The Sands of Windee Page 4

  “I hope you haven’t forgotten that we are to tin-kettle the Fosters tomorrow night,” Marion observed, pouring her father his second cup.

  “I had forgotten, but I am not going,” Stanton said a little grimly. “If you think that I, at my age, intend to travel eighty miles to play the fool round my overseer’s house, then you want to think something else.”

  “That is just what I am doing, Dad.”

  “Good!”

  Stanton drank his tea in silence. His daughter’s expression had subtly changed, and he knew that he was in for a battle he would probably lose, because he had lost every battle but one fought between them since the day his daughter was born. He awaited stoically her next broadside.

  “Harry Foster has worked for you since he left school in—let me think—yes, in nineteen-seven,” she said. “Without counting the years he was away fighting the Germans so that you could make more money, he has been working for you for thirteen years. You have never had one single uneasy thought that he wasn’t doing his job with all his heart.”

  “I’ve paid him well. I’ve_____”

  “He has worked hard for you, not so much because of the money, but because you gave him his chance,” went on the inexorable voice. “You gave him his chance because you liked him, far more than because he knew his job. Ethel and he have gone to a lot of trouble for tomorrow night, and if the Big Boss is not there I know they will be ever so disappointed.”

  Jeffrey Stanton abstracted from his pocket a tin of tobacco, a packet of cigarette papers and a box of matches. From those articles, which he set on the table before him, he looked at his daughter, and said in the voice of a martyr: “May I smoke?”

  “Father, you are going?”

  “No!”—emphatically.

  “Ethel is my best friend, and you will go just to please me, won’t you?” Her eyes were twin stars. The appeal in them was a vision of beauty. No living man could have won so unequal a battle. Stanton said:

  “Damnation!”

  “Dear old Dad!” cried she. “I knew you would say yes. For going I’ll make your cigarette for you. I can make them so much better than you can. You always make them with a camel’s hump in the middle.”

  Without speaking, he gave her the materials, and, whilst watching her supple fingers, he thought of his wife and the expression he had seen in her eyes the second before she gave him her first kiss.

  “If we leave at half-past seven, we shall get there at ten o’clock,” he heard her say when he accepted the cigarette she had made and lit for him. “Mrs Poulton can come with us. You’ll let as many of the men go as want to, won’t you?”

  “Decidedly,” Stanton agreed, accepting defeat with quite a good grace. “I’ll push ’em off on the trucks before seven, so that we’ll all get there together. They’ll be fit for nothing on Monday, but what matters work when my lady’s whims must be obeyed?”

  She laughed at him, and he laughed at and with her—laughed perhaps with a hint of grimness, yet also with a world of affection. The next instant she said:

  “And now that is settled, Dad, I want you to let me ride the grey gelding this afternoon. An hour ago I went over to the yards, and Bony was riding him, and assures me he is as good as gold.”

  Bony’s first horse was a grey gelding that had been regarded from birth as Marion Stanton’s own. He was a four-year-old, and out of a mare that had once won the Caulfield Cup, the second most important race in Australia. From the top rail of the horse-yards the detective had watched this beauty running ahead of a mob of a hundred wild, unbroken horses flying before the cracking stockwhips of the riders, and his heart had thrilled at the sight of him. To Stanton, who sat beside him, he had pointed out the grey, asking if it were one of the horses desired to be broken, and Stanton had said:

  “Yes. I want you to break him first. He belongs to my daughter. If you can’t break a horse in properly, I want you to say so now, because if anything should happen to my daughter through your bad breaking, it is quite likely that I’ll strangle you.”

  Bony had been astonished at the feeling in those words, and, looking straight at his employer, had replied gently: “I think I understand.”

  When told by Marion that Bony had judged the grey gelding fit for her to ride, Jeffrey Stanton’s eyes narrowed, not however with opposition. He knew that his girl was probably the best horsewoman in the State, but he knew, too, that ten days is a very short time in which to break in a horse thoroughly. What he said was:

  “You must let me talk with Bony first. You see, as yet I’ve had no sample of the fellow’s work. I must be sure before I consent.” The grim, hard lines about his mouth faded and vanished, being replaced by lines tender and rare, when he added: “I have sinned a lot in my time, girlie, but if I were to lose you the punishment would be unjustly severe.”

  “Dear old Dad!” she whispered. “I leave it to you.”

  Stanton left and went over to the yards where he found the half-caste “mouthing” a pert young miss with a black coat and a white blaze on her forehead. He and the filly had a yard to themselves, and Stanton, looking through the heavy rails, observed with the vision of the expert how light were Bony’s hands on the long reins whilst he walked behind the animal.

  Seeing Stanton, the breaker called to the filly to stop. Instantly she obeyed, whereupon he went to her and petted her and murmured to her until the slight trembling of her limbs ceased, and she realized that Man was not so terrible as she had always thought.

  “Good day, Jeff!” Bony said, strolling towards Stanton when he had removed the gear from the filly.

  “Day, Bony! How’s the grey gelding?” came from the station-owner.

  “Fit, I think. Miss Marion was here a little while since looking him over. I’ll try him out for you, if you like.”

  “Good!”

  Bony turned and opened the gate leading to the largest yard of all, wherein were twenty horses, including the gelding. Moving behind the filly, he snapped his fingers, and she trotted out to the mob all facing her way. From a corner of the small yard Bony took up a bridle, and, going to the gate, whistled shrilly with his fingers. Stanton, looking at the grey gelding, saw him hesitate. Again the breaker whistled, commandingly, imperatively. And the gelding trotted right up to him, then stood quite still whilst the bridle was slipped up his face and over his ears.

  Stanton admitted to himself that Bony was a marvellously quick worker. With complete satisfaction he watched the horse being saddled. It gave absolutely no trouble. Bony mounted with swift, effortless ease. The horse stood as still as a park statue. Dismounting, he passed to the off-side and again mounted. Stanton was more than satisfied, for very few horses will permit a rider to mount on the off-side.

  Now mounted, the half-caste kneed his horse close to Jeffrey Stanton, and asked him to open the outer gate giving egress from the range of yards. Stanton found Marion beside him, and when he opened the great heavy gate, he saw how her eyes were shining with anticipation and delight.

  Clear of the yards, Bony walked the horse away over the deep sand for perhaps a hundred yards, then, turning, brought him back at a canter. Close beside father and daughter he dismounted, and began adjusting a stirrup-leather from which they saw hung a leather thong several feet in length fastened to a strangely fashioned buckle.

  Bony faced round on the watchers, and lifted his old felt hat when he saw the girl. Stanton was on the verge of passing favourable judgment when the half-caste drawled in his pleasant voice:

  “There are two occupations which I love, one of which is handling horses. Knowing that a lady is to ride this one, I have taken a little more trouble. Madam, I stake my reputation that you will find this horse the most amenable to your wishes, the sweetest-tempered, and the very finest animal you have ever ridden, or ever will ride. I wish to show you one thing to prove to you that his education is perfect. Whatever happens, please remember not to cry out.”

  They saw him vault into the saddle, and then, as t
hough he changed his mind, he slid to the ground and climbed aboard the horse as a sailor heaving himself across a donkey at a seaside resort. Stanton was delighted to see that the animal never moved until his rider spoke. The girl’s eyes widened, but she was wondering at Bony’s voice and his command of English.

  He rode the gelding slowly from them for perhaps a quarter of a mile. Then he swung him round and urged him into a loping gallop. With effortless motion horse and rider swept towards them. Old and hardened in the ways of horseflesh Jeffrey Stanton admitted that he had seen no finer horse, and seldom a finer rider.

  Horse and man came on, leaving behind them a cloud of brown dust to rise high in the now windless air. The pride of the horse was arresting. Nearer and nearer he came, effortless, graceful, as though he galloped across a thin red cloud.

  And then, when horse and man came abreast of them, they saw Bony sway in the saddle. They saw him deliberately fall sideways. Puzzled and astonished at first, then alarmed, they saw the rider strike the ground and become enveloped in a cloud of dust. The dust rose and was wafted away. Marion wanted to scream, for Bony’s foot was caught in the stirrup-iron. And then, the wonder of it! The horse instantly stopped, swung aside his hindquarters, and stood motionless, looking round and down on the trapped man.

  Stanton moved forward to help him extricate his foot from the imprisoning iron, when Bony tugged at the thong and the whole stirrupleather came away. Dusty and smiling, he rose to his feet to say gravely:

  “The only thing poor old Bony cannot do with a horse is to make him speak.”

  Chapter Seven

  Silver and Sapphires

  A QUEENSLAND TAXPAYER in partial possession of the facts concerning Bony’s activities at this time might have seen reason to complain that in breaking horses he was not working for the State from which he received a salary. The complaint would not have been made, however, had he known everything.

  In but few cases had the detective permitted his real avocation to become known to any of the people among whom he was carrying on his investigations, until such times as he chose to reveal it, if at all. His general practice was to drift on the scene of a crime as a swagman, make himself known to the senior police officer of the district, and to him alone, and when his inquiries were complete to lay the result before this senior police officer and unostentatiously depart....

  When he told Stanton he could break-in horses, he knew from Sergeant Morris that the squatter wanted some horses broken in. He knew also that as a horse-breaker his position could not be bettered on Windee in opportunities for visiting the scene of Marks’s disappearance. A station horse-breaker will take in hand several horses at the same time, the horses being at various stages of their training. During the final stage of breaking-in the horse is taken out of the yards and ridden in the open country.

  Therefore every day after Bony had got his first horse at the last stage he rode to the junction of the two roads, where he tied the horse to a tree out of sight of anyone passing along the track. In a fork of the tree he kept his sheepskin sandals, and, wearing them, he wandered for an hour or more with apparent aimlessness round and round the clay-pan whereon the abandoned car had stopped. He made that clay-pan the centre of an ever-widening circle.

  Bony’s reasoning was based entirely on common sense. He had found the exact position of the car when it had stopped. What he knew of Marks’s history, in addition to the aboriginal sign that a white man had been killed, compelled his belief that a murder had been committed. Those circumstances pointed to the fact that the crime had been one of violence, and it followed as night follows day that, when one or more human bodies are violently agitated, some particle or object from the clothing on those bodies becomes detached and falls to the ground unnoticed.

  It was by an extraordinary piece of luck that the ants had revealed to Bony that cut sapphire, but not an extraordinary thing that the ants had used the sapphire to keep their eggs warm. Sapphires, cut or uncut, do not grow. They are never found in the rough state in the old sand-country of Central Australia. It could be assumed, therefore, that that particular cut sapphire was once set in a ring or a tiepin, that it was one of the objects that fell during the supposed struggle.

  It was not luck but downright patience, methodical tireless patience, which added yet further evidence. Bony knew that the Anglo-Saxon race, as well as the Australian aboriginal, instinctively kills at a distance, and not with a weapon retained in the hand. Since in this case the probable weapon used was a gun, the half-caste proceeded to gain evidence of it, if evidence there remained. Standing in the position of the car, it was impossible to fire a bullet horizontally in any direction for more than two hundred yards. Within that distance a tree would stop it, if it did not ricochet from a branch.

  Tree by tree, Bony searched for the mark that would indicate the stoppage or passage of a bullet. He examined nearly four hundred trees before he felt obliged to give up the search as fruitless. Yet it was a tree, a pine-tree with branches growing out from low down the trunk, which yielded him a second find. Wedged within a fork he discovered a small disk of silver, very thin and very slightly concave. It proved an object entirely baffling to him as to its use or purpose. Had it been of glass it might have come from the face of a wrist-watch; and if one might guess, which Bony seldom did, that faintly discoloured silver disk might well be the back of the inner case of a small silver watch.

  He found the disk precisely nine yards from the centre of the circle, and no more than the cut sapphire could the disk have just grown where he found it. Yet, although the disk could not so far be labelled, it materially strengthened the theory that a violent struggle had taken place where Marks’s motor-car had stopped.

  Considering all tilings, the half-caste was well satisfied with the progress of his quest. It was a case absolutely to his liking. Had he discovered the body of Marks, the case would have been so much the less interesting in that a murder would have been definitely established, whereas he first had to establish the fact of murder before he could go on to discover the murderer and his motive for the crime.

  He was also well satisfied with the companion fate had given him on the afternoon when the grey gelding was first ridden by Marion Stanton. He rode with Marion along the track to Mount Lion with the unalloyed delight of being in the presence of a lovely woman. The horse was behaving splendidly, a compliment to his breaker; whilst his rider was a compliment to his training.

  “Have you given him a name yet?” inquired Bony, seated on a quiet old mare.

  “No, I haven’t, Mr. Bony,” she answered. “Can you suggest one?”

  “Do you find his movements easy?” the detective countered with a smile, as unconscious of familiarity as she was unconscious that he was a poor half-caste horse-breaker and she a millionaire’s daughter. She said:

  “He is the loveliest horse I’ve ever ridden.”

  “Then why not call him Grey Cloud?”

  “Grey Cloud!” she repeated after him. He saw her lips move whilst she murmured the name several times, watched with his admiration of the beautiful, the contours of her face and her figure. She wore a black riding-habit that permitted her to ride astride, as do all true bush-women. “Grey Cloud! That will do. Yes, that is a most appropriate name. Why, it is almost poetical. Are you a poet?”

  “Alas, no,” Bony admitted gravely. “I tried to write poetry once, and its result was almost catastrophic. A certain professor of mathematics had an enlarged proboscis and a shrunken chin. I wrote a verse about him which quite by accident was dropped and picked up by the professor of literature, who saw me drop it. ‘Sir, ’ he said, ‘did you write this atrocious drivel?’ ‘Sir, I did, ’ said I, and went on to say I was ashamed, and had meant no disrespect to his learned colleague. ‘I am not interested in your lack of respect, sir, ’ was the reply I got; ‘I am more than interested, I am stunned, by your utter lack of metre. I shall remember you, sir!’”

  Marion laughed deliciously, and Grey Clou
d tossed his head and whinnied at the old mare. Then suddenly she became serious, as though remembering something, and asked: “Where was that?”

  “Why, at the University, Brisbane.”

  “And you were there?”

  “Yes. I won my way there through a scholarship.”

  Bony found himself regarded by a pair of steady grey eyes in which was an expression of perplexity.

  “And you are breaking-in horses on Windee,” she said slowly.

  “Why not?”

  “But what a waste of a fine education! Why, you could have become a doctor, or an architect, or a—or a...”

  “A policeman,” Bony suggested helpfully, and added, seeing a hurt flash in her eyes: “When I left the University I could have become almost anything I chose. I chose to become a student of nature, a master of human psychology, and a teacher of little children. I found in the north of my native State children so far from a school that they were in danger of growing up unable to read and write. I taught many their ‘three R’s’ and gave them some understanding of astronomy and elementary science. In the paper the other day I read that one of those children had gained a Rhodes Scholarship.”

  Now in her eyes he saw the divine light of enthusiasm, and he went on in his grave, gentle way:

  “Of course, I could have used my education purely for my own advancement. I have preferred to use it, when opportunity served, for the advancement of others and for justice.”

  “I have never thought of education quite like that,” Marion admitted, and for a while rode in silence. She could not help thinking how strange it was that for no explainable reason she liked this breaker of horses, her father’s servant, a common half-caste, immensely. Was it his steady blue eyes, or the way he smiled, or the tone of his voice, or the silent deference he paid to her good looks?

  When they had gone four miles from the homestead, he suggested that they turn for home, to which she objected, saying: