Bony and the Mouse Read online

  Moodily watching the retiring minister, Sam said:

  “Well, that’s that. When’s it going to be our turn, Nat?”

  “Could be soon. Could be late. It will come,” replied Bony. “Planting those shoes on Tony gives the man we want a lead, a big lead. Patience, Sam. He’s like a mouse in its hole, and I am the cat waiting outside.”

  “You know who he is, don’t you?” grumbled Sam.

  “I do. I’ve seen his tracks on Main Street. Yes, I know him, but, Sam, what I know wouldn’t justify Harmon arresting him.”

  “I believe you, Nat. Just you give him to me.”

  Bony turned slightly towards the patriarch.

  “Sam, look at me. I am much younger than you. Had your son lived he would have been about my age. Your son would have said what I am going to say. The age of feuding is past, and I don’t think the world is any sweeter for its passing. I am a primitive, as you are. I like simplicity in living, and in common justice ... as you do. But you and I are out of step with the men and women of today. We have to live in the world they have made, not the world we would have made. We catch that mouse and hand it over to the representative of this other world, the world that is, and when we do hand it over to Constable Harmon, we must be able to describe that mouse, its shape, weight, colour, tracks and actions, and we go on living, Sam, and find no foulness of his blood on our hands.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bony Smells the Mouse

  THE WAY of a cat with a mouse can be profitable to the student of human psychology.

  The cat, strolling along the wainscot, sniffs at a hole, is assured that the mouse is within, and settles into a coma of patience. The mouse, being a natural fidget, cannot bear inactivity and, when not asleep, he must adventure. Knowing that the cat has sniffed him, and unable to adopt complete repose, he must see just what the cat is doing.

  In the room the cat has become a fixture, alike with the legs of a table, a chair, a what-not. A squeak of defiance, a rodential ya-hoo, have no more effect on the cat than on the furniture.

  Thus the mouse begins that gradual mental process towards the state of regarding familiar things with contempt. As he surveys the outside from deep within, confidence swiftly strengthens and the mouse draws ever nearer to the entrance of his abode, until eventually he is crouching with his head outside the hole, squeaking and winking at the cat.

  The cat remains a fixture. The fidget retires for a while before again taking a mouse-eye view from his hole. Nothing has changed. Wariness of danger wears thin. Familiarity drugs thought and begins to blur instinct. At every visit to his doorway the mouse ventures farther out, until all of him is outside save his tail.

  So the foolish one continues to ultimate destruction. Once the mouse has emerged so far that the tip of his tail is no longer inside the hole, he cannot flick himself backward, but must turn about to retreat head first. The turnabout action requires time. Until this fraction of a second, time has meant nothing to the cat; to the mouse it is fatal.

  Much of the cat’s psychology had been bequeathed to Inspector Bonaparte by his aboriginal mother, a member of a race which down the ladder of the centuries had had to cultivate feline patience if it were to survive.

  The death of Katherine Loader proved that the human mouse was still in Daybreak, and now the human cat had sniffed him to his hole. Provided that the cat did not act out of feline character by moving even as much as a whisker, inevitably the moment would come to take the mouse, hide and all.

  The next morning Bony completed his usual kitchen chores and then exercised his muscles with the axe at the wood-heap. In the street were sounds of activity. During the night the transport from Laverton had arrived and was parked outside the hotel. Sam was now rousing the truckers, who had merely rolled into their swags beside the tarpaulin-covered loading, and the postmaster was anxious to take delivery of the mailbags.

  After breakfast Sam checked the cases and cartons and drums of beer down the steps to Bony, who stacked the goods in the bar cellar. The remainder of the morning Bony was busy in the bar, Sam having decided to visit the manager of his general store and watch the goods being checked in there. At midday the truck left on the return trip to Kalgoorlie, and Melody Sam took over the bar.

  This morning all of Daybreak had been absorbed by the unloading of the truck and the delivery of mail and papers, and so it wasn’t until crossing the police compound that Bony smelled another mouse, seeing there the animal’s tracks. The scent lay across the compound to a shed where were kept bags of wheat for Esther Harmon’s chooks, and lucerne for her brother’s horse.

  Coming now from this shed was Esther Harmon carrying a basket. She had apparently been collecting hens’ eggs, and on Bony looking into her basket he counted five.

  “Good-day, Miss Harmon! Hoping to reach yesterday’s tally?”

  “I am always hoping to beat the day before, Nat,” she said, brightly. “Are you going riding?”

  “Yes. Your brother is so pleased with himself he gave me permission to take his horse any time I wanted to. Is he about?”

  “No. I think he went down the street to speak to the minister. Something to do with a report on Tony Carr.”

  “And how is Tony this morning?”

  “Why! How on earth ... Are you trying to be funny, Nat?” The dark eyes glowed angrily, but anger was but a shadow masking alarm.

  “Tony must have come back on the truck, under the tarpaulin,” he said. “He crossed the yard and hid in the feed shed. I think I may assume that you have been talking to him.”

  Her finely-moulded mouth trembled, and her hands shook so that he took the basket from her. Bony asked when had she learned that Tony was hiding in the shed.

  “After breakfast, Nat. I was gathering the eggs. The hens lay in there. And Tony spoke to me. Nat, you mustn’t say anything. We must give him a chance. We can’t let him be hunted like a dingo. You won’t ... you won’t tell George?”

  “It shall be a secret. But why come back here?”

  “He said there is nowhere else to go,” Esther explained. “Said if I wouldn’t help him there was no one else he could ask. He was sitting in George’s car with the petrol all gone, and when he saw the truck coming, he hid behind a tree. When the men were looking to see whose car it was, he climbed up on the truck and under the tarpaulin. He says he knew it was the Daybreak truck.” They had arrived now at the kitchen door, and she clasped his arm impulsively. “What are you going to do, Nat? You can’t give him up.”

  “Have you taken food to him?” Bony asked, and she nodded. “Then he’ll be all right for a while. Your brother is unlikely to go to the shed, and meanwhile we’ll think of something. I’ll call in on you when I return from my ride.” Patting her shoulder, he said: “Once I told you you were a wicked woman. I take that back. And with it, half the load you’ve been carrying since breakfast.”

  Collecting the gear from the harness shed, Bony made ready to saddle the gelding, decided to make it easier to catch the animal with a handful of lucerne, and entered the fodder shed. Additional to bales and bags was much discarded junk, all providing Tony with adequate concealment.

  “It’s all right, Tony,” Bony remarked conversationally, “I’ve been talking with Miss Harmon about you. You are to stay where you are, and not budge outside until we say so. Clear?”

  The affirmative reply was given in a whisper, and Bony went outside and nonchalantly kicked dust over the tracks left there by Tony and Esther Harmon.

  He was astride the gelding and riding out of the compound when Bert Ellis called a good-day-ee. Men at the garage stopped to watch the horse, and to them he nodded, his mind occupied with the relationship of Esther Harmon with an item of human flotsam registered as Antony Carr. Although Daybreak could be thought the last place Tony would head for, here he was, and there was the policeman’s sister succouring him, and claiming there was no other than she to whom he could appeal.

  Bony was riding past the Manse when Harm
on appeared at the gate and held up a hand to stop him, and on Bony dismounting suggested they sit on the tree bench for ‘a quiet yabber’. They sat, and the horse stood quietly in the shadow with them.

  “Been asked by Headquarters for a conduct report on Tony Carr since he came to Daybreak,” Harmon said. “What d’you know about that? And Inspector Mann being good and satisfied with what we got on Tony, too. They must think a feller’s got nothing to do.”

  “You been talking to the minister about it?” questioned the yardman.

  “Had to. He’s got to support the report, if you get me. And, Nat, there isn’t anything against Tony up to the time we found the evidence in his hut and on the roof. I reckon Mann thinks the bloke defending Carr at his trial will make a hell of a lot out of good conduct since coming to Daybreak.”

  “What good will that do?” the yardman asked.

  “Could do a heck of a lot, Nat. You know, when we add it all up, all we got is tracks and plaster casts, and statements concerning all them casts and tracking. Enough for you and me to get fifty murderers hung. What’s the motive? We say the motive lies deep in the unsound mind of a killer who has already given proof of violence before he ever came to Daybreak. We can say there is no other motive for three murders, not one matching the other two. Only in one, the Lorelli case, can we prove that Carr was at the homestead at the approximate time of that murder. Good enough for us, Nat, but I’m thinking Mann feels it isn’t enough.”

  “Could be the Inspector wants to make it a hundred per cent,” offered Bony.

  “He’d want to do that all right,” agreed Harmon. “I’m beginning to see it’s not the lack of evidence we have, but the quality of it. Putting tracks over a jury as evidence is a different proposition to putting over fingerprints. Now if we had Tony’s fingerprints on the door handle you had sense enough to preserve, we would have had something. The doctor is ready to swear that the man who strangled Kat has hands the size of Carr’s, but he can’t swear they were Tony’s hands.

  “So what have we? I’m beginning to see myself on the witness-stand, and the defending counsel saying down his nose: ‘What is your experience of tracking, Constable? Why were not the abos brought to the scene of the crime before eleven that morning, Constable? Where are these famous abo trackers you have been telling us about, Constable?’”

  Bony burst into laughter, such was Harmon’s extraordinary mimicry of a supercilious counsel.

  “Funny and not so funny, Nat,” Harmon chuckled. “Those bastards down in Perth can turn a man inside out. Anyway, jokes aside, we have time to hunt up more evidence, and I’d be obliged if you kept that in mind.”

  “All right, I will,” consented the yardman. “I suppose Tony will be in Kalgoorlie by now, probably down in Perth.”

  “About it, Nat. What they learn in reformatories! You can lock your car and keep the keys in your pocket, and he can get it going in three seconds. You can put the cuffs on him and he slips out of them just when he wants. You can badger him for hours, like I did going down to Laverton, and he don’t open his mouth, not once, not even to curse me. But there’s this to it, Nat: the longer he keeps in smoke, the longer we’ll have to get additional evidence. So if he’s free for a month, that’ll suit our book. But that don’t mean lying down on the job, Nat.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind, Mr Harmon,” said the yardman.

  “You do. Riding out, I see. Call in on the abos and tell young Abie I want him up at the station.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Good. We get along, Nat.”

  The policeman, watching his horse loping away down the track, thrilled at the sight of him, and envied the seat of the rider. He wished he had Nat’s supreme confidence; and then the reaction of the Reverend MacBride to the report he had to make clouded the picture, and sent him glowering to his office.

  Bony sought the answers to questions which would assuredly have puzzled Constable Harmon, who knew nothing of the man who had forgotten to limp. Harmon had given a valuable card, and if the value hadn’t been recognised at the time, it was recognised for what it was when most needed.

  That Iriti and his men had held a poker hand all their own, he was sure. There was much behind the reluctance of the trackers, giving only bare essentials in their reports to their white superiors. Those trackers brought from the south would know the minds of Iriti and his fellows, so there was no actual independence of opinion between them and the local tribe.

  Had Harmon known how keenly the hotel yardman sought for additional evidence to support that which he already had, he might not at this moment have been so worried. Bony hoped that Tony wouldn’t be discovered, for this would indeed upset the policeman’s equilibrium.

  The Range flowed by on one side and the mulga forest down on the distant floor of the world slowly revolved like a wheel, as the gelding swept down the track until he was reined to the right, to reach the aborigines’ camp. There, no blue fire-smoke rose from among the great boulders. What did rise at Bony’s coming was a storm of black snowflakes.

  The camp was deserted.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Trade in Blackmail

  THE CROWN had placed their seal on the camp floor and had fossicked among the ashes of the smaller fires, proving that the aborigines had departed early this same day. Still earlier a horseman had visited the camp, and had conducted his mission without dismounting. He had come from Daybreak and had left in the direction of Dryblowers Flat. Bony recognised the animal’s tracks as being those of one of his horses, now supposedly running loose on the town common.

  The ‘mouse’ was beginning to venture a fraction from his hole. His mission had been to warn or to order the aborigines to vacate a camp to which they had come only a few days before.

  The trail of the exodus was easy to follow, and Bony was able to keep his horse to it at a hand gallop. Down the slope to the dry water-gutters, over them, and across the grass flats to the scrub patches, over the iron-hard red clay-pans, and round about the steep-sided salmon-pink sand-dunes. At three miles from the camp, Bony reined back the horse and sat for a minute regarding Bulow’s Range, and the dark stick which was the poppet head at Sam’s Find. The township was beyond the summit. Nothing moved in all this expanse save a black dot or two puffed upward from the deserted camp of the aborigines ... the omnipresent crows.

  Half an hour later, the grey was willing enough to pause a while beneath a line of desert box trees along the shores of an ancient lake, and here Bony made a cigarette and surveyed the place where the aborigines had rested and left evidence of their recent visit to white civilisation in burned matchsticks, the ends of self-rolled cigarettes, and mutton-chop bones.

  There was, of course, no water in the lake. Its level surface was covered shallowly with salt, a sheet marred nowhere save by the feet of the nomads, which, beginning in separate trails, had merged into a black trail extending to the distant shore.

  Bisected by the black mark, the ancient lake was now a pure white disc, edged with the deep green of trees, the pink of sand, and the grey-blue masses of spinifex. The cloudless sky above was black, the sun as near pure gold as anything not gold could be. Animation was lacking, the complete absence of motion associated with a picture which might have been painted before Time was born.

  The horse making no sound, Bony felt the magic of having stepped into this picture, became a painted figure in its composition that had never moved, and never would. He was one with the stiff tussock grass about his feet, one with the gnarled and almost leafless trees about him, an artist’s creation painted to give balance and perspective on the flat surface of canvas.

  It was now late April, and the beginning of a period in the autumn when, in this western section of the Interior, the air is still. The summer heat has passed, and the willy-willies no longer dance over the landscape, arid and brittle. The few birds appeared to have embarked on a far journey, and even the flies and the ants must be resting.

  Bony felt himself ca
ught and held in this eternally motionless scene, until sudden revolt spun him about to gain relief by sight of the horse and its flailing tail. He sighed gustily, the sound being music in his ears. He called to the horse, to prove he had ears with which to hear.

  He decided to ride around this salt lake for reasons other than the probability that near its centre the surface was too soft to bear the animal’s weight. The gelding’s anxiety to show off being now reduced, it was almost an hour later when they came to the place where the aborigines had stepped from the lake, continuing to travel to the north-west, and deeper into the desert.

  Bonaparte was not liking this job, for he was opposed to aborigines less influenced by white law than are those in close contact with a mission station. These people were much farther beyond the mirage of civilisation than those in the centre of the Continent, through which runs a railway, a string of townships, a military road, and the telegraph. He would have to deal with these people without sign of overbearing authority, and never with the threat of it.

  So confident were they in their own domain that he sighted the smoke of their camp-fires rising with no twist to their columns from gums lining a dry creek, in the bed of which would be soak water. He dismounted when a quarter-mile from the camp, securely tethered the horse to an acacia, and walked on until a hundred yards from the creek, when he shouted and sat on his heels. It had been no mean achievement to draw thus close to the camp without being seen, for his presence would certainly be astonishing.

  Dark figures emerged from the background of grey tree-trunks, remained a moment, faded into the background of frozen silence. Crouched on his heels, Bony rolled a cigarette and waited. Under any circumstances whatsoever, those who wait with patience live longer in this country than those who hasten.