Arthur Upfield - The Barrakee Mystery

Clair or Martha had made that track, and Clair or Martha was within seventy-three yards of King Henry when he met his death.

Bony had become great friends with the black cook, and had watched his chance to borrow her boots, with which he made an impression on a prepared piece of clay. The Research Department at Headquarters would tell what even Bony’s hawk eyes could not see. With camera and microscope the original track and the rough cast would be examined to discover if there were identical marks or not on both. If there were, proof that one and the same boot made them would be established. If not, then it would be necessary to apply the same process to Clair’s footwear, and on some pretext or other Clair must be brought in from his pumping job, since it was not advisable for Bony to go out to the Basin.

Regarding Clair, too, the half-caste had sent a letter to a friend of his living in the district where roamed that tribe of blacks whose bygone chief, a super-wrestler, had hugged two men at once to death.

To Bony the case afforded mental exhilaration. Because the rain had wiped out the letters and words stamped on the ground, Bony cried blessings on the rain. It was not now a humdrum case where good tracking only was required. To clear up the case successfully demanded inductive reasoning of a high order, and this mental activity was infinitely preferable to the physical labour of moving about. Moreover, it was beautifully restful to sit there in the sun and merely think. One need not even think if one did not wish. There was tomorrow, and there were the days following tomorrow when one could think. Yes, to the devil with thinking! So Bony slept.

How long he did sleep he never would say, although he knew precisely by the position of the sun when he fell asleep and its position when he awoke. He was awakened by a masculine cough, but the process of his awakening was confined to the quiet opening of his eyes. Before him, sitting on an oil-drum, was the smiling Ralph Thornton.

“Had a good nap?” he asked.

“I was thinking out a problem,” Bony lied. “It has ever been my misfortune that I cannot sleep in daylight.”

Ralph laughed at the glibly-spoken double falsehood.

“Is your name Napoleon Bonaparte?” was his second question.

“Those were my baptismal names. But”-solemnly-“I call myself Bony.”

“Well, Bony, are you acquainted with a lady named Martha?”

“I have that pleasure.”

“Then it will interest you to know that Martha is looking for you with a waddy in her hand,” said the grinning youth. “She says you stole her No. 9’s.”

“The human mind is always liable to delusions,” Bony murmured. And then, seeing Ralph look curiously at his clue, he added blandly: “That piece of clay contains my problem.”

“Ah! And the problem is-”

“The problem is a difficult one, because it requires imagination to study it and to find a solution,” explained the half-caste, picking up the slab of clay and holding it carelessly, knowing theunlikeliness of the young man’s observing thebootprint. “In this lump of matter,” he went on, “we hold a universe. Let us in imagination crush it to fragments and separate a fragment from the mass.

“Here we fall back on facts, for on examining our fragment we find that it is composed of atoms. Separating one of the atoms, we see before us a solar system-sun, moon and planets.

“Behold, then, established facts, reality, truth. Behold now Bony’s sublime imagination. The ordinary human mind is limited. It clings to facts, measurements, and scales. My mind rises above all three. At the bottom of the scale-the human scale made by the human mind-we have the atom, a miniature solar system, invariably in close proximity to countless other solar systems. At the top end of the scale we have our vast far-off solar system and our immeasurable universe. But perhaps you are not interested.”

“I am. Please go on.”

“Well, then, listen attentively,” commanded Bony, a reincarnation of Plato talking to his students. “You may deride imagination, but imagination rules the world, the universe. I have shown you the bottom and the top of our scale-our average human scale. I will now show you that Bony’s mind recognizes no scale, no limit. My imagination invents a super-super-microscope, and with super-instruments takes up one of the planets in the atom and sees a world composed of yet smaller atoms-atoms from a world within an atom which forms part of our world.

“My sublime imagination invents a telescope which ranges beyond and out of our universe, and I see that our solar systems are but neighbouring atoms, the whole comprising, let us say, a stick of wood on a greater world. I see, too, a man walking towards the inert stick of wood, and the time he takes to move each of his feet is a million of our years, our little whizzing years. The man lays down his swag. He is thirsty. He wishes to boil his billy. And, casting around for fuel, he picks up the stick of wood whereinis our world, our solar system, our universe, and with other sticks of wood starts a fire. Time to him is eternity to us; time to us is eternity to the atoms in this lump of clay. Half a million of our years expire whilst he draws a match across his match-box. The fire catches the wood, our universe; and soon we are gone, turned into floating gas.

“The Bible says: ‘In the beginning.’ We think it means the beginning of our world. Even Bony’s imagination cannot conceive the Beginning, or the End.”

The lad was gazing at the half-caste with rapt interest. Bony noted his intelligent face, and smiled; and when Bony smiled one lost sight of his colour and saw only a calm, dignified countenance lighted by dark-blue eyes, whose far-seeking gaze bespoke, at times, the visionary. The man’s egotism was simple, almost unconscious. His mind was high above the average human standard, and he was honest enough to take pride in the fact.

“Where did you learn all this?” Ralph asked.

“In books, in men, and animals, in sticks of wood and lumps of clay, in the sun, moon, and stars,” Bony told him. “My imagination, as I have said, is without limit; but there are very severe limits to my knowledge. Still, should I live another thirtyyears, those limits may be widened a little.”

“My mother tells me you are keen on Napoleon,” Ralph said.

“Your mother, sir, is a good woman. She sees goodness where goodness is found. Naturally, she would find it in the Emperor. ‘Honour thy father that thy days may be long, but honour thy mother that thy soul may live for ever!’ I honour neither my father nor my mother.”

“And why not?”

“Because they did not honour me. My mother was black, my father white. They were below the animals. A fox does not mate with a dingo, or a cat with a rabbit. They disobeyed the law of the wild. In me, you see neither black nor white, you see a hybrid.”

“Oh, I think you are too hard on yourself,” Ralph objected.

“Not a bit,” Bony replied. “I am what I am. I am not ashamed of it, because it is not my fault. But I feel sometimes as if black and white are at war in me, and will never be reconciled.”

They looked at each other silently for a while. Then Ralph said, in his frank way:

“I think I can imagine your feelings, Bony. But, though you bear marks of your people’s guilt, they have at least bequeathed you a fine brain, and I think that a great brain is the greatest gift a man can have.”

Bony smiled once again. Then he said, in a lighter tone:

“Plenty of grey matter is an asset, isn’t it?”

Chasing a ‘Killer’

RALPH THORNTON had fallen under the spell of a half-caste detective. The quiet, thoughtful young heir to Barrakee felt strangely drawn to this link uniting the worlds of black and white, with his imaginative flights, quaint philosophy, and colossal vanity withal.