The bushman who came back b-22 Page 3

  The all-seeing eagles knew the answer, as did the crows. The eagles this early morning came low to espy the stranger seated under the green tops of the pine trees, and the crows were equally interested, but quickly gave up when knowing he was alive. They indulged in insatiable curiosity in the stranger’s horses down in the yards, and in two women who were trudging towards the house from the direction of the aborigines’ camp. Some of the crows flew out a little way over Lake Eyre, and returned as though fearful, while several others continued on over the lake until Bony wondered if they intended to cross to the hidden shore beyond.

  When smoke issued from a house chimney, Detective Inspector Bonaparte walked from the ridge down to the homestead of Mount Eden.

  Chapter Four

  Mount Eden Welcomes Bony

  OFALLCanute’s subjects, numbering forty-three, only Sarah had not the slightest fear of him, and what fear, engendered by inherited instincts, she had of Murtee the Medicine Man was rarely manifest. She was one-fifth white, and four-fifths black, and all that her father contributed was a softening of the aboriginal lines of her features, and an acute sense of humour. It is told that before Canute was blinded by a grass fire, she laughed at him when in a towering rage, and that when Canute rushed at her, brandishing a waddy, she took it from him and knocked him cold, then stood over him and hugged herself tightly while laughing down at the silent one. It is also told of Sarah that in punishment Canute put the ban of silence on her, and she kicked him in the stomach and laughed right heartily.

  Now that Sarah was cooking at ‘government house’, she and Meena rose early and arrived at the kitchen near enough to six every morning. It was her job first to prepare the morning tea which Meena took to Mr Wootton, whom she would surely find seated at the transceiver and talking with a neighbour.

  This morning the fire had been lit and the water was simmering in the wide-bottomed kettle, and Meena was busily tidying the living-room, when there stepped into the kitchen one Sarah had never seen. She noted his lean dark face, the deep blue eyes, the white teeth, and the smile, the clean white shirt tucked into brown gabardine slacks. She said:

  “No feller ’lowed here. What you want? Brekus not ready yet.”

  “Iam allowed here,” he told her, adding as though an afterthought, “Iam allowed anywhere. Have you made morning tea yet?”

  Without invitation he seated himself at the scrubbed table, stretched his legs, smiled again at Sarah, who was undecided whether to be pleased or angry. It was the blue eyes which brought the indecision, they and the voice more than hinting at authority. Meena appeared, paused in the doorway to the living-room. Sarah swayed the teapot violently to assist the brewing, and, with the pot held by the handle and the tip of the spout, she asked:

  “You big-feller policeman, eh?”

  “Yes. You knew I was coming?”

  Sarah nodded, placed the pot on the side of the stove, took cups and saucers from the dresser. The boss was forgotten. First she served the stranger. Standing before the visitor, Meena came to stand beside her, and Bony said:

  “You are Sarah. And you are Meena. I shall be here some time. Is Mr Wootton up and about?”

  “He’s inside waiting for his tea,” replied Meena, recalling Sarah to her duties. “What’s your name?”

  “Napoleon Bonaparte. If we ever become friends you may call me Bony. Meanwhile, please tell Mr Wootton that Inspector Bonaparte is here.”

  “Inspector Bonaparte,” she repeated, and giggled. She cupped her hand about her breast, thrust forward her tummy, and again giggled. Sarah looked at her and dug an elbow hard into the ribs, which cut the giggle. She gasped, and managed to say: “I thought you would be old, have grey hair, look fierce. You married?”

  “Mr Wootton… tell him I am here,” Bony urged gravely.

  White or black, it makes no difference. Meena smiled at him, her hips swaying as she walked to the living-room. Once she looked back at him, and Sarah exclaimed:

  “That Meena!” But there was pride and affection on her broad face.

  Meena returned and nodded for Bony to enter the living-room, and, passing her, he tilted her chin and said:

  “You will not be so saucy when I leave Mount Eden.”

  The cattleman was standing with a tea-cup in one hand and a biscuit in the other. His expression was one of incredulity. His hair was tossed, and his moustache needed clipping.

  “Inspector Bonaparte?” he questioned, with emphasis on the rank. “Of what?”

  “Of detectives, Mr Wootton,” suavely replied Bony. “It seems that I am famous in some quarters and not so in others.”

  “But we know nothing about you. The policeman at Loaders Springs knows nothing.”

  “I asked him to know nothing,” calmly announced Bony. “In fact I am ten days late, having been delayed on a case at Boulia.”

  “In southwest Queensland? You came here by…?”

  “Horse. I needed to meditate between murders, Mr Wootton. My credentials.”

  Wootton placed cup and biscuit on the table and leaned forward to examine the open wallet, and the copy of the letter instructing Bonaparte to investigate the murder of Mrs Bell, for and on behalf of the South Australian Police department. Frowning, the cattleman straightened and stared into the blue eyes, so predominant in the dark face. He said:

  “You have no objection to my contacting Senior Constable Pierce?”

  “None whatever. By the way, your cook gave me a cup of tea which I left on her kitchen table. May I?”

  “Meena!” called Mr Wootton. “Bring Inspector Bonaparte another cup of tea and biscuits.”

  Meena came in with the tea. Bony’s eyes were directed to the polished panel of the transceiver, and her employer was at the wall telephone. Her gay mood had given place to one of curious watchfulness, and for a second or two she gazed at the slim figure with the squared shoulders, the straight back, before withdrawing with a rustle of her starched apron.

  Bony was looking over the titles of the books, of which there must have been a hundred on the shelves beside the transceiver, when Wootton said:

  “Pierce said he expected you. He said, also, that he told no one of your coming, in accordance with your instructions. And yet the blacks knew. The maid told me three days ago that a high-ranking policeman was coming. Doesn’t add up, does it?”

  “Oh yes, it adds up,” countered Bony. “They communicate, you know. Smoke signals, telepathy. I’ve been associated with them on the Boulia case.”

  “On the killing of that aboriginal stockman? I’ve heard about it. You found the killer?”

  “Of course.”

  “Otherwise you would not be here now?”

  “Naturally. I locate a killer once I start on his tracks.”

  “I am afraid you won’t get on the tracks of our murderer, Inspector. The wind wiped them out, bar at two places, and that a month back.”

  “I was speaking metaphorically.”

  “Oh! Well, anything I can do, we can all do, to help, you can be assured… Whatd’you suggest?”

  “I am in possession of the frame of this Mount Eden crime, and have to resurrect the flesh. That will take some time, in view of the reputation of Constable Pierce, and the thoroughness of his efforts. As you ask me to make suggestions-a room, a shower, breakfast.”

  “Of course. Meena! I’ll have the room prepared for you. Your things… where?”

  “On the pack-horse I left in your horse yard.”

  “Good! Meena! Call Charlie to fetch Inspector Bonaparte’s gear from the pack-horse in the yard. And see to it that the corner room is ready for the Inspector. Tell Sarah about the extra breakfast. And, Meena, don’t dally with Charlie.”

  Meena smiled faintly and departed. She was both impressed and subdued.

  “Pardon me remarking on it, Inspector, but your arrival indicates very early travelling.”

  “It surely does, Mr Wootton. I came down the Birdsville Track on the mail truck to Maree, caught ‘The Ghan
’ to Coward Springs, where I contacted Constable Pierce and borrowed the horses. I made north and looked over the country southward of Lake Eyre. When day broke this morning I was meditating on the long ago of the aborigines. Always I have been interested in anthropology.”

  “Sometimes I wish I had studied the subject,” Wootton said. “You know, I’ve been here only five years, and it’s my first experience of the country and the blacks. They defeat me. I hope some day to defeat the country.”

  “You never will. No man ever has. But I know what you mean. Could you spare your men for the day?”

  “Yes. I had work set for them, but it can wait.”

  “Thank you. After breakfast, could we have them gathered somewhere that I may talk to them?”

  “Of course. My office is large enough.”

  “Kind of you. I will try not to inconvenience you more than necessary. This part of the Eyre Basin needs rain. When was the last rain?”

  “Five months back. We want rain all right, but the ground feed is holding out. See anything of the floods up in Queensland?”

  Bony could add nothing to Wootton’s knowledge received over the radio, excepting to add his opinion that the water might reach Lake Eyre via Coopers Creek and possibly down the Warburton River. The cattleman sensed the determined avoidance of the subject in both their minds, and escorted Bony to the guest room.

  At breakfast Bony raised the subject of Yorky’s singular title.

  “Oh, that!” Wootton said, chuckling. “It happened years ago, before my time, anyway. I think Yorky is known, by repute, all over the back country. He’s quite a character, or was before his mind must have become unhinged. No horseman, and useless as a stockman, but handy to have in dry times managing a pumping station, or riding a boundary fence.

  “Like most of his type, he’d stick to a job for months, then suddenly leave with his cheque and make for a town. After drinking a cheque at Loaders Springs at the time I’m talking about, Yorky humped his swag out this way, intending to ask my predecessor for a job. The next thing was that the policeman at Loaders Springs-not Pierce, of course-rang through to say he’d received a report that Yorky was living with the blacks down on the creek, and would the owner of this place go along and bring him out. You know how it is, the law against a white man living in an aborigines’ camp.

  “Anyway, the cattleman, name of Murphy, rode to the camp. There was no one about excepting Chief Canute and a few of the lubras, including Sarah, now cooking for us. Sarah being more civilized than the rest, he called her and she came out of her humpy. Murphy said: ‘They tell me you got a white man in camp, Sarah. Tell him to come out at once.’ Sarah denied she had a white man in the camp, but Murphy persisted, until Sarah said: ‘No white feller in my camp, Boss. Only my olefren Yorky.’ It appeared that Yorky turned up suffering badly from the booze, and Sarah took him in and was nursing him with soups and things.”

  “Hence the Ole Fren Yorky,” supplemented the amused Bony. “How old would he be, d’you think?”

  “Difficult even to guess,” replied Wootton. “I’d say in his early sixties.”

  “Did you employ him ever?”

  “Oh yes. He left here with his last cheque three weeks before he shot Mrs Bell. He’d been on another bender then, you see, when I found him at the blacks’ camp. There were no aborigines there then. They were all away on walk-about.”

  “Tell me about finding Yorky there.”

  “Well, you see, it’s my custom to go to Loaders Springs every week, and always on a Thursday. On that particular Thursday, I left about half past nine, per car. Half a mile along the track there’s a gate, and just under another half mile there’s a creek. The creek’s always dry except after heavy rain, but between the road dip and the creek mouth with the Lake there’s almost a permanent waterhole. They tell me the blacks have made it their headquarters for generations. Murphy let them fence it in from the cattle, and I’ve never interfered with them or the water.

  “Well, that morning when I got there, I saw Yorky squatting over a bit of fire and drinking tea from a jam tin. I wondered why he’d camped there, when he had only to tramp another three-quarters of a mile to get here, and stopped to speak to him. He said he was sick, and he certainly looked it. He’d hoped the blacks would be thereso’s Sarah could look after him. And he pleaded for a drink-just a small reviver.

  “I had a bottle of whisky in the car, and I gave him a hefty nobbier and told him to get along to the homestead and ask Mrs Bell to give him a feed. He said he would, and I drove on. A minute later, when I looked into the rear-vision mirror, I saw him on the track, swag up, even his rifle strapped to the swag.”

  Bony pushed his empty plate a little from him, and drew closer the second cup of coffee.

  “How did he appear to you… mentally?”

  “All right, I think,” replied Wootton. “Of course he was shaking a little, having been on the spirits for three solid weeks. The nobbier I gave him certainly bucked him up but no one will ever make me believe that drop of whisky drove him off his rocker enough to shoot Mrs Bell and clear out with the child. It’s something I don’t understand.”

  “We shall,” Bony said, and rolled a cigarette.

  Chapter Five

  Digging

  THEFOURhands were invited into the office, Charlie and another aborigine being told they could take the day off. All four were familiar with the interior of this large room, and so noted that on the wall behind the desk had been tacked a large-scale map of Mount Eden.

  Wootton occupied the chair behind the desk. Bony stood beside the desk, almost lazily smoking, while the four men sat and made themselves comfortable, at the invitation of their employer. Finally, obviously wondering what this was all about, they regarded Bony with deep interest.

  “As you know, it is now several weeks since Mrs Bell was killed and her daughter abducted,” he began. “Five weeks ago a man and a small child vanished, and both man and child were known to you better by far than I am known to you.

  “Since that tragic day, you and many others were engaged in an intensive search for Ole Fren Yorky. You know the details of that search, and the balance of human effort within the extent of the country about Lake Eyre. No doubt you have assessed the chances of locating two human beings on an area of country many people outside would think to be a limitless world, in which fifty, a hundred, men could easily be lost. Thus you will agree with me that, despite all the hunting, all the planning, the chances of Yorky getting away, or holing up somewhere, were good from the beginning. The hunters held four kings, but Yorky held four aces. Correct?”

  “Could be, and could not be,” doubted Arnold Bray. “I don’t reckon Yorky planned it. He was too sozzled to plan much. I said, and I still think, that the blacks helped him.”

  “Knowing that Yorky was fairly close to the aborigines,” Bony proceeded to argue, “knowing that all the aborigines were camped on the Neales River, the first thing Constable Pierce did was to send riders at top speed to cut off that line of retreat for Yorky. When the trucks for the trackers arrived at the Neales River, they made sure that every aborigine was there. As you say, Arnold Bray, Yorky never planned the murder. It was committed on impulse.”

  “And then he was lucky enough to find he held four aces,” interrupted withered William Harte. “In the first place, Yorky knows this country better than any of us, and, better than us, he can think closer to theabos. Put yourself in his place… He done a murder before he even thought about it. He knows we’re all away, that no oneain’t likely to come around till middle afternoon. He’s shot Mrs Bell, and he can’t shoot the kid ’costhe reason he shot the womanain’t strong enough for him to shoot the kid. So he’s got the kid on his hands ’costhe kid seen himdoin ’ theshootin ’. He’s like a bloke having to walk with one boot on and the other off. So he looks over his cards, and decides he holds better cards than anyone else.”

  Seated on the floor with his back to the wall, Harte paused to roll a cigar
ette, and Bony prompted him, the others apparently conceding his superior knowledge and experience.

  “When he shot Mrs Bell,” resumed the ageless man, “Yorky knew the country was wide open to him. He knew just where all theabos were… fifty miles something up north. He knows themabos pretty well, knows how their minds work, and the reason why he didn’t shoot the kid was stronger than the reason why he ought to have shot her, to give him the best chance of getting clear out of this country. As I said, he knows the blacks better than any of us. He knows that once they’re put to his tracks, even if them tracks is bits of dust in the air, they’ll catch up with him. If they wants to, that is. He knows that if he kills the kid they’ll want to; if he don’t, they won’t. That was his cards.”

  “The aborigines thought much of Linda?” pressed Bony.

  “They surely did. Like everyone else. One time we wasplayin ’ poker over in the quarters, and I drew a Queen of Hearts and snaffled the jackpot, and I said without thinking: ‘That’s my Linda for you, fellers. The Queen of Hearts.’ And that’s what she was around these parts.”

  “The aborigines, however, did try to track Yorky,” Wootton reminded him, and Bony was delighted at the course his conference was taking.

  “Too right,” agreed Harte, who then had to go to the doorway for another spit. “What happened? They’re up on the Neales, half-starved, livin ’ on goannas and flies. They get brought back, and they’re given lashings of beef and flour and tobacco to start ’emoff right. Instead ofhuntin ’ aperenti or another feller’s gin, they’re set tohuntin ’ Yorky.