The bushman who came back b-22

by Arthur W. Upfield

  It was an item of information known by Canute when he and his tribe were all supposed to be fifty miles from the scene of the crime, and as nothing can reside in a man’s mind unless drawn into it from outside, from whom had he received the description of a bloodstain roughly in the form of a question mark?

  When Bony had bluntly asked the man and the woman still sleeping nearby how Canute knew of that mark, shutters fell. They might now know how or from whom Canute was informed, but they did know he had been so informed, and they could have gained their knowledge in the same way and at the same time that Bony had. They would not question Canute, would accept the fact that he knew, and be content to ignore something which did not concern them.

  Then why had Canute passed the knowledge to his followers? Was it to impress upon them his authority, and to confirm a ruling he and his Medicine Man had proclaimed? Where are Yorky and Linda Bell, those two sleepers had been asked, and the shutters had fallen swiftly as though he might read the answer in unguarded eyes.

  This would account for lack of evidence of concern about the fate of Linda Bell. It would support the opinion that the interest of the aborigines in tracking the man and the child waned long before it could reasonably be expected to do. For your aborigine is the greatest child lover of all human races, and Bony was sure that Yorky would have been tracked right to the tip of Cape York had he murdered Linda Bell.

  The rested ducks skittered across the glass-like surface of the small lake, to take off on the next leg of their journey, and within minutes it would be full light. Standing, Bony gazed on the sleeping lovers who dared not defy the authority governing their hearts and minds, and he was compelled to admire the degree of discipline to which they had been brought, and to pity them for the freedom thus denied them. He took a towel to the water, stripped and walked to the centre of the small lake, when it but reached his knees, and lowered himself into it and watched the changing lights in the sky above.

  To question Charlie and his Meena further would be unfair to them, as well as futile. They had consciously and unconsciously given him something to aid his investigation. They knew a little of the much known to Canute and his Grand Vizier. They were sure in mind that Linda was safe enough. And that meant the child was still within the Lake Eyre Basin. By tracking him, Charlie was merely obeying an order. By tracking Charlie, Meena had acted on impulse prompted by one of several reasons. Neither could be rushed; both could be led to further co-operation.

  Towelling himself, he dressed and returned to the camp, where he was shaving when the girl stirred and stood, stretched her arms and opened wide her shoulders. Seeing him, she turned to the fire and replenished the fuelling, then filled the billy from the pack-drum and set it against the flames.

  On completing his toilet, Bony crossed to stand with her.

  “After we have eaten you had better return to the homestead,” he said. “You will remember that you didn’t catch up with Charlie, and he and I will wipe out the tracks about this place to prove it.”

  She turned to face him, her large dark eyes gentle, the grey flecks soft and distinct. He saw himself in her, and she herself in him. Each of the same duality of race, each was of neither one race nor the other. There was a faint tremble about her mouth when she said:

  “Did you speak true last night when you told Charlie about your Meena, and being married and running away to that place among the tobacco bush?”

  “Yes. You heard that?”

  She nodded, her face downcast.

  “You would like the Missioner to marry you and Charlie, wouldn’t you?”

  Again the slight nod, the dark eyes hopeful, and Bony wished that Marie, his wife, was there to help the girl to break the chains of tribal taboos.

  “Canute is blind and old,” he reminded her. “Murtee is old. I’ll tell them to free you from the birth promise so that you can marry Charlie. When I tell them, they will. And then the Missioner can marry you, and you can go away and camp somewhere among tobacco bush where Charlie can love you.”

  “True?”

  “Bet?”

  She watched him break unequally two match sticks, watched him wave his hands, then present the sticks in his clenched fist, the tops on a level.

  “Long I will; short I won’t,” he recited.

  She pulled one of the sticks, and he opened his hand and she found her choice to be the longer. She remained so still with her head bent to look at those sticks, that he wondered if she had detected the trick which removed the gamble from the act, and then was rewarded by the smile on her face, a smile which, like the day, was slowly born.

  “Better wake that Charlie,” he advised, and turned away to re-pack his shaving gear.

  She wakened Charlie by nudging him with her toes and calling him a lazy black bastard. Charlie grunted, stood, stretched as she had done, grinned and lunged at her. She turned and fled, fled to the lake, and he raced after her and joined battle with splashing water. She danced about him, shouting with laughter at his attempts to grab her, shrieked with pretended terror when he succeeded. Together they fell and writhed in the foam, and eventually came walking back to camp hand in hand. And as they ate the food presented by Bony, the heat of the fire raised steam from their shorts.

  Later, the two men silently watched the girl skirting the lake, and Bony thought that if white girls had been there to watch Meena, they would never wear shoes. For a moment she stood on the crest of a red dune, then turned and waved before disappearing beyond it.

  “How far is the Loaders Springs road?” Bony asked, and was told some four miles. Eighteen miles beyond the road gate was the next of Yorky’s camps where water lay in a rock-hole. “You can follow on after me, Charlie. You know, make believe you’re still tracking me, eh?”

  Charlie laughed, and there was no doubt he was pleased at this way out of admission of failure. They discussed the matter of erasing Meena’s tracks, and Charlie said it couldn’t be done under two days, and predicted wind later on this day which would do the job for them. He brought the belled horses, helped to load the pack-animal, and squatted over the dying fire while giving Bony a lead of several miles.

  Sitting easy in his saddle, the pack-horse trailing behind, Bony began soon to doubt that Charlie’s weather prediction could be correct. The sky gave no sign of wind, and if no wind came to wipe away Meena’s tracks, they would be read by another aborigine, who would report them. Noon found Bony still riding. The willi-willies were again on the march, the sun-heat powerful, and the necessity of creating a diversion from those camp tracks became even stronger.

  One of Bony’s rules of crime investigation, and one which more often than not brought results, was to stir up those opposed to him when it seemed they were standing still. Canute and Murtee were reclining in the tree-shade and content with the counter-move they had made by sending Charlie to find out what the big-feller policeman was doing. Charlie and the big-feller policeman were following an endless boundary fence in the heat of a late summer, a fence lying along the perimeter of a great circle centred by Mount Eden homestead. In three days Bony and his follower would again reach Lake Eyre, this time to the south of the homestead, and so far the only gain for Bony was what he had set out to achieve, proof of interest by the aborigines in his investigation.

  He decided to create a diversion from Meena’s tracks which also would spur those wily aborigine leaders into action of some kind.

  He would smoke-signal to them!

  At four o’clock the wind was still absent, and the sky was wiped clean of clouds.

  The place for the signals was found in a narrow gully where grew young tobacco bush amid sapling gums. Bony heaped dry bush and sticks at three widely separated points, and beside the rubbish he deposited other heaps of green tobacco bush and green tree boughs.

  In general, smoke-signalling is done to convey simple messages, and in particular is used to draw a distant medicine man or head man into telepathic communication. It was not Bony’s intention to sen
d a message, but to create confusion, curiosity and alarm.

  He fired a heap of rubbish, and the rubbish burned brightly without smoke. On to this fire he tossed green bush, and at once dense smoke rose straight upward. When the column was high and the green stuff almost consumed, he fired the second heap, and when it was bright, blanketed it with green boughs. Thence from one fire to another, he sent up three columns with varied spacing of each, the weather being perfect, and he patted himself with justifiable satisfaction. Canute and his followers couldn’t read the message, because there wasn’t one, and what poor bewildered Charlie, now plodding along the horses’ tracks, would think of it was subject for quiet merriment.

  The aborigines in their camp, and Charlie on the tramp, would most certainly be perturbed by the signals they couldn’t understand.

  Aided by memory of the wall map in Wootton’s office, Bony estimated he was then nine miles direct from Mount Eden homestead. That the smokes would be seen by the aborigines there, he was confident, and that Canute would dispatch some of his bucks to investigate would be certain.

  An hour later he was riding up one of the gibber-armoured slopes over which Arnold had to pass to reach the old homestead for the iron, and on arriving at the summit of a tabletop he was amused and gratified to see smokes going up from Canute’s camp.

  He was about to begin the long descent to a wide belt of trees and a windmill, when he saw an answering signal rising from the place at which he had created both diversion and confusion. Charlie was informing Canute that adebil-debil was playing hell in general.

  Throughout the night, Bony sat with his back against a tree some three hundred yards from the rock-hole near which was based Yorky’s camp. He waited for Charlie, but Charlie failed to materialize from the encircling darkness.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Balancing Results

  SIGNSOFwind were not disturbing until noon the next day, when the sky was streakily washed with slacked lime and the sun’s rays were tinged with red. Bony rode a hundred yards from the fence to accept the meagre shade of a patch of bull-oaks which, when first seen, appeared to be ten miles distant when actually they were within a mile, and looked to be thriving British oaks on a mountain top when they were half dead on the slope of a shallow rise.

  The flies were in festive mood. Slightly smaller than the common house fly, Bony had kept them at bay with a leafy switch, like a pasha riding a small donkey, and now they followed him into the shade, to attack again as he removed the saddles from the tormented horses, not bothering to tether them as they were not so stupid as to wander into the sun-glare. At once they sought his company, when he, having made a small fire to boil water, found refuge in the rising heated air that he might convey food to his mouth, and the horses stood either side of him, their heads also in the hot air. Better the heat than flies drowning in the eyes.

  Of Charlie he had seen nothing since the morning of yesterday, and so far nothing resulted from his trick smoke-signalling. He had observed no puzzling tracks, and since leaving Mount Eden homestead had found no sign of Ole Fren Yorky.

  Still, in this country, the wise do not hasten to peer beyond the crest of a sand dune, but rather await the dune to come to them. And it indicated its intention of so doing when, later this day, Bony was continuing his journey along the endless boundary fence.

  He and the fence were crossing a vast area of gibbers. Fortunately he was proceeding eastward, because it was impossible to see anything westward for the glare of reflected light from the ironstone armour covering the ground. Ahead some few miles, the fence would terminate at Lake Eyre, seventeen miles south of the Mount Eden homestead.

  He saw the first of the smokes rising west of north, and so distant that they looked like gold straws sprouting from the mirage. There were three. One was continuous, one was broken at long intervals, and the third broken at short intervals. They lasted for about ten minutes and ended in a flat-top of dark-grey fog. Then four smokes rose from near or at Canute’s camp. Two were unbroken.

  That was all, this day, and when night masked the heated earth, and Bony hadn’t reached Yorky’s next water-camp, he hitched his horses to scrub trees, sat with his back to another, and dozed fitfully until the first ray of dawn.

  Before the sun rose, during those magic moments when this Earth is pure and without deceit, smokes rose from Canute’s camp, from far to the west, far to the south, and far beyond Mount Eden’s northern limits.

  As Bony rode, a grim little smile puckered his firm mouth, and he said to the horse: “When everyone even remotely concerned in a crime sits down, then do something to make them stand. My smokes have certainly made someone stand.”

  Before noon he came to a bore languidly spouting water on the far side of the fence, and remembered having camped here when journeying to Mount Eden. Passing through a gateway, he watered the horses and was filling the drums when he heard on the Mount Eden side of the fence a succession of shots sounding like rifle reports produced by a stock-whip. Minutes passed, then he saw the rider cantering to the gateway. He rode through to Bony’s camp fire, vaulting off the animal before it stopped.

  “Day-ee, Inspector. How you doing?” asked Harry Lawton.

  “So-so,” replied Bony. “Have a spot of tea?”

  “My word.”

  Young Lawton unstrapped the quart pot from his saddle, removed the cup-lid and filled it from Bony’s billy. He raised the cup and said:

  “Good hunting! Flamin ’ hot, isn’t it? Going to blow like hell before night by the look of that sky.”

  The brown eyes bespoke casual curiosity. The shaven face, the neck and chest revealed by the open shirt and the bare forearms had the smooth firmness of flesh possessed by Charlie, and were almost the same colour. Lawton’s trousers were of grey gabardine, his riding boots of quality kangaroo hide, and his spurs weregoosenecked and fitted with sixpences to make them jingle. He displayed the art of sitting on his heels without sitting on the spurs.

  “What are you doing out this way?” asked Bony.

  “Me? Oh, riding the ruddy fence and turning the cattle back towards the homestead. Cattle will hang around trying to get to the water this side of the boundary. You been missing some fun.”

  “Oh!”

  “My word!” Lawton grinned. “Been hell and low water down at theabos ’ camp. Best riot come ever. Yououghta see some of ’em. Rex is dragging an ear over his shoulder, Sarah’s lost half her teeth somewhere. Meena got hanks of her hair pulled out, and somebody wielded a waddy against old Murtee and outed him.”

  “When did all this happen?” sharply inquired Bony.

  “Night before last. Heck of a good go. We seen only the tail end of it. Bodies lying all over the joint when me and the boss and Arnold got there. Crikey! If only I had a movie camera. Been thinking a long time of getting one.”

  “You pacified them?”

  “Pacified ’em!” Lawton broke into a guffaw. “Strike me green, they was all pacified enough. Round about eight we heard theroarin ’ andscreamin ’. Boss came over from the house, but we told him to let ’emalone. He wanted to pacify ’emas you call it. Arnold said they’d quieten down by the time we wanted to sleep, and we were arguing about it when Meena came tearing up to say if something wasn’t done there’d be killings for sure.

  “So we went along. Would have toted our guns, but Wootton wouldn’t have it. Said we didn’t want shotabos lying around. Like I told you, there was plenty ofabos lying around, but they wasn’t shot. You’d have laughed when we got the camp fire blazing for light. Kids screaming; lubras yelling; abos shouting dirt andabos crawling round looking for waddies and things they’d dropped.

  “There was old Canuterollin ’ about, and when I asked him what he thought he was doing in his dungeon he tells me that a Kurdaitcha knocked him down. Feller called Jimmy Wall Eye thought he’d start something and made a lash at Arnold. You should have seen it. It was a beaut. Arnold prodded him on his good eye, and that fixed him.”

&nbs
p; “But what was it all about?” asked the unsmiling Bony, and Harry Lawton laughed again and said no one knew or would tell. He went on:

  “Next morning, the boss sent Arnold to the camp with the truck. Sent me with him. Said we had to gather up all the wounded and take ’emin to Doc Crouch to patch up. But thereain’t no wounded, noabos at all. They’d all cleared out except Sarah and Meena. They’re back on the jobcookin ’ and what not. Hell! I’ll have to get that camera. How Rex isgoin ’ to get his ear back on I can’t see.”

  Lawton stowed his lunch-cloth into a saddle-bag, and the quart pot he strapped to the saddle, then, standing loosely beside Bony and rolling a cigarette, he said:

  “Reckon I’ll be pushing off. Which way youmakin ’? Along to Yorky’s Lake camp?”

  “Yes. How far from here?”

  “ ’Bout six miles. Bit of horse-feed about the place, but crook in a dust-storm. You doing any good mooching about?”

  “Not much,” admitted Bony.

  “D’youknow what I reckon, Inspector? I reckon Yorky ditched the kid in asandhill, and got for his life over to the railway and jumped a train for the Alice. Easy done, y’know. Me and a mate jumped the rattler out of Loaders and put in a week up there on a bender, then jumped her back again to Loaders. Well, beseein ’ you.”

  Harry Lawton didn’t mount that horse. He rose up and into the saddle. He did not dismount to open the gate and close it when passing into Mount Eden country; he did that chore from the saddle. Then he waved and cantered into the mirage, which made him look like an ant on a grasshopper. And, automatically, Bony gathered his lunch equipment.