Arthur Upfield - Death of a Swagman

“Good day, Burns!” he said to Bony. “Let me see now. This is your last day, isn’t it?”

“That’s so, Mr Jason.”

“No ill feeling, I hope?”

“None at all, Mr Jason,” Bony assured him. “You had a job to do, and you did it quite well. As a matter of fact, I have enjoyed the period in jail.”

“I am glad to hear that.”

The rich voice seemed oddly at variance with the dungaree overalls being worn by Merino’s first citizen. Mr Jason’s white face and black moustache appeared at variance with those overalls too.

“What are your plans for the future?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m going to work for Mr Leylan. Reporting to him in the morning. Mr James got me a job with him.”

“Hum! You will find him quite a good employer. His men speak well of him.” Mr Jason produced his pipe and tobacco plug and knife. For the first time he smiled. Then: “There is one place on Wattle Creek Station I would not like to work from.”

“Sandy Flat!” breathed Mr Watson. “I wouldn’t camp at that place for a hundred pounds.”

“Nor me, either,” interjected the licensee. “Not after what’s happened down there.”

Bony called for drinks.

“If Leylan wants me to go and live at Sandy Flat,” he said, “I’ll not be going. No, not after having seen all those blowflies that day.”

Mr Jason, having loaded the bowl of his pipe, applied a match to the weed, and Mr Watson gently nudged Bony. The pipe seemed not to draw well, and Mr Jason unscrewed the little cup beneath the bowl, emptied the fluid nicotine onto the floor, replaced the cup, and applied another match. When the smoke appeared to rise slowly above his head like a lifting halo, he said:

“I cannot at the moment recall a line written by Milton about the spirits of the departed. To me the spirits of the departed would be less uncomfortable than the dust down at Sandy Flat. I understand that even a gentle wind will raise the dust there to suffocating volume. Still, to a man having imagination dead quiet nights would be very trying.”

“Any kind of nights at that place would be too trying for me,” Bony asserted.

Sand and Wind

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON of the following day Bony, now an employee of Massey Leylan, left Wattle Creek homestead for Sandy Flat. He rode a spirited grey gelding withwhom he had still to make friends, whilst fresh in his mind were the well-wishes and the condolences of Sam the Blackmailer, and those employed about the homestead. He had been assured by everyone that “not for a million quid” would they camp at the hut at Sandy Flat for a single night.

On leaving the homestead, instead of following the road to Merino till the right-hand turn was reached, he rode close beside the Walls of China, which rose on his left side in steep ramparts and slopes of sand supporting never a blade of grassnor a shoot of scrub. The wind came from his right, the west, fairly steadily and at an estimated velocity of fifteen miles an hour. It carried towards the Walls the sand grains flung upward by the hoofs of his horse and it blurred with white mist the curving lines of the summits upon which rested the blue sky. The sun was hot and good to feel on bare arms and neck and right cheek, and now and then Bony expanded his chest and breathed deeply. He was inclined to sing, for his spirit was uplifted.

This was his country. The vast, almost mountainous range of snow-white sand to his left, and the red bush-covered land rising gently on his right to the far distant horizon beyond and higher than Merino, was his city. The endless white sand flats separated by water gutters which rarely knew water were his streets. The very ground itself was his newspaper, supplied to him freshly clean and new after every moderately windy day.

Over the broad sand flats he rode a horse anxious to gallop, anxious to be free, to stretch the muscles of his legs and whistle the wind through distended pink nostrils. Well, during the immediate days ahead, the horse should have its wish, for there were hundreds of square miles of land to be surveyed, land over which a man had twice passed to and from the sinister hut at Sandy Flat.

He came to the eastern fence of the half-mile-square horse paddock, a fence which hugged the foot of the Walls, and when he reached the southern corner he rode for three hundred yards to pass the hut and to examine the water troughs. The truck’s wheel tracks were plain, as were the tracks of the driver from truck to hut and back. Yet even so soon, the wind was filling in those tracks. A few sheep were drinking at one of the troughs; several others were lying down far out and chewing the cud. The ground indicated that comparatively fewstock were watering here, that the water holes in the paddocks were still serving the majority.

He gave his horse a drink and then rode again past the hut to the gate of the horse paddock, went through it, loosed the horse, and hung saddle and bridle over a rail sheltered by a small roof of iron. The horse galloped away, and Bony walked back to the hut. By the sun it was then a few minutes after five o’clock.

In place of the door handles sent down to the fingerprint section a length of fencing wire had been passed through the hole and knotted, its outer end angled to slip down over a nail driven into the doorframe. This primitivedoorcatch Bony lifted up and then pushed inward the door, smiling grimly at the unwarranted precaution so soon after the visit of the truck driver. He even peered through the space between door and frame to ascertain if anyone stood behind the door with a strip of hessian sacking ready in his hands. On the table were the rations, a tucker box and meat in a calico bag, and his strapped swag.

Having raised the drop window in the back wall, he took two petrol-tin buckets to fill at a tap beneath the reservoir tank. The outside indicator showed that the tank was four-fifths filled, and so there was no necessity to release the mill. On getting back to the hut with his water supply, he made a fire on the open hearth and slung over it a filled billycan of water for tea. In the tucker box was fresh bread and cooked meat, so no cooking had to be done this evening. Then the jam tins, in which stood the legs of the meat safe in the small cane-grass hutment, had to be filled with water to defeat the ants, which in these parts defied even the shifting sand. After that he unrolled his swag on the bunk and prepared his bed for the night.

The sun could be seen framed within the trap window. It was huge and blood-red, and the light it shed into the hut splashed crimson upon the bunk, the table, and the floor near the door. The air was cooling, but the flies remained “sticky”, and even when the sun did vanish beneath the tree-bordered horizon they remained active, loath to leave Bony’s arms and face.

The wind was not as strong now, but it promised to blow throughout the night and the following day, and when he had washed the dishes after his meal and stood on the doorstep smoking a cigarette, he saw that the truck’s wheel tracks were almost obliterated. His own-excepting those against the doorstep-were wholly so.

As the twilight deepened he sat on the doorstep andsmoked, the nature lover in him entranced by the slowly changing colours of the Walls of China.

The wind’s plaintive moan at the corners of the hut failed to drown from his earsits hissing over the sand ripples all about. Unaccountably a cold arrow sped up the flesh covering his spine and made him glance over his shoulder at the dark interior of the hut limited by the oblong opening of the drop window. The same swift glance noted the crossbeam from which had dangled a dead man.

“There are times,” he mused aloud, “when my mother in me makes me too sensitive. I can smell the blood of men, and I can feel their spirits near me. Now, now, Detective Inspector Bonaparte, stand no nonsense from Bony.”