Arthur Upfield - The Bone is Pointed

An object of peculiar and significant interest was a small grey feather with a dark-red stain along one edge.

Throughout his examination of this locality the crow had been an interested and a constant spectator. Now and then it cawed with rude defiance, sometimes with puzzled annoyance. Bony’s lack of interest in the bird was only apparent. While he worked he was ever conscious of its proximity and, from its behaviour, he concluded that he was not spied upon. A spy, black, white or yellow, would not have remained concealed from that crow.

The half-caste hummed a lilting tune as he walked to the now cold fire and made another with which to boil the quart-pot for tea with lunch. He was experiencing mental exhilaration, based not on achievements but on crowding difficulties. The greater the number of “whys” that rushed at him to demand answers the happier he became. He now was living when normally he existed. The blood was tingling his scalp and the balls of his fingers and toes.

Why! Why! Why!

Ah well! Let him attend to these pestering whys.

Why had Diana Lacy ridden to this place, dismounted from her white horse and neck-roped it to a mulga-tree growing only a few yards from Meena country? Why had a person-sex not proved-ridden over Meena country to dismount on the far side of the fence and there to neck-rope his horse to a mulga-tree? Had that meeting taken place through design or accident? Why had someone come to this place after Diana had left it, and probably after the other person had also left, for the express purpose of efficiently wiping away all traces of it? The wind had not accomplished the effacement. There had been no wind of sufficient velocity to have wiped out the marks left by a naked foot, let alone by the hoofs of a horse. And if the wind had accomplished so much it would not have left small areas of groundunlittered by the scrub debris.

The human eraser of the tracks first bathed his naked feet in blood and then dipped them into bird’s feathers until the blood dried and stuck fast the feathers to the feet, aware that feet so treated leave no faintest mark on the ground. That an aboriginal had carried out this effacement was reasonably certain. A lubra would have scattered leaves over the ground after she had smoothed it. However, the methods used by the person doing the effacement, as well as the actual effacement itself, were of less importance at the moment than the why behind it all.

No one knew when he, Bony, was to arrive at Opal Town, and, when Sergeant Blake had arranged with Old Lacy for his transportation to the Karwir homestead, Diana Lacy had been out riding her white mare. Unless Young Lacy flew over her and dropped a note stating the reason for his flight to Opal Town, she could have known nothing of his arrival.

The person whom she met had evidently come from Meena, and he-assuming it had been a man-would not know of Bony’s arrival at Opal Town and his subsequent flight to Karwir. It was, of course, possible that she had informed him of it, having herself been informed by Young Lacy, but it was not probable because Young Lacy would fly direct to the township, passing over Green Swamp several miles to the east of the main road from Karwir. It was a point demanding proof.

What most likely had happened was that the person who had met Diana Lacy knew nothing of Bony’s arrival until informed of it by Wandin late that day Sergeant Blake had dismissed him.

Anyway, it was of less importance-how this person had been informed and by whom-than the reason behind his decision to prevent an investigating detective officer coming to know of his meeting with Diana Lacy. Why was it considered so essential that he, Bony, should not know of it? Neither the girl nor the person she met was to know that he had seen their horses at the trysting place, but he-still assuming it was a man-had sufficient imagination to know that traces of the meeting would be found and read, if not obliterated.

Yes, there were plenty of whys, and yet another came to demand answer. Was the meeting in any manner connected with the disappearance of Jeffery Anderson? Hardly, after the lapse of five months. Was it a chance meeting, resulting in a period of harmless gossip? No, because the traces of such a chance meeting would not have demanded effacement. What appeared to be most likely was that Diana Lacy had met beneath the bloodwood-tree a man who was her lover, and because he came from Meena it was more than probable that he was John Gordon. And Gordon being comparatively poor, and Old Lacy ambitious for his daughter, and Diana not yet being of age, the lovers feared that their secret would be revealed. That must be the reason for the meeting and for its effacement.

A smile flitted across Bony’s clean-cut features and lit his eyes. Lovers had nothing to fear from him, he who was at heart a romantic sentimentalist.

However, the whys were not quite so easily appeased.

The many whys raised significant possibilities and probabilities between which there was a gulf. There was no proof that this bloodwood-tree had shyly witnessed a meeting of lovers. It might have been a meeting of confederates. Nothing could be taken for granted until proved-and the effacement of all traces of the meeting by a person or persons whose naked feet were covered with blood and feathers gave that meeting a sinister air.

Then there was the matter of that smoke signal made so soon after Bony’s appearance in Green Swamp Paddock. That more than hinted at urgency. It strongly pointed to an interest in him much deeper than casual curiosity, and the fact that the fence work had certainly not been begun until the morning following his arrival at Karwir seemed to harden the supposition that the person who had met Diana Lacy had, when informed of his (Bony’s) arrival, instructed the blacks immediately to undertake the fence work in order to be near the investigator and at once to report on his work.

“If Bill the Better were here I’d bet him a level fiver that that’s how it is,” Bony remarked to his horse as he untied her neck-rope from about the tree and proceeded neatly to knot it under her throat. He mounted easily, and then, removing his hat, he bowed mockingly at the crow, which cawed derisively. Turning the horse’s head towards the road, he said to her:

“This is going to be a most interesting case, Katie dear. As the fortune teller says: there is a dark man, in fact many dark men in your life, Mr Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. There is at least as much black as white in this disappearance case. And such a case! It is almost made for me. Five months have gone since the man vanished in a paddock eighty square miles in area. There’s no body to give me a start, no pistol, no false wig, no finger-prints, no informers without whom my esteemed colleagues are almost helpless. I shall have to dig from the Field of Time five solid months, and turn them over to see what lies beneath them in this world of sand and mulgas, plain and sand-dune, water-gutter and claypan.”

They had almost reached the gate in the plain wire fence when the half-caste said to his horse-and she turned round her ears the better to hear him-in excellent imitation of the irate Chief Commissioner:

“ ‘Damn and blast you, Bony! As I’ve told you a hundred times, you’re not a cursed policeman’s shadow…’ Too true, my dear Colonel, too true. But I’m going to prove once again that I’m a cursed good detective.”

Progress

THOSE at Karwir did not see Napoleon Bonaparte again until the afternoon of the seventh of October. The weather was clear and warm, but the first heat wave of the summer had not yet come.

Old Lacy, working at his table in the office, saw Bony arrive at the stockyards, and ceased his labours to watch the half-caste unsaddle the horse, take her to the night paddock and there free her. His mind occupied by speculation on what this remarkable man had achieved, the squatter of Karwir found himself mentally unable to continue his work after Bony had disappeared beyond the garden gate. For an hour Bony remained beyond that gate, and when he reappeared he was shaved, showered and arrayed in a light-grey suit. The old man watched him crossing to the office, and wondered. Bony’s sartorial taste was as impeccable as that of a fashionable white man.