Arthur Upfield - Winds of Evil

“It must have been a great day,” encouraged Bony.

“Too right she was. Old man Borradale was never as generous before or after as he was when young Martin was christened. He was a hard old bloke, but he was just. He married the best woman ever the back country saw. She near died giving life to young Martin.”

“The boss appears to be well liked,” Bony craftily pursued. “He’s worried, though, about the Strangler, he being a Justice of the Peace and all that.”

“But,” objected the old man, “they got Barry Elson for it, didn’t they?”

“He never done it,” Harry interjected warmly. “And there’s a lot of people think like me, too.”

“And a lot think he done it,” dryly persisted the old man. “Still, I don’t think it’s him. I reckon it’s that therebunyip old Snowdrop has been yelling about for years. Wot-in-’ll’sthe reason for doing of it if itain’t abunyip. There’s more in them blacks’ ideas than you’d think. What wewants is a real detective to prove the Strangler is a real bloke or abunyip.”

“Sergeant Simone-” began Bony, but the old man cut him short.

“Him!” he exclaimed with withering contempt. “Imeans a real detective, not a drunk-pincher. Wewants a proper bush detective.”

“I agree there,” Bony said dryly. “Whoever the Strangler may be, I think he is a little mad-someone who goes mad now and then. Do you know a man just man enough to arrange his killings without being caught?”

Dogger Smith chuckled. He was blessed, like many lonely men, with a sense of the ridiculous.

“Only old Stumpy Tattem,” he said, and now his eyes were alight. “Now and then poor old Stumpy rams his hat on a fence-post and says just what he thinks of it. Me and him was putting up a division fence in Yonkers’ paddock when Mabel Storrie was nigh killed. It blew like the devil, you remember, and that evening I baked a damper, the best damper I ever baked. Old Stumpy went crook because it wasn’t perfectly round. Then he went for me and nearly bit me ’and in two. I had to clout him hard with me other, and when he comes round he gets up and clears off into the scrub, and I don’t see him again until next midday.”

“And the night he was away from your camp Mabel Storrie was attacked. Where were you camped that night?”

“Eh!” exclaimed the ancient, staring hard at Bony. “Crummy, I never thought of that! Why, me and Stumpy Tattem was camped only three miles south-west of Nogga Creek! Now, I wonder- No, of course not. Old Stumpy wouldn’t go and do a thing like that. Not poor old Stumpy, with his wooden leg and all. He goes off his rocker now and then, but he’s as ’armless as a dove.”

“Where is Stumpy Tattem now?” asked the half-caste.

“Stumpy! Why, he’s working away across onWestalls ’. He’s a decent kind of bloke, is Stumpy, even if he gets a bit rampageous now and then.”

Bony recalled having removed the name of William Tattem from his list, and now he considered putting it back again. Stumpy would certainly have to be followed up. He must work Dogger Smith right out now this opportunity had come to find the old man in the proper frame of mind.

“How long have you lived in the Carie district?” he asked.

“Close to fifty years.”

“What was Carie like back in those early years?”

“She was good-oh! When I hit Carie the first time there was three pubs in her!”

“Indeed! More people, too, I suppose?”

“Too right there was. Real people, too. Hard doers, all of ’em,” Dogger Smithpridefully replied. “In them days the bush was thriving. Wool was worth only round about sixpence a pound, and sheep could be bought for a shilling a time, but the money them days went a thousand miles farther than it does these. They can have their high wages an’ all that, but give me them times and low wages, when the wages we did get went farther. The squatters had plenty of money, and they spent it, too. When the companies took over and put on managers and talked about their flamingshareholders, that was the finish of the bush as it was in them days. The runs carried more sheep to the acre, and places what now employs a dozen ’andsuster employ fifty or sixty. Nowblokes has to go to the cities to find work. The know-alls blame the sand-drifts, or the over-stocking, or the rabbits, but old man Borradale knewmore’n all theperfessors when he said that the root of all evil in the bush was the stupid leasehold system of the land.”

“How’s that?” asked Bony, his interestswitched off from his investigation.

“It’s simple enough. People who lease land are no different to people who rent a farm or a house. They don’t know what isgonna happen to them in the future, and they naturally gets all they can outer the land before they gets chucked off be the government. They overstocks and don’t do more improvements than they must. Why, they would be fools to rest paddocks and clean up the rabbits and do real improvements for some other bloke to step in and collar the benefits, wouldn’t they?”

“I heartily concur,” Bony said vigorously, although it was a national problem which had not and did not interest him. Had Dogger Smith said that the Prime Minister ought to be hanged he would have agreed without reservation. Having got the old man “warmed up”, he did not hesitate to put this question:

“How far back did Mrs. Nelson go into the hotel at Carie?”

“Away back in 1910. Shecome into some money from an aunt, so she said, but her mother was a Rawlings and she didn’t have no sisters, and her father only had one and she died in 1902.”

“She is a character, isn’t she?” Bony pressed, giving the old man no time to reflect.

“She is that,” Dogger Smith agreed. “Some reckons she’s pretty hard, but itain’t my opinion. When she first took over the pub she had a fine way of getting rid of cheque-men after their money was cut out. She would go round the tables herself and she’d ask each feeder what he’d have. ‘Will you have goat or galah?’ she’d say. ’Course every one would say, ‘Goat please, Mrs. Nelson.’ When a bankruptchequeman said that, she’d say, ‘Indeed, you won’t. You’ll have galah.’ And galah they would get-the toughest birds ever stewed half-way through.

“She only made one mistake in her life, and that was marrying John Nelson. A fine-looking, ’andsomebloke he was, I give that in, but he was a born boozer and gambler like his father before him. Ma Nelson tamed him some after she married him, and if it hadn’t been for her, he wouldn’t have lasted as Cobb and Co.’s groom as long as he did. And then, when she bought the pub, his end was quick and sure.

“I gets into Carie one morning and I finds Ma and the yardman and Trooper Halliday all trying to hold John down on his bedso’s Doctor Tigue could get to work on him with a squirt thing. John is that powerful that he’s heaving ’emall around like they were straws. He’s well in the horrors, and he’s roaring that he’ll do ’emall in. There wasn’t nothing I could do but grab him, stand him up and place him right, and then clout him a goodun under the chin to quieten him and to give old Tigue a chance to prod him with the squirt.

“Oh, yes, John Nelson was a doer all right. What he drank no one kept tally, and in the end Ma got tired of trying to keep ’imoff it. Any’ow, I don’t think she did much trying after she bought the pub. Some says she oughtn’t to have bought it, knowing what John was, but buying it made no difference either way. Jail or the South Pole was the only place for him. He got to be like old Stumpy Tattem, wanting to bite everybody. Now, he could have done all these murders if I hadn’tmeself laid him out in his coffin what was a foot too small for him, but made up in width.”