Arthur Upfield - The Bone is Pointed

“It was a question I was bound to ask,” Bony told her gently.

“Of course, you had to,” Gordon agreed. “All the same, Jimmy Partner couldn’t have killed him. He was with me up till three o’clock when Anderson should have been miles past the Channels and riding along the road home.”

Bony had actually forgotten his cigarettes, and now he abruptly relaxed and felt his clothes for tobacco and papers.

“I’m glad I came,” he said quietly. “Why, for a few minutes I think I have been living outside the shadow of civilization. Just think if the world were as pure and life as simple as it was in Australia before ever Dampier saw it. Ah, but then, I should not have been happy, I suppose. There was no crime higher than the elementary crime of stealing your neighbour’s wife. No, no! After all, I think I prefer the shadow in which crime and bestiality thrives.”

They laughed with him, and Young Lacy’s interest was diverted.

“By gum, John, you’ve got some rabbits over here,” he exclaimed.

“Some! We’ve got millions. I’ve never seen so many around Meena Lake. They’re thicker than they were in 1929. TheKalchuts are doing very well out of them, however, and this summer, if it doesn’t rain, will see the end of them.”

They all went down to the machine about which the curious aborigines were gathered. Nero was presented to Bony who was not impressed by the chief. He looked for, but failed to see, Wandin and Inky Boy and Abie. Then Mary Gordon was warmly inviting him to call soon and often, and her son was urging him to seek from Meena any help he might require.

And all the way back to Karwir a phrase repeated itself in Bony’s mind, the words written with black and evil smoke. The Shadow of Civilization! How real was the shadow to these heroicGordons, how menacing to the happy Kalchut tribe ignorant of its inevitable doom!

It was full time that the Creator of man wiped out altogether this monster called civilization and began again with the aborigines as a nucleus.

Menace

THE net gain to Bony from his work throughout the following week was exactly nothing. One full day was spent in the Karwir North Paddock, another day along the west boundary of Mount Lester Station, and a third in examining the Meena country immediately north of Green Swamp Paddock. His reading of the Book of the Bush was fruitless, but even so, at the end of this week he felt still more sure that he was being opposed, actively opposed, in this investigation.

About eleven o’clock this Monday morning he was riding the mare, Kate, northward to the mulga forest in which lay the netted boundary fence, and he was still on the plain when he heard behind him the sound of the Karwir aeroplane. The machine passed him at low altitude. Young Lacy waved down to him and he answered the greeting. In the passenger’s seat was Diana Lacy. She did not wave. The pilot was flying his machine above the road to Opal Town, and Bony wondered why he was not taking the more direct route to the township, crossing over Green Swamp four miles to the east.

Diana Lacy was giving much material for speculation. With immense satisfaction Bony was beginning to think that her aloof attitude to him was not based on the fact of his unfortunate parentage; for, try as he might, he had failed to detect in her mental make-up the feeling of superiority begotten by a city education. Nor was she governed by the snobbishness he had so often encountered among far-northern people who employed aborigines as servants. This was not the far north of the continent, where there is a distinct colour prejudice based on familiarity with aborigines debased through association with white people. Here, in this part of Australia, as in so many other inland districts, the sterling character of the full blood and the half-caste was paid reasonable tribute.

Bony was almost certain that it was not because of his birth that Diana Lacy maintained towards him an attitude of controlled hostility. This hostility was a compliment to him. She was not regarding him as an inferior, but rather as an enemy. She feared him, and her fear appeared to have its origin in that meeting at the boundary fence between herself and an unknown man.

It was the subsequent actions of the blacks-the wiping away of all traces of the meeting, the telepathic broadcast, announced by the smoke signal-that made this meeting an important corner-stone in the investigation. He had discarded his theory that the actions of the blacks had been dictated by lovers desirous of keeping their association secret. There was some other reason.

This morning Bony had an engagement to meet Sergeant Blake at the white boundary gate at noon, and now in the mulga forest he was again feeling what he had felt for many days-that he was being kept under constant surveillance. With an hour to spare before meeting the Sergeant, he determined to put this feeling to the proof.

As though casually, he turned his horse to ride back over her tracks, clearly to be seen on the soft sandy surface. Here, but a mile from the boundary, and two from the road gate, the trees were comparatively tall, robust and widely spaced. Lower to the ground grew currant bushes and wait-a-bit, and still lower were the dead filigreebuckbush, waiting for the next windstorm to roll in their millions over the dust-masked world. The trees’ debris littered the ground, forcing the horse to advance on a winding course-the course just previously made.

For a quarter of a mile Bony made the animal walk back over her own tracks, and then he reined her away to follow the line of an imaginary circle, his eyes small and gleaming as they surveyed the reddish ground ahead and on either side, and peered along the tree aisles for the possible glimpse of a black face or body.

The full circle was completed without his seeing any sign of blacks. The bush was empty, or appeared to be, save for a few robins, two Willie Wagtails busy with their fly-catching, and several sleepy goannas. Tracks there were of an odd rabbit, those left by doves, by reptiles and by insects, but the land was empty of tracks made by possible spies.

Bony was still not satisfied. Arriving at the place where he had turned back, he moved on towards the boundary fence. The day was calm and warm, the cloudless sky appearing to rest on the tree tops. The cawing of a crow at some distance behind him caused him to tighten further his eyes and the frown above them, and when the fence came into sight, he abruptly turned back again and rode in concentric circles.

He now gave less attention to the tree trunks and more to the ground immediately in front of the horse’s nodding head. If he was being spied upon by aborigines it would be almost a waste of time trying to see them. And so it was that he saw lying beside a dead leaf a small black feather.

Without sign of haste, he dismounted, stretched himself, then squatted on his heels and rolled a cigarette. The feather was almost at his feet. While he rolled the cigarette he gazed intently at it, observing that it was not black but grey and that it was a bird’s breast feather. Having lit the cigarette, he took up a stick and, with apparent idleness, began to draw figures on the sand; and when his pencil passed the feather it was taken up between the ball of his little finger and the edge of the palm of his hand. There was no knowing if a black spy was watching him from round the trunk of the nearest tree.

Along the base of the small feather was a dark-red stain.

Blood on a feather! Blood and feathers!

Where Bony squatted was fully three miles from the bloodwood-tree beneath which Diana Lacy had met the unknown, where a man with feathers blood-dried to his feet had obliterated traces of the meeting, and it was improbable that a feather then detached from a foot could have been wind-blown to this place.