Arthur Upfield - The Bone is Pointed

Such handicaps, however, to a man of Bony’s inherited tenacity and patience were, but a spur to sustained effort and the determination to succeed. The disappearance of the neck-rope, which was almost certain to have been attached to the animal, seemed to support the supposition that Anderson had been killed and his body carefully hidden. Had he merely been thrown the chances of his not being found were indeed small. Had he deliberately vanished, as so many men do every year in every city, without doubt he would have taken his hat, and, because he was such an expert with a stockwhip, he would have taken his precious whip. But why, supposing this were the case, should he have taken his horse’s neck-rope, but not the water-bag which, it was reasonable to expect, would have been indispensable to him?

Bony’s spirits rose high as he considered these difficulties. He smiled when recalling the sternly given verbal order that on no account was he to spend longer than two weeks on this case, for he had been sent only to quieten a boisterous letter writer. If in the time assigned him he discovered a lead hinting at foul play, then he could return to Karwir at a later date more convenient for the department overloaded with work.

As though he, Napoleon Bonaparte, cared twopence for orders once he began an investigation, and such an investigation as this promised to be! As though he were a mere policeman to walk this beat or that according to the orders of a superior! Bah!

Shortly after leaving the homestead gate the fence led him into the mulga where the ground was sandy and easily windblown, where grewbuckbush andspeargrass androlypoly. The stockmen riding the fence over the years had left a plainly discernible horse pad, and this pad was followed by Bony’s horse. Here was a country into which the light wind failed to penetrate, a reddish-brown world pillared by short dark-green tree trunks, and canopied by a brilliant azure sky. At twelve o’clock Bony reached the first corner, eight miles due east of the homestead.

Here he camped for an hour, boiling his quart-pot for tea and eating the lunch daintily prepared and enclosed in a serviette. So far, the country he had traversed could not possibly offer a clue to Anderson’s passing. The ground was too soft and sandy to have left unburied any clue.

From this first corner post the fence took a northward direction, and, after a further mile of the mulga forest, Bony emerged on to the plain that composed the southern half of the paddock. Now the sunlight was brighter and the wind could be felt. The horizon fled away for miles, cut here and there by cleanly ridged solitary sand-dunes and the tops of groves of trees raised into spires by the mirage. Five miles from the corner Bony came to an area ofclaypans across which his horse had to pass-and across which The Black Emperor must have passed when he carried Jeffery Anderson.

At theseclaypans Bony dismounted and led the horse with the reins resting in the crook of an arm. Now he walked in giant curves and smaller circles. Now he crouched to look across a claypan at an oblique angle. Four times he lay flat on his chest in order to bring the cement-like surface to within an inch of his eyes.

His examination of The Black Emperor’s tracks that morning had revealed to the half-caste that the gelding pressed harder with the tip of his off-side fore hoof than with that of the near-side fore hoof, and, to make a balance, harder with the near-side hind hoof than with the off-side hind hoof. When he had cut the animal’s hoofs in the yards the evening before, he had been careful to note the faint colouration of the growth since April, when Anderson had last cut them, and he had cut them as closely as possible to their former shape.

After five months it would have been stupid to expect to find The Black Emperor’s tracks on sandy ground, on loose surfaces such as composed most of the plain, or on surfaces scoured by the rainwater that followed Anderson’s disappearance. Theclaypans, however, always gave promise, for they could retain imprints for years, even if the imprints required the magnifying eyes of a Napoleon Bonaparte to see them. And, at irregular spaces across theseclaypans, Bony thought he could discern the faintest of indentations that could have been made by a horse before the last rain fell. He thought it, but he could not be sure.

For nearly eight miles Bony rode northward, again to dismount at the edge of the maze of sand-dunes stretching away into Mount Lester Station from Green Swamp. Here, where the fence rose from the comparatively level plain to surmount the dunes like a switchback railway, Bony and Lacy surmised Anderson to have stopped for lunch. A little way back from the fence grew a solitary leopardwood-tree, to which The Black Emperor could have been conveniently roped for the lunch hour.

Bony was now thrilling as might a bloodhound when in sight of the fugitive. He walked his horse to a tree distant from the leopardwood, neck-roped her to it, then returned to the leopardwood and began a careful examination of its trunk at about the height of the black gelding.

Now the bark of this tree is soft and spotted and green-grey, and Bony hoped to find on it the mark made by rope friction caused by an impatient horse. He found no mark. The tree grew above ground covered with fine sand, and those of its roots exposed he examined inch by inch for signs of injury from contact with an impatient horse’s stamping hoof. He found no such injury. With the point of a stick he dug and prodded the soft surface, hoping to uncover spoor buried by wind-driven sand. He found no spoor, but he unearthed a layer of white ash, caked by the rain and covered by dry sand blown over it after the rain. Here Anderson had made his lunch fire.

His blue eyes gleaming, Bony stood up and smiled as he made a cigarette and smoked it like a man knowing he deserved the luxury. Leaning against the smooth trunk of the tree, he faced to the east. To his right began the plain, to his left the sand-dunes, before him, some twenty yards distant, was the plain wire fence separating Karwir from Mount Lester Station.

Here Anderson had stood or sat while he ate his lunch. He had observed the rain clouds approaching. Possibly it already had begun to rain. He had decided that to visit the swamp and the hut would be unnecessary. What had he done then? Had he mounted his horse and continued northward along the fence? Had he climbed over the fence into Mount Lester Station for any reason, any possible reason? Far away to the south-east Bony could see the revolving fans of a windmill and what might be an iron hut at its foot. It was two miles off the fence. Had Anderson walked over there, even strapped the wires together and induced The Black Emperor to step over the fence that he might ride there? It was a possibility that might yet have to be accepted and investigated.

There wereclaypans all along the foot of the sand-dune country, but Bony did not stay to examine those near by, for Anderson would have crossed them before the rain fell and they would have provided him with a clue no more definite than those others had given him. Then, too, he was satisfied by the remains of the small fire that the man really had camped at this place for his lunch.

Again mounted, he followed the fence into the sand-dunes, into a world of fantastically shaped monsters, gigantic curling waves, roofs of sand that smoked when the wind blew, cores of sand tightened with clay particles to be fashioned by the wind into pillars and roughly inverted pyramids, nightmarish figures and slim Grecian vases.

For two miles Bony continued to ride over these dunes till he arrived at the second corner of the paddock. Here the plain wire fence joined a netted and barbed barrier, the northern fence of Green Swamp Paddock and the boundary fence of Karwir and Meena stations from this point to westward. To the eastward lay Meena and Mount Lester stations.