“I may have to test your hospitality for several weeks, and we must not permit ourselves to be bored by any one subject.”
Bony was assured that no subject could be boring to people starved for outside contacts and was conducted to a pleasant room facing across the compound to the creek trees. Having been given the hint by Howard, he changed into more formal clothes and, on hearing a triangle beaten with a bar, made his way to the dining-room. Here he found his host and Howard, with two young men, gathered before a sideboard, and was offered beer or sherry.
A red-bearded, blue-eyed man was presented to him as Old Ted, and a boy looking no older than sixteen was presented as Young Col. Young Col’s hair was fair and over-long, and his hazel eyes glinted with mischief. Both spoke with polished accents.
“We have heard about you, Inspector,” Young Col said, raising his glass as though to toast. “Nothing to your discredit. Could I be wrong, Ted?”
“Not this time,” replied the bearded man and, raising his glass, added, “Here’s to the Guest of Honour. May his stay with us always be peaceful.”
“It always will, provided you call me Bony.”
“Delighted. What d’you reckon, Chief?” inquired the red man.
“Comes easy to the tongue,” agreed the cattleman.
Tessa came in, this time with the two children. Bony greeted them and smiled into their excited eyes. A tall thin man in chef’s livery appeared, carrying a large platter, and was followed by a young Aborigine woman, wearing cap and apron over a black dress, bearing another tray.
The room, the appointments, the company, Bony found most pleasing, and he quickly realized it was due to Rose Brentner’s long influence over this homestead. Her husband talked easily, the young men teased Howard, the children asked questions without seeming to intrude, and Tessa supervised their meal. He was promised introduction to a Mister Lamb, who was a pet sheep, to a Mrs Bluey, the mother of a litter of five pups, and to a pet kangaroo called Bob Menzies.
He met Mister Lamb the following morning when, after arranging with Howard about times he could be contacted by radio, and having watched the policeman’s jeep disappear beyond the creek crossing, he was made aware of this animal by being bunted gently against his leg. Little Hilda then informed him that Mister Lamb requested a cigarette, and she was enumerating Mister Lamb’s virtues and vices when she was called to the school-room by her mother.
Rose beckoned and Bony joined her on the veranda. She said, “Come along in for morning tea. I’m dying to gossip, and I want to know all about you. The men will be busy all morning, so I have my chance.”
“Everyone knows all about me,” he told her, lightly.
“I don’t. I’m an inquisitive woman. To us you are wonderfully unusual.”
“I am the most unusual man in Australia,” was the humorously expressed claim. He was laughing and she knew it was at himself. As he told her of his origins and the highlights of his career, victories over himself rather than over others, the sense of superiority which had been with her was expunged from her mind. She admitted she hadn’t been able to brew tea in a billy-can when she came to Deep Creek as a bride, and she spoke of the many amenities she had missed, and the blessings she had been given. Eventually he asked if he might talk shop, and to this she nodded.
“I’d like to go into your experiences on that day the plane people dropped the message,” he said. “It was a bad day, wasn’t it?”
“Everything went wrong from the moment I read the message.”
“So I’m given to understand. You couldn’t get the transceiver working, and yet Mr Leroy found no difficulty in opening up. There is the possibility that someone disconnected something to delay word getting to Howard, and then made the connexion just before Leroy got here. What do you think?”
“It was talked about, I know. But who would do that? No, what happened, I believe, is that Jim and I were so excited we couldn’t do the right things to make it work. Neither of us know much about it.”
“What of Captain and Tessa?” Bony pressed.
“You may count them out. They don’t know the first thing about it.”
“Well, whatever the cause, the delay occasioned by Scolloti having to go to Beaudesert to contact Howard measures almost one day. That one day might have been important. I don’t know.”
“But why should anyone have interfered with the transceiver?”
Bony shrugged faintly, saying, “Life would be easy if we had the answers to all the questions. When you and Scolloti went outside again everyone had vanished, save the children. Even Tessa had disappeared, and it wasn’t till after sundown that Tessa returned with Captain, or rather Captain came home bringing Tessa with him. Tessa had been crying and her dress was torn as though she had been forcibly brought home. The explanation given Howard was that the tribe had suddenly decided on a walkabout, which is quite normal, and that Tessa and Captain went off with the tribe. Again quite normal, both being members of it. Tell me, what was Tessa’s explanation to you?”
“That she ran away with the others and thought better of it after Captain made her come back.”
“Please!” The blue eyes had caught her and she couldn’t evade them. “Nine years ago a child sought your protection. She was never initiated; she was adopted by you. Today she is almost fully assimilated. Her dress sense is excellent, her poise very good. Her conversation is intelligent and lucid. And she would just run off with the tribe when told? Her explanation, please.”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly like that. When I taxed her about it, she wouldn’t say anything. Then she said she didn’t know why. Eventually she confessed that the lubras beckoned and she had felt something inside compelling her to run after them. I wonder! Kurt thinks it was the collective will of the tribe. Can you agree with that?”
“Certainly. But what prompted the will of the tribe to command your Tessa? You and the children were left utterly alone after the cook went off to report. You and the children went to the camp and found it completely deserted. On your return you cleaned your husband’s guns and decided to sleep in the store-room, as it seemed the strongest place. And then in the early evening Captain returned with Tessa, the girl crying and her dress torn. The picture is clear enough, but there’s something wrong with it.”
Chapter Four
Objects of Gold
IN CONTRADISTINCTION to the Interior Aborigines, the Kimberley natives are well-built, tall, graceful in walk and poise. It has been considered likely that these people were the last to migrate from the northern islands, then driving the original inhabitants into the inhospitable arid lands, as the original inhabitants of the continent had been driven down into Tasmania before that island was separated from the mainland.
Captain was a typical Kimberleys man. He was five feet ten in height, he was well formed and in excellent physical condition, partly due to the fare provided by Jim Scolloti. The cutting scars either side of his backbone went far to prove his complete initiation, and the absence of cuts on his chest proved that he hadn’t risen to a place among the élite of his tribe.
Bony watched him at work on a young gelding. Man and horse were within a circular yard, and round and round this yard the Aborigine followed the horse, carrying the bridle destined to be slipped up and over the animal’s ears, today, tomorrow or sometime. One of them would tire first and it would not be the Aborigine. One would be worn of patience and it would not be the man. Wearing only old dungaree trousers, Captain followed the horse with the tenacity of a dingo.
As he would not want to be interrupted, Bony saddled the roan mare put at his disposal and rode from the yard past the homestead and thus to the desert with Lucifer’s Couch ahead. He had asked for a quiet horse, and the roan was certainly docile, in fact too docile. She declined to canter. She made it obvious that leaving the homestead wasn’t done at two o’clock in the afternoon. Having no switch, Bony had to drum her ribs with his heels.
The sky was flawless. The air was motionless. T
he sun, well past the zenith, gave black shadow to every ground thing: shrub, grass tussock, sharp unevenness of sand made by animal tracks. The green of the creek gums was over-painted with opalescent tints. The line of creek gums retired slowly to the left, but the gold nugget lying on the horizon appeared never to draw nearer. Here again Bony found himself in the Deceitful Land where distance is either magnified or reduced, level land becomes low sand ridges, and great sand-dunes sink to become as level as a billiards table.
He followed the well-defined track of motor wheels first made by Scolloti’s utility and subsequently by the motors conveying the investigators. Maintained at a sharp walk against her will, the roan brought Bony to the outer of the three rings circling the Crater. This rock upthrust was barely a foot above the general level and sand filled the declivities, and here the motor vehicles passed over without obstruction. It ran away to the south and to the north as far as could be seen and appeared rule-straight. It was much like the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz badly in need of repair.
The next or middle ring was like the same road, well formed and needing only to be rolled and sealed. Rocks had been removed to permit the passage of vehicles, as the average height above ground level was three feet. It was here that Lucifer’s Couch jumped from being a golden nugget on the horizon to become a flat-topped wide hill of commanding front. Coming to it athwart, the rays of the radiant sun upon it appeared as though a mass of golden nuggets had been thrown with force against a mound of pitch, the shadows actually being responsible for this effect.
On arriving at the inner ring, Lucifer’s Couch seemed touchable, although still a quarter-mile away. More man-labour had been done to make passable the crossing of this ring, many yards in width and four to six feet high. That is at the outside edge, because, along the inner side, the wash of sand and earth debris lay almost level with the summit. The roan walked on and up the gentle ground slope to the foot of the massive front of golden rocks.
Bony there reined her to the south and thus proceeded to skirt the Crater wall estimated to be one mile in circumference and, until recently, thought to be almost straight.
When with Howard on the wall or rampart he had noted, without much credit, that, although the summit was almost level, there was at one point a cleft or sinkage reducing the height at this point by fifty-odd feet. He rode on round the wall until opposite this cleft and here dismounted and neck-roped the horse to a stout desert jamwood.
He climbed the wall from rock to rock, like walking up a steep stairway, and, on reaching the top of the lower section or cleft, he gazed again upon Lucifer’s Couch and marvelled at the perfection of cosmic bombardment. The only living creature to be seen was an eagle, which came over the wall, sailed down into the pit and, with merely a few slow wing-flaps, rose to sail over the wall on the far side.
The bird was obviously on its beat, hopeful of finding a goanna or lizard drowsing in the warm sunshine, and Bony wondered idly if the great bird remembered those days the dead man lay there unprotected. The scrub trees about the central soak-hole appeared like ragged buffalo grass, and the lesser bush-trees on the circular slope down to it like spindly grass stems. Lucifer’s Couch! It would have been unforgettable: the sight of Lucifer’s Fall; it was a well chosen place, too. The isolation he felt on the summit of the wall, plus the feeling of remoteness from this majestic and yet desolate monument to a meteor, momentarily gave the feeling of complete nakedness.
He shrugged it away and brought his mind to work on the problem set him, and he tried to project his mind back in time and into the skull of the man who had selected this vast pit to receive the dead. Why carry the body up and over this wall and leave it down by the dry soak? To every compass point save to the north, the desert lay bare beneath the sun to the unbroken rim of the inland plain, a horizon so sharp as to appear little more than a mile or two distant, as well as to provide certainty of the earth’s roundness of shape. There lay thousands upon thousands of square miles of arid wastes. Why had Cain not buried Abel where the crime had been done? Why bring the body to this Crater? And, having brought it, why place it in the clear outside the soak for a wandering aircraft to fly over? Why not accept the concealment provided by the meagre scrub about the soak? It didn’t square with the psychology of the white man, of the semi-civilized Aborigine, or of the wild black man who inhabited the southern wastes.
One week prior to this day a man had said, “Our interests in this dead man are of varying importance. Mainly, we want to know how he got into the locality without being observed and reported. We’d like to know what he was doing out there. We would like to know why he was murdered. Who murdered him doesn’t concern us, for that is the police job; yours, not ours.”
“Do you know who he was?”
“Yes,” answered the man. “We have identified the body by the fingerprints, the dentures, the evidence of smallpox. Therefore, we are not interested in the question of identity. Do you grasp what we want of you?”
“Naturally, having been to school,” Bony had replied, and walked out of the office where the condescending type lorded it.
Now he argued that, were he confronted with the problem of carrying a dead man over this gigantic wall, he would select the place where the wall was lowest in the length of its circumference. That would be where he was sitting. He conceded that a white man or men either in haste or panic would not think of this, or would decide it was better to struggle up the wall at the point reached rather than carry the body a further half-mile to mount at its lowest point. He was, however, confident that the wild Aborigines would select this lowest point or pass, because they would have no lubras with them to undertake the labour. White men or black men, was the question he needed first to answer.
He stepped down from rock to rock to the floor of the Crater. It was clean of tracks until he had proceeded some twenty yards towards the centre. Keeping at that distance from the wall, he completed the full circle. He visited the pegs driven in the ground to mark the position of the body and finally came again to the base of the wall at its lowest point. He had crossed countless tracks made by boots and naked feet, and he had made one discovery.
The native trackers, including Howard’s, had known that the dead man was a white man. They had been instructed to look for the tracks of a white man or men and, believing that no white man could be expert enough to leave no tracks, they hadn’t bothered to examine the base of the crater wall. None had thought to look for proof where the wall had been crossed.
The man who could think like an Aborigine and reason like a white man proceeded to test the theory that the dead man had been brought over the wall at its lowest point.
He mounted the wall, this time using his hands as well as his feet, to bring his eyes closer to the individual rocks and the deeply shadowed crevices. Instead of climbing directly, he mounted in wide zigzags to cover the entire area below the pass. His hands found what his eyes failed to see. The fingertips felt the still sharp angles of splintered rock which rain and wind and sun had not completely eroded away, proving that the meteor must have fallen in recent times and not hundreds of years ago. The edges were not sharp enough to cut his fingers and thus would not cut the feet of a wild Aborigine.
He spent two hours climbing the wall and when again he sat and smoked in the cradle of the pass, his hands were sore and his legs ached. The sun was setting over the northern mountain summits, the arms of the ranges thrusting into the desert dressed in purple and dark blue. The westward face of the Crater wall was painted indigo, and that facing the setting sun purest gold.
Bony stood and faced the setting sun now dancing upon a distant tor. His right hand rose to touch the left pocket of his tunic where reposed an envelope containing several fibres which, he was sure, were of hessian, the material used for bags, the material used by the men who had brought the body to the Crater to wrap about their feet, and thus reduce the depths of their imprints and the more efficiently erase them.
The wild
men would not use hessian bagging. They would not own hessian bagging were they so minded to use it.
The sun scorched the distant tor, and the neighbouring summits became a chain of pastel-tinted jewels. The light took the standing Bonaparte and transmuted him to gold, the gold of the rocks about him, and even his teeth, bared in a grin of triumph, for a second or two, were of gold.
He rode homewards in the twilight of this magic world, the thrill of detection carrying him onward, as an empty belly urged the horse to run at racing speed. He had been able to eliminate the wild Aborigines, for the fibres proved that men wearing boots had conveyed the body to the Crater. They would be white men, or Aborigines employed as stockmen. They could have come from Deep Creek or from Beaudesert, distance lengthening the odds in favour of Deep Creek.
This evening a conversational point with the Brentners and their two off-siders was a coming tour of the Kimberleys by a Federal Ministerial party, and Bony, not particularly interested in how public money is spent, retired fairly early. From a heavy suitcase he took a pair of woollen shoes, made with the wool on the outside and intended to permit the wearer to leave no tracks. Having then ordered his subconscious to wake him at four, he slept until that hour.
It was moonless and cold when, with the woollen shoes slung from his neck by the thongs, he left the house and followed the Creek bank, wearing his ordinary riding boots. Above, the meteors were busy and it was seldom that a full minute passed without at least one flashing into momentary brilliance. He was at the ford where Howard and he had crossed the Creek, when the first herald of the new day be-flagged the eastern sky.
The ford, the homestead and Lucifer’s Couch, formed a rough triangle, each side three miles in length. Thus it was three miles to the Crater and, now wearing the sheep-skin shoes, he had gained shelter among a clump of desert jamwoods less than a mile from the great wall when the light was strong enough to observe its shape.
The Will of the Tribe Page 3
