Arthur Upfield - The bushman who came back

Wisps of dead grass and herbage formed her feet, shimmered her red gown with gold to the waist. Her slim body rose to several hundred feet, swaying gently in a swooning waltz as she proceeded. A gambler here would be in paradise, for he could back his hunch without taking into account pulled horses or stacked cards, and Bony was backing this willi-willi to pass on his left, when the unpredictable happened.

As they are conceived by a gentle eddy so the willies die in an eddy. This one began to die when but a hundred yards from Bony. Something gross and unsporting punched her in the tummy, but she staggered onward in increasing tempo as though striving to keep up with the orchestra.

Bony betted she wouldn’t reach his side of the flat, and won. Suddenly she lost her head, and lifted her skirt as though to cover her shamed head.

Absorbed in the fate of the female, he saw not the male, for there was Charlie racing to cover, he having almost crossed the flat in the centre of a revolving column of sand.

In Effort to Trade

BETRAYEDBYthe willi-willi, Charlie gained the nearest cover at Olympic speed, ending the spring with a dive for Bony’s cotton bush.

Following the dieting of the walkabout to the Neales River, Charlie had fattened on Sarah’s white-man tucker, and was now in excellent condition, his arms and legs of Grecian proportions, his tummy less to be admired. All he wore was a pair of dark-brown shorts; his only equipment a hessian bag subsequently found to contain a small calico bag of tea and a gnawed leg of fire-charred kangaroo. On coming to rest under the cotton bush, his head was within fifteen inches of Bony’s head. When their gaze clashed, Bony said mildly:

“Good day-ee, Charlie! Are you travelling?”

Charlie grinned, genuine humour associated with astonishment in his black eyes.

“Day-ee, Mr Bonaparte. Bit hot in the sun, eh?” Then realization of the situation smote him and he shrank away without thought of the sunlight burning his feet beyond the bush. “Crikey! This your bush, eh? I’ll get going.”

“We go together,” purred Bony, standing with Charlie. “We have much to talk about, and three miles’ travel to the next camp. We go that way, to my horses.”

Charlie found dislike of the hard blue eyes and of the automatic directed to his stomach, and ultimately disliked the hard smile on Bony’s face. He was ordered to unhitch the pack-horse and lead it to Yorky’s next camp, and on glancing backward now and then, it was to see Bony mounted, the pistol in his right hand. Escorted occasionally by an indifferent willi-willi, they moved over the flats and the low sand ridges, through the swamp gums, across dry creek beds and narrower gutters, to arrive at a bough shed erected beside a lake of shallow water maintained by a bore half a mile away.

Here Bony told Charlie to remove the load from the pack-horse. Then with his left hand he unstrapped one of the pack-bags and took from it a pair of handcuffs. They were not of the kind Charlie had seen previously, which are manacles rather than wrist-cuffs. Still, he knew their purpose, and he offered no resistance. The heavy pack-saddle was lifted into the shade of the bough shed, and then, before he understood what was going on, one of the cuffs was unlocked from a wrist and relocked to the iron structure of the pack saddle. Thus he had one hand free with which to protect his face from the flies, and if he wanted to run, well, the saddle went with him, and he wouldn’t run far and never fast.

Save for its proximity to water, the camp site was unsatisfactory, open to the westerlies, unprotected from the dusty ground churned by the hoofs of nomadic cattle. Although brackish, the water was good enough for tea if taken with plenty of sugar, and the closer to the bore, so was the water more heavily laden with alkali, hot almost to boiling point at the mouth of the L-shape iron outlet pipe. Day and night gushed the water from the depths, year after year since the bore was put down.

Bony made tea, gave Charlie a pannikin of it, opened a tin of beef for each of them. He tossed the charred kangaroo leg to the already gathered crows, and then when they were smoking and the sun had gone down, he began the interrogation.

“You’re a rotten tracker, Charlie. Too much Mission learning, eh? You learn to read and write, but you’re no tracker.”

“I followed you all the way from Mount Eden, anyway,” reminded Charlie, cheerfully, and yet with wariness in his eyes. “I done no wrong. Free country. Mr Wootton go crook when he knows about this.” He raised his cuffed wrist, and for the first time anger glowed. “I got my School Certificate, like Meena and the others. I’ll write to the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Adelaide.”

“Do that, Charlie,” Bony said kindly. “Ask him to call on you in jail. You see, Charlie, I’m a terrible liar. I’m the worst liar you ever met. I may-it will depend on you-arrest you and put you up on a charge of interfering with a police officer in the execution of his duty, obstructing the police, assaulting a police officer, taking unlawful refuge inside a willi-willi, and several other matters I could think of.”

“You got to prove all that.”

Charlie was as yet unimpressed, because his respect for Constable Pierce was due to that policeman’s tolerance, and also to the result of a little learning and association with a Missioner. Evil white men hadn’t entered his ken. On the opposite side, Bony knew all too well that you cannot abstract with violence information from an unwilling aborigine. He was sure that Charlie hadn’t tracked him of his own volition, that he had been ordered to do so, and most likely was instructed not to divulge who issued the order.

“You know Constable Pierce, Charlie,” Bony went on. “Some other place boss policeman over Constable Pierce, and some other place bigger boss policeman. Now I am a Big Chief policeman. I’m like Chief Canute. What I say goes. I tell lies about you and everyone believes me, not you. You tell the judge I’m a big-feller liar, and he’ll add six months more jail. I say you did all these things, and you go to jail for three years. Better for you to tell me where Yorky is, and then instead of jail Constable Pierce will make you his tracker.”

“Sezyou,” scoffed Charlie, and Bony was dismayed because Charlie now appeared to be more sophisticated than he had thought.

“You must have been to the pictures,” he said.

“Too right! Down at Loaders Springs. Us Missionabos was allowed by the Missioner everySat’day night. Took us to town in his truck. We seen BobMitchum and Gary Cooper and all them.”

“You astonish me, Charlie. The cinema on Saturday night and hiding in a willi-willi on Sunday morning. Singing in church on Sunday evening, and pointing the bone on Monday afternoon. Still, you’ll be seeing films in jail once every month, and singing songs when locked in a nice cold cell at night. And, Charlie, while you’re in jail, do you know what will happen?”

“What?”

“Some other aborigine is going to take Meena.”

With boosted confidence, Charlie countered with:

“Meena belongs to Canute. No blackfeller can take Meena.”

“But you tried, Charlie. I saw you the other night. She slapped your face, and then let you kiss her. She let you kiss her twice when you made the doll of her and gave it to Linda. I know you like Meena. I know that she likes you, too. But you’re afraid, aren’t you? You’re afraid of old Canute. You know that if you run away with Meena, the bucks will track you and catch you, and you will be speared, and Meena’s knees will be broken so that she can’t run away another time.”

The scenting nostrils were flaring, for love and desire are not the prerogatives of the white man. Almost dreamily, Bony went on talking.