It was signed by Colonel Spender, Chief Commissioner, Queensland Police, and under the signature a vicious ink-splashing pen had inscribed three further words: You are sacked.
Whilst returning this communication to its envelope Bony chuckled, for he could so easily visualize the colonel’s purple face when he dashed down these three words with final impulsiveness. As in the past, he would, when the Marks case was finalized, report for duty. He would be shown into the Chief Commissioner’s office, there to receive a lecture on discipline and asked pointedly how the devil and what the devil he thought the service would be without it … “and for heaven’s sake go and help that fool to find out who stole the Toowoomba Bank cash and bonds!” or “assist that ass on the Cairns murder case!”
Presently he rose and in the soft warm darkness walked back to the men’s quarters, where he accompanied the accordion-player on a succession of box-tree leaves.
At six o’clock he was up cooking the men’s breakfast; and the men, who thought they would have had to cook their own meals, were highly gratified. To Jeff Stanton, who came into the kitchen after he had given out his orders, he said in his calm manner:
“I do not like cooking, but I will carry on until you can get a cook. I hope that will be soon.”
“I telephoned to Father Ryan last night, Bony. There is no cook in Mount Lion wanting a job just now. I’ll do all I can to get one. How much have you been making on your breaking-in contract?”
“Somewhere about seven pounds a week.”
“Well, that’s a stiff price to pay a cook. But I’ll pay you that in wages as a cook. The men must have a cook, and it is unfair that you should receive less wages as a cook than you were making breaking-in horses.”
“But for the money I would rather break-in horses,” Bony said, yet was pleased that Alf had left hurriedly.
Chapter Fifteen
The New Cook
THE IDEAL station-hand is the man who can do any job required to be done on a station. Most men follow up a particular line of work—horse work, rough repairing, cooking, fencing and well-sinking, team driving, or truck management. There are many men, however, who can do any or all these things creditably, and Bony was one of them.
The vacancy in the men’s kitchen made by the dramatic departure of Alf the Nark presented to Bony a sure avenue of winning his way to the hearts, via the stomachs, of Moongalliti and his tribe. To these natives, whose habitat was a hundred-mile radius of Windee, Bony was quite an outsider. Had he been a full-blooded aboriginal they would never have accepted him as one of themselves, because his totem would not have been their own. As a half-caste, and a strange half-caste, he would at all times be regarded with suspicion; but as a station cook, with somewhat of their racial blood in him, he could successfully bribe them and win a measure of friendship with food, for food and the getting of food occupies far more of the native mind than any other subject.
To have approached them abruptly and casually asked which of them had put up the sign near Marks’s abandoned car would have produced looks of blank astonishment and protestations of complete ignorance, not for any reason to fear they had infringed the white man’s law, of which they knew very little, but because the meaning of their signs is kept but little less secret than the ceremonies accompanying the initiation to full adulthood of their young men and women.
Bony got on with his job well satisfied, and that morning baked the bread from the dough made by Alf the Nark. At nine-thirty he struck the triangle for morning lunch, at twelve for midday lunch, and at three for afternoon lunch, and was towards four o’clock “putting on the dinner”, when a step behind him caused him to look around and see Marion Stanton regarding him with amused but friendly eyes.
“You know you are a surprising person, Bony,” she said laughingly, and seated herself on the only chair in the place—the cook’s chair. Bony’s face lit with that inward flame which was as the slow turning up of a lamp-wick.
“Why should you think that, Miss Stanton?”
“Well, in the first place you are a university graduate, yet you break-in horses most expertly; secondly, you play divinely on an ordinary tree-leaf; and now I find you cooking, having been told that you really can cook. What else can you do?”
“What I can do, you know. Is it not enough? I can very easily enumerate what I cannot do: I cannot manage a station; I cannot preach a sermon; I cannot dance; and, alas, I cannot compose poetry.”
“Do you want to be able to do those things?”
“I should like the gift of composing poetry,” he said gravely.
“Why?”
“That I might write a poem about you!” was the bland reply.
Marion’s face flushed, and the smile gave place to a look of haughty surprise. Bony went on unperturbed. “Yesterday when I looked back and saw the hills riding on the mirage sea I felt sad that I could not fix the beauty of it with words as a great painter with his brushes. To make an immortal copy of beauty, either with brush or pen, would, I believe, be a most satisfying accomplishment.”
“I think I begin to understand you,” Marion told him. By this time the freezing look had melted away.
“I am glad of that. Permit me to attend to this custard for one moment.”
Watching him at work over the big range, Marion recognized that she was strongly attracted by this man’s personality. He was so natural, so utterly without affectation, and so perfectly free from the slightest taint of coarseness. No other men of her acquaintance, and they ranged from an Irish peer down to a horse-boy, possessed the likeable personality of this half-caste. Dear old Father Ryan was splendid, of course, and he came very close.
“Have you been doing station work ever since you left the university, Bony?” she asked softly.
“Mostly station work, yes,” he replied, turning. “You see, had I been a half-caste Chinaman, or a half-caste anything else, I should not have felt the call of the bush as I did and do. A lot of white people, even in the Australian cities, know very little about the Australian native, and nothing whatever of the cause of his being the happy nomad that he is. White people, some of whom are quite intelligent, imagine it to be possible to throw the mantle of the white man’s civilization about a native or a half-native and keep it there. I have never known a half-caste, even with the educational attainments I possess, remain all his life in a city among white people.”
“Nor I either, Bony.”
“From the mission where I was reared I graduated to a high school and from there to the university. Mastering the arts and sciences came to me with extraordinary ease. Many people who knew me foretold for me a brilliant future. ‘Observe the white man’s culture in Bony,’ they said. For a little while I believed them, and then one day I began to want something that I couldn’t define or name. You yourself, having been born in the bush, might be able to name my want.”
“Well, it is hard to describe it, Bony, unless we name it the Call of the Bush. I have felt that call when I was at college and during the time I was in England with Dad.”
“That is it, Miss Stanton. You were born in the bush, and have felt the call. How much more plainly must I have heard that call with the blood of countless nomadic ancestors in my veins! I left Sydney when I was twenty-two and went back to North Queensland, where I first saw the light. And my body craved for complete freedom from the white man’s clothes. I wanted to go ahunting as my mother’s father had hunted, and I wanted to eat flesh, raw flesh, and feast on tree grubs, and then lie down in the shade and go to sleep, fed full and feeling the wind play over my naked skin.
“That is what I wanted to do; but reason, the trained white man’s reason in me, caused me to behave a little less primitively, and in the end the white and the black blood in me called a truce; and behold the result to-day—Bony!
“I have worked on stations. I have taught children their ‘three R’s’. I go to Sydney to study psychology occasionally, and to Brisbane to supervise the education of my three
children. Marie, my wife, also a half-caste, stays there because of them, but neither she nor my children nor myself can resist the call of the bush. You understand and sympathize; but how can the white fool understand who has never been farther than a few miles from a city? It is like caging a full-grown galah and expecting it to be happy.”
“And are you happy?”
“Quite, although for many years I was very unhappy. Now I have come to balance accurately the white man’s impulses against those of the black man.”
“Tell me about your wife and children,” she said. He did so, the while making a bread-pudding for the men. He told her of his firstborn, who was following so decidedly in his footsteps, of Bob being tortured by the call of the bush, and of baby Ed, who was adventuring to his first school. He watched the changing expressions on her face and glimpsed the purity of her in her eyes, and he came to know that in spite of the ring she wore she knew nothing of what lay behind the blackfellow’s sign of the sheep’s leg and the sticks fashioned as a fan. To know that was why he had conducted their conversation as he had done. In the art of guiding conversation, and establishing scientific conclusions from it, Bony had few, if any, superiors.
He was, however, in several respects not unlike the great man whose names he bore. In conducting a case he knew how to make his depositions, and when and how to force his opponents into inextricable situations. Within rigid bounds he was unscrupulous. If he wanted an object as proof of a contention, and that object was in the pocket of another person, he would not hesitate to obtain it through sleight of hand with a dexterity that many expert pickpockets would have envied. Nor would he scruple to employ the gentle art of “pumping” to extract information from unsuspicious people. He proceeded to “pump” Marion.
“The bush always had a very strange fascination for me,” he remarked in his gentle way. “Birds and insects and animals always interest me. The honey ants, those peculiar ants who live in a tiny cavern deep in the earth, and are fed with honey by the other ants until they become so full they are unable to move; and the black ants, who heat small stones by laying them in the sun to take down to keep their eggs warm. I know a man who, watching a nest of those ants, actually saw one bring up a tiny nugget of gold. The nugget had dropped off someone’s watch-chain, for it was quite evident that it had had a fastener of some sort.”
“How strange!” Marion said, her face alive with interest. “It reminds me of the sapphire I lost from this ring months ago. I lost it, however, in the house somewhere, so the ants hadn’t a chance. I am positive about that, because all the stones were in my ring when I had breakfast one morning, and I hadn’t been out of the house when I missed it.”
“That was very unfortunate.” Bony was watching her.
“Indeed, yes. The ring was my mother’s engagement ring, and she willed it to me before she died. I was obliged to send it to Adelaide to get the stone replaced.”
“Perhaps I may be able to track it.” Bony smiled. “They say I am rather good at tracking. Once in Queensland I tracked a lost man when the aboriginals gave it up.”
“Indeed! That’s another thing you can do! It is a pity you weren’t here a month or two back. There was a man lost not two miles from here. I expect you’ve heard all about that?”
“Yes. The affair appears most peculiar.”
“It was. All the men and even Dad and I, rode out day after day and never found a trace of him. No one ever saw him after he left the house, having taken lunch with us. Dot and Dash were kangarooing in the next paddock south, and never came across his tracks. Of course, it was some time after he went away that his car was found and the search was made.”
“Were there no trackers among the blacks here?” inquired Bony innocently.
“Yes. There were Ludbi and old Moongalliti, and the day we took them to the car you would think they couldn’t track a horse after rain. They were almost useless. Said too many days past when Marks walked away from the car.”
“Very sad. Most sad. I suppose Mr Marks was a friend of your family?”
“Oh, no. Dad had had some business with him years ago, and he called on Dad to persuade him to make some investment or other. If he had been a friend it would have been dreadful. … Why, just look at the time! I’ve been here an hour. You are to be complimented, Bony.”
“And you, madam, to be heartily thanked.”
Marion rose, but at the door paused to say:
“Do you think I could ride Grey Cloud this evening?”
“Decidedly, but permit someone to ride with you until Grey Cloud has proved himself.”
“Thank you! I will.” Marion smiled and was gone.
Chapter Sixteen
Bony Goes Courting
A CONVERSATION conducted by Bony was seldom without result to him. The conversation he had had with Marion pleased him immensely.
There was certainly a good deal of the mystic in Bony, although he seldom admitted it. Of all the great world religions he was sceptical, but where several religions agreed he agreed also. Which is to say he believed in the fundamental existence of God. Of all things spiritually beautiful Bony was a worshipper. A beautiful view, a glorious sunset, and a lovely woman—not necessarily a beautifully featured woman—always won homage from him. Seeing and sensing the spiritual beauty of Marion Stanton, the soul of this strange man thrilled, and he was made positively happy to be once and for all convinced that she had nothing whatever to do with the disappearance of Marks.
He now awaited two things: the arrival of the aboriginal tribe and the receipt of Marks’s or Green’s official history. If a certain happening was mentioned in the history, it would justify his referring to an eminent authority the small thin silver disk, with the details regarding Marks, for positive identification. Should his own theory as to that silver disk be substantiated, then the death of the man Marks was proved.
On the evening of the third day of his cooking activities one of the riders informed him that the blacks would reach their main camping-ground, half a mile down the creek, where there was another deep water-hole, that night. Bony smiled and waited patiently. And the following evening, while he was washing up, a guttural voice spoke to him from the doorway, and there he saw Moongalliti’s cunning old face.
“Goo’-day-ee, Cook!” greeted the chief, with a broad happy grin as though welcoming a lifelong friend.
“Good day!” drawled Bony, carrying on with his work.
“Alf, ’e bin gone Mount Lion for pop-eye?” came the friendly inquiry.
“That so. Full up with grog by this time.”
Moongalliti laughed heartily, seating himself on the doorstep. Then: “You’m the new cook, eh?”
“Yes.”
“What say? Bimeby you gibbit tucker, eh?”
“Perhaps.”
“You come long way? You no Windee feller, eh?”
“No. I come from North Queensland.”
“Um! Nor’ Queensland—long way, eh? Wot ’em your totem?”
It was a question Bony had been expecting. The sergeant had told him that the totem of those people was the emu; and, to make him akin to them, he said: “My totem—emu. My lubra mother she emu totem.”
Moongalliti beamed, and regarded Bony with fresh interest. “Good, eh?” he exclaimed with seeming enthusiasm. Then he said something in his native dialect which Bony could not understand; and the half-caste told him in a North Queensland native dialect that Moongalliti was a spirit-slaying, bone-pointing old scoundrel, which that important personage likewise did not understand. He reverted to his broken English.
“You young feller bin—bin … You young feller bin made—bin made buck?” he inquired casually.
That was another question Bony had been waiting for. Laying aside the plate he was drying, he removed his white apron, and pulled up his shirt about his neck, and old Moongalliti saw welts made by a sharp flint on Bony’s chest, and chuckled with satisfaction.
“You orl ri’, eh?” was his judgmen
t.
Bony turned about and showed Moongalliti his back. Across his shoulders was cut a rough square and in its centre a circle, and when Moongalliti saw these his black eyes bulged and he crept closer to Bony, the better to examine the brand.
“My!” he said, almost in a sigh. “You beeg feller chief, Nor’ Queensland, eh?”
Turning, Bony nodded, set his shirt in order, then resumed the apron of his calling. Moongalliti’s attitude towards the stranger half-caste had become almost deferential. He now was convinced that Bony had been through the initiation ceremony making of him a man, but he was astounded to see that Bony was very high in the mysterious cult, little known even among the blacks, which may be compared in many respects to the craft called Freemasonry.
Inwardly Bony was delighted to find that the old fellow recognized that sign. It would smooth away many difficulties of access to the heart and the mind of the chief or king of this small tribe.
Moongalliti left presently with as much waste and unused food as he could carry. Bony watched him across to the creek-bed, where he was met by an old white-haired gin and a much younger one who limped badly. With a lordly air Moongalliti gave them the food to carry, and himself walked on before them. The next evening, and in the future, it would be the women who would come begging for food. The reason the chief had come himself that night was to “place” the strange half-caste, the new cook.
Thenceforward every morning two young lubras passed the kitchen on their way to work at the “Government House”, and repassed on their way back to their camp every evening. At Bony they cast curious shy glances, and since he doubted not that both he and they were watched by Moongalliti or Ludbi, or others of the bucks, he made no overtures to them whatever. Regularly, when the men had finished dinner and he was cleaning up, two and sometimes three of the oldest gins came along asking for tucker, and to these Bony made himself particularly pleasant.
To several of the young bucks Jeff Stanton offered employment at white man’s wages, but this they declined until such time as the corroboree was past. Judicious questioning of the hands, particularly of Jack Withers, elicited the fact that Moongalliti’s tribe consisted of forty-three adults, of whom eighteen were women, and an unknown number of children of all ages. The stockman, the man of the atrocious squint, was at all times exceedingly interested in the blacks, and was chaffed unmercifully by the others, who professed to consider him in danger of becoming a “combo”, or a white man who is married—more or less—to a lubra.
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