Bony Declares Himself
CAPTAIN LOVEACRE had been flying for many years. The experience gained from several forced landings miles from any human habitation had fostered the habit of never going in the air outback without a small hamper, a billy-can, and a drum of water. When he announced that these things were in the grey biplane, the detective at once offered to fetch enough wood from the lake’s shore with which to brew tea.
“Strange bird that,” remarked Loveacre, when Bony had gone off for the firewood.
“Strange indeed!” agreed Cartwright. “The police sergeant was right about him, I wonder!”
“What?”
“I wonder, if given the same opportunities, how many Australian half-castes could reach the level of Bony’s attainments.”
The pilot frowned. “I have had dealings with a lot of them,” he said thoughtfully. “In answer to your question, I’d say that quite a number could. Among the many I have met there are a lot of really smart fellows. Environment is against them, and so…”
“Well?” Cartwright pressed.
“The bush often gets ’emin the end. You take a black or a half-caste, and you put him to college or teach him a trade, but the time may come when he’ll leave it all to bolt back to the bush. Some of them can’t long resist the urge to go on walkabout.”
“Perhaps they are happier on walkabout?”
“Of course,” Loveacre instantly concurred. “They haven’t got the curse of Adam laid on ’emlike the white man. You can’t tell me that it’s natural for a man to slave in a factory, or on a road, or in an office. It is not natural for a man to work. That the white man does so is just because he’s always been greedy for power over his fellows. Many blacks never have worked. They have neverhad to work and they can’t see thesense of working. Blessed if I can see the sense of it, either. I know well enough that were I a half-caste I wouldn’t work when I could go on walkabout and dig up a yam or catch a fish when I wanted to eat.”
Ten minutes later they sat down with Bony on the ground and ate tinned sardines and biscuits and drankmilkless tea.
After they had rested for some time, Loveacre jumped to his feet, and feeling for his watch, said: “Well, this won’t do. We shall have to push off, for the sun is getting low,”
“It is ten minutes after five o’clock,” announced Bony.
The airman had seen the detective glance at the sun, and when his watch proved that Bony was correct, he asked: “Did you guess the time?”
“I did not,” replied Bony. “I have never found it necessary to carry a watch. When the sun is hidden by clouds I ask a policeman.”
“Supposing you cannot find one?” inquired Cartwright.
“When that is so I do not worry about time. In fact, I seldomdo worry about it.” While they strolled over to the biplane, Bony said to Loveacre: “I am lamentably ignorant concerning aircraft. Assuming you were flying with your greatest enemy as a passenger, and assuming that you decided to murder him by jumping per parachute, leaving him to crash with the machine, would you switch off the engine or not?”
Loveacre regarded Bony with narrowed eyelids.
“Assuming that,” he said slowly, “I think I would fix the stick and the rudder controls, and leave the engine running. To do that would give me a better chance of getting clear of the plane, although by first switching off the engine I would not be necessarily hindered from leaving the machine, nor would the parachute necessarily be fouled by the machine even if at once it went into a spin or stalled.”
“Thank you! Might I ask both you gentlemen, as a personal favour, to accept in confidence what I have said about this matter?”
“Decidedly,” the assessor promptly replied. When Loveacre added his assent, Bony smiled, saying:
“Until a few days ago I thought that I knew everything. It is a conceit due, I think, to my wife, to whom I am really a hero. I should have studied flying and all appertaining to it, for it was inevitable that an air crime would come my way. Where are you staying to-night?”
“Golden Dawn? Youcoming?”
“No, Captain, thank you. Well, kindly convey my regards to Sergeant Cox. And do, please, remember to be red-tapish. Thereare time when it is so convenient.”
“So long, Bony. I’m damned glad to have met you, and I will look forward to meeting you again,” Loveacre said warmly.
“Thank you, Captain. The pleasure, then, has been mutual.”
“That goes for me, too,” seconded Mr Cartwright. “We will remember the god of the civil service when this aero-plane leaves the ground. Good-bye, and good luck!”
The two men climbed into the machine.
A quiet smile hovered about the finely-moulded mouth of Napoleon Bonaparte when, with his hands clasped behind him, he walked slowly to the timber, where his nervous horse was impatiently waiting.
Nitro-glycerine! Cartwright, he decided, was broad-minded and altogether a decent sort: a man, moreover, extremely clever. He would have liked to know how the fire assessor could, from the evidence at hand, determine that it had been nitro-glycerine which had partly destroyed the aeroplane, not gelignite, or dynamite, or gunpowder. The fact that some explosive had been used to assist destruction certainly pointed to one assumption. The man who walked through the bush to destroy the machine certainly did not carry the explosive with him. His object was to destroy any clues, and to do that it was sufficient to set fire to the plane. The explosive agent, therefore, must have been in the machine when it landed, and the inferences to be drawn from that were plain.
Mounting his horse, Bony turned it due north. He had to give the animal his attention, for it was thirsty and hungry and wanted to return to its home paddock. Reaching the boundary fence he found a place where the wires were slack, and, strapping them together, he coaxed the animal to step over them. Having released the wires he rode smartly north-eastward to Gurner’s Hotel.
Dusk was falling when he reached the single-story, rambling, wooden building facing north across a three-chain road. The wayside hotel was set down in the centre of sparsely scrubbed land, and there were no other buildings within sight. On riding into the yard adjoining the building, he espied a horse-trough and dismounted beside it to allow the beast to drink. To him came a tall, lank, unprepossessing aboriginal, grotesquely attired in the tattered garments of a tramp.
“Are you the yardman?” Bony inquired.
“Too right, boss!” replied the black. “You stay here?”
“For an hour. I want a feed for my horse.”
“Orlri’! I feed him up goodo. Yougibbittchilling?”
“Here you are. Here’s your shilling. Give him a good feed, mind.”
Without haste, the detective strolled out of the yard and so to the door of the bar. The place was very quiet. East and west, the winding track snaked along the wide cleared road until masked by the falling night. Above, the stars hung like hurricane lamps beneath the roof of a shearing-shed. In the bar, Bony found a little rotund man with a round red face and dark appraising eyes.
“Good night!” said this individual, somewhat haughtily. “Travelling?”
“Are you Mr Gurner?”
“I am.”
“Then I am glad to find you disengaged. I am Detective-Inspector Bonaparte. I want a drink first, then a confidential chat with you, and then dinner.”
Mr Gurner’s superior air had by now utterly vanished.
“The drinks will be on the house, Mr Bonaparte. I heard that you had come from Brisbane. Riding a hack? Staying the night?”
“Yes to the first; no to the second. I’ll take anobbier of port wine in a tumbler filled with soda water. See about dinner, will you? Then we can talk.”
“Very well. It’s been a hell of a day, hasn’t it? That dust-storm was about the worst I’ve ever known.”
When the little man returned his expression would have been jovial enough had his eyes been less hard. Bony called for another drink and opened the inquisition.
“I understand from Sergeant Cox that none of your people here heard an aeroplane passing overhead the night Captain Loveacre’s monoplane was stolen at Golden Dawn. Who was here that night, and where did they sleep?”
“In the house. There was me and my sister, who does the cooking and housekeeping, the maid, and three guests. Jack Johnson, the yardman, slept in one of the sheds. No, no one here heard any aeroplane that night or any other. Extraordinary affair, don’t you think? How is that young woman going along?”
“There is no change in her condition. Twelve miles north of here is a stockman’s hut, occupied by a man called Larry theLizard. What kind of a man is he?”
“To look at? Six feet or a bit over. Red hair and beard. Voice like a thunderstorm. He’s neither better nor worse than the average bushman.”
“And what waters are in the vicinity?”
“Well, there’s Bore Fourteen, south of here and this side ofCoolibah’s boundary. There’s another bore over at Larry the Lizard’s place, and there’s a surface dam seven miles along the road to St Albans on what is called Martell’s Selection.”
“Thanks. My thirst is still rather chronic.”
While Mr Gurner attended to business, Bony noted the clean, scrubbed counter, the spotless shelves of bottles, the set of sporting prints high on the walls, and the petrol-lamp suspended above the bar. With the drinks set up between them, he leaned towards the publican and began to speak in a low, confidential tone.
“Think back to the night that aeroplane was stolen, Mr Gurner. Did you have a visit from the Coolibah boss stockman, Ted Sharp?”
“Yes!” replied Gurner without hesitation.
“What did he come for?”
Mr Gurner smiled knowingly. Affability itself, he seemed most anxious to assist the police in the investigation of a crime which had stirred the State.
“Ted Sharp came here to meet a man,” he replied.
“Indeed!”
“Yes, rather a mysterious sort of fellow, too, if you ask me. I got a telephone message early that day from Yaraka from a person giving his name as Brown. Brown asked that a bedroom and a sitting-room be reserved for him that night. He got here about five in the afternoon. I put him in Room Four, and I let him have a spare room for a sitting-room. It was the first time I’ve ever been asked for one.”
“What kind of a man was this Brown?”
“I certainly couldn’t place him, Mr Bonaparte. He was a tall, thin, dried-up, miserable man about fifty or thereabouts. He arrived in a hired car, and he tells me that he and the driver may be stopping the night or they may not. He says he’sexpectin ’ a gentleman to call on him.
“Well, in they come. Mr Brown, he goes to his room carrying a suitcase in one hand and what theycalls an attache case in the other. The driver reckons he’ll leave his gear in the car until he knows what’s going to be done. Dinner-time comes round, and out comes Mr Brown to ask the way to the dining-room, and he’s still carrying the attache case. All through dinner he sits with that attache case on his knees. After dinner he goes into the sitting-room I fixed up for him, and I’m told to take in a bottle of whisky, a jug of water, and two glasses. And there he stays all the evening.”
It was evident that Mr Gurner was enjoying himself.
“Then,” he went on, “a little after ten o’clock, who should arrive in his runabout truck but Ted Sharp. And what should he do when he comes in here, where I’m serving half a dozen customers, but whisper in me ear for this Mr Brown. Old Harry Wilson, the teamster, asks Ted to have a drink, and Ted puts him off, saying that he’ll be glad to later on. So I shows Ted Sharp in to Mr Brown, and on the table I seen several papers with typewriting on them.
“They’re in there as thick as thieves formore’n an hour. Anyway, it was well after eleven when Ted comes into the bar. I was tired and was trying to get Harry Wilson and Nutmeg Joe to clear off with another bloke calledMcNess, who was taking them to St Albans. Anyway, Ted shouts for all hands twice, and then he wants to know if he can use the telephone.” Mr Gurner indicated the instrument on the wall between the bar counter and the rear door. “He rings through to Golden Dawn. Of course, the row is pretty bad. There was an argument going on between Nutmeg Joe and Peter Leroy, and I couldn’t follow what Sharp was saying. I did hear him ask the night operator in the telephone exchange at Golden Dawn to take down a telegram and see that it was dispatched early the next morning.”
“As you said, Mr Gurner, it sounds a little mysterious, but no doubt there is quite a simple explanation,” Bony murmured. It was obvious that the publican did not feel any affection for the Coolibah boss stockman.
“Yes. Let’s hope so, anyway,” Gurner agreed. “I overheard a few words.‘Adelaide’ was one.‘Kane’ was another. I heard him say:‘Be careful.’ And then:‘Nothing must ever leak out.’ That was all I did hear, and after Ted Sharp had shouted again out he goes to his runabout and drives off back to Coolibah. Oh, I forgot! He buys a bottle of whisky to take along with him.”
“And when did Mr Brown leave?”
“Early next morning, heading back for Yaraka.”
“Do you know the driver of the hired car?”
“No. He was a stranger to us. Like Mr Brown, he said nothing gratis.”
“Hum!” murmured Bony reflectively. “Well, Mr Gurner, I am much obliged to you. Might I ask you to hold our conversation in strict confidence?”
Mr Gurner smiled.
“Of course. I am only too willing to assist the police. If you would slip a word to Sergeant Cox that I have helped you a little…”
The publican winked, and Bony winked back. Someone beyond the bar called that the dinner was ready, and Mr Gurner raised the counter flap invitingly.