Arthur Upfield - Sands of Windee

He leered like a gargoyle on Notre Dame. Bony forced a smile. In spite of three hours’ rest, the Stormbird was a deadly weary man, but the very pride of his manhood compelled him to hide it as much as possible behind his jeers. Whilst Bony had had only one spell of work, the Stormbird and his partner had had three such spells. It was Combo Joe who set the pace, and, hell and damnation, the Stormbird could keep up with him, “blarstim!”

It was two o’clock in the morning when Withers roused Bony from a fitful sleep, and for another three hours they relieved the others on the treadmill of nightmare. They worked without thought, men governed by one idea, driven by it, each muscle whipped by it. But when they were relieved their walk back to the tank and the horses was almost two miles, and in their ears was the Stormbird’s injunction to get a spell, for the wind was veering to the south of west and freshening, and the fire there slowed in its march to the toddling of a small child.

Withers awoke to daylight, and to find that Bony had vanished and with him Grey Cloud. Bony had left at dawn. He rode back south to the fence, traversed it westward for three miles, and then turned due north. In this way, if Dot and Dash had gone west or north-west from Carr’s Tank, he was bound to cross their horses’ tracks. Riding at an easy canter, his body crouched over the gelding’s neck, Bony searched the ground a good twenty feet beyond Grey Cloud’s head, for it is far easier to distinguish a track a little ahead of one than it is to do so at one’s feet.

He cut the partners’ tracks seven miles north of the fence, just when he saw that the fire, at this distance from the breaks having mushroomed far to the west, lay ahead of him to force him out of his north-bound path. Once on the tracks, he turned north-west, followed them till they struck the Freeman’s Run-Nullawil road, followed them on the road to the State Border Fence, thence for a further five miles, and lost them where the road ran, dimly marked across an iron-hard clay-pan.

He was balked for half an hour before he again discovered the tracks, very, very faint, and saw the ruse Dot had adopted to throw off trackers.

Bony understood then that, not meeting with the expected helpers from Freeman’s station, Dot had decided at the clay-pan to muffle their horses’ hoofs. It had been done at the sacrifice of each man’s single blanket. For the four feet of each horse one blanket had been quartered, and each portion tied about a hoof. After that they had ridden over a large area of clay-pans adjoining each other. They had progressed thus but half a mile when the first hoof-tip penetrated its blanket protection and left its tell-tale mark on the clay-pan for Bony’s lynx eyes to detect.

Now, in a generally north-western direction, Bony continued, ever following tracks that became more plain, sometimes espying particles of blue-dyed wool, then a worn strip of blue blanket, and finally brought to the place where the pieces of blanket had been discarded and the men had drunk tea made with water from the canvas bags slung from their horses’ necks and secured hard against their chests with a strap looped round the saddle-girths.

It was now noon. Bony followed the example of the pursued. Dismounting, he removed Grey Cloud’s saddle and the water-bag hanging from his neck. He urged and succeeded in persuading the animal to roll on a patch of loose deep sand, and then left him to graze at will, the bridle still on his head, the bit slipped from his mouth, but the reins dangling because Bony could not afford to risk losing him.

The detective made and drank his tea without sugar, for sugar is a thirst creator in the heat of late December. He ate nothing, but smoked three successive cigarettes, and allowed his aching body to relax for but thirty minutes.

Again in the saddle, he noted that the wind was very much stronger. The air, too, was blue with smoke that came not from the Windee fire.

Smoke and Flame

BONY CAME to the hut normally occupied by Dot’s old friend, situated on the north boundary of Freeman’s Station, shortly after noon. The occupant was not at home, and Bonyproceeded to water and feed his horse with chaff found in an outhouse and put the absent tenant’s billy on the fire he quickly made inside the hut. Whilst it was coming to the boil the half-caste interestedly glanced round to read what was to be read by all-observant eyes.

There were no blankets on the rough wooden stretcher. The ashes in the fireplace had been cold. There were no dogs chained up outside. Within remained the owner’s tucker-box and billy-cans; without there were no canvas water-bags. He had left after, and not before, Dot and Dash had called and gone on, for the tracks Bony had been following were obliterated about the hut by the other tracks of horses and men. Dot’s friend evidently was interested in sport and bushrangers, for lying on a shelf were several volumes of the late Nat Gould’s works, and quite a miniature library of Australian literature featuring Ned Kelly, Starlight, Morgan, and other eminent law-breakers.

After eating, Bony replenished the gelding’s feed-box and slept for four hours. Much refreshed, he ate another meal, watered his horse, placed sufficient chaff in a bag for twolight “feeds”, mounted a fence, set his horse in a wide arc, and picked up the partners’ tracks. It was then five o’clock, and he had left himself approximately three hours of daylight.

Now at a gallop, now at an easy canter, he followed after Dot and Dash with the sureness of a bloodhound. Placed at a disadvantage in that he could not follow tracks in the blackness of night, whereas the night would not prevent the quarry from travelling so long as Dot could see the stars, Bony determined to cover as much ground as possible before the daylight waned and vanished. Arrived at the northern boundary of this run he saw where a deep fire-break had been burned along the east-west fence. Ahead of him, to north and west, lay the vast region of “open country”, unsettled, unfenced, uninhabited. Into it had gone Dot and Dash in the middle of summer, when there had been no rain for four months, when even the seemingly permanent water-holes might, when reached, be dust-dry.

On this account the detective had no fear, though the country was strange to him. The partners would travel from water-hole to creek pot-hole, and hill range rock-hole. He would reach those watering-places by simply following their horses’ tracks. The possibility of the partners’ poisoning the water behind them did not occur to him, for that would be a crime no bushman would commit, no matter how great a felon and how hardly pressed.

That evening the sun sank into a bed of crimson down, sank deeper and deeper, whilst its colour changed rapidly from pale yellow to crimson, from dark red to dark amber before it vanished half an hour before it was timed to reach the horizon. Bony watched it disappear, noted the cloud low-hung in the west, noted, too, how the wind came from that quarter. For another hour he pressed on, and when night fell he had not come to a water-hole, and was obliged to tether Grey Cloud to a tree and offer him chaff slightly dampened from the canvas chest-bag, and the ration poured in a heap at the foot of the tree.

Over his little fire Bony boiled his quart pot and made tea, still taking it without sugar. After eating, he sat on the heels of his boots and smoked cigarette after cigarette, pushing together four sticks whilst the tiny fire consumed them. He sat and tended his fire in the way his mother had done-but not his father, who would have built a fire over which it would have been impossible to crouch.

For several hours he sat thus on his heels, his mind working on the rounding-off of this case he was engaged on. He fitted together the few pieces of the jig-saw puzzle given him by the sands of Windee, and added the remaining pieces fashioned by the magic of his imagination. He knew that his work had been good, that once more he had brilliantly succeeded, triumphed as never before had he triumphed; for had he not built a splendid mansion with a few bricks he had made without straw?