Arthur Upfield - Sands of Windee

“I don’t know. What do you want him to be brought here for?”

“Not to kiss him,” said the bland Bony. “I want to introduce him to friend Moongalliti.”

“What the deuce for?”

“Because I am sure he will like Moongalliti.” Then Bony became serious: “I intend trying to obtain certain information from Moongalliti,” he explained, in his way of imparting what seemed much but which amounted to little. “My efforts, however, will, I think, be without result. My friend’s method will, I am positive, be more successful. He is a charming person, although I believe he has not washed for sixty-seven years, which is his age. I want you to instruct Headquarters in Sydney to send a man to Burke, in North Queensland, there to get in touch with a tribechiefed by Illawalli. He is to tell this chief that Bony wants him, and is to bring him to me as fast as aeroplanes, trains, and motors can bring him.”

“Instruct Headquarters?” Sergeant Morris gasped.

“No less. If you prefer a request it will be delayed. They’ll want to know why I want Illawalli. Tell them what I have said as though you were the Great Corsican himself. Tell them that if they refuse or delay granting my request I shall throw up the case.”

“Do you often instruct your own Headquarters?” Sergeant Morris asked with forced calmness, although his worship of discipline writhed under this irreverent handling.

“I have found during my career as an investigator of crime that if one wants a thing one has to issue a demand and not seek a favour,” Bony explained calmly. Then with superb vanity he added impressively: “My Headquarters know that I have never failed in a case, and that I am the only detective who has not failed and failed repeatedly. They also know my views about delaying and wasting time.”

Sergeant Morris burst into hearty laughter. He really could not help it. “I will forward your instructions,” he promised, with a purple face.

Fire Salvage

LUDBI’S DEATH quickly drifted into the limbo of things forgotten. Sergeant Morris discovered that no one among Moongalliti’s tribe knew or could remember the buck on Mertee’s sidewho had driven the fatal spear. It was more than probable that no one belonging to Mertee’s tribe, save the thrower of the spear himself, could have named the slayer. The details of tribal battles are lost in the excitement of the participants, which is extreme, and, since it was not deliberately planned murder, the law passed it over. Ludbi was buried in due course with the usual tribal honours.

At the end of the first week in November Bony was still cooking in the men’s kitchen. By then he was utterly bored, and he was more pleased even than Jeff Stanton when Father Ryan telephoned to say that Alf the Nark was recuperating in the Mount Lion gaol, and would be ready for work at the end of a further two days.

Hearing this, Bonysighed relief, and the men sighed for the opposite reason. Runta, who came regularly at sundown to obtain food and roll her big black eyes at the handsome cook, began to wail when Bony informed her of the approaching return of Alf the Nark. She spoke fair English.

“You come camp with me, Bony,” she said with delightful naivete. “You marry me andyou’m work no more for old man Jeff, eh? I get plenty tucker for you.”

“Bimeby,” replied the unabashed Bony, prevaricating. He spoke in her vernacular. “You’mno like Bony for long; Bony very bad man. He’m got awful temper. He’m beat two lubras with a waddy, so hard that they die.”

“Oh! Oh, Bony, you fool me!” gasped Runta. Very solemnly Bony shook his head. Then, placing the tip of his forefinger against the middle of his forehead, he said significantly: “Sometime now, sometime presently, Bony bad fellow. Killumquick. Debil-debil in here.”

Runta faded out. Bony knew that he had frightened her temporarily, but that next evening her courage would permit her to gaze again on the adored one. His reading was correct. Watching for her, he espied her coming up along the creek, and, when she finally reached the kitchen and poked her head in through the doorway, she became as a rough-hewn block of black marble.

Bony was seated on the floor. His fine straight hair was fiercely ruffled. His face was smeared with flour. Before him stood a statuette fashioned from dough, and he was menacing this statuette with a very businesslike waddy or club. And then Runta saw herself being examined by wild, terrible eyes, and she saw her hero move forward on his knees and one hand, the waddy in the other. He was creeping towards her. Quite evidently it was one of the periods of “sometime now, sometime presently”. Poor disillusioned Runta fled screaming.

From the doorway Bony watched her flight and experienced a qualm of remorse. Playing Don Juan was not a weapon he used often, but in this instance he considered the end justified the means. From Runta he had discovered an important fact, whilst through Runta he had broken the ice of suspicion and was now well received by Moongalliti.

Alf the Nark came back in triumph. He entered the kitchen and resumed his duties with not a particle of grit on his poor liver. Bony went back to his horses, and in five days had his first post-cooking horse in the last stage of its training. Thenceforth on every afternoon he rode by devious ways to the junction of the two roads, and for several hours walked about in his sheepskin sandals, or over-shoes.

On previous occasions he had found where the skinned carcass of a kangaroo had been burned. A charred piece of wood, a bone or the long tail of the animal, invariably not skinned, charred and blackened, always indicated where the carcass had been burned, in spite of the ever-encroaching sand. There was nothing unduly startling in this, since, on many stations, the single condition laid down by the squatter in giving his permission to skin- and fur-getters to operate on his holding is that all carcasses must be burned. Rotting carcasses are breeding-grounds for the blow-fly, and this fly is the sheep’s greatest enemy.

Walking in ever larger circles, with the spot where the abandoned car was found as a centre, Bony had carefully examined almost half a thousand acres. On that area he had found the remains of almost a hundred fires, and these fires had been lit between eight and twelve weeks previously, or, to be more precise, some had been lit before the disappearance of Marks, and some after.

It was no mean feat to establish the approximate dates of those fires. Yet it had been done to Bony’s complete satisfaction by observing the quantity of sand swept over them, and the condition of a bone here and there, which had been partially cleaned of flesh by the ants where it had not been so cleaned by the fire.

After this point of date had been decided, he learned in his roundabout way that the kangaroos shot and burned there were the work of Dot and Dash, who at that time were camped near a well, situated a mile south of the road junction in what was called South Paddock. He determined to examine that camp-site after he had re-examined all those hundred fire-sites.

The re-examination of the fire-sites occupied the afternoons of more than a week, and at the conclusion of this second scrutiny Bony decided that one particular site might be well worth examining for a third time. With no little difficulty he smuggled away from the homestead a short-handled shovel and a small-meshed sieve, and took these tools one night to a fire-site about four hundred yards north of the road junction and three hundred yards north of the abandoned car site.

The following morning he made pretext to require more particular instructions about a certain horse of Jeff Stanton’s, and heard his individual orders to the men. During that afternoon no one of them would, in their work, be riding near the fire-site he proposed to sift with his sieve. At three o’clock he started work.