Arthur Upfield - The Bone is Pointed

Blake grinned, but there was no mirth in his eyes.

“I can guess so much,” he said, “that I concur in your decision about not confiding further in me. Privately, I think that the penalties imposed on whites for crimes against the blacks are not nearly severe enough. By the way, you remember you asked me to find out if the officer in charge here thirty-six years ago was still living, and if so whether he remembered an Irish woman working on Karwir at that time. I have had a letter from him. He is now retired and living at Sandgate.”

“Ah-yes,” Bony murmured.

“He says that he does remember an Irish girl working at Karwir in the year 1901. Her name was Kate O’Malley.”

Bony smiled.

“That small jotting of evidence may come in useful,” he said. “I wonder-I wonder if I might eat another thin slice of bread and butter?”

“Think you’ll be able to master it?”

“I think so. And then you may leave me. You must be sick and tired of visiting me daily, and your office work will have accumulated. I have only to locate Anderson’s grave, and now that will not be a difficult task.”

After Blake’s departure, Bony carried a sack to the boundary fence. Many days before he had been compelled to cut the two topmost barbed wires, to lay the sack over the third barbed wire and lever himself over. He was this afternoon so physically exhausted that, having reached the Meena side of the fence, he had to cling for a space to the barrier. But now, when he ought to have been lying down, he was energized by a crystal-clear brain. By a process of elimination, he had grown confident that Anderson could have been buried in very hard ground because less than two miles away, at Green Swamp hut, there were shovels and a crowbar.

Often accompanied by Sergeant Blake, he had spent hours fossicking about the lee slopes of the sand-dunes. Hour after hour he and the dogs had hunted for a body below the surface of the flat lands west of the dunes and north of the northernmost depression. Now he began an examination of the wide line ofclaypans running along the foot of the dunes.

Claypansare invariably to be found skirting sand-dunes. Here they separated the dunes from the flat lands, forming a grey ribbon a hundred odd feet in width. In the centre of this ribbon grew the mulga-tree on the trunk of which Bony had found the wisp of green sewing silk and the human hair.

In size, claypans vary from a few square feet to many acres. These that Bony began to examine averaged about five hundred square feet. Somewhere far to the westward the prevailing westerly wind had gouged into the soft sandy soil and lifted billions of tons for many miles before depositing the sand grains in the form of these dunes. The top soil of sand having been thus removed, the wind set to work on the clay beneath, carrying particles of clay to deposit them on the dunes.

The wind’s action on the dunes is to move them forward, leaving the heavier grains of clay to becomewaterholding bottoms of pools. In this manner rainwater is conserved in country as porous as a sponge; but as the sheets of water are seldom deeper than a few inches, the sun’s heat quickly evaporates them. The wind constantly playing on the surface of the water during the course of the evaporation creates a perfectly level surface of clay, and the sun’s heat bakes the clay to the hard consistency of a brick. Even heavily loaded trucks may pass across a claypan without leaving wheel depressions.

What eventually aroused Bony’s interest in a particular claypan within a few yards of the solitary mulga-tree was the extremely faint ridging of its surface in the rough form of a giant star. So faintly corrugated were these marks that even Bony, with his inherited keen eyesight, would not have observed them had he not been looking for just such marks.

The claypan was one of the larger pans along this ribbon ofclaypans. Like all the other pans it was surrounded by a ridge of soft sand in which were two natural cuttings. One took overflow water from the pan nearer the dunes and slightly higher, the second cutting permitted overflow water to fall into the pan lower and nearer the flat lands, all theclaypans representing shallow steps from the dunes to the flat country.

Accompanied by the dogs, Bony walked to the slope of the nearest dune where he sat down and rested his back against it. His investigation was complete. Again he had successfully solved a case.

“Yes, it was very cleverly done,” he toldHool-’Em-Up. “A claypan makes a perfect grave, one never to be detected by man, by bird or ant or wild dog. One that will never fall in. One that nature itself will cover with stone almost as hard as marble. Beneath the surface of that cement-hard claypan lies the body of Jeffery Anderson and, most probably, his stock-whip and his horse’s neck-rope.

“Ha-hum! I have the feeling that I am going to be sentimental. After all is said and done about justice, why should a dead man be able to do more evil to the living than he accomplished whilst he lived? And what sense would there be in arraigning men on a charge of justifiable homicide merely to acquit them? To do so in this case would be no tribute to justice. It would be opposed to the rightful interests of very many men and women, even little children. Yes, I am sure I am going to be sentimental.”

The blue eyes were shining as Bony slowly and falteringly walked back to the fence, and so on to reach his camp where he brewed a billy of weak tea and drank it with the addition of fresh milk left by Sergeant Blake.

He lay down for an hour before shakily saddling the mare, and mounted her with the assistance of a tree stump. Once on her back he was rested, and slowly she carried him to Green Swamp well, where at the trough she took her fill of water. Bony was satisfied and quietly triumphant, and when the sun was westering and the first of the birds were arriving at the trough to drink, he became blind to his surroundings while he planned the dramaticdenouement of this case. The horse, instead of taking him back to his camp, followed the track to the main road leading to the homestead, and when Bony “awoke” he found himself opposite the southern corner post set in the middle of the southernmost depression.

This hot and still afternoon the mirage water lay deep over the depressions. Small bushes growing on the separating ridges appeared like giant trees and the ridges themselves like tall cliffs. It was strange water, this mirage water; it could never be reached. The walking horse, on its way to the camp, for ever walked on dry land, as though it were carried by an island, less than fifty feet across, from ridge to ridge. The fence before and behind ran back into the “water,” then rose to an extraordinary height above it.

The horse was crossing one of these wide depressions when the detective’s interest was abruptly aroused by innumerable lines of grey dust cutting the surface of the mirage westward of the barrier. All these growing dust lines were approaching the fence. They were not unlike the tips of shark fins.

In the far distance a peculiarly yellowish mist was rising from the mirage water, as though the sinking sun were sucking upward impurities from the heated ground beneath the “sea”. Bony directed his horse to the fence the better to observe this phenomenon, and so the animal came to stand on an “island” bisected by the Karwir boundary fence.

Then, as though coming up out of a prehistoric sea, as though wading through the shallows to reach the dry land, there appeared dun-coloured sticks, all in pairs. High and still higher out of the “water” came the first of the twin sticks. On the surface of the shallows appeared dark things all moving towards the shore. Small brown heads appeared at the base of the sticks, and, astonished, Bony saw they were rabbits.