Arthur Upfield - The Mountains have a Secret

“But I will be with you tomorrow night,” Simpson objected half-heartedly.

“No matter. Come tonight too. There are one or two items I would like to arrange before tomorrow night.”

“All right! Thanks, I will. I’ll be in the mood for Wagner.”

Benson flicked the reins over the horse’s head. He held out his left hand and Simpson accepted it.

“We have both made one very bad mistake,” he said. “Yours was the old yardman, mine was in acquiescing to Cora’s demands. Your mistake will have been completely eliminated tomorrow morning, when you dispose of the residue of that fire. My mistake still waits to be rectified. We will discuss the matter this evening.”

Mounting, Carl Benson nodded down at Simpson, and Simpson raised his right hand in partial salute, nodded in return, and strode away to the dray. The dust of the road rose in little puff-balls behind the departing horseman.

Simpson returned to the fire, which he circled slowly and with evident satisfaction. There was no need to push inward unburned ends of wood, for the stack had burned evenly and now was a low mound of white ash and overlying red coals. By nightfall it might be sufficiently cold to prospect for items similar to those which in the past had brought men to the gallows. Of a certainty the harvesting could be done on the morrow.

Bony wondered where, precisely, Shannon was at that moment. Although from concealment anywhere near the clearing he could have seen and recognised the horseman, he could not have overheard the conversation. That was just as well, for the American could not be permitted to enter upon a private war before all the threads of this tangled skein were in his, Bony’s, hands.

The implications of the recent meeting in conjunction with the pyre were truly tremendous. That Simpson, a hotel-keeper, should murder his yardman was astonishing enough, but that the owner of Baden Park Station and the famous Grampian strain of sheep should be associated with murder caused Bony to compel himself to relax in order to accept and assess it. The man had spoken of two mistakes as one speaking of betting mistakes, and one of the mistakes was not being informed of a murder that he could have guided the murderer in disposing of the body. He had mentioned a trust which was his and Simpson’s, responsibility to which overshadowed a murder, and which was so great that a murderer was forced to dig up his victim in the night and transport the remains to destroy them with fire.

What Carl Benson’s one mistake could have been in surrendering to some demand made by his sister was beyond the power of Bony’s imagination.

There were those other men, the riders who had met at the gate to return in company to the homestead. The picture of the younger man talking to Simpson in his car flooded Bony’s mind. Simpson had been angry. He had complained of something to the rider, who had nodded in sympathy and who, as the car moved away, had called: “I don’t envy you your job.”

The job! Had Simpson gone that afternoon to Baden Park to confess his mistake? Had Benson then ordered him to disinter the body and transport it to thewoodstack for destruction? If so, if that was the complaint made by Simpson to the rider, then the rider was aware of the trust which so affected both Benson and Simpson. And, likely enough, the other fellow also was aware of it, and still others in Benson’s employ.

It was big, very big. If those two girls were killed because they learned something of this trust, if that woman artist was insulted in order to persuade her to leave or give the excuse for ordering her to leave, and himself assaulted to be rid of him, if Price had been killed because he had discovered something of vital importance, then anyone discovered investigating too closely would meet ruthless treatment, not at the hands of one man, Simpson, but at the hands of Benson and perhaps a dozen of his riders.

He felt that Shannon was capable of looking after himself, although not sufficiently a bushman to conceal his tracks from the average bushman. He himself would be able to outwit a dozen riders, given just ordinary luck, but assuming that during a moment of ill luck he was discovered and either captured or killed, to whom would pass the information he had gathered? Ought he not to leave a record of what he had discovered with Groves, the policeman at Dunkeld, to circumvent the possibility that he fail?

No horse shied away from a fluttering rag as violently as Bonaparte shied away from this word “fail”. To fail meant damnation, sure and complete. Failure would dethrone Pride, when nothing would be left him.

Pride drove him on to withstand the idea of reporting his progress to the police. Pride lured him onward to battle alone, promising great rewards, blinding him to the several results to others should he fail.

He saw Simpson walk away to the horse and dray and, glancing at the sun, noted the time. He was suddenly conscious that he was both hungry and in need of a cigarette, and it was when Simpson began to lead the horse down the road towards the gate that he himself began the manufacture of a cigarette.

The dray wheels creaked, and Bony knew that if he lived for a hundred years he would feel his blood chill by a similar noise. He smoked and watched the man and dray pass through the gateway, saw Simpson lock the gates and pocket the key. He heard the creaking wheels for some time after man and dray had disappeared.

For another hour he remained in concealment, watching the birds to tell if Shannon were close. And then, as cautiously as he had hitherto moved through the bush, he made his way back to the nest of rocks where the swags had been left.

Shannon’s swag was gone. His own was there, and against it was tilted the partly filled bottle of brandy.

The Frightened Man

BONY slept for six hours, despite the stealthy March flies and a few inquisitive ants, waking when the sun was setting in a hot sky and the birds by the whispering creek were expressing satisfaction with their day. Having made a smokeless fire and placed thereon his billy for a brew of tea, he shaved and then stripped and bathed in the creek, returning to his cooking fire refreshed physically and mentally and tempted to whistle to express his satisfaction with his day.

Shannon loomed as prominently in his mind as Carl Benson. His liking for the American was begotten in the main by the sentimental streak in his make-up, played upon by the romance of a young ex-soldier setting out alone across the world to prove what had happened to his sweetheart. Beyond the sentimentality of that, Bony, the police officer, could not approve of “private wars” and civilian citizens “mooching” around, when loaded heavily with pistols and throwing knives. The knives displayed in the hotel and the pistol with its ungainly silencer attachment more recently displayed caused him to be thankful that Shannon was not on the warpath against him.

That Shannon had not been sufficiently close to overhear the conversation between Simpson and Carl Benson, if, indeed, he had actually witnessed the burning of the body, was cause for satisfaction. Like all official investigators of crime, Bony felt aversion to amateur detectives.

A greater problem than Shannon, however, was O’Brien’s skeleton buried in the cooling ashes of Simpson’s fire. On the morrow Simpson would remove the remains and pound them to dust in a prospector’s dolly-pot, a utensil shaped like a gun shell, in which stone is reduced to dust and then washed to ascertain its gold content. Once the licensee had done that with the old man’s bones, evidence of the crime would be merely circumstantial, resting on the word of two witnesses, plus the possible salvage of clothes buttons and the metal eyelets from the victim’s canvas shoes.