Читать книгу Bony and the Mouse - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 4

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Should you alight from the Q.A.N.T.A.S. air liner at the Golden Mile in Western Australia, travel northward to Laverton, then along a faint bush track for one hundred and fifty miles, you would come to the Land of Melody Sam.

Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, equipped with a sound alias, did not travel by this route, as he had reason to enter Sam Loader’s kingdom by the back door. It was a clear, hot and windy day when first he sighted the Land of Melody Sam from the verge of a breakaway, and there he dismounted from a horse and rolled a cigarette whilst contemplating the scene. The breakaway was the granite lip of a vast and shallow saucer, on which grew a mulga forest the like of which is exceedingly rare in modern Australia, where steel axes have been frantically wielded for more than a century. The limits of the forest in the saucer could be seen; the entire area difficult to guess. Outside the saucer, on higher ground, there grew only the sparse jam tree, the waitabit bush, and the spinifex, patched by large areas of surface rock, and larger areas of salmon-pink sand.

Over beyond the many square miles of this mulga forest, Bulow’s Range lay sprawled above the eastern horizon, a pale-grey daub under the light-blue shimmering sky. Bony could see the burnt match-stick of the poppet head of Sam’s Find, and the outline of the town of Daybreak surmounting the whale-back Range, distant at least ten miles. There was the Land of Melody Sam, the destination of this traveller whose business was luring murderers from their holes.

The hot north wind ruffled the mane of the brown mare, and that of the pack-horse burdened with saddle bags, spare saddle, and the gear of a horse-breaker. Scorched clouds moved across the sky, and not one passed over the face of the conquering sun. From this breakaway were no limits to confine the soaring spirit of a man.

Down in the mulga forest it was different.

Again astride his horse, the man who was ‘Bony’ to all his friends rode through the forest which had aroused his interest in the story of its being. Before Cook first sighted Australia, an aborigine had stood on the breakaway and had seen, not this forest, but a vast flat expanse of spinifex dotted with jam-woods, gimlet trees, and ancient drought-stricken mulga trees of the broad leaf variety. Game was scarce, and he and his family were hungry, so he called the lubra whose job it was to carry the fire-stick from camp to camp, and with this he put the fire to the spinifex, for the purpose of driving into the open snakes, lizards, iguanas and banded ant-eaters.

Doubtless the present day was like that day, and the wind took charge and carried the fire across the saucer from side to side, burning everything to a grey ash. For many years the native trees had dropped their seed encased within iron-hard pods which nothing but fire-heat could burst open. They exploded like small-arms after the major fire had passed by, scattering the seed wide to fall into the cooling ash.

Quite soon thereafter came a deluge of rain and the seeds split open and sent their roots down into the steamy earth. A riot of spinifex and scrub covered the fire-bared land, and the mulga seedlings, proving the strongest of all, eventually gained the victory. More rain fell and, like Jack’s beanstalk, the saplings branched and the weaker of these were eliminated, the strongest ultimately surviving to claim their own living space, and leaving no surface moisture for anything else to mature.

Of uniform height, about twenty-five feet, they were uniformly shaped, the branch-spread dome-like, the trunks straight and metal-hard, and matching the dark-green foliage massed to give shade, unusual in the interior of this continent.

Bony and his horses passed over the parquet floor of salmon-pink and shadow-black. The wind hissed and raved among the topmost branches, and failed to sink low enough to reach him. The summit of the arches swayed; the walls of the arches did not move.

Nothing else moved either. There being no ground feed, there were no animals to be seen; and no reptilian life, and thus no birds. The entire absence of lesser trees, low scrub and spinifex, and grass, quickly made of it an empty forest. It was almost a relief to enter the clearing, and Bony dismounted at the edge of it and rolled a cigarette, whilst the horses nickered and raised their upper lips to the scent of water.

Bony found the water in a deep hole among a rock-pile, and beside it a bucket fashioned from a petrol tin. Thus able to give the animals a drink, he loosened saddle girths and boiled water in his quart pot and brewed tea. Seated in the shadow of the rock-pile, he lunched leisurely and ruminated on his mission.

The Case-files, the Statements, the Plaster Casts of shoeprints, and the Reports of Detective-Officers, seemingly piled as high as this isolated rock-mass, had given him a fairly clear picture of a community, and the shadow of murder which had fallen upon it. Daybreak, a town which had been created by one man, and seemingly controlled by this man, of unknown age and known to every prospector and miner in Western Australia as ‘Melody Sam’. Three hundred miles from Kalgoorlie, a hundred and fifty miles inward from the end of the terminus of a branch line at Laverton, all this country unfenced, unused, never properly prospected, save a ribbon either side of the unmade road based on the rail-head. And they called it ‘The Land of Melody Sam’.

Daybreak, a one-pub town owned by Melody Sam. He owned the general store, he financed the mail-and-goods run from Laverton. He built and owned the church and paid the parson’s stipend. He built the court-house, the school of arts, and would have built the police station, the post office and the school, had the authorities agreed. He did not, therefore, pay the salaries of the officials.

Melody Sam. A tycoon! A dictator! A political boss! There was only the one verdict provided by the records. Melody Sam was universally honoured, if not universally loved. It seemed that he had one failing in the estimation of his people: he would, without notice, march up and down Main Street playing a violin very well, but not the tunes in greatest favour. And, too, he was a trifle unpredictable. No one could forecast the hour when he would start on a bender which might last many days.

Murders at Daybreak! There were three, the first that of a young aborigine called Mary, who was a protégé of the minister and his wife. In July of the previous year she was found on the footpath outside the Manse, having been killed with a blunt instrument. A month later a Mrs. Mavis Lorelli, the wife of a cattleman living five miles on the road to Laverton, was found by her husband, having been strangled during his absence. In January of this year the third murder had been committed, this time the victim being a youth employed in the town as garage apprentice. His throat was cut.

Now it was April, ten months after the aborigine’s death, and nothing achieved by the police, other than a collection of plaster casts of sandshoes worn by a man having a slight limp in his right leg.

It was surprising how many men living at Daybreak had an injury to their right leg, and yet not so in a comparable community of bush people. It was strange that the local aboriginal tribe was absent when the girl was killed outside the Manse, for the aborigines were on walkabout and she should have been with them. It was also odd that when the remaining two crimes of homicide were committed the tribe was away on walkabout, and the policeman had to call for the services of a native tracker at Kalgoorlie, and he seemed to be useless.

It was reasonable to assume that one man killed these three people. His tracks were found on the scene of the second and third murders, and the plaster casts made of them identified him on each occasion. There was nothing more of any value. Motive was not indicated. No one crime was related to the others.

Suspects? Only one, a young man named Tony Carr, a teenage delinquent of bad record, and now employed by the local butcher.

Quite an unusual set-up, and not to be resisted by D.I. Bonaparte when in Perth on an assignment. On the evening before leaving Perth he had dined with the Commissioner and his wife, and the Commissioner had wished him luck, and the Commissioner’s wife had urged him to make himself known to her niece, Sister Jenks, from whom he could obtain much local colour.

Sister Jenks! She had often appeared in the case records. Constable George Harmon, it would seem, was efficient and inclined to be ruthless. There was a man called the Council Staff, and Katherine Loader, Melody’s granddaughter. A man named Fred Joyce did the butchering for Daybreak, and was stated to be guardian-employer and general tamer of the delinquent Tony Carr. And, of course, others, including a gentleman called Iriti, and his medicine-man, having the euphonious name of Nittajuri.

Too small a town, a too closely related community for a detective-inspector to enter in full uniform of braided cap and sword and spurs. Success would surely attend on an itinerant horse-breaker called Nat.

Bony tightened girth straps, and left the rock-pile, to be immediately intrigued by an arrangement of stones, obviously the work of aborigines. The stones were roughly circular and flat, each about the size of a white man’s soup plate. Between each was a space of about two feet. They formed two circles joined by a narrow passage, that farther from the rock-pile being much larger than the nearer one. Twenty men could have stood without contacting one another in the larger circle, ten could have done this in the smaller one, and two men could walk abreast along the connecting passage, a hundred yards long. At the far curve of the large circle, three stones were missing, so that it was possible for a man to walk into the circle, and from it along the passage to the small circle, without stepping over the outline of the design.

An aboriginal ceremonial ground. The carefully selected stones had been brought from outside the forest. All were of white quartz. The upthrust of rock, amid which was water, was, however, of conglomerate ore, and thus evoked the question: why bring stones from outside the forest when a plentiful supply was to be obtained on the site?

There were additional points. The white stones were maintained in regular spacing, and free from drift sand. The absence of human tracks proved that the design had not been used for a ceremony for some time. It was a secret place which no white man would have reason to visit in a search for lost cattle, or on a kangaroo hunt. It was a lonely place, a magic place, and Bony was sure that amid the rock-pile was the local tribe’s treasure-house where were kept the pointing-bones and the father and mother churinga stones.

The spirits of his maternal ancestors came from the trees to whisper their taboos. Under the wind there was a silence, a watchfulness by the unseen, and sudden withdrawal from this place, of the world of living men. Bonaparte’s white progenitors mocked him in these moments, called up his education, his reputation, to wave like flags before his eyes.

He compromised by leading his horses round the edge of the clearing to avoid crossing over the ceremonial ground, and so continued his journey through the forest, which never varied in aspect from what it had been before coming to the rock-pile. The floor of salmon-pink sand, unmarred by the feet of man or beast, continued flat and unruffled by the defeated wind. Can a man disown his father and his mother? In the mind of this man, so constantly battled for by his unknown parents, the thought was created that in every one of these identical trees was imprisoned for eternity the spirit of a once living aborigine.

Bony must have ridden nine or ten miles since leaving the breakaway, when he sighted the eastern extremity of the forest, vistas of space appearing in the arches, and extending as he approached. Before him was no rock-faced breakaway. He could see the land rising gently beyond the mulgas, could see in the open spaces the snow-white trunks of several ghost gums.

The mulgas thinned at the forest limit, and the ground here was scarred by shallow water gutters. He found he hadn’t done badly when crossing the maze, for he was out of course for Daybreak by very little when he saw the town on the curved back of Bulow’s Range. A four-wire fence skirted the forest, obviously marking the boundary of the town common, and he rode to the right, hoping to come to a gate, and thus disturbed a party of crows settled on an object slightly inside the forest. Well, it was early yet, and curiosity took him to the crows’ find—the body of a doe kangaroo. And at once his attention was removed from it to the story written on this page of the Book of the Bush.

A barefooted woman accompanied by a dog had run into the forest. The dog had killed the kangaroo. The woman had fallen, and had lain on the ground for some time. Then she had crawled over the sandy soil out of the forest to the skirting wire fence. She was a white woman.

Bony urged his horses along the track of the crawling woman, coming to the fence, and seeing that she had crawled beneath the bottom wire, and so on into the open country, and towards the seven or eight widely spaced and ancient ghost gums. Tethered to one of the gums was a saddled horse. Bony cautiously followed the trail of the crawling woman until he came to the edge of the slight depression where grew the ghost gums.

Under one of them a woman was lying, and a man was bending over her with a long-bladed knife lying horizontally on his two hands, as though he were contemplating just where to plunge it.