Progress
THOSE at Karwir did not see Napoleon Bonaparte again until the afternoon of the seventh of October. The weather was clear and warm, but the first heat wave of the summer had not yet come.
Old Lacy, working at his table in the office, saw Bony arrive at the stockyards, and ceased his labours to watch the half-caste unsaddle the horse, take her to the night paddock and there free her. His mind occupied by speculation on what this remarkable man had achieved, the squatter of Karwir found himself mentally unable to continue his work after Bony had disappeared beyond the garden gate. For an hour Bony remained beyond that gate, and when he reappeared he was shaved, showered and arrayed in a light-grey suit. The old man watched him crossing to the office, and wondered. Bony’s sartorial taste was as impeccable as that of a fashionable white man.
“I am glad to find you here, Mr Lacy,” the detective said on entering the office. “I hope, however, I am not interrupting important work.”
Like many poorly educated men, Old Lacy found pleasure in a well-spoken man provided that person attempted to take no advantage-should he attempt it Old Lacy quickly proved that education was nothing.
“Not at all, Bony,” he said with hearty assurance. “I’m finishing up, and what I leave the lad can fix. Can’t get along without him, y’unnerstand. Takes after his mother. Neat and particular.” A rumbling chuckle issued from the lips framed with white hair. “He takes down my letters in shorthand and then types ’emout in his own language. I say: ‘Sir-Why the devil haven’t you sent me that windmill part as ordered a month ago?’ The lad writes: ‘Dear Sir-We regret to have to inform you that at date the windmill part ordered on the 20th is not yet to hand.’
“Only this morning I’m sitting here and the telephone bell goes off. The lad answers it. The call’s from Phil Whiting, the storekeeper and postmaster at Opal Town, and from what I can make out the fool is explaining to the lad why our mail-bag was put on the Birdsville mail car by mistake. The lad hums and haws and says the mistake is to be regretted, and that it has caused us great inconvenience. So I grabs the telephone and I says: ‘That you, Whiting? Good! What the so-so do you mean making that mistake with our mail-bag? Sorry? What the so-so’sthe use of being sorry? If you do it again you’ll lose the Karwir custom for a year, and that’s flat.’ Now, which is the best way to deal with ’em?”
“Your way, of course,” instantly replied Bony smiling. “You know, if all the polite phrasing were to be cut out of business and official letters some two or three million light years would be saved. Colonel Spendor says often: ‘Give me the guts not the trimmings.’ The idea may be vulgarly expressed but it is sound.”
“Ah, I’ll remember that,” chortled the old man, and from a drawer he produced a bundle of letters. “These came for you yesterday. Should have been here days ago. Hullo! That’s the afternoon tucker gong. Come on! Diana’s a stickler for being prompt on the job. How’s the investigation going?”
Bony followed Old Lacy outside the building before answering.
“Not fast, but it has progressed.”
Now as they crossed to the garden gate the old man kept half a pace ahead of the detective, walking firmly, his body carried straight, his white-crowned head held high, his hands white in places that once had been scarred with hard work.
“You married?” he asked.
“Yes. I have been married a little more than twenty years,” Bony replied. “I have a son attending the university and the youngest is going to the State School at Banyo where I live with my wife and children-sometimes.”
“Humph!” grunted Old Lacy, slightly increasing the pace. “This flash education has its points, I admit, but I don’t know that it makes people any more content with life. Young people of to-day stand four-square, but I much doubt that they are any better than the young people of my day. That they are not worse is a blessing.”
They discovered Diana standing beside the tea table set on the cool south veranda. She smiled at her advancing father, and to Bony she gave the slightest of cool nods. That she was thoroughly interested in him he suspected, and that she now experienced slight astonishment at his taste in dress she admitted afterwards to her father. But she kept herself at a distance from Bony, and he knew it. Yet, undaunted, he said to her:
“Coming to a homestead cannot be unlike coming to an oasis in the Arabian desert. Outside the house the birds are ever numerous, and inside almost invariably are to be found wickedly luxurious lounge chairs.”
Diana inclined her head towards a wonderful wicker-work affair.
“Let me recommend you to that super-wicked luxury chair,” she said, still unsmiling.
“Thank you.” Bony sighed after he had taken the chair, which was not until the girl had sat down to pour out the tea. He wasn’t to be tricked too easily into making a social mistake. “Why cannot some inventive genius evolve a saddle to give the standard comfort set by even an ordinary chair?”
“Look funny, wouldn’t it, to see a chair like the one you’re sitting in lashed to the back of a horse?” remarked Young Lacy as he approached them.
“They fix luxurious seats in motor-cars these days,” persisted Bony.
“And comfortable seats in aeroplanes,” Diana added. “The passenger’s seat in your ship, Eric, is the acme of comfort.”
“My contention,” asserted Bony. “Twenty years of air and motor travel have evolved comfortable seats. Saddles to-day are not more comfortable, or rather, not less uncomfortable, than they were hundreds of years ago.”
“Comfort! Luxury! Softness!” exploded Old Lacy, settling himself into a leather affair with foot-wide arm rests and a velvety soft bulge to take the neck. “In my young days there was no softness, no luxury chairs.”
“Which was your great misfortune, father,” countered Diana. “Now take this cup made in England by Grafton, and please don’t say you would prefer to drink tea out of a tin pannikin.”
“Hur! Thanks, my gal. In your hearts you young people think you’re a sight smarter than the old people, but the old people don’t think, they know they’re smarter than the young folk. And now, as we seem to have settled the family argument, perhaps we can persuade Inspector Bonaparte to tell us something of what he’s been doing.”
“A real policeman never tells anything to anyone,” Bony said sadly, and theLacys regarded him sharply for the sudden change of mood. “Of course, I’m not a real policeman, as I have told you, but you make me feel like one when you call me Inspector.”
“Good for you, Bony! I forgot,” almost shouted Old Lacy.
“Ah-that’s better. Now I feel more like myself,” Bony said with a quick smile. “Progress has been slow, but I am not disappointed because I expected it to be slow. However, the case is proving to be of great interest, and if you, Miss Lacy, will permit me to talk shop-?”
Diana inclined her head. She refused to be drawn, but Bony’s penetrating eyes detected her eagerness to hear what he had accomplished.
“Well, then. I have discovered clues which satisfy me that Jeffery Anderson parted from his horse somewhere in the northern half of Green Swamp Paddock. I know that he camped for lunch, that day he left here, at the foot of the sand-dunes where the paddock’s east fence rises from the plain country. You see, Mr Lacy, we were right in our reasoning. He camped for the lunch hour at the foot of the sand-dunes, and before he left it began to rain, and he decided it was not necessary to ride over to the swamp and the hut.
“From this point I cannot definitely establish Anderson’s movements, but I incline to the supposition that he continued to ride northward along the east fence as far as its junction with the netted boundary fence. There, he turned westward along the boundary fence, which forms the north fence of Green Swamp, and so eventually rode down from the sand-dunes on to flat country bordering the Channels.
“I say that I incline to that supposition. Anderson, when the rain began, might well have decided to take a short cut home by striking due westward from his lunch camp and so come to that corner post on the southernmost depression and continue along the fence to the road gate.
“Let us draw an imaginary line from his lunch camp to that corner post on the depression. We see then that north of the line lies Green Swamp, the sand-dunes east and north of it, and the Channels. At the lunch camp, remember, I discovered proof that Anderson had boiled his quart-pot there. And, south of the line and south of the corner post on the depression, I found tracks made by The Black Emperor not before it rained or after it had stopped raining, but while it was raining, when it had rained about half an inch.
“Now, Mr Lacy, you said that at four o’clock that afternoon you went out to the rain gauge and found in it fifteen points of rainwater. At what time that evening, do you think, had about half an inch fallen?”
“Ah-um!” The old man pondered. “What do you think, lad?”
“Well, it took almost two hours for fifteen points to register,” slowly answered Young Lacy. “I was working in the office late that day, I remember, and when I knocked off about half-past five I stood at the window looking at the rain and thought by sight of it, and by the noise it was making on the roof, that it was coming down harder. My guess is that fifty points registered about seven or half-past seven that evening.”
“Yes, lad, I think you’re about right,” Old Lacy agreed.
“Then,” began Bony, “if half an inch had fallen by seven o’clock, at seven o’clock The Black Emperor was just south of our imaginary line when he and his rider should have been home. To-morrow, or some other time, you might make inquiries to ascertain if someone in the district happened to register the rain at that hour. The important point I have to stress is this-when The Black Emperor left his tracks at the place just south of our imaginary line he did not have a rider on his back.”
The effect of this assertion on his hearers was peculiar.
Young Lacy stiffened in his chair and his eyes became big. Diana’s eyes became small, the pupils tiny circles of violet almost as dark as her eyebrows. Her lips straightened just sufficiently to make her mouth hard and to alter the cast of her face. Old Lacy, with emphatic deliberation, set his cup and saucer down on the arm of his chair and shouted:
“How did you find that out?”
Secretly delighted at the effect of his verbal bomb, Bony smiled at them in turn, and noted how the girl’s strained expression gave way to one of cool, impersonal interest.
“When people read of a blackfellow being employed by the police to track a criminal, they think that the black-fellow’s extraordinary ability is due to his naturally keen eyesight,” he said, delighting in keeping his audience in suspense. “Any normally good tracker has served an apprenticeship as long and as thorough as any white craftsman. He begins when a small child, when the lubras take him with them to hunt for food, and when success in the hunt depends on ability to track. Without that apprenticeship the blackfellow would be no superior to the white man who has lived his life in the bush.
“I began my apprenticeship after I left the university, when I went bush instead of continuing my studies, and my aboriginal mentors found me a good student because I had inherited the white man’s ability to reason more clearly and quickly than they. Theclaypans preserved the imprints made by The Black Emperor. Memory of that horse’s tracks seen that day I rode him, told me that the tracks on the claypan had been made by him. The outline of the tracks and their spacing satisfied me on that point. Depth, the sludge left in them, the angles of certain facets in conjunction with certain others, informed me what approximate amount of rain had fallen on theclaypans when they were made. And the manner in which the animal had made them showed that he carried no burden. It takes many years to make a university professor. How many years would it take to make the professor a tracker like me?”
“Loveacre was right when he told me you were a wizard at the game,” asserted Young Lacy. “It seems to me that the more you know about the blacks the less superior to them you feel. Gordon, over at Meena Lake, could write books about them.”
“Yes! I understand that he and his mother have been in close contact with them for years,” Bony said. “By the way, to-morrow being Sunday, would you be able to fly me over to Meena? I should like to discuss certain matters with Mr Gordon.”
“Certainly. No trouble at all,” agreed Young Lacy.
“Might be as well to ring Gordon,” suggested the old man.
“Yes. Suggest the middle of the afternoon,” Bony urged in support. “There is another matter. What became of Anderson’s effects after he disappeared?”
“They are still in his room,” answered the old man. “His room hasn’t been touched after it was tidied and the bed made the morning he rode away,” added Diana.
Bony’s expression indicated keen pleasure. He said:
“I should like to examine that room presently. He was, I am given to understand, remarkably facile in the use of the stockwhip. The stockwhip he carried with him that fatal day was never found. Was it the only whip he possessed?”
“Oh, no,” replied Young Lacy. “He owned several.”
“Where would they be now? In his room?”
“Sure to be-with all his other things.”
“Would you bring them here to me?”
Young Lacy at once left his chair. Diana began the movement to rise to her feet when Bony waved her back, saying:
“Eric can bring them, Miss Lacy. I suppose you have some embroidery silk in the house?”
“Yes. Why?” she asked.
Bony smiled at her, and Old Lacy, more often observing his guest than his daughter, failed to note her coldness in opposition to Bony’s sunny warmth.
“If you would be so kind as to bring me some-would you?”
“Yes. I have several hanks in my work-basket.”
“A matter of interest to me, Mr Lacy,” Bony began when the girl had left the veranda, “is that everyone thinks his or her walk of life is superior to others. For instance, I think that the detection of crime is the most important work of any. You, probably, think that raising cattle and growing wool is of the greatest importance. We all appear to fail in giving the other fellow credit for his success which, when all is said, is based only on the keen application to the job in hand. It puzzles me why the getting of coal should be considered so much less important than speaking in Parliament, that the position of secretary to a business man should be thought to be of little account compared with that of, say, the Governor-General. The secretary can be mentally superior to the Governor-General, and the coalminer can be of greater concern to the community than the statesman. That, of course, is by the way. Here are the stockwhips. Thank you, Eric.”
Bony accepted four whips varying in length, weight and age. The old man and Young Lacy silently watched the detective whilst he examined each in turn from the handle to the silk cracker neatly affixed to the end of the tapering leather thongs. He was thus engaged when the girl came out with her work-basket. From this examination, Bony’s gaze rose to the young man.
“I am sorry to give so much trouble this afternoon,” he said. “Is there such a thing to hand as a magnifying glass?”
“Yes, there is. And we have a microscope, too, if you would like that.”
“Well-no, not the microscope. The glass will be of use.” To Diana, when Young Lacy had left, Bony said: “Ah! The work-basket, Miss Lacy. Now what embroidery silk have you there?”
Without speaking, Diana brought from the basket several hanks of silk-white and black and several shades of blue and of red. These Bony examined for a full minute before looking up and smiling.
“If only the human brain could encompass all knowledge,” he complained with mock sadness. “Have you no green silk?”
“No. I never use green or yellow silk for my fancywork.”
“Hum! I asked that because I find on each of these four whips crackers made with green silk. Anderson, then, did not obtain his cracker-silk from you.”
“No.”
“I see that on the slip-over label on one of these unused hanks are the words ‘cable silk.’ It seems much coarser than that of the other hanks.”
“Yes, it is not used for embroidery work but for fancy knitting.”
“The word ‘cable’ reminds me,” said Young Lacy, who had returned with the magnifying glass. “I remember ordering green cable silk from Phil Whiting for Jeff Anderson. As a matter of fact Anderson always used green silk for his crackers.”
“I wonder, now,” Bony said, slowly. “Did Anderson have a special liking for green as a colour?”
“Two of his suits are dark green,” replied the young man.
“He must have had a strain of Irish in him.”
“What’s that!” exclaimed Old Lacy, his body jerking upward.
Bony repeated the remark, and then, accepting the magnifying glass, he studied one of the whip crackers. Several minutes were spent on the study of the four whips.
“Undoubtedly Anderson made his whip crackers with cable silk,” he said, breaking a long silence. “Now let us observe with the glass a wisp from the frayed end of this cracker with a wisp of silk I have found.”
Bony produced from a long slender pocket-book an envelope, and from the envelope a spill of cigarette paper. Immobile, as though each of them held breathing suspended, the others saw Bony take from the paper a wisp of silk and lay it upon the envelope. No one offered comment when he set beside it a wisp of frayed silk from one of the crackers, and with the glass examined both with studious care. When he looked up at them they saw satisfaction depicted on his face.
“I should like you all to examine these two wisps of silk with the glass,” he said, the satisfaction now in his voice. “Both specimens are much faded in colour, but they are sufficiently alike for us to assume that both came from the same material-cable silk.”
One by one they accepted the glass and agreed that both wisps of silk were alike in colouring, though both faded.
“What’s it all mean, Bony?” demanded the old man.
“One moment, Mr Lacy,” said Bony. He returned the wisp of silk to its cigarette paper and the paper to the envelope which he marked Exhibit One. Then he removed one of the crackers and placed this in a used envelope which he marked Exhibit Two.
“I am unable to satisfy your natural curiosity,” he told them smilingly. “My own curiosity is not yet satisfied concerning the scrap of cable silk I discovered in a somewhat remarkable position some five months after it was detached from the cracker of Anderson’s whip. While I am not sure, I can hazard a guess in which particular square mile Jeffery Anderson played a part in the drama which closed his life.”
“Do you really think he was killed by someone?” asked Diana, that hard expressionless mask again on her face.
“Of course he was,” interjected Old Lacy. “The blacks killed him for what he did to Inky Boy. I told Jeff to be careful and always to keep his eyes well open.”
Bony nodded his head in the affirmative, and neither the girl nor Young Lacy could decide if the affirmation referred to the old man’s statement or to Diana’s question.