Arthur Upfield: Sands of Windee

It was by an extraordinary piece of luck that the ants had revealed to Bony that cut sapphire, but not an extraordinary thing that the ants had used the sapphire to keep their eggs warm. Sapphires, cut or uncut, do not grow. They are never found in the rough state in the old sand-country of Central Australia. It could be assumed, therefore, that that particular cut sapphire was once set in a ring or a tiepin, that it was one of the objects that fell during the supposed struggle.

It was not luck but downright patience, methodical tireless patience, which added yet further evidence. Bony knew that the Anglo-Saxon race, as well as the Australian aboriginal, instinctively kills at a distance, and not with a weapon retained in the hand. Since in this case the probable weapon used was a gun, the half-caste proceeded to gain evidence of it, if evidence there remained. Standing in the position of the car, it was impossible to fire a bullet horizontally in any direction for more than two hundred yards. Within that distance a tree would stop it, if it did not ricochet from a branch.

Tree by tree, Bony searched for the mark that would indicate the stoppage or passage of a bullet. He examined nearly four hundred trees before he felt obliged to give up the search as fruitless. Yet it was a tree, a pine-tree with branches growing out from low down the trunk, which yielded him a second find. Wedged within a fork he discovered a small disk of silver, very thin and very slightly concave. It proved an object entirely baffling to him as to its use or purpose. Had it been of glass it might have come from the face of a wrist-watch; and if one might guess, which Bony seldom did, that faintly discoloured silver disk might well be the back of the inner case of a small silver watch.

He found the disk precisely nine yards from the centre of the circle, and no more than the cut sapphire could the disk have just grown where he found it. Yet, although the disk could not so far be labelled, it materially strengthened the theory that a violent struggle had taken place where Marks’s motor-car had stopped.

Considering all tilings, the half-caste was well satisfied with the progress of his quest. It was a case absolutely to his liking. Had he discovered the body of Marks, the case would have been so much the less interesting in that a murder would have been definitely established, whereas he first had to establish the fact of murder before he could go on to discover the murderer and his motive for the crime.

He was also well satisfied with the companion fate had given him on the afternoon when the grey gelding was first ridden by Marion Stanton. He rode with Marion along the track to Mount Lion with the unalloyed delight of being in the presence of a lovely woman. The horse was behaving splendidly, a compliment to his breaker; whilst his rider was a compliment to his training.

“Have you given him a name yet?” inquired Bony, seated on a quiet old mare.

“No, I haven’t, Mr. Bony,” she answered. “Can you suggest one?”

“Do you find his movements easy?” the detective countered with a smile, as unconscious of familiarity as she was unconscious that he was a poor half-caste horse-breaker and she a millionaire’s daughter. She said:

“He is the loveliest horse I’ve ever ridden.”

“Then why not call him Grey Cloud?”

“Grey Cloud!” she repeated after him. He saw her lips move whilst she murmured the name several times, watched with his admiration of the beautiful, the contours of her face and her figure. She wore a black riding-habit that permitted her to ride astride, as do all true bush-women.

“Grey Cloud! That will do. Yes, that is a most appropriate name. Why, it is almost poetical. Are you a poet?”

“Alas, no,” Bony admitted gravely. “I tried to write poetry once, and its result was almost catastrophic. A certain professor of mathematics had an enlarged proboscis and a shrunken chin. I wrote a verse about him which quite by accident was dropped and picked up by the professor of literature, who saw me drop it. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘did you write this atrocious drivel?’ ‘Sir, I did,’ said I, and went on to say I was ashamed, and had meant no disrespect to his learned colleague. ‘I am not interested in your lack of respect, sir,’ was the reply I got; ‘I am more than interested, I am stunned, by your utter lack of metre. I shall remember you, sir!’”

Marion laughed deliciously, and Grey Cloud tossed his head and whinnied at the old mare. Then suddenly she became serious, as though remembering something, and asked: “Where was that?”

“Why, at the University, Brisbane.”

“And you were there?”

“Yes. I won my way there through a scholarship.”

Bony found himself regarded by a pair of steady grey eyes in which was an expression of perplexity.

“And you are breaking-in horses on Windee,” she said slowly.

“Why not?”

“But what a waste of a fine education! Why, you could have become a doctor, or an architect, or a-or a…”

“A policeman,” Bony suggested helpfully, and added, seeing a hurt flash in her eyes: “When I left the University I could have become almost anything I chose. I chose to become a student of nature, a master of human psychology, and a teacher of little children. I found in the north of my native State children so far from a school that they were in danger of growing up unable to read and write. I taught many their ‘three R’s’ and gave them some understanding of astronomy and elementary science. In the paper the other day I read that one of those children had gained a RhodesScholarship.”

Now in her eyes he saw the divine light of enthusiasm, and he went on in his grave, gentle way:

“Of course, I could have used my education purely for my own advancement. I have preferred to use it, when opportunity served, for the advancement of others and for justice.”

“I have never thought of education quite like that,” Marion admitted, and for a while rode in silence. She could not help thinking how strange it was that for no explainable reason she liked this breaker of horses, her father’s servant, a common half-caste, immensely. Was it his steady blue eyes, or the way he smiled, or the tone of his voice, or the silent deference he paid to her good looks?

When they had gone four miles from the homestead, he suggested that they turn for home, to which she objected, saying:

“Oh, not yet! Why, the afternoon is still young.”

“But your horse is newly broken,” Bony pointed out. “As yet he is not hardened to carrying even your weight over a long distance. There is always to-morrow.”

“Then let’s gallop.”

And before he could say anything she wheeled Grey Cloud, cried to him, and the gelding sprang away. That ride! It was like sitting on a flying feather, and when she reached the stockyards, her face flushed, her eyes sparkling, she leapt to the ground and, turning to Bony, impulsively held out her nowungloved hand whilst thanking him. And he, looking down at the fair hand lying in his black one, saw on the little finger a gold ring set with sapphires, one of which was missing.

Dot and Dash

MOUNT LION like a great many bush towns is remarkable for the contrast of its buildings. To-day the court-house, the police quarters, the small gaol, and the post-office are built of bricks faced with cement; whilst the dwellings of the fifty-odd inhabitants are constructed of assorted pieces of corrugated iron, flattened out petrol-tins, and much hessian. As though to soften the contrast, the two general stores, the hotel, and the Catholic convent are built of weatherboard kept in fair repair and roofed with red-painted iron.

At the beginning of the century Mount Lion was four times its present size. During a Saturday evening it was then impossible for any person to run from end to end of its broad main street on account of the crowds on the sidewalks and the horses, buggies, and carts in the road.