No footprints in the bush b-8 Read online

  Two roads were open to him. He could retire along that road leading to security in the success he had already achieved of unmasking the man who had committed the crimes tabulated for his investigation. He was able to prove that one particular man had instigated the theft of McPherson’s cattle, had been thus directly implicated in the murder of two aboriginal stockmen, and was responsible for much inter-tribal unrest. His allotted part had been accomplished; the remainder was the concern of the ordinary police who would without doubt charge the criminal with the murder of Sergeant Errey.

  The other road, however, beckoned him with imperative gestures. But this road was fogged by McPherson’s attitude of quiet hostility, by his determination to tread a path of his own, and by the inaccessibility of the criminal so early unmasked. To follow this road meant undertaking strenuous hardship and facing grave danger to achieve in success nothing more than already achieved, save an additional supply of that drug on which he so much depended.

  To follow the second road was to travel far into the “open” country inhabited by a tribe of fierce and relentless aborigines, and there apprehend a wily half-caste armed with the latest weapons provided by science and aided by a people who are past masters in the art of concealment and evasion. Locating and arresting a criminal in a large city would be child’s play in comparison, for Rex McPherson could move at will over a hundred and fifty thousand square miles of semi-desert country. It would mean undertaking the work of a large body of police and aircraft.

  Such a force might well demand a year to achieve the arrest or destruction of Rex McPherson. McPherson’s idea of taking a party of the Wantella blacks into the open country to exact justice was more likely to succeed and in a much shorter period of time. More likely to succeed but not likely to succeed, wherein lay a subtle difference.

  He was still pondering this matter when Flora McPherson stepped out to the veranda, where she was received by a suavely polite man who arranged for her a chair and offered her a tailor-made cigarette from the silver box he had brought from the lounge.

  “Now tell me what deep schemes you are trying to hatch,” she said, seriously.

  “They are about you and Doctor Whyte,” he told her as though to lie wasan impossibility. “I have been expecting to hear that the flying doctor has left Birdsville to visit us, and I have been hoping to hear of his departure because I rather want him to show me from the air as much of the Illprinka country as possible. Then, too, I have been thinking of Burning Water. What a travesty he must have appeared in clothes.”

  “Indeed, he wasn’t,”came the instant defence. “He wore clothes as naturally as you do-as uncle does. I came here first on a Sunday, and I was introduced to a tall attractive black man wearing a suit of spotless duck and white tennis shoes. I had never imagined an aborigine wearing anything but dirty rags and speaking in a kind of guttural broken English. You see, the only aborigines I’d ever seen were those haunting the stations of the Transcontinental Railway.”

  “What an introduction to the race!” exclaimed Bony.

  “I was to be further astonished by him when he played me at tennis at which I thought I was passably good,” she went on. “You ought to see him and uncle as captains of matched cricket teams.” Flora laughed. “And you ought to see the blacks playing cricket, too. Oh no! Burning Water was never a travesty in clothes. Why, he is theMcPhersons ’ greatest achievement in Australia, and if the blacks had been given the chances the Maoris got in New Zealand they would today have been as cultured and as good citizens.”

  “I see that you have a deep admiration for their qualities,” Bony murmured, charmed by the forthrightness with which this girl expressed herself.

  “I have. What is it that makes the world go round?”

  “Money.”

  “No.”

  “Love.”

  “No. I’ll tell you. It’s loyalty. Only the basest of us are not actuated by loyalty: loyalty to one’s class, to one’s people, to one’s ideals. The blacks are as loyal as the best of us. Here they are loyal to their rites and beliefs and customs, to Burning Water and to uncle. They call him not the boss butThe McPherson. I’ll own they were drifting when Burning Water and uncle pulled the tribe together, but that was no fault of theirs. They have helped to make McPherson’s Station. Burning Water helped Uncle with the dam wall. Uncle has achieved much, but his greatest achievement is Burning Water.”

  “You get along very well with your uncle?”

  “Of course. Uncle appeals to my mothering instinct.”

  “And do you like living here so far from the cities?”

  “Again of course. In the city I am a mere cipher. Here I am able to give full scope to a gift for organization. I ama somebody. Besides, I am a throw-back.”

  “Indeed!” Bony said, with well simulated incredulity.

  “Yes, it’s the truth. Both my mother and father hated the bush. I’m like my grandmother and the wives of all those men pictured in the dining-room. I’m more loyal to the clan than my mother was, but don’t think I’m not being loyal to her, will you?”

  “Certainly not; and that is the truth, because I want especially to please you this afternoon. I have a favour to ask. I am going to ask you to go away from McPherson’s Station until this Rex McPherson affair is wound up.”

  “Oh, but that would be silly,” she countered. “Where’s the necessity?”

  “The necessity lies in your uncle andmyself having complete freedom from concern for your safety. Rex threatens to strike again and harder still. He might destroy this house, and everyone in it, with his bombs. He might even attempt to abduct you again. I have the feeling that his next attack will be even more spectacular than what has already happened.”

  “Was this why you asked Doctor Whyte to visit us?” she asked.

  “No. I spoke the truth when I said I wanted him to take me up to see a portion of the Illprinka country. However, if you did consent to take a holiday in one of the cities you would be rendering both your uncle and me a service. Doctor Whyte could fly you as far as Broken Hill and the railway.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “The situation here may develop in such a manner that your presence would create fatal restrictions. You see, we’ll have to act against Rex McPherson. He cannot be permitted to continue. It will mean going away into the open country after him, and if you are still here either your uncle or Burning Water, with the majority of the bucks, will have to stay to guard you.”

  “I can look after myself.”

  “It is probable that you will be confronted by a personal danger from a bad half-caste, and when a half-caste is bad-well, he is so. He has already proved in a shocking manner how ruthless he is. I fear I will have to press the urgency of your taking a holiday.”

  “Why be annoying?” Florademanded, her eyes afire.

  “Not annoying, surely, Miss McPherson. Possibly persistent.”

  “Then don’t be persistent. When you are persistent I can’t help thinking you are a detective.”

  “But really, all joking aside-”

  “I am not joking. I am not leaving McPherson Station. I’m not running away from a bad half-caste. Grandmother never ran away when the homestead was threatened by the blacks. If Rex threatens me I shall kill him. See…”

  Her hand went swiftly to the neck of her low-cut blouse to appear again holding a small automatic pistol. The swiftness of the action aroused Bony’s admiration, and silently he watched her return the weapon to the soft-leather holster strapped beneath her left armpit.

  “I know how to use it, too,” she said, firmly and a little pale. “Burning Water coached me.”

  “Burning Water appears to be proficient in many branches of sport,” Bony surmised.

  “Now you’re being sarcastic,” she flamed at him.

  “I am sorry, Miss McPherson. I should not have made that remark,” he told her contritely. “I fear it’s a bad habit I’ve got from my Chief Commissioner, who in condemnation of anyon
e asserts they must be sickening for something. But really I am a little uneasy about you, and that is my excuse. If you promise me not to hesitate to use that weapon if you are ever threatened by danger I would be less uneasy about you.”

  “It will not be necessary for me to make the promise. But I’m not going away and you mustn’t make me.”

  “Make you!” he echoed. “How could I make you?”

  “You could make me go all right. I know that, and so do you. But please don’t insist. I’d feel cowardly if I ran away-even when you had made me.”

  Bony sighed loudly, with pretended pain.

  “To hear you speak one would think I was a real policeman,” he said, and laughed. “What I said was only a suggestion.”

  Bony stepped off the veranda into the hot sunlight and, with his hands clasped behind his back, trod the yielding paspalum grass lawn to arrive at the bottom fence and there lean against one of the squared and white-painted posts.

  Beyond this fence the ground sloped sharply downwards to the mile-wide verge of claypans two to three hundred feet below the higher ground. Vast sheets of burning water covered the table-flat verge of the plain so that the low tobacco-bush and acacias beyond were raised to tall masts, waving palms and fantastic shapes to be likened to nothing on earth. Effectively hidden was that wide belt of old-man saltbush in which Bony and Chief Burning Water had skirmished with the Illprinka blacks.

  The land shoulders, west and east of the homestead jutting farther into the lower land, shortened the view of the plain’s extent. The road to Shaw’s Lagoon slipped furtively down the slope where it furtively entered the stream of burning water. Thence it undulated over the plain, crossed the far verge of claypans and rose upward to twist among the distant hills and flow for mile upon desolate mile towards the farthest west outpost of civilization and white law.

  It was no wonder that McPherson considered himself, as his father had done, to be a kind of dictator who made laws, who exacted obedience to his laws and punished disobedience. Like his father, he would not long survive if he ever became timid enough to rely on a yell for a policeman to acquit himself of “an annoyance.”

  Bonaparte was not yet used to this garden which in itself was a monument to human courage and tenacity and dauntless effort to create and maintain beauty. Here and there the sprinklers shed their rainbow hued showers upon the gleaming grass. There grew two fine lily-of-the-valley gums, castingbroadbased spear-heads of inviting shade. Over there, roses climbed an arch of trellis and made a sanctuary of the seat below them. To the west and the north an eight-feet-high wall of cane-grass protected the garden from the withering hot winds.

  In the eastward wall was a door, and beyond this part of the wall a line of graceful sugar gums bore aloft jade bracelets to catch the rays of the brilliant sun.

  A famous English novelist wrote a story about a door in a wall beyond which lay-And through this door in a wall of cane-grass Bonaparte passed to enter-a shrine. It was all a shrine, a place of quiet beauty, for cemetery, which hints at cement and coldness, is not the right word for this place of the sleepers.

  The shrine was square-shaped and walled with cane-grass, and in extent was approximately half an acre. In the centre was a white marble fountain-a woman holding aloft the torch of truth from which a thin column of water rose and plumed into spray which descended into the shell-like basin. The entire floor of this place was a lawn in which small circular beds of roses seemed like incense bowls. Against the north walllay two massive slabs of red granite: three similar slabs were over against the south wall. And over all, roses and grass, fountain and red granite slabs, danced the shadows of the sugar-gum leaves.

  Bony slowly passed to the twin slabs of red granite where he read the names chiselled deep and wide. Angus McPherson appeared on the one, and Flora McPherson appeared on the other. There were no dates and no epitaphs.

  A little awed, conscious of standing on hallowed ground, Bonaparte turned to skirt the fountain and to stand before the three slabs resting side by side. Names were chiselled on all three, but those on the outside had been obliterated with cement which easily could be removed when the vault beneath had received its casket. The name on the centre one contained but the one word-Tarlalin-pronounced by McPherson, “Tar-lay-lin.”

  Tarlalin! The name itself was poetry. Tarlalin! An Australian aborigine was lying beneath that magnificent slab of red granite brought all the way from Scotland. Tarlalin!

  The bodies of Australian aborigines had rotted to dry dust in the hot sands of the deserts: had slowly perished in creeks and waterholes: had swelled with the effect of the white man’s poison: and festered with the effects of the white man’s bullets. They had been flogged at Sydney, hanged at Brisbane, loaded with chains at Adelaide and at Perth: had sunk into theferntree gullies of Tasmania. The aborigines had been debased, outraged, jibed at and made the butt of both coarse and refined wit. They had been drawn into the shadow of a civilization which, compared with theirs, was a riot of criminal lunacy. And here in this beautiful shrine one man of all the thousands who had sinned consciously and unconsciously against a race had made atonement when reverently he had laid to rest one aboriginal woman in a mausoleum of imperishable granite, protected from the withering wind by the wall, from the hot sun by the branches of the sugar gums, perfumed by flowers, cooled by luscious, vivid, green grass.

  Tarlalin! One aboriginal woman of all the countless women who, down through the ages, had been little better than beasts of burden, been used carelessly and cruelly by men; regarded without honour, without value, save the questionable value of producing children that were seldom wanted because of the hard-won food they would eat and the precious water they would drink. Of all those numberless women but one had been loved greatly in life and greatly honoured in death.

  Bony breathed her name again and again. It stirred him in a manner never before experienced. What had the white girl said ruled the world, when he had answered money? Why, loyalty! Of course, she was right. Loyalty was actuating McPherson now-loyalty to his ownname, his own people, his own clan. He was now fighting for what? To preserve his name from being soiled and Tarlalin’s memory from scorn and derision. He was fighting an evil spirit, threatening Tarlalin’s memory and his own name.

  And McPherson should win his fight. Oh yes, he should win it. Bony would ensurevictory, ensure security for a woman’s memory and a man’s name. No hint of public derision should reach the man who so signally had honoured a woman of Bony’s own mother’s race. Here in this shrine was the die cast for him. Here began the road he would take. Tarlalin! She could have been the mother he had never known, the unfortunate who laid herself down to die in the shade of a sandalwood-tree, holding in her arms a sleeping babe that grew up to become Detective-Inspector Bonaparte.

  Old Jack spoke twice before Bony became aware of his presence.

  “She’s a pretty little graveyard, ain’t she, mister?” remarked the little old man who looked so like the Emperor Franz Joseph when his old felt hat hid his bald cranium.

  “Oh, hullo, Jack. Where did you come from?”

  The ancient chuckled, and Bony could hear no irreverence in it.

  “I was a-lying down over there having forty winks,” explained Old Jack. “It’s nice and peaceful in here, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. And very beautiful. Tell me, who is that stone to cover-presently?”

  “That one! That’s the boss’s resting-place-to-be.”

  “Ah! And the other?”

  “That’s the resting-place-to-be of the young master that went away years back.”

  “Rex McPherson, eh?”

  “Thatbe him, mister. You know about him?”

  “Yes. He hasn’t done much good has he?”

  “Well, no,” slowly agreed the old man, to add: “But he’s only a bit wild. He wasn’t handled right, to my way of thinking. Aye, he were a bonnie boy, and hegrow’d up to a fine looking man, too. Full of spirit, you know. Devilmentmore’n anythi
ng. The boss was a bit severe like with him after he came from school.”

  Bony regarded the little old man standing peering up at him with bright eyes. Old Jack went on:

  “Yes, mister, this here’s a beautiful place. The woman lying yonder thought of it first before it ever happened. She loved flowers, you know. So do I. Y’see over there at the feet of them two slabs of Angus and Flora McPherson? That’s where I’m going to take my last long sleep. The boss has promised me that, and he’ll keep his promise, never fear.”

  Bony’s gaze wandered from the bright eyes. Loyalty! The girl was right.

  After discussing cabbages and kings over the tea cups, Bony visited the office where he remained for twenty minutes before walking thoughtfully to the blacks’ camp.

  At fifty yards the scene he gazed upon was indolent and peaceful. Chief Burning Water was lying in the shade and again permitting a “chook house” to be erected on his stomach, and it was this that brought the heavy frown to Bonaparte’s forehead, for here he was confronted by that facet of the aborigine’s character which is the fatal bar to his advancement in step with other races. Educate him as you will, influence him as you may, you cannot eradicate his supreme indifference to tomorrow.

  “The McPherson is not yet home,” Bony informed Burning Water.

  “There is nothing unusual about that,” the chief asserted. “The McPherson no doubt has found other work to do from that he set out to do. I have known him go away for the day and stay away for a week.”

  “But other circumstances in conjunction with his absence give ground for worry,” Bony pointed out. “Constable Price says there is no word from Doctor Whyte in reply to the telegram asking him to pay The McPherson a visit. Also, I am unable to get through to the out-station. The line is dead. There is a white man out there, isn’t there? Married, too.”

  “Yes. Tom Nevin is at the out-station with his wife and two babies, A tree branch must have fallen across the line, because Mrs Nevin would be there to answer a ring.”