‘It’s possible. What is the character of the man Larkin?’
‘Average, I think. He told me that he and Reynolds had met when both happened to be riding that boundary fence, the last time being several months before Reynolds vanished.’
‘How many people beside Larkin at that outstation?’
‘No one else excepting when they’re mustering for fats.’
The conversation waned while Bony rolled another cigarette.
‘Could you run me out to Morley Downs homestead?’ he asked.
‘Yes, of course,’ assented Evans.
‘Then kindly telephone the manager and let me talk to him.’
Two hundred square miles is a fairly large tract of country in which to find clues leading to the fate of a lost man, and three months is an appreciable period of time to elapse after a man is reported as lost.
The rider who replaced Reynolds’ successor was blue-eyed and dark-skinned, and at the end of two weeks of incessant reading he was familiar with every acre, and had read every word on this large page of the Book of the Bush.
By now Bony was convinced that Reynolds hadn’t died in that paddock. Lost or injured men had crept into a hollow log to die, their remains found many years afterward, but in this country there were no trees large enough for a man to crawl into. Men had perished and their bodies had been covered with wind-blown sand, and after many years the wind had removed the sand to reveal the skeleton. In Reynolds’ case the search for him had been begun within a week of his disappearance, when eleven men plus a policeman selected for his job because of his bushcraft, and a black tracker selected from among the aborigines who are the best sleuths in the world, had gone over and over the 200 square miles.
Bony knew that, of the searchers, the black tracker would be the most proficient. He knew, too, just how the mind of that aborigine would work when taken to the stockman’s hut and put on the job. Firstly, he would see the lost man’s horse and memorize its hoofprints. Then he would memorize the lost man’s bootprints left on the dry earth beneath the verandah roof. Thereafter he would ride crouched forward above his horse’s mane and keep his eyes directed to the ground at a point a few feet beyond the animal’s nose. He would look for a horse’s tracks and a man’s tracks, knowing that nothing passes over the ground without leaving evidence, and that even half an inch of rain will not always obliterate the evidence left, perhaps, in the shelter of a tree.
That was all the black tracker could be expected to do. He would not reason that the lost man might have climbed a tree and there cut his own throat, or that he might have wanted to vanish and so had climbed over one of the fences into the adjacent paddock, or had, when suffering from amnesia, or the madness brought about by solitude, walked away beyond the rim of the earth.
The first clue found by Bonaparte was a wisp of wool dyed brown. It was caught by a barb of the top wire of the division fence between the two cattle stations. It was about an inch in length and might well have come from a man’s sock when he had climbed over the fence.
It was most unlikely that any one of the searchers for William Reynolds would have climbed the fence. They were all mounted, and when they scoured the neighboring country, they would have passed through the gate about a mile from this tiny piece of flotsam. Whether or not the wisp of wool had been detached from Reynolds’ sock at the time of his disappearance, its importance in this case was that it led the investigator to the second clue.
The vital attribute shared by the aboriginal tracker with Napoleon Bonaparte was patience. To both, Time was of no consequence once they set out on the hunt.
On the twenty-ninth day of his investigation Bony came on the site of a large fire. It was approximately a mile distant from the outstation of Reefer’s Find, and from a point nearby, the buildings could be seen magnified and distorted by the mirage. The fire had burned after the last rainfall – the one recorded immediately following the disappearance of Reynolds – and the trails made by dead tree branches when dragged together still remained sharp on the ground.
The obvious purpose of the fire had been to consume the carcase of a calf, for amid the mound of white ash protruded the skull and bones of the animal. The wind had played with the ash, scattering it thinly all about the original ash mound.
Question: ‘Why had Larkin burned the carcase of the calf?’ Cattlemen never do such a thing unless a beast dies close to their camp. In parts of the continent, carcases are always burned to keep down the blowfly pest, but out here in the interior, never. There was a possible answer, however, in the mentality of the man who lived nearby, the man who lived alone and could be expected to do anything unusual, even burning all the carcases of animals which perished in his domain. That answer would be proved correct if other fire sites were discovered offering the same evidence.
At daybreak the next morning Bony was perched high in a sandalwood tree. There he watched Larkin ride out on his day’s work, and when assured that the man was out of the way, he slid to the ground and examined the ashes and the burned bones, using his hands and his fingers as a sieve.
Other than the bones of the calf, he found nothing but a soft-nosed bullet. Under the ashes, near the edge of the splayed-out mass, he found an indentation on the ground, circular and about six inches in diameter. The bullet and the mark were the second and third clues, the third being the imprint of a prospector’s dolly pot.
‘Do your men shoot calves in the paddocks for any reason?’ Bony asked the manager, who had driven out to his hut with rations. The manager was big and tough, grizzled and shrewd.
‘No, of course not, unless a calf has been injured in some way and is helpless. Have you found any of our calves shot?’
‘None of yours. How do your stockmen obtain their meat supply?’
‘We kill at the homestead and distribute fortnightly a little fresh meat and a quantity of salted beef.’
‘D’you think the man over on Reefer’s Find would be similarly supplied by his employer?’
‘Yes, I think so. I could find out from the owner of Reefer’s Find.’
‘Please do. You have been most helpful, and I do appreciate it. In my role of cattleman it wouldn’t do to have another rider stationed with me, and I would be grateful if you consented to drive out here in the evening for the next three days. Should I not be here, then wait until eight o’clock before taking from the tea tin over there on the shelf a sealed envelope addressed to you. Act on the enclosed instructions.’
‘Very well, I’ll do that.’
‘Thanks. Would you care to undertake a little inquiry for me?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Then talk guardedly to those men you sent to meet Reynolds every Monday and ascertain from them the relationship which existed between Reynolds and Harry Larkin. As is often the case with lonely men stationed near the boundary fence of two properties, according to Larkin he and Reynolds used to meet now and then by arrangement. They may have quarreled. Have you ever met Larkin?’
‘On several occasions, yes,’ replied the manager.
‘And your impressions of him? As a man?’
‘I thought him intelligent. Inclined to be morose, of course, but then men who live alone often are. You are not thinking that -?’
‘I’m thinking that Reynolds is not in your country. Had he been still on your property, I would have found him dead or alive. When I set out to find a missing man, I find him. I shall find Reynolds, eventually – if there is anything of him to find.’
On the third evening that the manager went out to the little hut, Bony showed him a small and slightly convex disk of silver. It was weathered and in one place cracked. It bore the initials J.M.M.