Arthur Upfield - Death of a Swagman

Bony essayed his first smile.

“Gooddayee, Padre,” he responded. “I’ll think over what you have told me. As I read somewhere: no man ever becomes a saint in his sleep.”

Mr James had proceeded towards the garage, but he turned sharply to look back with swift suspicion at the half-caste, who was dipping a paintbrush into the pot. He came to the verge of saying something, but checked himself.

Bony began his work mechanically. His eyes were engaged with the footmarks left on the soft earthen sidewalk by the Rev. Llewellyn James.

A Scar on Nature’s Handiwork

ON THE SEVENTH DAY of his “imprisonment,” Bony suggested to Sergeant Marshall that they visit the hut at Sandy Flat in which the body of George Kendall had been found. The suggestion was readily accepted by the sergeant, who had been tied more than he liked to his desk.

That Bony should wait seven days before indicating a desire to visit the scene of the crime he was in Merino to unravel was to Marshall peculiar, to say the least, but those seven days had not been spent merely in painting government property. There had been the prolonged study of large-scale maps of the district to imprint on Bony’s mind the situation and layout of every surrounding station property, every road and track, every water hole and well. There had been hours spent on Detective Sergeant Redman’s reports and on the statements he had gathered. And Bony had got to know nearly every man and many women who lived at Merino.

It was a little before eleven o’clock on the morning of December fifth that they left Merino in the sergeant’s car, in the boot of which Mrs Marshall had herself placed a hamper and a tea billy. Once clear of the town, Bony said to the sergeant, who was wearing flannels and an open-necked shirt:

“I am a great believer in intuition. For instance, intuition never fails to warn me when my eldest son is about to ask for financial accommodation.”

“Doing well?” inquired Marshall, now hopeful that following a period of “closeness” Bony would be confidential.

“Very well. I am, secretly, proud of him. For that reason, when intuition warns me that a loan is about to be requested, to avoid paining him by a refusal, I make excuses to rush away. What is your opinion of the Rev. Llewellyn James?”

“Not much.”

“Do you mean that the opinion is not much in length or of value, or that the opinion is not favourable?”

“Even now I can’t tell whether you are serious or pulling my leg. I don’t like the Rev. Llewellyn James.”

“Officially or privately?”

“Privately, of course. Why be legal this morning?”

“I am in the mood for exactitude,” Bony told him, although his voice indicated the opposite. “What is the general opinion of James held by the people?”

The sergeant did not at once answer this question.

“The best way to deal with the subject,” he began, “is to make a comparison with the previous parson. James has been here four years and a bit. He arrived eight months after the other man left. The previous man was very well liked. He was elderly and a really great man who inspired love as well as respect. You know what is wanted in a parson by bush folk. To get on well with bush people, a parson has to be a man’s man as well as a churchman. James may be a good churchman, but he’s not a man’s man.”

“You do not seem confident that he isor is not a good churchman?” pressed Bony.

“That’s so. I don’t go to church. My wife does, however, and she says that James is better than nominister at all, and also that what he lacks is compensated by his wife.”

“Oh!” Bony made no other comment for a period. Then he said lazily: “You would not have had time to spare, as the statistician of every government department, to study criminology. That is a study thought unsuitable for real policemen, and so no time is allowed for it. I used once to compile data on the physical features of murderers and near-such, when it was proved how remarkably highis the percentage of killers having light blue eyes. James, you will recall, has light blue eyes.”

“Eh!” exclaimed the startled sergeant.

“Don’t let it worry you. Millions of people having light blue eyes go through life without committing a murder. We must not allow our natural reactions to Mr James to cloud our common sense. I mentioned the matter only for interest value. So that is the cemetery! Well! Well! It tells us its own history.”

“What does it tell?”

“It is elementary, my dear Watson. In bygone years people hereabouts died and were taken to their rest over there. Thencame the motor car, to transport sick people swiftly to the hospital at the much larger town of Mildura. And so only very poor persons, and those who died suddenly or from accident, have been buried at Merino. Right?”

“Yes. Before Kendall was buried there the last was several years ago.”

“It is likely that another will be buried there shortly.”

“What!”

“Imagination, Marshall, just imagination. It runs away with me sometimes. Hullo! Here is the left-hand turning.”

Instead of taking the road turn to the north, Marshall stopped his car at a gate through which a lesser track continued eastward towards the Walls of China. They were now two miles out from Merino and three miles from the homestead of Wattle Creek Station along that north road. The great barrier of white sand dominated the scene far more powerfully than it dominated the township, rising several hundred feet in a series of whaleback ridges. The sparse scrub trees and blue bush and saltbush growing on red soil verged on the limits of vegetation.

Bony alighted and opened the gate in the five-wire fence, then stayed to regard the track beyond whilst the sergeant drove through. Not since the rain had a vehicle been driven down this track, the wheel ruts semi-filled with drift sand making progress slower for Marshall’s car.

“Those Jason men are singular in their individual ways, don’t you think?” remarked Bony.

“You’re telling me,” agreed the sergeant succinctly.

“Which of them is the boss? I went into the garage the other morning and was just in time to hear young Jasontell his father to ‘get to hell away from that’. Old Jason was standing by the engine of a truck. The engine was running and he was peering in at it under the raised bonnet. When the son shouted at him from a wall bench the father straightened up and moved away after switching off the engine. He said nothing; made no attempt even to remonstrate with his son for speaking as he did.”

“They’re a peculiar pair,” Marshall further agreed. “The son is the motor mechanic, and a good one too, and the old man does allwheelwrighting and coffin making. He’s a bit of a brick, in his way, for he takes a lot from the lad and seldom asserts himself. Pities him, I suppose, for his deformities, and the son resents it.”

“Where do they come from?”

“Bathurst, I think.”

“Redman doesn’t record their origin, although in his reports he is hostile to young Jason. There is a lot in origins, you know. The history of murders and lesser crimes doesn’t begin five minutes before they are committed. The origin of some murders began generations before the-er-blunt instrument was used.”

Now the country was swiftly changing. The trees were thinning out and the barley and spear grass were giving place to tussock grass, that wiry, seemingly indestructible grass growing in clumps in the drier, more inhospitable parts of the inland. The red sand was becoming heavier, and on the east side of every clump of tussock grass the sand was raised into a small mound. Quite abruptly the trees and bush shrubs ended in an irregular line, and the car passed out onto a half-mile-wide ribbon of plain land bordering the Walls of China. The red sand gave place to white sand, and now the tussock grass gave out. Nothing grew here on the white sand foundations of the Walls of China.