The Great Will-o’-the-Wisp
DECEMBER WAS born in a temperature of 100°. When it was twelve hours old the mercury of the thermometer on the homestead veranda recorded 115°.
Every well on the Windee holding was in requisition, for three of the great open dams were dry, and the water-level in others was rapidly sinking. The early summer thunderstorms that year were extraordinarily erratic in their courses and afforded no measurable rain. It was now more than three months since the last rain fell.
Over all that vast extent of country owned by one man there was not to be found a single green shoot of grass or herbage. East of the range of hills the hot and rainless period had no apparent effect on the sturdy salt-bush; but the salt in this tiny shrub, plus summer heat, caused the sheep to linger round the troughs at the watering-places and consume much more water than those on the range itself and on that vast stretch of country west of the range. Here the winter grasses raised by a plenitude of rain to the height of a tall man’s knee were wheat-coloured. Mile after mile of yellow grass, like an illimitablewheatfield just before harvest, lay encircling the ever-widening areas of bare land in the neighbourhood of the dams and wells.
Bony was out, riding the last horse of his breaking-in contract-a contract he had extended as long as possible. His horses were a credit to him, and Stanton was pleased, as well he might be. He offered the half-caste the contract of erecting a set of sheep-yards a mile above the homestead on the creek, and the versatile Bony accepted, exceedingly glad that his open stay at Windee was to be prolonged.
He was riding a gay young filly, all black without a single white blemish, and, whilst riding with his habitual care, he was considering a point that required explanation. Within the last week he had definitely felt a change in Marion Stanton’s attitude towards him.
Her pleasing democratic bonhomie, pleasing because bonhomie was the natural expression of her sunny nature, had vanished, and had become replaced by an unaccountable coldness. Instead of personally asking Bony to saddle Grey Cloud for her evening ride, when he almost always accompanied her, she had instructed the station groom to perform the office on three consecutive evenings. Once she and Bony almost met on the office side of the house; but, seeing him, Marion had deliberately turned in through a wicket-gate.
Not only was Bony perplexed. He was saddened also by this inexplicable change of front, because he had delighted in her beauty as well as in her personality. Going back over the rides they had taken together, he could find not one that indicated how he had offended.
Her coldness apparently affected Jeff Stanton as well. During the last few days when he had met the squatter Stanton was subtly changed from the bluff, downright man of his reputation. When Jeff looked at him Bony felt that he was being rejudged, and by a man carefully adjusting the scales. His changed attitude was not the result of bad work on Bony’s part. Of that Bony was quite sure.
Both these people accepted him for what he was. The colour-bar in him was no bar to them. He pleased the squatter by the thoroughness of his work, and he pleased the girl by his intellectual gifts and attainments and his sympathetic personality. And now suddenly he sensed that he displeased them both. This displeasure he could not understand. He had no clue to it.
Reaching the road junction, he guided the filly off the track more by his knees than with the reins, and eventually tied her to the tree in whose fork he kept his sheepskin sandals. It was a very still day, and before leaving the horse he watched her for a few seconds, and then, seeing that she was neither suspicious nor suspected the proximity of any other horse and rider, Bony moved away on yet another examination of the scene of Marks’s disappearance. He had covered twenty-five yards when he came on the tracks of a single horse, a horse that had walked.
At once Bony was interested. There were, he knew, no horses in that paddock. The tracks indicated that it was not a loose horse broken into that paddock from another, for the trail was too straight to have been made by a riderless animal. He threw himself into a quick ambling stride, as that of a man wearing snow-shoes, and back-tracked the strange horse till he found that it had left the main road about four hundred yards Windee side of the road junction. Turning about, he followed the tracks back to where he had picked them up, and continued to follow them, his mind going over recent weather conditions to ascertain their age. They were between seventy and seventy-seven hours old-approximately three days-and the horse that had made them was either Grey Cloud or Doll, Jack Withers’s mare. Of that Bony was naturally very sure, for the shape and size of the hoofs of every animal he had broken and every animal in work at Windee had been carefully inspected and memorized in his ordinary routine.
The strange tracks led Bony direct to the clay-pan and sand-ridge where Marks’s car had been found, and where he had been presented with a sapphire by the industrious ants. They led north from that place, and, coming to the fire-site he had so meticulously examined, they circled twice before going on again for nearly half a mile, when they began to take a wide curve that eventually ended in a straight line going back to Windee.
Why had the rider made an obviously special visit to that fatal locality? Was it because he, Bony, was suddenly held in suspicion? If so, had the suspecting person made that visit to look for proof that Bony also had visited that place? The purpose of the rider was all too obvious. Walking slowly to his tethered horse, Bony smiled. The unknown rider had found no proof that Bony had ever visited the place; but he, Bony, had found proof that a strange rider knew precisely where Marks’s car had been found, and also knew where three kangaroos and a human boot at least had been consumed by fire.
Had the unknown rider ridden over that maze of sand-ridges to find proof of Bony’s activities? It was the outstanding question. If so, Bony was suspect by someone. Was that someone Jeff Stanton, or his daughter, or both; and were the coldness of the one and the curious weighing of the other the outward signs of their suspicion? Their altered attitude seemed to indicate suspicion of him, and that in turn indicated that they knew something about Marks’s disappearance after all.
Since the afternoon was yet young, Bony took the Mount Lion road for no other purpose than to quieten his mount, his mind concentrated on the tangle of this Windee skein, which appeared to be becoming increasingly tangled. So absorbed was he in this mental effort that he was startled when Sergeant Morris spoke to him and he saw the policeman sitting his horse at the edge of the track.
“Day, Bony!”
“Good day, Sergeant! We are well met.”
“I was on my way to Windee on the chance of speaking to you,” Morris said in his grim way. “We are fortunate to meet here.”
“Indeed we are.” Bony gazed about with an abstracted look. Then: “I see there a fine pine-tree throwing a most inviting shade. For at least thirty minutes I have not smoked a cigarette.”
“Good enough,” Morris agreed softly, smiling at the perfect accent and studiously correct grammar.
Their horses standing in the shade of another pine-tree, the two men threw themselves on the soft red sand cooled by the shade, and set about rolling each a cigarette. Then: “Have you any news, Sergeant?”
“Yes. Headquarters have consented to send for your dear friend, Mister Illawalli. You appear to have the power of charming even a police chief.”
“Your chief commissioner is a man of perspicacity,” Bony murmured. “However, in common with my own chief, he is a man of fixed ideas, at least in regard tomyself.”
“In what way?”
“They will persist in regarding me as a policeman, one who arrests petty thieves and ordinary inebriates; whereas I am a crime investigator. On the other hand, they know how useless it is to hurry me, or direct me, for they know that when I want a thing done I have most excellent reasons for having it done.”
“Won’t you tell me why you have persuaded Headquarters to fetch your friend from North Queensland at an expense of something like two hundred pounds?”
There was a note of pleading in Sergeant Morris’s voice, and for a little while Bony studied the strong face cast in the military mould. He asked a somewhat surprising question: “Do you believe in spiritualism?”
“I think there is more in it than the sceptics will admit. Why?”
“Do you think that if you take a half-caste baby, rear it, educate it, and finally teach the grown man a profession, that he will follow the profession most of his life and remain a lifelong unit of the white man’s civilization?”
“I’m damned sure he wouldn’t. The black blood in him would pull him back into the bush. Every bushman knows that. It’s happened too often.”
Bony sighed. “Yet there are intelligent Australian people who will not believe it. However, as you appear to be a man with an open, reasoning mind, I will take you a little into my confidence.”
“Good! I’m all attention.”
“Very well. Thereis a very great number of people who regard the Australian aboriginal as standing on the lowest rung of the human ladder. Because they have found no traces of a previous aboriginal civilization, no settlements, no buildings, no industry, they say that he always has been a man of a very low type. Yet, for all that, he has possessed for many centuries that which the white race is constantly striving to obtain, and whichits striving brings no nearer. The blessed possession I refer to is Contented Happiness, the only human possession worth having…
“The despised black man, ignorant, without wisdom, is contentedly happy. He desires nothing but life’s essentials. In his profound ignorance andunwisdom he ruthlessly practises birth control. He makes sure that the very occasional mental degenerate and the physical weakling will not reproduce their like, and he keeps the population down well below a point which the country’s natural food supply will support by the same method of birth control.
“The blackfellow thus is the world’s greatest statesman. Every race, every nation, has something to learn from him. True, he has none of the white man’s monuments to boast of or to point to as evidence of a supreme culture. Such monuments he would regard as millstones about his single ethereal monument of happiness.
“Because the blackfellow is so lacking in that boastfulness which is the white man’s prerogative, the white man looks on him with contempt. Yet the blackfellow possessed culture when the white man ate raw flesh because he did not know how to make a fire. He did not inscribe his culture on tablets, nor did he force it on the general community. His secrets arc well kept, and his powers well restrained. Old Moongalliti can kill a man or woman by merely willing it. A love of ceremony demands the pointing of a bone at the doomed man. It is not the pointing-bone that kills, but will-power.
“I have known instances where a white man has died because a contemptible Australian black has willed it. Old Illawalli can project his mind into the brain of another man and read that man’s thoughts throughout his whole life as easily as you or I would read a book by turning its pages. I am glad to see you are not laughing.”
“I am a bushman,” Morris said simply.
“Good! Now Moongalliti and I belong to the same cult or craft. He knows who killed Marks and how the killing was done. Wait-do not interrupt. In my own way I have questioned him, but without any result. I could obtain what I want to learn through the craft which unites us; but to pass on or make use of the knowledge would be to break my oaths and stain my honour. Illawalli will get the knowledge by a different method. He will hypnotize Moongalliti without Moongalliti’s knowledge.”
“Ah, I see the drift now.”
For a little while Bony fell silent. He was making yet another cigarette. Then: “Even when we know who killed Marks, I am afraid we shall only have disposed of the preliminaries of the case. We shall have to prove that Marks is dead and was murdered, for Illawalli’s testimony will not be admitted. Again, so far we have no glimmering of the motive for the crime. Have you those records for which I asked?”