Arthur Upfield - The Bone is Pointed

From here Bony’s course lay to the west, continuing over the dunes to their westward edge and for another mile before the third corner was reached; the fence then sent Bony southward to cross the wide and shallow depressions separated by the narrow ridges of sand on which grew only the coolabahs. Over these depressions the netted barrier was in bad condition, the netting having rotted at ground level since the depressions had last carried water. Now the netting was curled upward from the ground and an army of rabbits would have found it no barrier at all.

Where the fence again angled to the west to reach its fifth corner just westward of the gate spanning the road to Opal Town, lay the southernmost of the depressions. The corner was almost dead centre of this depression, and from it could be seen the track from the main road to the hut at Green Swamp.

Here Bony left the fence and rode eastward till he reached the road which took him into a wide belt of shady box-trees growing about the swamp. The hut was situated on the south side, erected on higher ground to be above possible flood level. For this reason, too, the well had been sunk and the mill erected over it. The place was well named Green Swamp, for a wall of green trees shut away the sand-dunes behind them.

As the sun was pushing the tip of its orb above these trees the next morning, Bony was riding towards the corner of the fence he had left the evening before, and he was no little astonished to see how badly the netted barrier needed repairs along this further section of it.

He had proceeded about a third of the distance to the main road gate when he saw ahead several men working on the fence. Then he saw the smoke of the campfire among the scrub trees and the tent twenty or thirty yards in Meena country. Approaching nearer the working party he saw that it consisted of three aboriginals. He passed the tent before reaching them, to observe the empty food tins littering the camp, indicating that it had been there several days. Coming to the workers, he cried:

“Good day-ee!”

“Good day-ee!” two of them replied to his greeting, the third continuing at work. They were footing the fence with new netting: digging out the old, attaching the new to the bottom of the main, above-ground wire and burying it, thus making it as proof against rabbits as when the barrier was first erected.

“The fence here is in bad condition,” remarked Bony, taking the opportunity of the halt to make a cigarette.

“That’s so,” agreed the man who had not replied to the greeting. From Sergeant Blake’s description, Bony recognized him.

His clear voice and reasonably good English, his powerful body and legs, tallied with Blake’s word picture of Jimmy Partner. He seemed to be a pleasant enough fellow and was obviously in charge of the party. Of the others, who appeared younger, one was shifty-eyed and spindle-legged, and the second, although more robust, had his face set in a stupid, uncomprehending grin.

“Have you been working here long?” asked Bony.

“Three days,” replied Jimmy Partner who, having leaned his long-handled shovel against the fence, drew nearer to Bony the better to examine him while he rolled a cigarette. “Haven’t seen you about before. You working for Karwir?”

“Well, not exactly for Karwir. I am Detective-Inspector Bonaparte, and I’m looking into the disappearance of Jeffery Anderson. Was the condition of this fence then like it is now?”

“No. It was bad, of course, but the April rain made it like this. Looking for Anderson, eh? I don’t like your chances. He was looked for good and proper five months back, and the wind has done a lot of work since then.”

“Oh, I fancy my chances are good,” countered Bony airily. “All I want is time, and I have plenty of that. What’s your name?”

The question was put sharply to the spindle-legged fellow and he goggled.

“Me! I’m Abie.”

“And what’s your name?”

The grin on the face of the other had become a fixture, and Abie answered for him.

“He’s Inky Boy,” he said.

Bony’s brows rose a fraction.

“Ah! You’re Inky Boy, eh! Sergeant Blake told me about you. You’re the feller that Anderson beat with his whip for letting the rams perish.”

Inky Boy’s grin vanished, to be replaced with an expression of furious hate. Jimmy Partner cut in with:

“An ordinary belting would have been enough. It wasn’t cause enough to thrash Inky Boy till he took the count. Still,” and he tossed his big head and laughed, “Inky Boy won’t never go to sleep and let any more rams perish.”

“I don’t suppose he will,” agreed Bony who did not fail to detect the absence of humour in Jimmy Partner’s eyes. “Well, I must get along. I may see you all again soon. Hooroo!”

He clicked his tongue, and Kate woke up and began to walk on. Jimmy Partner fired a last shot.

“You won’t find Anderson anywhere in Green Swamp Paddock,” he shouted. “If you do I’ll eat a rabbit, fur and all.”

Bony reined his horse round and rode back to them.

“Suppose I find him within ten miles of Green Swamp Paddock, what then?”

“I’ll eat three rabbits, fur and all. You won’t find him ’coshe’s not here. We all made sure of that when he disappeared. No, he bolted clear away. Sick of Old Lacy and Karwir. Anyway, what with things he done the country wasgettin ’ sick of him.”

“Well, well! It all has to be settled one way or the other, Jimmy, and I’m here to settle it. So long!”

Now as he rode away towards the boundary gate, Bony examined the new earth piled against the new footing. The extremely faint difference of the colouring of the newly-moved earth plainly informed him that this party of aboriginals had not begun work here three days back but only the morning of the day before, the morning he had left the Karwir homestead. He was aware, of course, that time is rarely accurately measured by an aboriginal, but it had been Jimmy Partner who had stated the period, and he was too intelligent, too well educated, inadvertently to have made such a mistake.

Bony came to the gate spanning the road to Opal Town, and saw the west fence of Green Swamp Paddock coming from the south to join the netted barrier beyond the gate. In it, too, there was a gate, a roughly made wire gate. Beyond it ran back the cleared line cut through the mulga forest along which was erected the boundary netted fence, and Bony instantly understood that no one standing on this road, or riding in a car, could have seen the white horse tethered to a tree on the Karwir side and a brown horse similarly secured on the other side.

To read the page of the Book of the Bush on which that meeting of Diana Lacy with an unknown had been printed, Bony opened the gate in the plain wire division fence, mounted again on its far side, and so rode the boundary fence in the Karwir North Paddock.

From the plane he had estimated that the meeting place was a full half mile from the gate and the road, hidden from any passer-by on the road by a ground swell. He rode a full mile before turning back over his horse’s tracks, for he must have passed the meeting place. He spent a full hour looking for the tracks of horse and humans. He failed utterly to discover them.

The Trysting Place

THE frown drawing Bony’s narrow brows almost together was chased away by a quick smile. Then he frowned again, squinted rapidly at the sun, flashed a glance at his own shadow, thus judging the time to be a quarter after ten o’clock, and decided to boil water in his quart-pot for tea.

“Delightful!” he cried softly as he neck-roped the mare to a shady cabbage-tree, then made a fire and set the filled quart-pot against the flame. “I believe I can guess correctly what has been done to bluff poor old Bony, as though poor old Bony, alias Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, could be bluffed. What a beautiful tree is that bloodwood! What a striking feature it makes in this most limited locality! How shady, how ideally situated amid this low scrub, to be a trysting place easy to remember. When I was young, and the world was young, and the girl I loved with me! Dear me, I must be careful.”