Now the moon’s light fell strongly upon the front of the hut, glinted in bars on the iron roof, fell upon the motionless figure lying on the veranda floor covered with a blanket. Nero and Wandin crouched on the warm moonlit ground less than two hundred yards from the sleeping Bony. With his hands Nero pushed the sand before him into a long ridge to serve as a protection to him and his companion, and to prevent their victim from dreaming of the ancestral camps in which lived their respective mothers, for such a dream would tell him who the bone pointers were.
On their side of the sand ridge Wandin buried the six bones and the eagle’s claws of the boning apparatus. Nero from his dilly-bag took a ball of porcupine-grass gum and proceeded to knead it into the form of a plate. Having done this he took from his dilly-bag a full twenty of Bony’s discarded cigarette ends, placed these on the gum plate and then turned up the circular edge to enclose them into a completed ball. With the ball of gum, containing matter that had once been one with the victim, on the ground between them, the two men crouched over it and began to “sing” it with their magic.
“Bony feller may you die,” muttered Nero.
“Bony feller may you die sure and slow like the bark said,” muttered Wandin.
“May you groan like a bull-frog.”
“May your liver bleed and be drowned in its blood.”
“May your bones become like sand.”
“May you sick when you eat.”
“May you be hungry and still sick when you eat.”
“May you howl like a dingo.”
“May you groan like a bull-frog.”
“May you sit down and roll on the ground.”
“May you die thirsty.”
“May you die with blood in your mouth.”
Each man spat upon the gum ball. Nero dug from the ground the buried boning apparatus-five sharply pointed little bones attached to one end of a long length of human hair string, and one small pointed bone and two eagle’s claws fastened to the other end of the string. And while Wandin repeated all the curses they had sung into the gum ball, Nero forced the point of each bone and the tip of the claws into the ball, so that claws and bones might take from the “sung” gum ball the curses to be transmitted to the victim. Thus was the evil magic sung into the cigarette stubs, that once had been in contact with the victim, to be sent through the bones and the claws into the body opened to receive it by themauia stone dust.
Nero passed the eagle’s claws to Wandin, himself retaining the five pointed bones. He knelt facing the sleeping Bony, and Wandin took a similar position behind him. With the human hair string connecting the five bones and the single bone and the claws, as well as connecting the two men, they pointed bones and claws at Bony and solemnly repeated all their curses. So from the tips of bones and claws their magic sped through the air to enter the body of the man asleep.
For a full quarter-hour they repeated their curses, after which Nero placed the boning apparatus in his dilly-bag and then gravely handed to Wandin the ball of gum in which were embedded the cigarette ends.
Wandin rose to his feet to walk away in a wide circular course that took him to the rear of the hut. A soundless black shadow casting on the ground a shadow as black, he cautiously moved round the hut wall, reached the end of the veranda, edged close and closer to the sleeping Bony, and deposited the gum ball on the ground a few inches from his head.
As it had come to the hut, so the shadow departed to rejoin the chief of the Kalchut tribe.
Chapter Fourteen
The Bomb
IT was the third Friday in the month, a day when Old Lacy sat on the bench in the small courthouse at Opal Town, and this particular day in early summer was windless and heavy with heat. The birds inhabiting the vicinity of the Karwir homestead drowsed in the bloodwoods lining the creek, their calls and theirchatterings stilled by the necessity of keeping wide their beaks. All the morning the musical ring of hammer on iron and anvil had issued from the blacksmith’s shop, but this, too, ceased when the cook beat upon his iron triangle calling the hands to lunch. The ensuing silence was disturbed only by an occasional blowfly beyond the fly-netting of the long veranda where Diana Lacy sat in a lounge chair pretending to read.
The luncheon table had been prepared on this same veranda-for two. Already the house gong had sounded, and the girl’s slim fingers beat an impatient tattoo on the arm of her chair. Except for this nervous betrayal she appeared calm and, as usual, mistress of herself. Yet she was feeling slight excitement as she awaited the person who was to lunch with her.
When the door at the far end of the veranda was opened, the drumming of her fingers instantly ceased, memory still vivid of that occasion when she had first met Mr Napoleon Bonaparte at the horse yards. Her blue eyes with the violet irises continued to stare at the printed page, and did not glance upward to meet the eyes of the Karwir guest until he came to stand before her.
“I hope I have not delayed lunch over long, Miss Lacy,” Bony said, gravely. “It was a little difficult to take the first step from under the shower.”
Almost impersonally she studied him: his suit of tussore silk, his white canvas shoes, the entire polished grooming of him. It was as though her mind was still commanded by what she had been reading. Before rising, she said:
“You have caused no inconvenience, Mr Bonaparte. The weather dictates a cold lunch. My father and brother have gone to Opal Town to-day, so you will have to put up with my demands to be amused. Will you take that chair?”
“Thank you.”
Bony assisted the girl to be seated at the table, before he took his place opposite her and then moved the vase of flowers lightly to one side.
“I met Mr Lacy and your brother on the road this morning,” he told her. “Evidently your father prefers a car to an aeroplane. He takes a great interest in court work, I understand.”
“Yes. He likes to feel he’s a dictator. I have often sat in court and watched him. He fines all culprits two pounds and costs, and, should one attempt to argue, he shouts him down. I suppose you are accustomed to being a dictator all the time.”
“A dictator! Why, Miss Lacy, I am the victim of several dictators. Colonel Spendor, my wife and my children are to be numbered among them.”
“But what of your victims? Don’t they regard you as a kind of dictator?”
Bony smiled. “Their nemesis, perhaps,” he corrected, adding as an afterthought: “And then only when they’ve been apprehended. Before being apprehended they think they are the dictators, issuing orders for me to follow. Then they reveal astonishment when they are informed that, as the old song puts it, their day’s work is done.”
For a little while they gave attention to the food, and then Diana, setting down her knife and fork, said, slightly frowning:
“You know, you puzzle me. I’ve heard you say that you never fail to unravel a mystery. Is that really so, or were you boasting?”
“Since I became a member of the Criminal Investigation Branch I must have conducted at least a hundred investigations,” Bony replied. “Some were quite trivial; several were very involved. No, I have not yet failed to complete satisfactorily any case I have taken up.”
“Do you really think you will succeed in completing this one?”
“I can see no reason why I should not.”
Again Diana gave attention to her plate. She did not look at Bony when she put her next question.
“May I assume from that that you are-what shall I say?-well forward in your investigation?”
“Er-hardly. As a matter of fact, I have made very little progress. This disappearance case, taken up so long after it actually began, is proving to be most difficult. Even so, I see no reason why I should not succeed in finding out what happened to Jeffery Anderson. Success depends only on the factor of time.”
“And luck?”
Bony considered, Diana regarding him with her eyes turned slightly upward as her face was turned down to her plate. She was very much mistress of hers
elf and inclined to underestimate the man she could not bowl out socially.
“And luck,” Bony repeated. “Yes, I suppose a little depends on luck, if coincidence may be regarded as providing an investigator with luck. I think luck plays only a small part, certainly a much smaller part than the mistakes committed by the criminal. Even in my present investigation, I have been favoured by one bad mistake made by someone.”
“One bad mistake!” the girl echoed. “What was that?”
“As I have said, time is the only practical factor on the side of the investigator, Miss Lacy,” Bony went on, gently ignoring her inquiry. “Given unlimited time, no investigator need fail.”
Perhaps Diana suspected a trap, or perhaps she feared rebuff if she pressed her question concerning the mistake he mentioned.
“The sole basis of my reputation for uninterrupted successes is my inability to leave an investigation once I have begun it,” Bony said. “I suppose I have conducted at least a hundred investigations as I think I mentioned. The majority of them were completed within a week or two. Some, however, occupied my attention for many months, eleven months being spent on one. I hope you will not become bored with me should I have to spend eleven months on this Anderson case.”
She raised her head and actually smiled at him. It was as though strain had relaxed. She said:
“Eleven months is a long time, Mr Bonaparte. Wouldn’t your wife and children come to miss you?”
“Alas! I fear that my unfortunate wife, and my no less unfortunate children, have formed the habit of missing me. Still, were I a sailor they would be even more unfortunate. Then, of course, there is another side to these prolonged absences from home. We are an affectionate family, owing probably to the effect of absence on the human heart.”
“Now you are being cynical.”
“They say that the cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and who never fails to see a bad one,” said Bony, smiling. “That being so, I am no cynic.”
Diana appeared to think the conversation was drifting, for she said:
“From what you tell me you seem to have a free hand with regard to the time taken in your investigations.”
“Yes. Oh yes! I see to that. Punctually at the end of the first fortnight that I am away from home my wife writes imploring me to return, and my immediate superior demands to know what I am doing. Then, after the first month, Colonel Spendor writes to announce that he has given me the sack, the word ‘sack’ being his. Having received the sack, I then have to interview the Commissioner and have myself reinstated without loss of pay. Colonel Spendor is the kind of man who likes to sack me, and then likes to feel the glow of generosity when reinstating me.”
“From what you, say, Colonel Spendor must be more or less like my father.”
“More, Miss Lacy, much more. Pardon me for seeming familiarity, but you and I have something in common. We both know how to manage human lions for their own good.”
Bony’s effort to warm the girl towards him failed. The barrier she had erected between them refused to give to his assault. For a second or two he gave attention to his food, while his mind worked at this problem of the immovable barrier.
That his reading of this charming Australian girl was at fault he declined to admit. She was a little white aristocrat; he an Australian half-caste. It was not, he felt sure, a sense or knowledge of racial superiority that formed the unbreakable barrier, else she would not have been here sitting at table with him. He had never seen her smile with real warmth, nor detected warmth in her voice. And yet she was warm, a chip off the old block. No, it was not racial superiority that had built the barrier. There was an entirely different explanation, possibly knowledge of secret events, or a suspicion of them, which affected her or those to whom she was loyal.
Loyalty! That was it. This vivid young woman was opposing him because of loyalty to someone his presence at Karwir might ultimately affect. There was no hint of admiration in his eyes when he raised them and spoke to his hostess.
“I like lions, human lions,” he told her. “When one has removed a lion’s skin one finds a new-shorn lamb. My chief blasts and damns me, his face scarlet, his eyes globes of ice. He shouts. Yes, he likes to shout. He shouts at me, telling me to get out of his sight. He loves to tell me I’m no policeman. He tells me I am a rebel who ought to be shot for insubordination. But, Miss Lacy, he has never said I was a fool. Tell me, please, whom it was you met at the bloodwood-tree on the boundary fence that day I arrived here.”
“Whom did I-I beg your pardon?”
Bony’s voice remained mildly conversational when he repeated the question. He had timed his bomb to explode at the close of luncheon, and now he leaned forward over the table and offered her a cigarette from his open case. Her gaze centred on his guileless eyes, her hand gropingly extracted a cigarette and then a match flared and was held in service. She accepted the service before rising indignation took her to her feet to stare at him, as he, too, stood up.
“I consider you to be impertinent,” she cried. “You ask a question smacking of innuendo.”
“Indeed no, Miss Lacy. I asked a quite straightforward question. I’m sorry, but I must press for the answer.”
“I refuse to give it, Mr Bonaparte.”
“After that meeting between you and someone who came from Meena, the blacks most thoroughly wiped away all traces of it,” Bony said, well satisfied with the effects of his bomb. There was less anger than mortification in her eyes. “The action of the blacks indicates, or appears to indicate, that either you or the person you met desired that I should not know of the meeting. Apparently the object of the meeting was a secret to be kept at all costs. Were I sure that the meeting was a quite harmless one between, let us say, two lovers, I should certainly not even have mentioned it. Since I am not sure, I must continue to press you for the answer to my question.”
Now anger held full sway in the blue eyes, and furiously the girl cried:
“I still refuse to answer your question. It does not concern you.”
After this declaration they stood on either side of the table, Diana with her head thrown back, her breast quickly rising and falling, her eyes blazing; Bony passive, his eyes lakes of blue ice. He wished ardently to break her, to smash down the barrier she had erected between them, to know her true self.
“Might it be that your answer would implicate the person you met in the disappearance of Jeffery Anderson?” he said in an effort to obtain an admission of the name of the person she had met. “Recent events point to the fact that the people who wiped away traces of the meeting have come to fear me for what I will discover concerning Anderson’s fate.”
“You are quite wrong. I will not answer a question that concerns my private life only. Whom I meet is my affair, not yours.”
Bony sighed in mock defeat and, bowing stiffly, turned and walked away to the far veranda door. Having placed his hand on the brass knob, he left the door and returned to the girl’s side. She stared up at him, her breath held, her lips parted. She heard him say, his voice still provokingly calm:
“The next time you use the telephone at Pine Hut, remember to refrain from making in the dust on the note shelf many little crosses.”
“Crosses! Little crosses!”
“Little crosses, Miss Lacy. When I was very young I used to place little crosses at the bottom of letters I wrote to a young woman.”
And then swiftly, without another word, he turned, crossed the veranda to the door, leaving her speechless.
Half an hour later she saw him, dressed in his old bush clothes, leave the house and pass out through the garden gate. She was then in the garden, and through a gap in the cane-grass hedge she saw him go into the office, come out with the key of Anderson’s room, unlock its door and enter. He was there only a minute, and then he returned to the office where, presumably, he left the key. Ten minutes after that she saw him leading his horse to the Green Swamp Paddock gate, saw him mount on its far side and ride away
along the road to Opal Town and the boundary.
Even then she was still biting her lips in anger.
Chapter Fifteen
The Time Factor
BONY rode away from Karwir with a shadow in his eyes and a faintly grim smile about his mouth. He had paid the call at the homestead only for the purpose of learning a little more about the meeting of the riders of the white and brown horses, knowing that Old Lacy and his son would be absent at Opal Town.
Like almost every man living in solitude, Bony found pleasure in talking aloud to his horse. And now he said to her:
“Making crosses at the end of a letter, indeed! As though I, Napoleon Bonaparte, would ever have done such a thing, when I could and did pen poetry about my love. Ah, youth is Life, but age is Triumph, triumph over Life, mocking youth and tormenting it. If you possessed a human brain, my dear Kate, you would agree with me.”
The mare softly snorted, tossed her head and increased her pace. It was as though she did understand and appreciate her rider’s confidences. Bony continued:
“I suppose, Kate, that hunting evil-doers and associating with detectives and policemen have gone far to making me a fearful liar. Who was it who said: ‘Liars are verbal forgers’? Hum! That hints at crime. I must tread more circumspectly else I become a moral criminal. Still, I suppose there are occasions when the end does justify the means. Those imaginary crosses drawn in the dust thick on the telephone instrument at Pine Hut did produce a result, a negative one possibly, but one which my imagination can make positive. That very nice and wholesome young woman, who actually thinks she is smarter than poor old Bony, answered my question so clearly by refusing to answer it at all-with words. She admitted that she had met John Gordon at the boundary fence, that she loves him and he her; and she now thinks that she unconsciously drew little crosses while talking to him on the telephone to Meena.
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