The Bone is Pointed

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Blake wanted to smile and dared not. Secretly he was a rebel against the authority that kept him roped to a place like Opal Town. Bony began to read the typescript he had withdrawn from the long official envelope:

  Ninth October—Prior to your assignment it was made clear to you that the exigency of the Department required you to report back not later than October the seventh. Former latitude extended to you could not in this instance be granted. Therefore, as from the seventh instant you are granted leave of absence without pay until October the twenty-first. Should you fail to report for duty on or before that date, the Chief Secretary will be advised to terminate your appointment.

  Blake’s face was serious.

  “Better report on time,” he said. “You have only six days of your leave left.”

  “But, my dear Blake,” argued Bony, becoming at once grandiloquent. “If I had thrown up my investigations at the orders of headquarters, how many of them should I have successfully finalized? Why, about three per cent. The Commissioner has sacked me at least five times for refusing to relinquish an investigation. Then, I have had to give a detailed explanation and get myself reinstated without loss of pay. Since this present investigation will not be concluded in time to permit me to report on the twenty-first I shall again be sacked, and again have to trouble myself to get reinstated. One would think that no successful investigator of crime would have to suffer such pin-pricks. However, we will forget it. Did you make any further progress with the inquiry into the local sale of green cable silk?”

  Again Blake wanted to smile but dared not.

  “A little,” he replied. “Whiting says that he has not sold green cable silk to the Gordons for a very long time, and that he doesn’t remember ever having sold cable silk, green or any other colour, to the Mackays. What’s the strength of this cable silk?”

  “The tensile strength?”

  “No. You know what I mean.”

  “I will tell you that, and several other things, for I think I could rely on you should the necessity to do so ever arise. I found a wisp of green cable silk adhering to the trunk of a tree at about the height of a man’s head. It was detached from the cracker of Anderson’s stockwhip, and I think it was so detached when he was about to thrash a man as he once thrashed Inky Boy. Immediately afterwards he was killed.

  “The situation of the tree indicates the approximate locality where Anderson was killed—always assuming he was killed. It might well have been he who was tied to the tree trunk and flogged to death with his own whip. I have been prevented from making a minute examination of the tree trunk, and the locality, by the constant surveillance maintained by one or more aboriginals who have adopted the blood and feathers method of leaving no tracks. Do you think you could get me two dogs?”

  “What sort of dogs?”

  “Mongrel cattle dogs for preference. I must become a huntsman. Could you bring me out two?”

  “Yes, I could borrow them from the butcher, I think. When will you want them?”

  “I’ll let you know. In a day or so. By the way, how long have you been stationed here?”

  “Eleven years. Ten years too long.”

  “I have been instrumental in having two senior police officers stationed in outback districts promoted to eastern districts. If you want a thing done, remember always go to the wife of the man who can do it. Who was the officer stationed here before you?”

  “Inspector Dowling, now stationed at Cairns. He was here eight years.”

  “Oh. He won’t do. Find out for me who was stationed here thirty-six-seven-eight years ago. The officer at that time is certainly now retired, but he may not be dead. If he is alive, get in touch with him, and ask him if he remembers an Irish woman, probably cook, employed at Karwir. Got that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that will be all to-day. Have the two dogs ready to bring out here when I call for them. Be discreet.”

  For some time after Blake had left, Bony squatted beside his lunch fire smoking the eternal cigarettes. Now and then he moved to ease his legs, but not once since the policeman had left him did he look up or about. He knew, because his scalp and back informed him of it, that he was being watched, and he thought he knew the position of the watcher by the constant chattering of two or three galahs in a tree somewhere beyond his horse.

  He was well aware that to pursue the watcher amid the close cover provided by the mulga forest would be fruitless, and that a search for his tracks would also be fruitless. Squatted there in the shade cast by the cabbage-trees, he was assailed by temptation. He was probably facing grave danger to his life; and he knew that there could be no possible reflection on his career if he at once threw up this case and obeyed the order to return to Brisbane. By refusing to abandon this investigation, he might well be dismissed from the service, for on former occasions when he had disobeyed a similar order the Chief Commissioner himself had added the threat of dismissal in his own handwriting. There was nothing personal in the typewritten communication he had just received.

  Yet he knew he would never succumb to the temptation. Pride was his weapon; his reputation his armour. He would go forward even if he lost his official position, even if he lost his life. Once he failed to solve a case, once he was conscious of failure, it would be the beginning of the end for him. And for Marie, his wife, and for the boys, too. For they and he owed rank and social standing only to his invincible pride.

  This day he was very different from the man who walked the earth as Detective-Inspector Bonaparte. Within Bony’s soul constantly warred the opposing influences planted therein by his white father and his black mother, and according to external influences of the moment, so did the battle favour one side or the other. To the fact of his alliance with the aborigines he had blinded Colonel Spendor, many of his colleagues, and many people like the Lacys and the Gordons. But he had not blinded these Kalchut blacks. They knew him, knew that never with the hammer of pride and the file of success would he break the racial bond. Their blood flowed through his veins. Their beliefs and their superstitions were implanted in the very marrow of his bones, and all his advanced education could not make him other than what he was.

  And now his soul was swiftly becoming ruled by his mother and her people, the rule hastened by the Kalchut tribe. Their shadow had fallen upon him, a half-caste, when it would have failed utterly to touch a white man. A white man would never have suspected himself of being watched and tracked by people who were never seen and who left no sign of their movements on ground that showed the imprint even of scorpions.

  Yes, they could kill him as it seemed certain they were about to do. They could demand his body and take it. He could never be free of the blood, never escape them. Ah—but he could! He could escape them before they struck. He could return to Brisbane, and there rant and rave at being ordered to return and so claim that he was officially prevented from successfully completing this case. Yes, he could do that. But he himself would know it for an excuse. Defeated by fear, within six months he and his would become bush nomads. Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte would indeed become poor old Bony. Better death than that. Compared with that what would be death?

  His unseen trackers had retrieved his discarded cigarette ends, because they had once been one with his person. No longer was his trackers’ attitude towards him a negative one. They had resolved on action. They, or someone who controlled them, determined to deal with him, to remove him because he was dangerous. And he, being what he was, was open to receive their magic with which they would kill him.

  They were preparing to point the bone at him.

  The act of pointing the bone was, of course, merely a theatrical show, having a psychological effect both on the bone-pointers and the victim. The power to kill lay not in the outward show but in the mental willing to death conducted by the executioners. Bony knew that the pointing bone could be used by any male member of nearly all the Australian tribes, but its success in killing depended on the mental power of the
pointers. If the victim could conquer inherited superstitions, and then if his mind were stronger than the minds of the bone-pointers, he might escape death long enough for his relations to find out who was pointing the bone and at once exact vengeance.

  Once the bone was pointed at him, Bony, his escape from death would depend on his ability to resist the minds willing death long enough for him to finish his job and return to Brisbane where the white men’s influences, plus the service of a hypnotist, would free him of the magic.

  A light, cold finger ran its tip up Bony’s spine and touched the roots of his hair. The pointing bone had killed that Dieri man away at the back of Lake Frome. Bony’s mind recalled the fellow’s terror-stricken face on which was written the awful knowledge of his doom. Five days he had lived before he died in convulsions—the eagle’s claws buried in his kidneys and the bones piercing his liver and heart. There had been that half-caste just over the southern Queensland border, he who had run away with a chief’s favourite lubra. A pointed stick had been aimed at him, and he had taken two months to waste away to death despite a white doctor, a squatter and his wife, and Bony. The doctor had said it was the Barcoo sickness.

  Bony’s eyes closed. Doubtless it was the heat of the afternoon or, perhaps, the smoke of the fire. Or was it? Bony’s subconscious mind urged him to stand up, urged him to race to his horse and ride like the wind to Opal Town to hire a car to take him to the distant railway. He ought not to feel the need to sleep. He never slept during the daylight hours. He should not want to sleep now when his mind was so occupied with this case, and so influenced by the menace crowding close.

  Was the idea of sleep being suggested to his mind?

  For five or six long minutes Bony fought the demon of panic, while his motionless body rested on his heels. Little beads of moisture glistened on his broad forehead and at the corners of his mouth. His will eventually beat down the panic. Now he knew that he could and would pretend to submit to the suggestion to sleep. Uncertainty in the immediate future would be unbearable.

  In simulation Bony rose to stretch his arms and to yawn. He made a little hole in the soft sand of the ground to take his hip and settled himself so that he lay on his left side facing the horse, his head resting on his left forearm and his right hand tucked away under his body, the fingers firmly curved about the butt of his automatic pistol. His eyes partially closed, and his mind at work countering the suggestion to sleep, he maintained a steady watch on the dozing horse, while listening to the chattering galahs.

  The minutes passed in slow procession. The invisible birds screamed once and then flew to another tree to continue their chattering in which now was certain anger. Then the horse awoke to toss her head, then to stand without movement and to stare at a point beyond Bony’s range of vision.

  Slowly now she began to move the angle of her head, and to Bony it was obvious that she was watching something moving, something that was approaching him. Then he saw it. A tall black figure slowly became detached from the trunks of a tree standing in shadow. The man was entirely naked save for the masses of feathers about his feet.

  It was Wandin. His hair was glued with clay and encircled with a ring fashioned from canegrass. He carried no weapon, neither waddy nor spear. He carried, like any one might carry a saucer filled with tea, a curved piece of bark. When he entered the sunlight Bony saw clearly his face fixed by the expression of hatred, his eyes alive like black opals.

  How carefully he carried the piece of bark in his right hand! It might have been filled to the brim with liquid, but, as Bony knew, it contained not liquid but powder. Without sound, the aboriginal drew near and nearer to the recumbent man so sorely tempted to shoot with the weapon he kept hidden beneath his body. What Wandin was going to do could be prevented now, but not for always. What he did not achieve now another would achieve in the future.

  And so Wandin came to stand close to Bony. His right hand carried the bark over Bony’s body and tilted it so that the powder fell in a mist upon him. That Bony continued inactive, that he did not spring to his feet and shoot down this sorcerer carrying out a further step in the boning, said much for the half-caste’s courage and power of will. He began to tremble when Wandin retreated, but gave no sign that he was awake.

  So the blacks had been tracking him for weeks, and intuition had again served him well. The Kalchut were behind the disappearance of Jeffery Anderson, and knowing Bony to be a danger to them, they were preparing to remove him.

  Well, they could get on with their boning. He would fight it with all the strength of his mind, and again he would triumph over his aboriginal ancestry as he had so often done before. He would put on the armour of the white man and carry the weapons of mockery and cynicism. By the shade of the Little Corporal himself! Was he a savage? Was he an ignorant nomad of the bush? Was he a child to suffer palpitation of the heart because a black ghost had appeared in broad day? Was he a mental weakling to suffer evil born in lesser minds, to be frightened away from this absorbing investigation by the mental power of a people free of the curse laid upon Adam?

  He pretended to awake. He sat up, stared about, scrambled to his feet and gathered sticks with which to replenish the fire. He knew the worst now, and now he felt strong.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Pointed Bones and Eagle’s Claws

  THE most potent magic is that brought from a great distance.

  When the world was young, when the white men, probably, were gug-guggering like apes, an old Pittongu man left the Murchison Range to travel far to the north. Like a knight of a much later age, he was well armed, carrying with him stone axes, stone knives, barbed spears, and a particularly deadly magic called maringilitha.

  One day, when well forward on his journey, he dropped some of the maringilitha which, on striking the ground, caused a great explosion. The old Pittongu (bat) man was blown into dust, as were all his weapons, and on the place arose a great stone surrounded by very many little stones. Into the big and all the little stones entered the bat man’s maringilitha magic, so that these stones became of great commercial value to the tribes who owned the land, the Worgaia and the Gnanji.

  The most daring members of these tribes from time to time collected little stones and sang into them their own particular curses, then wrapped each stone in paper bark and tied the bark with human hair string. To all the tribes far south and east this new form of magic, called mauia, came to be considered one of the most potent forms of magic that could be employed against an enemy.

  Several of these stones had in the course of inter-tribal trade come into the possession of the Kalchut tribe, and were safely kept, with the sacred articles used in initiation ceremonies, in the secret storehouse situated somewhere among the hills east of Meena Lake.

  Previous to Bony’s visit to the Gordons, Nero and several of his older men had travelled to the storehouse, from which they had taken one of the mauia stones and the pointing bone apparatus. Subsequently Wandin had set out with the mauia stone in the dilly-bag suspended from his neck, to await a favourable opportunity of “opening” Bony’s body that the magic of the pointed bones might more easily enter it.

  Seen only by the galahs, he had watched the meeting of Bony and Sergeant Blake, and then, when the policeman had departed, he had sat with his arms rested on his hunched knees and his forehead pressing down upon his arms, and willed Bony to sleep. Thinking he had achieved this, he scraped particles off the mauia stone on to a piece of bark, carried the bark to the recumbent form of the half-caste, and spilled over him the dust of the magic stone.

  Having then retreated to a secret camp, he made a fire and placed on it the piece of bark, watching to see how the bark would burn. It burned slowly, telling Wandin that the prospective victim would die slowly.

  Out of the tribe’s sight that night he and his chief held a conference about a little fire. It was decided to perform the boning during the night of the full moon, when, it was thought, the dreaded Mindye, so fearful of the light, would
tarry at his home.

  Thus, when the full orb of the copper-coloured moon rose above the sharp rim of the uplands east of the lake, Nero and Wandin stole from the camp, regarded fearfully by the men and the women who suspected a deed of magic was to be committed this night. They passed the Meena homestead almost immediately below the veranda on which John Gordon sat reading to his mother who was knitting. On went Nero and Wandin, their naked feet making no sound, their black bodies covered only with trousers, until they stopped before a tree killed by lightning and never since used by the nesting birds.

  It was Nero who knelt before the tree and Wandin who climbed on his broad back to reach a hand into a great hole in the trunk. From this hole he brought out the pointing bone apparatus which he thrust into his dilly-bag.

  Neither man spoke and, turning away, they began the journey to the secret camp. Nero walked first, taking unusual care never to touch a fallen stick with his feet, careful to follow claypans as much as possible, Wandin walking in his tracks so that it would appear that only one man walked abroad this night.

  The moon had reached the meridian when they came to the road at a place midway between the Karwir boundary gate and Pine Hut. Nero selected a claypan crossing on which the tracks of motors were hardly discernible in broad day-light. It was two o’clock in the morning when they arrived at the secret camp beside the banked fire. Nero gave his orders. One broke down the banked fire and added fuel, and on it placed an old rusty billycan. The other brought a kangaroo, the hind feet of which were tied together.