Arthur Upfield - No footprints in the bush

“You reason like The McPherson, my brother.”

“I reason better if he, reading those smoke signals, thinks all the Illprinka men are retiring to that distant waterhole to hold a corroboree. The situation, my brother, is certainly not clear, but it makes me glad I reached a particular decision when gazing on the tomb of your sister, Tarlalin.”

McPherson Moves

AS Burning Water had said, a squatter seldom can be sure, on leaving his homestead, when he will return to it. So many problems arise without warning to demand instant attention that a projected absence of a few hours may extend into several days.

When McPherson left his homestead, the morning following the visit of the aeroplane, his intention was to run out to Watson’s Bore, where there were a dozen male aborigines working as stock-men. There was no telephone at this hut situated midway between homestead and out-station on country appearing to the uninitiated as semi-desert despite the growth of buckbush, cotton- and flannel-bush, and the green-sprouting tussock-grass.

The bore itself was half a mile from the hut on lower ground denuded for miles of scrub by the cattle. Situated on the north-western edge of the Great Artesian Basin, from its inverted L-shaped above-ground iron casing flowed every twenty-four hours half a million gallons of steaming water, forming the genesis of a creek which in turn had created a lake amid distant sand-dunes.

McPherson reached the hut a few minutes before eleven o’clock to find a solitary aborigine to greet him-one named Titchalimbji, shortened to Tich to savebreath. Tich was rotund and oily but clean. Ever cheerful, he was a man who, grown up with McPherson, had evinced a keener interest in cattle than his fellows, and finally had been promoted to boss musterer.

“Good day!” he shouted, hurrying from the hut to the car.

“Good day, Tich! All the boys away?”

“Too right!” exclaimed the boss musterer with immense satisfaction. “I push four of the loafers across to the Basin to have a look over them breeding cows. The others I tell go away out to Hell’s Drift. I bin thereyestiddy. Ground bog enough to trap a rabbit. You come in have a drink of tea?”

McPherson nodded and followed the fellow into the hut, at one end of which was the open hearth and a few blackened cooking utensils. In the middle was the long table flanked by forms, and at the other end on the floor was a toss of blankets left by the occupiers of the communal bed they had slept in.

Tich made tea in a blackened billy and McPherson filled a telescopic cup he took from a pocket. Seated on a form, he helped himself to sugar and then proceeded to cut chips from a tobacco plug, the cold and empty pipe dangling from his lips against the full grey moustache. Seated opposite him was Tich, waiting for gossip, wondering, hoping. His eyes were big as he stared at the ignited match held to the pipe bowl, and they became still bigger when McPherson’s hand slid into a waistcoat pocket and brought out a cigar.

“You like cigars,” stated the squatter as though there could be no argument about it.

“Too right, boss! You give-it that one, eh?”

McPherson proffered the cigar and a fat hand reached forward and accepted it. The round face was expanded in a grin of anticipated pleasure, and into the wide mouth went half the cigar, to be masticated by strong but tobacco-stained teeth. Presently Tich swallowed, like a camel, and said:

“You fetch out tucker, boss?”

“Yes. You bin hear about Sergeant Errey and Mit-ji?”

“No. What about?”

The squatter related the grim details as given him by Bonaparte, and during the recital the expression of good cheer never once left the round black face or the round black eyes. When he had done, Tich said cheerfully:

“Who you think that plane feller, boss? Rex?”

“Yes, Tich, it was Rex,” McPherson admitted, sadly and desperately. “He’s put himself beyond the pale. He flew over the house last night and dropped a letter ina treacle tin. He wrote in the letter he was going to hit me again and hit hard this time. There’s another policeman at the homestead now, a big feller half-caste policeman who is going to catch Rex-or thinks he is. He won’t, because we’re going to catch Rex ourselves.”

“Too right we catch Rex you say so, boss,” eagerly asserted the aborigine.“We cunning fellers all right. You bring here Jack Johnson and Iting from out-station. Ole Jack he cunning feller. Best feller in Wantella mob, any’ow.”

The fat face continued to bear the expression of cheer, but in the voice now was definite entreaty. McPherson smoked for several seconds without speaking. Then:

“All right, Tich. I’ll go on out for Jack Johnson and Iting. I’ll have to fetch extra saddles and bridles. You can come out for the rations, and then you can go after the spare horses and yard them. We can ride to the boundary and let the horses go there. They’ll be a drag on us in the Illprinka country.”

Tich, having taken the rations into the hut, walked out into the night paddock after the night horse, and on it rode away into the horse paddock accompanied by his excited dogs and yellinghimself with excitement. McPherson drove away and covered the fifty miles to the out-station in an hour and a half, to be welcomed by Mrs Nevin and her two children, and by the blacks who were camped above a water-hole farther down the creek.

“Tom out, Mrs Nevin?”

“Yes, Mr McPherson. They’re moving cattle from the north-west corner, as you said to do last night. You’ll stay for lunch?”

“Thank you. But I can’t stop long. Tell Tom I’m taking a couple of saddles and bridles, and Jack Johnson and Iting back with me. Meanwhile I’ll write him a note and leave it on the office table for him.”

The woman suspected the strain, seeing it in his eyes, hearing it in his grim voice, but wisely she refrained from inquiry and bustled away to prepare the meal. The two small girls accompanied the squatter to the office at the end of the veranda, unafraid of him, babbling gossip about a calf they were rearing and about a newly-robbed galah’s nest.

The great McPherson spent a minute chatting with them, and then asked for silence while he wrote a letter to “dad.” They stood beside his chair, silent and tense, waiting for him to finish the letter before continuing their chatter. He wrote:

Stay at home till you hear from me. Shift the blacks into the sheds and keep them from going away. I am expecting trouble from the Illprinka. Rex has threatened again, and we know what he is. I don’t think he and the wild blacks will come here, but you can’t take chances. I am leaving five hundred cartridges for the rifles on the shelf above the door. If Jack Johnson and Iting are not away I’ll be taking them with me. Flora will be all right at the homestead. That inspector will be there and he’s no fool, but I’ve got to beat him and deal with Rex myself. You know how it is. So long!

The letter, sealed into an envelope, he left on the writing table and, talking about calves and young galahs, he was accompanied by the children to the car from which he took the boxes of cartridges and returned with them to the office. From the veranda he shouted for Jack Johnson and Iting.

A black urchin told him Iting was away with the men, and a chain of voices extending down the creek took up the cry for Jack Johnson. Presently he appeared, a man as tall as Burning Water but walking with a slouching gait. Over-long arms dangled from massive shoulders. Aprognathous jaw, a pimple of a nose, a protruding frontal bone and deep-set eyes, combined to make a face truly ape-like. A thin piece of bone was thrust through his nose, and from the forehead-band of red birds’ down dangled five gum leaves.