel, and had asked him to investigate these Daybreak crimes, crimes which included the killing of one of their own women. Carefully avoiding insult, he lashed them for their indifference towards this particular murder, and claimed that among his own people no killer would have remained hidden and unpunished.

  Their reaction? One of blank, stone-like imperviousness. The white man would have been infuriated: Bonaparte accepted the inferences stemming from their attitude of mind. They had shut him out, not because he was a stranger, but because he was old Melody Sam’s private eye. Standing, he pointed away to the crow-dots whirling about the killingyards, and they stood with him, and now the shutters were up, and their faces were lit with half-smiles, like the faces of children forgiven for some misdemeanour.

  “Tony Carr he bin killum bullock,” Bony said, almost gaily. “You eat and eat and eat, all right.”

  “Too right!” exploded young Abie, and the medicine-man grunted and grinned. “Too right!” haltingly repeated the chief, and eased his empty stomach by pressing his bony hands into the valleys of it.

  Mounting his horse, Bony waved to them to accompany him, and they shouted to their fellows below. Whereupon the lubras set wood in a pile, and fired it with a live fire-stick which they had brought all the way from the previous night’s camp fire, and the men and the children came racing up the hill to join the elders.

  Riding in their midst, Inspector Bonaparte might have been a general entering Rome; when he was but a half-caste taking a mob of ‘savages’ to a feast.

  Chapter Eleven

  George Who Wasn’t George

  GENERATIONS OF men have sat on the topmost rail of stockyards watching a horsebreaker at work, or just sitting and nattering in the presence of a yard full of horses or cattle. There is nothing more uncomfortable to sit on than a rail, but then what is comfort when the points of a horse or a steer are to be summed up and discussed?

  There was a horse yard in a corner of the police station compound, and this morning there sat on the topmost rail Constable Harmon, Melody Sam, Fred Joyce and Bony. In the yard stood the constable’s splendid grey gelding, and Bony’s two horses, that by comparison were merely runts to look at, but tough as wiregrass to work. The animals were lazily swishing flies with their tails, and the men were as lazily doing nothing. It was enough that men and horses were closely together.

  “Did you have to give those black bastards a whole bullock?” Harmon asked Melody Sam. “They’ll all be that gutted with beef that Abie won’t be fit to work again for a week. I don’t like being without a tracker.”

  “Things are quiet enough,” mildly observed the butcher, “No new murders or anything.”

  “Just so, Fred,” agreed the policeman. “No new murders or anything ... yet.”

  “You think we can expect another?”

  “Any time, Fred. Once a killer starts he can’t let up.”

  “True enough,” Melody Sam contributed. “But with the murders we had, the blacks were on walkabout. They won’t be going on walkabout again for a week or two. Why worry? We got Nat here if Abie don’t show up, and I’m not climbing a tree to take me hat off to Abie ... or any other of the tribe.”

  Harmon was morosely chewing a stem of barley grass, his big body relaxed so that he was like a bag of chaff balanced on a wire. Joyce sat with his hat tilted to the back of his head, and his frank grey eyes were puckered against the sunlight.

  “I reckon Nat here’ll tell us more about them sandshoe tracks than the abos,” Melody Sam continued. “That is, if we have another murder.”

  “We’ll have another one,” growled Harmon. “Bound to. And I’ll be ready for it. I’m going to be right on Tony’s wheel when it happens.”

  “Aw, give the kid a go,” argued Joyce. “He might’ve been a no-hoper, but he ain’t done anything bad since he’s been here.”

  The silence which fell among them indicated their hope that the policeman would carry on, and when it was evident that Harmon would not, Bony said:

  “Could be there won’t be another murder. What makes you think there will be?”

  “That book the constable’s got called A Thousand and One Murders,” replied Melody Sam. “It’s all in there. Serial numbers they call these repeats done by one man. He gets a lift out of his killings. Does ’em all the same way.”

  “But our killer don’t do ’em all the same way,” objected Joyce, and the policeman countered with:

  “He doesn’t have to do ’em the same way. He gets his kick through feeling ’em perish from a weapon, like a blunt instrument or a carving-knife. I know how they start. They start being at war with the world, and go through street fights, then robberies, fouling milk-bars, and so on till one night they get in a fight and smell blood, and that’s when they become tigers. That’s why the only likely bastard we got here in Daybreak is young Tony Carr. There’s no one else that fits.”

  “Well, I still think you’re wrong,” Joyce said, and twisted about, preparatory to lowering himself to the ground. “See you after. I got work to do.”

  “And I’d better get back to me labours, too,” remarked Melody Sam. “You can stay put if you want to, Nat, havin’ done your chores and no customers about this morning.”

  Slyly he winked at Bony, turned about, and strode from the compound, his back straight, shoulders squared, ready to pound the teeth in of any liar who claimed to have seen him a woeful victim of the booze. It is the periodic drinker, not the habitual, who lives to be a hundred. The policeman said:

  “That grey’s still a bit of an outlaw, Nat. I’d shoot him if it wasn’t for his smooth action. Feller has to have his mind on him all the time.”

  “Sorry you’re not satisfied, Mr Harmon.”

  “Oh, that’s all right, Nat. I’m satisfied well enough. You’ve done wonders with the bastard. As you know, some colts never turn out any good. They’re
like some humans. Kindness, firmness, anything you like, is sheer waste of time. What d’you reckon? You keep on with him?”

  “Yes, if you wish,” assented Bonaparte, well aware that some men, no matter how good on a horse, are invariably bad with a horse. Men like Harmon have not that spiritual affinity with a horse which achieves perfect accord and co-ordination between man and beast. Someone was cooee-ing, and Harmon stirred and began reversing the pose preparatory to going to ground. “That’ll be morning tea. Better come over and have some.”

  When both were off the fence, he said:

  “You know, Nat, you’re a strange feller. Don’t talk much, think a lot. Should have been in the Force. You’d have done better than me at that.”

  Morose, hard, bitter, Harmon was a man whose brain had been scarred by the blows of life, and recalling what Sister Jenks had said of Harmon’s personal tragedy, Bony assumed cheerfulness.

  “I’ll keep with the grey, Mr Harmon. Never beaten by a horse yet. As for being a policeman, I’d be no good. Tried once over in Brisbane, and the instructor at the barracks said I’d never be a policeman’s bootlace.”

  Harmon led the way into the kitchen of his quarters, where his sister had tea and cake set out for them. She smiled at Bony with her dark eyes, but her voice was a trifle sharp when she bade him be seated at the table. When she brought the teapot from a corner of the stove, her left leg swung wide in that pathetic motion which people tried not to notice and never really succeeded.

  “Horses!” she exclaimed. “Give a man a horse, and nothing else interests him. Like a very small boy with a pup. How are you liking being at Daybreak, Nat?”