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.
Of the hundred-and-odd fires that Bony had superficially examined, this particular site had one peculiarity. It had been a large fire, and the reason of that might have been that more than one carcass had been burned there. On the other hand, Bony did not exclude the possibility that the charred remains of a human body might lie below the charred remains of a kangaroo. A second fire might have been lit over the site of the first.
Very carefully he removed the sand that had drifted round and over this fire-site, proclaimed by a kangaroo’s hind-foot. One by one he removed a quantity of bones by feeling for them in the loose combination of sand and ash. Satisfied that he had recovered all that the fire had not consumed-and ordinary fire consumes very few bones-he carefully sorted them and eventually obtained proof that all belonged to the bodies of three kangaroos.
A further fact he discovered was that the wood which burned the carcasses had not been just thrown on them and fired. Jeff Stanton’s condition had been carried out conscientiously, for Dot and Dash had laid a bed of wood to make the burn more thorough.
Now with great care Bony began to put the ash and sand mixture through his sieve. The residue remaining from each sieve-load he emptied on a chaff-bag, and when he was satisfied that the whole of the fire-site had passed through the sieve or lay on the bag, he paused in his labours and began making and rolling a cigarette.
With the most interesting section of the examination before him, Bony smoked complacently and visualized the scene of the killing of Marks. The act committed, it was at once urgently necessary to dispose of the body. Fire was the easiest and most practicable method. There were no disused mine-shafts down which to throw a body and then explode over it a few tons of earth and rocks. There was no steam power on Windee, no big steam boiler to drive the shearing machinery, no big boiler furnace to incinerate a human body. All Windee power plants were petrol-driven.
There was to be taken into consideration, however, the probability that the murderer or murderers of Marks might have scooped a hole anywhere in that vast region of sand and simply buried the victim, certain that the first windstorm would wipe out all tracks. That method of disposing of the body would naturally occur to the average mind, especially the mind of a killer who was a new-chum to the bush.
This theory, however, was discounted by two facts. Not one of the fish in Bony’s net was a new-chum, and not one fish was there who did not know that, although the first windstorm would obliterate all tracks, there was the certainty that a future windstorm would blow the sand from the body and expose it. To obviate this danger the murderer might have taken the body by truck or car from the scene of the crime and buried it in hard ground on the great plain, or somewhere near the hills.
If that were so, Bony’s task would be infinitely greater, but the hangman’s rope for the murderer would be infinitelymore sure. He was not safe whilst the body existed in whole or in part, and, whilst Bony had so far nothing tangible on which to base his belief, he did believe that the body no longer existed, in whole at least. Ludbi had known, and Moongalliti knew, the killer of Marks. The killer, therefore, was absolutely in their hands. They would blackmail him for even a pound of tea, and, knowing that their demands would inevitably increase, the killer would have vanished before then if he were not absolutely secure from blackmail, even secure from their accusation, in the knowledge that no body existed. No one had left Windee since Marks had disappeared. Neither Moongalliti nor Ludbi had come into any coveted possession, such as good clothes or any of the hundred-and-one trinkets of which a blackfellow dreams. And, given the chance, the aboriginal becomes a front-rank expert at blackmailing.
Bony extinguished the cigarette and put it in a pocket before drawing the bag of sieve residue to him. Every piece of matter he examined with his keen eyes, finally to lay it down on his other side. Most of the material was plain charcoal. There was a quantity of blackened pieces of furred skin and five small bones that he decided were knuckle-bones. Since a kangaroo’s paw is five-fingered and similar in shape to the human hand, and since many kangaroos have paws almost as large as the human hand, Bony considered that these bones came from kangaroos’ paws. To be sure on that point he pocketed them with the intention of sending them to the Research Department at Headquarters.
The pile of seeming rubbish on the bag was growing appreciably less. Still, there might yet be evidence that something more than kangaroos had been burned. Marks’s teeth had been gold-filled, and, although the fire would have sundered the gold from its setting of bone, its temperature would not have been high enough to melt the gold. And then he came on melted metal, and his knife proved it lead. It had run into irregular flat cakes. He found three such cakes of lead, and knew them once to have formed bullets that had killed the burned kangaroos. From that he knew it was Dot who had shot those animals, for Dot used a. 44 Winchester carbine firing a lead bullet, and Dash always used a. 22 Savage firing a soft-nosed nickel-plated bullet.
The refuse not yet examined was becoming a very small collection, but to the very end Bony persevered. He had concluded that his work was fruitless, yet he felt no disappointment, for there were other avenues to be explored, when he came upon a single blackened boot-sprig, a boot-nail less than half an inch in length. Hurriedly he went through the remainder. It gave him nothing of significance. His reward for all his labour that afternoon was a single little boot-nail.
The nail proved that something in addition to kangaroo carcasses had been burned there.
Quite slowly, smiling radiance came to Bony’s face.