Bony and the Black Virgin Page 9

  A small problem unworthy of a white man’s attention!

  It was obvious that the wind had not brought it, and equally plain that it hadn’t been used by anyone as a fly whisk. Used by someone! For what purpose? It could be an efficient eraser of footprints. Were that so, then what had been the motive?

  Without expecting a result, Bony, from various positions on the circumference of the clearing, crouched to gaze angle-wise across the ground, seeking for any irregularity left by the action of the wind. Meticulous attention to detail, unlimited patience, and unbounded curiosity received their reward from the ancient Spirit of the Land who had tested him.

  The wind had patterned the surface, and by bending low he was able to see the pattern etched by shadow cast by the miniature ridges. The pattern was perfect save in the middle of the clearing, where an obstacle had contended with the wind.

  Standing over it, he could not detect the slight flaw on the wind’s pattern, and he sought for the cause with the toe of a socked foot. Thus he felt a hard object a fraction above ground level, and with his hands exposed the end of a burned stick. More delving brought to light pieces of charcoal, unburned ends of small sticks, and ash.

  Why bury a small fire in this country when ground surface was so denuded of grass and herbal rubbish?

  History was written on this page of the Book of the Bush. Someone had made a small fire in the centre of this clearing, and then dug a hole beside it and buried the residue. With that tea tree branch he had erased his foot-tracks, tossing the branch aside when he completed the task. For this purpose he had brought the branch from another place, viz. that belt of tea tree.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Patience Rewarded

  IT WAS not unlike trying to read a serial story backwards from the instalment one picks up by chance. Someone had come to the sandalwood clearing, carrying a branch of tea tree with which to conceal his purpose. He had burned something of importance to himself.

  The belt of tea tree crossed the road nearer to Lake Jane by half a mile, and Bony reached it by keeping parallel with the winding track. As estimated, it was a hundred-odd yards in width, and he proceeded to examine that section of it extending on the same side of the road as was the sandalwood clearing. The bushes, for they cannot be classed as trees, were unaffected by the long rainless period. Their shadow was black on the red, windswept ground, and here and there a branch had been broken by the wind. The vital branch must have come from this belt.

  Again in stockinged feet, Bony wandered among the forest of tall bushes seeking to read on this page of the Book of the Bush a word to connect it with the writing in the clearing.

  There were the prints made by a fox, roughly like a four-leaf clover, and the animal had crossed the belt since the last high wind, and had evinced no interest. Then he detected a dingo scratch where a dozen or more bushes grew unusually close. The markings of the claws were old, and those of the pads had long ago been erased by the wind.

  A dog doesn’t obey a nature call save at a place used by another dog, although, of course, there always has to be a first dog. Now a first dog will invariably succumb to habit at a place or object which had attracted its interest by way of his nose. It was not, therefore, by chance or luck that Bony was interested in these close-growing bushes.

  The centre of them provided a natural bower where the sunlight was masked, the air cool, and the wind, when it blew, would be defeated. The floor of the bower was covered deeply with tea tree tips, now dust-dry, grey and brittle. The alignment of the tips proved that they had been gathered by human hands and placed carefully in position to form a couch or mattress.

  The tips had not been slashed or broken from the walls comprising the bower; they had been gathered and laid some considerable time before, when the branch found at the clearing had been severed from the parent bush. Another detail Bony learned was that the tips had not been lain upon after they had lost their leaves.

  Why make camp here? There was no water nearer than that at Rudder’s Well. If the tea tree branch at the clearing had been used to erase footprints, and he was confident that had been the purpose, then it could have been employed here for that purpose. A secret camp was indicated.

  Why the secrecy? The aborigines would have no reason to form a secret camp, and it would be most unusual for them to take the trouble to pick bush tips and make so perfect a sleeping mattress. An aborigine would merely light a fire on the lee side of a bush, and lie down between it and the bush and sleep as comfortably as he might in a featherbed. In fact, he would damn the featherbed.

  It was a puzzle to delight Inspector Bonaparte. He crawled over the mattress of twigs, quartering it, finding nothing. He wormed his way in and among the arboreal walls, hoping to find a clue in a spent match, a cigarette end, anything to give a lead to the camper; and found nothing. He prospected outside for a fire-site, a food tin, even a meat bone, even another buried fire-residue, and was disappointed. So he proceeded all over again, starting with the mattress, unarmed with a magnifying glass, because his eyes were as good.

  Patience is seldom unrewarded. He found his clue outside the bushes forming the bower. It was entangled by a bush spur, all the seven hairs of it!

  The owner! The hairs were black, and similar to those found clutched in the hand of Paul Dickson. The owner was probably a blackfellow, but it could be Robin Pointer, for her hair was similar in colour. But then so was the hair of half a million other women down in Melbourne and Sydney.

  Further clues were necessary to create a picture from the dusty past, and although Bony spent another hour, he was not further rewarded. He might have spent yet another hour, had it not been advisable to return to Lake Jane before the curiosity of the Downers was fiercely aroused.

  So widely did he circle that he came to the Lake well beyond the Crossing, and then followed the narrow white beach remaining above water. The house windows were reflecting the sunlight, and smoke was rising from the single chimney. A hundred yards from shore Eric was diving from the boat, and after his long afternoon walk, Bony decided to fetch his towel and swim out to join him.

  He was, however, given no time, for when he was nearing the house old John came to the veranda and banged on a tray to call the ‘hands’ to dinner.

  “Go far?” he wanted to know when they sat to dine on kangaroo steak and dehydrated vegetables.

  “Feel as though I did,” Bony replied wryly. “Wish I had a horse. Like Richard of old I’d give my kingdom for a horse.”

  “Horses are as scarce as kingdoms in these parts right now,” Eric pointed out. “Where did you prospect?”

  “Beyond the Crossing, to see the country that Carl Brandt headed for when he cleared out. The map says it’s eighteen miles to Blazer’s Well, and from what I’ve seen of the country today it would be a very hard eighteen miles.”

  “You’re right there, Bony,” agreed John. “Some of the roughest country out that way. Hard on a man afoot, and harder still on a man pushing a loaded bike, let alone trying to ride it.”

  “Brandt couldn’t have known what he was in for when he left here with his bike loaded with two swags,” Eric averred. “He knew the Blazer’s Dam end, and all about the Dam, because he shot ’roos and trapped foxes in his spare time, but he didn’t know this end. I’ve always said that somewhere on that trip he planted his bike and the swags where they won’t be found in a hurry, either to travel faster to reach the road at Jorkin’s Soak and thumb a ride down to the Hill, or because he knew he was being trailed, and found he could travel faster without the bike.”

  “Perhaps too much emphasis is placed on the theory that he was trailed by someone and killed in revenge for killing Paul Dickson,” temporized Bony. “He could have been killed for the bike and swags where his body was found. His murder could have no connection with the murder of Dickson.”

  “That could be,” agreed John. “But there was no one in that section of the country at the time. There was no stock, and no water.”

/>   “What of the aborigines? Some were camped at Bore Ten, were they not?”

  “Yes. Nuggety Jack and his mob were at Bore Ten, but if you knew Nuggety Jack you’d know he and his crowd wouldn’t murder for a bike which anyone at L’Albert would recognize.”

  “They couldn’t sell it to anyone,” supported Eric “There was not one stranger at L’Albert to sell it to, even for a plug of tobacco. You have to take into consideration all the conditions at that time, and they were then no better nor different from what they are now.”

  There was impatience in Eric’s voice, and more than a hint that he was bored by the subject. Bony thought he could be excused, for discussion of one subject for seven months would bore anyone. He said so, and Eric met him with:

  “I know it’s your job to investigate these murders. I don’t mind in the least answering questions on topography, climatic conditions, people. But to talk about what might have happened, when no one knows what did happen, gives me the willies.”

  “But Bony, nor any detective, wouldn’t get far without arguing this and that,” John said, placatingly.

  “I agree with you, Eric,” Bony told him, “It’s impolite and unwise to talk shop at dinner, in any case. Theorizing takes us nowhere. That picture there: did Robin Pointer do it?”

  “Yes. About four years ago. Her best period, I think. Eve Pointer calls her studio the Chamber of Horrors. Did you see her pictures?”

  “Mrs Pointer suggested it, and Robin took me to see them,” Bony replied, and John Downer felt easier in his mind.

  “And what is your opinion of them?”

  “There was a picture of horses standing in the shade of sugar gums I liked very much, and another of the wind in the sand dunes I thought exceptional. Mind you, I have no knowledge of technique, and the rest.”

  “Nor have I, but I like her work, or some of it. Others I detest.”

  For the second time this evening Eric’s grey eyes became hard bright discs in his dark face, and once again his father was troubled.

  “She has certainly caught the Spirit of the Land in her picture entitled ‘Desert Spirit Slays a Man’, and there is something of it in the one called ‘The Fool’. The one on her easel I thought particularly well executed, although it did come close to home.”

  “Oh, what was that?” asked Eric.

  “‘Never the Twain shall Meet.’”

  “I don’t ... I haven’t seen that one. What’s it about?” Eric was perplexed and surprised. “Had she just finished it?”

  “It didn’t appear to have been done recently.” Bony described the picture in detail, and as he proceeded, the fingers of Eric’s left hand began drumming on the table. When he paused, Eric would have spoken, but Bony continued: “I fear that I took the whole thing a little personally, when it wasn’t intended, as I quickly realized. Robin said that the idea for the picture came from a visitor’s story.”

  Eric’s fingers still beat the tattoo, and John asked if Robin had related the story.

  “Yes, she did,” answered Bony. “It appears that a young white boy fell in love with an aborigine, and despite warnings and pleadings of their respective parents, they eloped. They were found bound to a tree, both dead, and it was never known which side killed them.”

  “I must have been the visitor, ’cos I told her that story,” John said. “I told her that story a couple of years ago.”

  “You never told it to me,” Eric burst out. “You never said anything about telling her that yarn.”

  “Damn it, Eric, why lose your temper? Nothing to tell. It happened years and years back. I remember it sort of came to me on the spur of the moment.”

  “I told her that Kipling was wrong, anyway,” Bony said, quietly. “I told her that the East often meets the West, and that the East met the West in me.”

  Eric sighed, and the fingers ceased their drumming to permit striking a match for a cigarette. Then he said, with spurious calm:

  “Did you see her picture called ‘Surrender’?”

  Bony shook his head.

  “Pity. Great work of art. Shows a lamb in the talons of an eagle. The eagle has its bloody beak deep in the lamb’s stomach, and the lamb’s head is fallen back and you know that no longer can it feel pain in the death kind enough to come for it. Did you see the one called...”

  “What about calling it a day, lad?” asked John, and Eric stood and glared down at them.

  “Did you see the one called ‘Interest in Anatomy’? There’s seven crows on a tree looking down at an eagle on the ground. The eagle has in its beak the entrails of a horse. It is walking away, pulling the entrails from the horse yard by yard. And the horse has its head raised and is looking at what the eagle is doing, and in the horse’s eyes you can see ... Great God! What do you see in the horse’s eyes!”

  Eric pounded the table, and old John stood, his hazel eyes like the blacks’ rainstones, and his mouth like a dingo trap.

  “I tell you that I hate that girl when she does that with paints,” shouted Eric. “And I could hug her, too, for putting on canvas the Truth, for tearing the blindfold from our eyes, so that we see ourselves as the wretched, tortured animals see us. When she showed me those pictures, those frightful, those utterly truthful pictures, I wanted with all my might to strangle her. Instead we clung together, and I kissed her, and in her kisses I sought for understanding and sympathy for me, for the horror I felt, and there was no sympathy, nothing but desire. I tell you both that Never the Twain shall Meet ... not the twain we are.”

  Panting with emotion, Eric sat and buried his face in his hands. After a few moments, during which his father and Bony were silent, he said more calmly:

  “You two clear out to the veranda. I’ll clear up the dinner things. Sorry I lost grip.”

  Bony nodded to John Downer, and the old man followed him to the veranda. He sat and began cutting chips for his pipe, and Bony stood at the rail, and gazed out over Lake Jane, now painted crimson and black and silver by the sunset sky, and changing the ring of sand-dunes to purple. Neither spoke as Lake Jane appeared to sink lower than the sheets of colour, and then Bony said, excitement causing him to drawl:

  “Come here, John, and tell me if you can see what I think I see.”

  Against the glory of this desert sunset sky, myriads of black dots were arranged in broad arrow heads.

  “Birds,” whispered John.

  The arrow heads swiftly became larger, yet did not alter distance between them. There were others behind them, like stepping-stones to the Evening Star.

  “Pelicans!” cried Downer and, rushing to the house door, shouted: “Come on out, Eric! The birds are coming home. Come out and watch.”

  Eric came to stand beside his father, and what he witnessed drew despondency from him, and renewed the enthusiasm of youth. The pelicans were descending on a long glide, occasionally a bird using its wings to maintain exact position. They were approaching as arrows aimed at the very heart of Lake Jane. John said, gripping Eric’s arm:

  “There’s always the good things, lad. Just look! The birds are coming home at last.”

  Squadron by squadron, every wing taut, the fleet passed in review, the last of the day’s light gleaming like ivory on the majestic prow of every ship.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Flotsam and Jetsam

  THE 31st of March was a day to be recorded and long remembered. It began by bringing to John Downer a restlessness of mind, which drove him to suggesting they all pay a visit to the Pointers at L’Albert. Eric voted in favour, and Bony against, as he had thinking to do and reports to write, and clothes to wash.

  Bony had the clothes on the line and letters written when the Downers left shortly after nine, the old man saying on leaving:

  “There’s bread in the crock and cold ’roo in the meat safe. The place is all yours.”

  Bony took him literally. Having seen the truck vanish in scrub beyond the Crossing, and smoked a cigarette whilst watching the massed pelicans at the far end
of the Lake, he entered the house and glanced into old John’s bedroom. The heavy brass and iron double bed was neatly made. There was a marble-top washstand bearing an ornate ewer standing in a matching basin, and which, doubtless, had not been used since Mrs Downer died. There were pictures on the walls, and these interested Bony. A photograph of Mr and Mrs Downer showed her as having been taller than her husband. Her eyes and brows indicated a placid temperament, her mouth and chin a strong character. Beside it was the portrait of Eric, done by Robin Pointer.

  Eric’s room was as neat as that of his father. Here were pictures of him at school: one of form grouping, one of the football team and another of the cricket team, in both of which he was prominently placed. He was then not as darkly good-looking as he had become. In a picture of the school cadets he was a sergeant, slim and stern.

  When cutting himself a lunch of bread and meat, Bony was feeling in his own sons the pride that Downer and his wife must have felt in Eric. Today Eric was a victim of the drought, which had found him without the armour worn by more resolute and less sensitive men, but when drought was defeated he would regain poise and confidence.

  Having written a note saying that, after all, he chose to tramp to the back of the run, and that he would take the heeler with him, he filled a canvas water bag and before noon was boiling water at Rudder’s Well for lunch tea.

  On this hot and windless day he had walked four miles, and again wished he had a horse to carry him across the man-made plain beyond the mill to the distant scrub line dancing in the heatwaves. It was comparatively cool sitting in the shade of the canegrass shed, when from the heat stepped the Devil to tempt him.

  Why tramp out into that sea of heat and blinding mirage? Why not relax here in the coolness of the shed? Later, when the sun is setting, you could stroll comfortably out there to Eric’s one-time windbreak and tent camp. Why, you could camp there tonight, look around in the early morning, and be back at Lake Jane before the sun becomes really hot again.