Arthur Upfield - The bushman who came back

To question Charlie and his Meena further would be unfair to them, as well as futile. They had consciously and unconsciously given him something to aid his investigation. They knew a little of the much known to Canute and his Grand Vizier. They were sure in mind that Linda was safe enough. And that meant the child was still within the Lake Eyre Basin. By tracking him, Charlie was merely obeying an order. By tracking Charlie, Meena had acted on impulse prompted by one of several reasons. Neither could be rushed; both could be led to further co-operation.

Towelling himself, he dressed and returned to the camp, where he was shaving when the girl stirred and stood, stretched her arms and opened wide her shoulders. Seeing him, she turned to the fire and replenished the fuelling, then filled the billy from the pack-drum and set it against the flames.

On completing his toilet, Bony crossed to stand with her.

“After we have eaten you had better return to the homestead,” he said. “You will remember that you didn’t catch up with Charlie, and he and I will wipe out the tracks about this place to prove it.”

She turned to face him, her large dark eyes gentle, the grey flecks soft and distinct. He saw himself in her, and she herself in him. Each of the same duality of race, each was of neither one race nor the other. There was a faint tremble about her mouth when she said:

“Did you speak true last night when you told Charlie about your Meena, and being married and running away to that place among the tobacco bush?”

“Yes. You heard that?”

She nodded, her face downcast.

“You would like the Missioner to marry you and Charlie, wouldn’t you?”

Again the slight nod, the dark eyes hopeful, and Bony wished that Marie, his wife, was there to help the girl to break the chains of tribal taboos.

“Canute is blind and old,” he reminded her. “Murtee is old. I’ll tell them to free you from the birth promise so that you can marry Charlie. When I tell them, they will. And then the Missioner can marry you, and you can go away and camp somewhere among tobacco bush where Charlie can love you.”

“True?”

“Bet?”

She watched him break unequally two match sticks, watched him wave his hands, then present the sticks in his clenched fist, the tops on a level.

“Long I will; short I won’t,” he recited.

She pulled one of the sticks, and he opened his hand and she found her choice to be the longer. She remained so still with her head bent to look at those sticks, that he wondered if she had detected the trick which removed the gamble from the act, and then was rewarded by the smile on her face, a smile which, like the day, was slowly born.

“Better wake that Charlie,” he advised, and turned away to re-pack his shaving gear.

She wakened Charlie by nudging him with her toes and calling him a lazy black bastard. Charlie grunted, stood, stretched as she had done, grinned and lunged at her. She turned and fled, fled to the lake, and he raced after her and joined battle with splashing water. She danced about him, shouting with laughter at his attempts to grab her, shrieked with pretended terror when he succeeded. Together they fell and writhed in the foam, and eventually came walking back to camp hand in hand. And as they ate the food presented by Bony, the heat of the fire raised steam from their shorts.

Later, the two men silently watched the girl skirting the lake, and Bony thought that if white girls had been there to watch Meena, they would never wear shoes. For a moment she stood on the crest of a red dune, then turned and waved before disappearing beyond it.

“How far is the Loaders Springs road?” Bony asked, and was told some four miles. Eighteen miles beyond the road gate was the next of Yorky’s camps where water lay in a rock-hole. “You can follow on after me, Charlie. You know, make believe you’re still tracking me, eh?”

Charlie laughed, and there was no doubt he was pleased at this way out of admission of failure. They discussed the matter of erasing Meena’s tracks, and Charlie said it couldn’t be done under two days, and predicted wind later on this day which would do the job for them. He brought the belled horses, helped to load the pack-animal, and squatted over the dying fire while giving Bony a lead of several miles.

Sitting easy in his saddle, the pack-horse trailing behind, Bony began soon to doubt that Charlie’s weather prediction could be correct. The sky gave no sign of wind, and if no wind came to wipe away Meena’s tracks, they would be read by another aborigine, who would report them. Noon found Bony still riding. The willi-willies were again on the march, the sun-heat powerful, and the necessity of creating a diversion from those camp tracks became even stronger.

One of Bony’s rules of crime investigation, and one which more often than not brought results, was to stir up those opposed to him when it seemed they were standing still. Canute and Murtee were reclining in the tree-shade and content with the counter-move they had made by sending Charlie to find out what the big-feller policeman was doing. Charlie and the big-feller policeman were following an endless boundary fence in the heat of a late summer, a fence lying along the perimeter of a great circle centred by Mount Eden homestead. In three days Bony and his follower would again reach Lake Eyre, this time to the south of the homestead, and so far the only gain for Bony was what he had set out to achieve, proof of interest by the aborigines in his investigation.

He decided to create a diversion from Meena’s tracks which also would spur those wily aborigine leaders into action of some kind.

He would smoke-signal to them!

At four o’clock the wind was still absent, and the sky was wiped clean of clouds.

The place for the signals was found in a narrow gully where grew young tobacco bush amid sapling gums. Bony heaped dry bush and sticks at three widely separated points, and beside the rubbish he deposited other heaps of green tobacco bush and green tree boughs.

In general, smoke-signalling is done to convey simple messages, and in particular is used to draw a distant medicine man or head man into telepathic communication. It was not Bony’s intention to send a message, but to create confusion, curiosity and alarm.

He fired a heap of rubbish, and the rubbish burned brightly without smoke. On to this fire he tossed green bush, and at once dense smoke rose straight upward. When the column was high and the green stuff almost consumed, he fired the second heap, and when it was bright, blanketed it with green boughs. Thence from one fire to another, he sent up three columns with varied spacing of each, the weather being perfect, and he patted himself with justifiable satisfaction. Canute and his followers couldn’t read the message, because there wasn’t one, and what poor bewildered Charlie, now plodding along the horses’ tracks, would think of it was subject for quiet merriment.

The aborigines in their camp, and Charlie on the tramp, would most certainly be perturbed by the signals they couldn’t understand.

Aided by memory of the wall map in Wootton’s office, Bony estimated he was then nine miles direct from Mount Eden homestead. That the smokes would be seen by the aborigines there, he was confident, and that Canute would dispatch some of his bucks to investigate would be certain.

An hour later he was riding up one of the gibber-armoured slopes over which Arnold had to pass to reach the old homestead for the iron, and on arriving at the summit of a tabletop he was amused and gratified to see smokes going up from Canute’s camp.

He was about to begin the long descent to a wide belt of trees and a windmill, when he saw an answering signal rising from the place at which he had created both diversion and confusion. Charlie was informing Canute that adebil-debil was playing hell in general.