Arthur Upfield - Sands of Windee

Banyo, nr. Brisbane.

Dearest Bony,

Detective Holland came out from town yesterday especially to tell me that you had left Sydney for the Western DivisionN. S. Wales, on another case. He says that Colonel Spender is very angry, because you went to Sydney only to finalize a case and have gone off without authority, especially when there is a murder case giving them trouble out of Longreach.

We are all disappointed, too, because we were looking forward to a walkabout beyond Winton. When are you coming back? We haven’t had a walkabout now for nearly nine months, and you know how it is with us. Little Ed is going to the Banyo school next week. Bob wants to go west and get a fob on astation, and I know you won’t like that. You had better come home and stop him…

Do come home, dear Bony. But there, I know you won’t until your present case is finalized. Charles is going up for his University entrance exam the week after next. He is going to be like you, but like you and me and all of us the bush will get him in the end. It’s in our blood and can’t be resisted.

We send our love, dearest Bony. All are well.

Marie.

The handwriting was neat, the spelling faultless. The writer was a half-caste like Bony, and in her way an equally satisfactory product of mission station education. Bony was smiling gently when he replaced the sheet in its dainty mauve envelope and thought of the pride of his life, his eldest son Charles, to whom he had bequeathed most of his mental gifts, and then of the lad who was always unhappy at school, always pining for the bush. The call of the bush was knocking at Bob’s heart almost as soon as he could walk, whilst the call came to his wife and himself much later in life, but nevertheless was equally insistent, equally compelling.

Once more he smiled, this time a little morebroadly, when he ripped open the official envelope from Headquarters, Brisbane. The typed part was terse and to the point. Below his name and rank it read: You are hereby notified that you are allowed six weeks’ leave of absence without pay, as from October 1st, 1924. Should you fail to report at the expiration of this period your appointment will automatically cease.

It was signed by Colonel Spender, Chief Commissioner, Queensland Police, and under the signature a vicious ink-splashing pen had inscribed three further words: You are sacked.

Whilst returning this communication to its envelope Bony chuckled, for he could so easily visualize the colonel’s purple face when he dashed down these three words with final impulsiveness. As in the past, he would, when the Marks case was finalized, report for duty. He would be shown into the Chief Commissioner’s office, there to receive a lecture on discipline and asked pointedly how the devil and what the devil he thought the service would be without it… “and for heaven’s sake go and help that fool to find out who stole the Toowoomba Bank cash and bonds!” or “assist that ass on the Cairns murder case!”

Presently he rose and in the soft warm darkness walked back to the men’s quarters, where he accompanied the accordion-player on a succession of box-tree leaves.

At six o’clock he was up cooking the men’s breakfast; and the men, who thought they would have had to cook their own meals, were highly gratified. To Jeff Stanton, who came into the kitchen after he had given out his orders, he said in his calm manner:

“I do not like cooking, but I will carry on until you can get a cook. I hope that will be soon.”

“I telephoned to Father Ryan last night, Bony. There is no cook in Mount Lion wanting a job just now. I’ll do all I can to get one. How much have you been making on your breaking-in contract?”

“Somewhere about seven pounds a week.”

“Well, that’s a stiff price to pay a cook. But I’ll pay you that in wages as a cook. The men must have a cook, and it is unfair that you should receiveless wages as a cook than you were making breaking-in horses.”

“But for the money I would rather break-in horses,” Bony said, yet was pleased that Alf had left hurriedly.

The New Cook

THE IDEAL station-hand is the man who can do any job required to be done on a station. Most men follow up a particular line of work-horse work, rough repairing, cooking, fencing and well-sinking, team driving, or truck management. There are many men, however, who can do any or all these things creditably, and Bony was one of them.

The vacancy in the men’s kitchen made by the dramatic departure of Alf the Nark presented to Bony a sure avenue of winning his way to the hearts, via the stomachs, of Moongalliti and his tribe. To these natives, whose habitat was a hundred-mile radius of Windee, Bony was quite an outsider. Had he been a full-blooded aboriginal they would never have accepted him as one of themselves, because his totem would not have been their own. As a half-caste, and a strange half-caste, he would at all times be regarded with suspicion; but as a station cook, with somewhat of their racial blood in him, he could successfully bribe them and win a measure of friendship with food, for food and the getting of food occupies far more of the native mind than any other subject.

To have approached them abruptly and casually asked which of them had put up the sign near Marks’s abandoned car would have produced looks of blank astonishment and protestations of complete ignorance, not for any reason to fear they had infringed the white man’s law, of which they knew very little, but because the meaning of their signs is kept but little less secret than the ceremonies accompanying the initiation to full adulthood of their young men and women.

Bony got on with his job well satisfied, and that morning baked the bread from the dough made by Alf the Nark. At nine-thirty he struck the triangle for morning lunch, at twelve for midday lunch, and at three for afternoon lunch, and was towards four o’clock “putting on the dinner”, when a step behind him caused him to look around and see Marion Stanton regarding him with amused but friendly eyes.

“You know you are a surprising person, Bony,” she said laughingly, and seated herself on the only chair in the place-the cook’s chair. Bony’s face lit with that inward flame which was as the slow turning up of a lamp-wick.

“Why should you think that, Miss Stanton?”

“Well, in the first place you are a university graduate, yet you break-in horses most expertly; secondly, you play divinely on an ordinary tree-leaf; and now I find you cooking, having been told that you really can cook. What else can you do?”

“What I can do, you know. Is it not enough? I can very easily enumerate what I cannot do: I cannot manage a station; I cannot preach a sermon; I cannot dance; and, alas, I cannot compose poetry.”

“Do you want to be able to do those things?”

“I should like the gift of composing poetry,” he said gravely.

“Why?”

“That I might write a poem about you!” was the bland reply.

Marion’s face flushed, and the smile gave place to a look of haughty surprise. Bony went on unperturbed. “Yesterday when I looked back and saw the hills riding on the mirage sea I felt sad that I could not fix the beauty of it with words as a great painter with his brushes. To make an immortal copy of beauty, either with brush or pen, would, I believe, be a most satisfying accomplishment.”

“I think I begin to understand you,” Marion told him. By this time the freezing look had melted away.

“I am glad of that. Permit me to attend to this custard for one moment.”

Watching him at work over the big range, Marion recognized that she was strongly attracted by this man’s personality. He was so natural, so utterly without affectation, and so perfectly free from the slightest taint of coarseness. No other men of her acquaintance, and they ranged from an Irish peer down to a horse-boy, possessed the likeable personality of this half-caste. Dear old Father Ryan was splendid, of course, and he came very close.