Arthur Upfield - Batchelors of Broken Hill

“I am wondering, Jimmy.”

“What in hell about?”

“Whether you are being driven by love or avarice.”

Jimmy heaved up to his feet.

“Whatd’you think?” he almost shouted, and indignation told its tale. “Goodnight!”

“I’ll see you out,” Bony said, and accompanied the burglar along the corridor. His shoes resounded on the bare floor; Jimmy’s feet made no more noise than a cat’s paw. At the door Bony paused.

“The best of luck, Jimmy. I mean that.”

To Court a Maid

TED PLUTO was a Darling River aborigine and quite a smart fellow. He could read comic strips and the sporting papers and he could write and even work out the simpler crossword puzzles. Naturally, he was a fine horseman and a fairly reliable stockman.

Ted liked Broken Hill. He liked working for the police as black tracker, horse breaker, car-washer, and handy man at the lock-up. Since he was only twenty, it could be expected that he would soon tire of the city and its white people and suffer unbearable nostalgia for the bush and the maidens of his own race, but then ChicChic was the city magnet for Ted Pluto.

ChicChic was eighteen and beautiful, and the Reverend Playfair quite a good sort, provided a fellow did his courting openly and in daylight. Thus it was that every Sunday afternoon Ted Pluto walked to the Manse, escorted ChicChic to Sunday school and back to the Manse to eat quantities of sweet cakes in the kitchen with ChicChic after she had taken afternoon tea to the Reverend and Mrs Playfair.

These visits demanded much attention to dress, and this Sunday, as usual, Ted Pluto asked Sergeant Crome for leave of absence and left the Headquarters with his mind cleaned like a slate of everything connected with it. Even the glass dagger.

The haft of the glass dagger had become an object of great importance to Ted Pluto, as to the other trackers. He had contributed to the story of the man who had carried a dead woman across sandy ground to the foot of a mullock dump, and he had been shown the blade of the dagger, cleaned of blood, and translucent blue when held before the sun.

With the other trackers and Sergeant Crome, Ted Pluto had hunted for the missing dagger haft, and he had quickly made up his mind that it wasn’t to be found in that section of waste ground. Nevertheless, Sergeant Crome had ordered him to continue the search, and to please the boss he and the other trackers had done so. Finally the sergeant had promised a pound of tobacco to the tracker who found the haft which fitted the glass blade.

Dressed in gabardine trousers and white silk shirt, and with gleaming brown shoes on his slightly pigeon-toed feet, and with a pretty face in the offing, who the heck wanted to remember glass daggers with or without hafts?

He was some distance from the Manse when he saw a group of white children playing, and the game they played so captivated him that he actually forgot that ChicChic would be waiting.

A small boy and a smaller girl were sauntering along the pavement. The boy carried a stick as, doubtless, he had seen a Regency Buck so doing on the screen. The little girl trod daintily at his side, over her arm a narrow sheepskin hanging to represent a fur. She had brilliant red hair and wore a clean print frock, and from about her neck was suspended a shining ‘gem’.

Out of their sight, round the corner of a low iron fence, lurked three desperadoes, one armed with a pistol, and, on the lady and her escort arriving at the corner, they jumped out, shouting:

“Stick ’emup!”

The gentleman employed his stick as a sword, whereupon the gunman shouted “Bang!” and the gentleman realistically sagged at the knees and collapsed in the best cinema style. The desperadoes proceeded to surround the lady, and the gunman shouted:

“Come on, now, hand over that jool or you’ll get it too. This is a stick-up, lady, an’ we’re desperate men.”

As the gunman’s accomplices were holding tightly to the lady’s arms, it was not possible for her to obey, and the gunman clenched his teeth about the pistol and jerked the ‘jool’ upward to free the neck string from the lady’s head. The three then decamped, and the dead gentleman raised himself to one knee, groaned with agony, lifted his stick like a rifle, and yelled thrice “Bang!” He proved to be an excellent shot, for one after another the robbers fell down lifeless.

That concluded the game. The children gathered into a bunch, and the boys proceeded to argue which of them should be the gentleman in the next performance. This having been settled, the game was played through to the end, watched by the entranced Ted Pluto, who till then was more greatly interested in the play than in the prop which gleamed like the Pacific Ocean under the noonday sun.

With a mental shock he was forcibly reminded of the blue glass dagger and all that Sergeant Crome had said about the missing haft.

“Let’s have a look,” he asked the little girl, hand outstretched.

Gazing into his round and smiling face, she permitted him to lift the ‘jool’ attached by the string to her neck, and one of the boys shouted that it was only a bit of old glass they had found. Ted examined it closely. There could be no mistake. The marks of the file and the smooth facet at the break were sharply clear.

“Give you ashillin ’ for it,” he said.

The boys accepted the offer, but the girl declined. Ted raised the offer by a shilling, and the boys became excitedly eager to close. Still the little girl objected, not to the amount of the offer but to parting with the pretty ‘jool’. The tracker persisted, raised the offer by yet another shilling, and one of the boys snatched the glass from the girl, broke the string, and presented it with one hand, the other held out for the money.

The little girl burst into a storm of tears, and Ted Pluto was instantly compassionate. He had to have the haft of the dagger wanted so badly by Sergeant Crome, chiefly for the glory which would be his and lastly for the desirable pound of tobacco. Having gained possession of the haft, he was tempted to run away from the weeping girl and the shouting boys, and refrained from so doing only by his inherited sense of fair play.

“Who owns this bit of glass?” he asked above the uproar.

“I found it,” one of the boys shouted.

“We all did,” yelled the remaining three, and the girl stopped crying to add her claim. Ted remembered the waiting ChicChic; was dismayed by the time he had dallied here.

“I’ll give you all a shilling and be done with it. Yes or no?”

That settled it. And with the dagger haft rammed into his hip pocket, Ted Pluto hurried off to the Manse, his mind busy with excuses.

Arrived at the kitchen door, he was confronted by an indignant ChicChic. She was a modern miss, and no aboriginal man was ever going to keep her waiting, or behave like the lord of the bushland. In up-to-date parlance she told Ted just where he got off, then cooled down and ran a critical eye over him before they set out for Sunday school.

The bulge of his hip pocket gave her another handle to turn.

“What you got there, Ted Pluto?” she demanded, pointing to his nether region. “You bin wasting money on another pipe, Is’pose.”

A guilty hand flashed astern to feel the protuberance.

“Summit I got for the sergeant,” replied Ted, withdrawing the glass haft.

“Ooh! Nice!” ChicChic thrust forward a hand. Ted made no effort to place the ‘jool’ in that shapely hand of dark brown velvet, and ChicChic stamped her well-shod foot. “Let me see that, Ted Pluto.”

“Can’t. Belongs to the police. ’Tisn’tmine, ChicChic.”

The girl grabbed the hand and began a struggle to force it to give up its treasure. Ted Pluto came within an ace of cuffing her, and it was surprising that countless generations of lordly men failed to hold this young man to their iron influences, so that instead of cuffing her he placed his other hand over Chic Chic’s hands fighting to obtain the lump of blue glass, and with wrist strength forced her hands away.