Arthur Upfield - The Mountains have a Secret

“Cheerio, and the best of possible luck, old man. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”

Bony opened the door, stood on the running-board, tossed his swag and gunny-sack into the scrub, and then jumped from the car into the scrub and thus avoided leaving his tracks on the roadside. He crouched beside hisdunnage and was concealed when the car’s headlights were switched on. He watched the machine growing smaller in the frame of its own lights, watched it until it disappeared round a bend in the road, and listened until the sound of it was overmastered by the frogs in a near-by stream.

He sat on his swag and smoked cigarettes whilst the quiet and balmy night caressed him like a woman wanting to wean him from all distraction. Only very gradually did the night subdue the elation of the hunter, the chill of the hunted, the warm thrilling of the adventurer. He was alone in strange and glamorous country, and the vibrant instincts of his mother’s race would not wholly submit. Now he was cut off from men and was the close companion of the living earth, clothed with tree and scrub. He would have to pass over the living earth upon his two feet, not along plain and easy roads, but over gully and mountain, and through tangled scrub and treacherous swamp, the while trying to see round corners and himself never to be seen.

A transformation of himself was going on, and it was not the first time in his life nor the first time he noted it with incurious interest. It was similar to the transformation of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, although the opposing influences were not good and evil, but rather the complex and the primitive in man. The highly-civilised Inspector Bonaparte was retreating before the incoming primitive hunter. The dapper, suave, and almost pedantic product of modern education and social intercourse, which is but a veneer laid upon the ego of modern man, was now being melted away from this often tragic figure, in whom ever warred the influence of two races.

Hitherto, Bonaparte had not wholly surrendered himself to his mother’s racial instincts, the great weapon of pride winning for himself the battle. He would not wholly surrender himself on this occasion, but he did give himself in part because of the conditions which would govern his life for the next days or weeks, and because of the probable forces with which he would have to contend.

His career as an investigator of violent crime had been unmarred by a single failure, and this was due much less to keen reasoning and keen observation, than to the inherited lust for the chase, bequeathed to him by a race of the greatest hunters the world has ever known, a race which has had to employ reason, patience, and unbreakable determination to gain sustenance in a country where food was ever hard to win.

Within the rhythm of the battle of instincts and influences going on within, there was born a note of discord, and the contestants fell apart and were quiet, that the alarm could gain ascendancy. The conscious mind became receptive and through the ears strove to detect what had struck the discordant note. Bony could hear the bullfrogs, the rustling of insects, the trees breathing the zephyrs. Into this orchestral symphony came the low booming of a bass drum, and after split-second hesitation Bony decided what it was. It was rock falling down the face of a mountain range.

Then he heard that which had given the alarm. From the general direction of the hotel came the sound of a motor-cycle. It was coming from the hotel and was being driven at the highest speed permitted by the track.

Bony backed off his swag farther into the scrub and lay down behind it. At this level the road and the bush beyond presented a black and featureless void, and it was a full minute before the right edge of the void paled with light. A few seconds later the motor-cyclist arrived at the road junction, rounded the bend, and came roaring to pass him. The back glow of the single headlight clearly revealed Glen Shannon.

The image of the road and the scrub, across which had flashed the machine, faded out. The night fought with the sound and slowly, slowly won. Bony waited and wondered. And then his mouth widened and his upper lip lifted in a hard and fixed grin, for from the hotel he heard the sound of an oncoming car.

The car stopped at the road junction, its lights illuminating the world of trees and scrub to Bony’s right. Upon hands and knees, he crept to the edge of the road, where he was able to see the junction and the men who were examining the ground. There were four men, three of whom Bony had not previously seen. The fourth man was James Simpson.

The men conferred for a little while and then vanished behind the car’s headlights. The car was driven forward and turned on the junction, and it was not Simpson’s Buick. It disappeared down the side track leading to the hotel, and the sound of it proved that the speed on the return journey was much slower.

It seemed that the four men had come thus far to establish whether the American had taken the road to Dunkeld or that to Hall’s Gap. The tracks of the motor-cycle on the dusty road would have decided the matter for them.

Bird’s-Eye Views

IN every city throughout the world men watch houses and note who enter into and issue from them. Men watch houses from busy sidewalks, from dark doorways, and often from houses opposite. For the first time Bony watched a house from a mountain-top.

A great volume of water had passed down the creek to skirt the Baden Park Hotel since that early night when Mulligan left him on the roadside, but not much had been added to the investigation into the disappearance of the two girls.

Entry by the back door into this scene, as he had described his intention, had been effected in the dark of night. He had carried his swag and essential equipment for five miles over country extraordinarily difficult in broad daylight, and before dawn had made his camp inside the little mountain of rocks sundered from the parent range.

For five days now he had maintained observation on the hotel, and had employed the early hours of daylight in scouting expeditions, which previously he had been unable to conduct without being observed.

Having discovered a way up the face of the range to the summit, he had selected for his observation post two huge granite boulders set upon the very lip of the precipice and appearing as though a child could push them over. Between the boulders lay dark shadows, and behind them the scrub provided concealment from any who might come up the mountain slope.

From this vantage point Bony was able to gaze to the far limits of the great amphitheatre, in which old Simpson had founded a home and reared his family. The forest carpet of rough pile appeared to be almost level. Actually it concealed swamp and water gutter and creek, steep slope and stony outcrop, barrier of tangled scrub. He could see a section of the white bridge near the road junction, and the indentation on the forest carpet marking the track from the junction to the hotel and then on for some distance towards Lake George.

Fifteen hundred feet below, and seemingly so near that it was possible to drop a pebble upon the roof, stood the Baden Park Hotel, red-roofed and cream-painted. Nearer to the watcher, the hen-houses and the stables appeared like so many silver matchboxes, and the hens in freedom like white and black pinheads upon light green velvet. Nearer still was the square of the deserted vineyard.

Throughout the days of his vigil he had seen nothing untoward in the lives of those down at the hotel. Ferris Simpson fed the hens morning and evening, and her brother looked after the dray horse and the gelding he had recently purchased. On one afternoon he had harnessed the bigger animal to the dray and brought in a load of wood and thereafter was seen cutting the wood at a saw bench. Bony never once sighted Glen Shannon, and no other man appeared to take the yardman’s place in the hotel organisation.