Tracks on the Walls of China
DURING THOSE SECONDS of horror following the opening of the hut door, Sergeant Marshall changed from the very human being he had permitted himself to become back to the coldly calm, efficient police administrator. He refrained from saluting only by a fraction of time before striding to his car and driving away across the waste of white sand to the fringe of bush and scrub timber.
There had also occurred a subtle change in Bony. The easy and apparently careless movement familiar to Sergeant Marshall was replaced by taut, spring-controlled action-the difference marked in a cat when, following its master about a garden, it sights its prey within stalking distance.
Despite his long association with crime in its worst degree, he had never become indifferent to the proximity of death, for beneath the veneer of the cultured white man the black man’s fear of the dead lurked deep within his subconsciousness. It was, therefore, with unusual haste that he set to work to remove the door handles, thankful that the screw gave easily to the point of his penknife.
He had seen a pair of old trousers in a far corner of the hut and for the second time he edged past the swinging corpse, the soul of him in revolt. When he regained the open air he wrapped the door handles within the trousers and the parcel he pushed under the raised floor of the hut near the doorstep. The door he wedged shut with a wood chip from the wood heap. And then, with a feeling of thankfulness, he crossed to the cane-grass meat house, peeped inside at the safe on its tall legs set in jam tins filled with water, and finally squatted on its south side with its wall as a back rest.
It was noonday and the shadow cast by the meat house would not have covered a plate. He was oblivious to shadow and sunlight; the making of a cigarette was entirely automatic. He was unconscious of the nearer, the inner, languorous silence which lay heavily over the dazzling white scene of white sand, but the buzzing of the blowflies was a constant and sinister reminder of what was within the hut, whilst the noise created by a party of distant crows at first made no impression on his mind.
A state of ecstasy lifted him up, urging him into activity which had to be resisted. What he had predicted to Sergeant Marshall but an hour since, that another would be buried shortly in the cemetery, would take place. For a lie will beget lies, and murder will beget murder. And now he knew for certain what he hadexpected, that the man who had killed Kendall had not fled but remained in or close to Merino.
The whys and wherefores of this latest death could be divided into two sections: those concerning the dead man and the circumstances of the discovery of the body; and those concerning the living man who had so carefully obliterated his tracks. The dead could wait, could be left to Dr Scott and Marshall, and to Coroner Jason. The living was his concern, for that living man who flailed out his tracks was the quarry he, Napoleon Bonaparte, was here to hunt. It was the ecstasy of the hunter that was now lifting him up, that was coursing through his veins like a fire, liquid fire refined by generations of the most cunning, the most patient, and the most relentless hunters this world has ever known.
Rising to his feet, he walked to the place where he had outlined with a match the marks made by a flail of strips of hessian sacking. Slowly he followed the regular series of marks over the steps made by a man, visualizing the action of the flail on the fine sand. First the hard pressure on the ground to fill in the deep indentations, then the lighter touches with the ends of the strips. The flail could smooth the sand, leaving the faintest marks for only the most expert of trackers to see, but the flail wielder could not re-create the delicate sand ripples made by the fingers of the West Wind.
Time must have been necessary, and also daylight. The operation was carried out most probably immediately following the dawn of the day, for the wind of yesterday would certainly have covered those hair-fine marks had they been made the morning before. Presently he stopped to find himself close to the well.
The marks led him to the windmill over the well, and from there to the stand on which was the iron reservoir tank. There was an iron ladder giving access to the wooden platform on which the tank rested some fifteen feet above the ground. The marks were closer here at the foot of the ladder, as though for some reason or other the man had gone up that ladder to the tank. The marks continued on past the ladder and Bony continued to follow them east towards the Walls of China. And at the foot of the Walls, where the foot of the lowest sand dune rested on the plain, the flail marks ceased and there began larger, light indentations which at this shadowless time of day were barely more easily followed.
From this point back to the hut the flail had been used. From here on and up the Walls the man had considered the flail unnecessary to wipe away the tracks made by his feet encased in loose hessian.
Whether the man had come down this way or had gone back this way Bony could not determine; therefore he could not know if he was following the man’s tracks or backtracking him, and the only way to find out was to continue.
On the soft and fine sand of the slopes the imprints were hardly deeper than the cover of a book and as large as the impression made by an elephant. They led him up a minor gully between the lower dunes, twisting about to take still other gullies, until finally they reached the comparative flat top of the Walls of China. Onward they went directly eastwards over the field of dazzling white sand. Bony halted to take stock of his position.
The sunlight was reflected by the iron roofs of Merino situated midway up the vast rise of land reaching to the western horizon. The bush lay like an old and moth-eaten brown carpet, the holes in it red with the sandy soil; and the green of the pepper-trees lining the street of the township made striking contrast. To the north, close to the huge sand range, were the roofs of Wattle Creek homestead, and the sun glinted on the fans of a windmill in action. At Bony’s feet was the little iron hut and mill at Sandy Flat; whilst to the south, also close to the Walls of China, roofs and a windmill marked the home of Mrs Sutherland.
It appeared mathematically impossible for the entire bulk of this mighty sand range to have been raised from the strip of white sand country upon which it was founded. As yet he could see no eastern limits, for the bushlands to the east were lower than the “roof” on which he stood. Here and there pillars of sandstone rose like monoliths from the “roof”, some twenty feet, others thirty feet high. And those pillars possibly indicated that the Walls of China had not been raised by the wind but by an earth upheaval, that out of the bowels of the earth this section of white sand had been heaved to become the sport of the West Wind, to wear it out and away from the hard cores.
Bony turned to the east and continued to follow the almost invisible tracks of the man who wore sacking about his feet. Ahead, about midway to the farthest limits seen of the sand range, a party of crows were vociferously engaged with something lying on the sand. The object he could not see, but their antics proved that something did lie there. Some of the birds were flying in erratic circles; others were on the white sand like blots of ink on paper.
The man tracks did not extend directly to the object of interest to the crows, but when they reached a point close to it, he left the tracks and walked the short distance to ascertain what it was. At his approach the birds whirled upward in flight, cawing angrily, some to alight on the sand and continue their loud protest at his intrusion.
In a small and shallow declivity lay the body of an animal which Bony instantly recognized as young Jason’s brown and white dog with the nail missing in its right forepaw: The crows had ripped out its entrails, but the manner in which the dead animal lay revealed clearly that it had died from takinga poison bait.
Bony considered, thoughtfully gazing over the roof of sand and thereby maintaining the anger of the crows. He could see nothing other than the roof of the Walls of China, limited to the east and west by the blue of the sky, to the south and north by endless slopes and summits of whalebacks lying in shimmering faintly purple opalescence. And here and there those strange cores of sandstone behind which could shelter a corps of spies… or one man armed with a rifle.
Within yards of the carcass the crows had obliterated the last tracks made by the living animal. Bony found them at the edge of the crow-disturbed area, and backtracked. He came to the place where the unfortunate animal had lain in a spasm of agony and, still farther along, to another where it had endured probably its first. Continuing to backtrack, he reached the slight indentations made by the man who had visited Sandy Flat, and then it was established that the man had been on his way to Sandy Flat from the east country, and that the dog had been following his trail when it picked up the poison bait.
Question: Was the bait dropped by one of the station men to destroy a dingo, or had it been dropped by the man to prevent the dog with one toenail missing from following him and thus probably drawing attention to his own tracks so carefully smoothed out by a flail made with strips of sacking? The answer could be established by inquiries made at Wattle Creek homestead.
The answer was in favour of the poisoning having been done by the man who wore sacking on his feet. Was that man the owner of the dog? That was possible but not probable, for Bony had himself seen the same dog following Mr Jason, Constable Gleeson, two stockmen, and Fanning, the butcher.
When Bony continued with his work it was tobacktrack not only the man’s faint impressions but also to backtrack the perfectly plain tracks of the dog. He was led to the eastern side of the Walls, their leeward side, and here the flank of the sand range abruptly fell more sheerly than the slope of a house roof down to hard whiteclaypans.
Beyond theclaypans, many covering unbrokenly an acre or more, lay a strip of wire-grass country varying in width from half to a full mile away to the edge of thick mulga scrub.
Bony pursed his lips. Had he been a profane man, he would have sworn, for it was useless to attempt to track across that dense growth of wire grass growing to a height of eighteen inches, grass so springy that beneath the tread of a rhinoceros it would rise again within the hour.
The man and dog had obviously come up from those clay-pans and, most probably, from across that wire grass, which would bend but never break and then stand up again within the hour. They could have traversed either theclaypans footing the Walls or the wire-grass country for miles from the south or from the north, and now to continue backtracking them would be time ill spent. Where man and animal had climbed up the steep face of the sand cliff, huge dislodgments had scarred the perfectly symmetrical face.
Having established from which point the man had travelled to the hut at Sandy Flat, it remained for him to ascertain in which direction the man had left. Even that was less important than other work to be done. And after all, with all his minute care to avoid discovery, the man had failed to frustrate Napoleon Bonaparte, failed in his attempt to lead justice to believe that the unfortunate man within the hut had committed suicide, if, indeed, he had been hanged.
Bony walked southward slowly, rolling the inevitable cigarette now that the tenseness of the chase was relaxed. The great cores of sandstone were not found on this side of the Walls. He stood looking downward upon a huge claypan containing water two inches deep, and down he went in a flurry of sand to reach its edge and follow it round to see if the dog had taken a drink there. The tracks of sheep were left on the softer edge of the pan against the water, and there, too, were the tracks made by two dingoes and many birds and several horses. There were no tracks of the dog having a toenail missing from its forepaw.
Once again up on the Walls, he continued walking southward, and then, approximately a mile south of the tracks made by man and dog across the roof, he found the tracks of the man returning from the westward side, alone.
Looking upward at a crow winging softly towards those now far-distant blots on paper, he said:
“Some people hate you and your kind. I don’t hate you. How often have you black devils led me to a clue of great importance? Well, you to your carcass, and me to my little brain teaser. A man takes extraordinary pains to leave no trace of his walkabout over these beautiful Walls of China at a time when a man is hanging from a crossbeam of a lonely stockman’s hut. Interesting… most. As Charles would have said, it’s amonty that that poor devil was hanged and did not hang himself. But if I had not discerned those faint straight lines where there are only curved lines, it is probable that the death would have been recorded as suicide.”
He began the walk to the north-west which would take him directly above Sandy Flat well.
It was as deserted as when he had left it. There was no sign of the returning police sergeant’s car on the track he could see running from the left-angle turn up to the township. He sat down on a ledge at the base of a sandstone pillar and rolled another cigarette. And two minutes later he vented another long-drawn “Ah!”
Riding towards him at an easy canter was a woman on a grey horse. She was coming from the south, and so clear was the air he could see the tracks made by her horse on the slope of a whaleback more than half a mile away. She and her horse disappeared in a declivity, to reappear three minutes later much nearer to him. She was, apparently, riding towards the homestead of Wattle Creek.
“Good morning!” he said, adding hastily: “Or is it good afternoon?” He sighted his own shadow, and then noted the position of the sun. “Why, it is twenty minutes past two.”
“Why itis twenty minutes past two o’clock!” she exclaimed. “Oh! Good afternoon! You made a remarkably good guess.”
Bony smiled broadly. The smile lay deep in his blue eyes and lingered about his mouth, revealing his perfect teeth. Then, before the smile had quite departed, he said boastfully:
“I never guess… when I am serious. Have you ridden far today?”
The impertinence of his question went unnoticed. She sat still, looking down at him, whilst telling him that she had ridden out from the homestead thatmorning to make sure that a mob of horses were getting water. Although he had boasted that he never essayed a guess, he guessed that this girl’s age was in the vicinity of twenty-eight or -nine. She was slight of figure, and she sat her horse as though long accustomed. Khaki jodhpurs and silk blouse, the absence of a hat revealing light blown hair drawn to a bun at the back of her head, showed modern Australian womanhood at its best. She was not actually good looking, but Bony had long reached an age when beauty of personality was more appreciated than skin beauty.
She appeared oblivious to his degree as stockman, as well as to the fact of his birth. That she should overlook these matters, he prided himself, was due to his own charm. He knew that he could be charming when he wished… She said, puzzlement leaping into her eyes:
“But what are you doing here? On foot and no swag! Have you lost your horse?”
“No. I got the day off, and so decided that I would tour these extraordinary sand walls.”
“They are certainly well worth a visit. Who are you working for?”
“His Majesty’s representative, the governor.”
“The governor!”
“You see, I insulted the police force over there in Merino, and the police force hauled me before Justice Jason, who ordered me to be held in durance vile for ten long days… and nights, by the way. Thereupon the police force suggested-suggested, mind you, not ordered-that were I to paint the police station fences a sickly yellow colour I would be given three meals a day by Mrs Marshall and two shillings a day for beer at knock-off time. Today, however, to celebrate the halfway period of my penal sentence, I asked for the day off, threatening that if I were not granted the holiday I would immediately go on strike. If the coal miners can go on strike over stupid and trivial things, why can’t I?”
The girl tossed back her head and laughed, and he noted how her nose wrinkled at its bridge and how her eyes seemed to dance in the light.
“The threat of leaving the police station only half painted was sufficient even for Sergeant Marshall,” he went on. “You would appreciate that could you see the new yellow paint over the old blue tints.”
“I have heard something about you,” she told him, abruptly serious. “Mr James, the minister, spoke to my brother about you. Asked my brother if he could find you a job after your release.”
“You are, then, Miss Leylan?”
“Yes. What is your name?”
“I am known as Robert Burns.” Bony raised a hand and mimicked the parson at Merino. Then he adopted a Scotch accent and denied his descent from the poet. “For some reason unexplained,” he went on, “all my friends call me Bony. I prefer it that way. It saves a lot of arguments.”
“You speak very well-Bony. Good school?”
“My father gave me a sound education,” Bony replied gravely. “Do you think your brother will give me a sound job?”
“Probably. I didn’t actually hear what he said to Mr James. I left them together. Mr James didn’t mention the matter when I saw him this morning.”
“You saw him this morning?”
“Oh yes. We met by chance away out east from the Walls of China a little before I found our horses. The silly man had blown his horse. It was in a lather of sweat and he was rubbing it down with a piece of hessian sacking. If I’m any judge, he would have to walk his horse back to town.”
“Your brother is a great friend of his, I understand,” Bony suggested.
“Not exactly. My brother says that the minister makes his toes itch to be up and doing. We like his wife. You will find her a splendid woman. Well, I must be going. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Miss Leylan. By the way, do your menlay poison baits on these Walls of China?”
“No. Why?”
“There is a dog dead over there, and I thought it might have picked upa bait.”
“Indeed!” She turned and gazed in the direction indicated by him. “I’ll ride over and have a look at it.”
“I have seen it before. It’s a town dog.”
She heeled her mount round, waved a hand to him, and rode away.
He turned from watching her to see the dust of a car coming down the slope from Merino, and to murmur:
“Well! Well! So this very morning Mr James was wiping down his blown horse with a piece of hessian sacking. And Mr Leylan is not a great friend of Mr James, after all. Well! Well! Our official interest in Mr James goes on and on and on.”