The Sands of Windee, serialised in The Western Mail newspaper at the time of Rowies’ Trial, was a major success for Upfield. His own account of the Snowy Rowies story, The Murchison Murders, was published (Sydney, Midget Masterpiece Publishing Company) in 1934. Upfield continued producing Bony thrillers, 29 novels in all, until his death in Bowral, New South Wales, in 1964. The last, The Lake Frome Monster, was completed by J.L. Price and Dorothy Strange and published in 1966.
‘Wisp of Wool and Disk of Silver’ was especially written for the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and is the only short story by Upfield. It is interesting to compare it with The Sands of Windee, if only to discover how authors sometime hate to leave a good idea alone.
Wisp of Wool and Disk of Silver
It was Sunday. The heat drove the blowflies to roost under the low staging that supported the iron tank outside the kitchen door. The small flies, apparently created solely for the purpose of drowning themselves in the eyes of man and beast, were not noticed by the man lying on the rough bunk set up under the verandah roof. He was reading a mystery story.
The house was of board, and iron-roofed. Nearby were other buildings: a blacksmith’s shop, a truck shed, and a junk house. Beyond them a windmill raised water to a reservoir tank on high stilts, which in turn fed a long line of troughing. This was the outstation at the back of Reefer’s Find.
Reefer’s Find was a cattle ranch. It was not a large station for Australia – a mere half-million acres within its boundary fence. The outstation was forty-odd miles from the main homestead, and that isn’t far in Australia.
Only one rider lived at the outstation – Harry Larkin, who was, this hot Sunday afternoon, reading a mystery story. He had been quartered there for more than a year, and every night at seven o’clock, the boss at the homestead telephoned to give orders for the following day and to be sure he was still alive and kicking. Usually, Larkin spoke to a man face to face about twice a month.
Larkin might have talked to a man more often had he wished. His nearest neighbor lived nine miles away in a small stockman’s hut on the next property, and once they had often met at the boundary by prearrangement. But then Larkin’s neighbor, whose name was William Reynolds, was a difficult man, according to Larkin, and the meetings stopped.
On all sides of this small homestead the land stretched flat to the horizon. Had it not been for the scanty, narrow-leafed mulga and the sick-looking sandalwood trees, plus the mirage which turned a salt bush into a Jack’s beanstalk and a tree into a telegraph pole stuck on a bald man’s head, the horizon would have been as distant as that of the ocean.
A man came stalking through the mirage, the blanket roll on his back making him look like a ship standing on its bowsprit. The lethargic dogs were not aware of the visitor until he was about ten yards from the verandah. So engrossed was Larkin that even the barking of his dogs failed to distract his attention, and the stranger actually reached the edge of the verandah floor and spoke before Larkin was aware of him.
‘He, he! Good day, mate! Flamin’ hot today, ain’t it?’
Larkin swung his legs off the bunk and sat up. What he saw was not usual in this part of Australia – a sundowner, a bush waif who tramps from north to south or from east to west, never working, cadging rations from the far-flung homesteads and having the ability of the camel to do without water, or find it. Sometimes Old Man Sun tricked one of them, and then the vast bushland took him and never gave up the cloth-tattered skeleton.
‘Good day,’ Larkin said, to add with ludicrous inanity, ‘Traveling?’
‘Yes, mate. Makin’ down south.’ The derelict slipped the swag off his shoulder and sat on it. ‘What place is this?’
Larkin told him.
‘Mind me camping here tonight, mate? Wouldn’t be in the way. Wouldn’t be here in the mornin’, either.’
‘You can camp over in the shed,’ Larkin said. ‘And if you pinch anything, I’ll track you and belt the guts out of you.’
A vacuous grin spread over the dust-grimed, bewhiskered face.
‘Me, mate? I wouldn’t pinch nothin’. Could do with a pinch of tea, and a bit of flour. He, he! Pinch – I mean a fistful of tea and sugar, mate.’
Five minutes of this bird would send a man crazy. Larkin entered the kitchen, found an empty tin, and poured into it an equal quantity of tea and sugar. He scooped flour from a sack into a brown paper bag, and wrapped a chunk of salt meat in an old newspaper. On going out to the sundowner, anger surged in him at the sight of the man standing by the bunk and looking through his mystery story.
‘He, he! Detective yarn!’ said the sundowner. ‘I give ‘em away years ago. A bloke does a killing and leaves the clues for the detectives to find. They’re all the same. Why in ‘ell don’t a bloke write about a bloke who kills another bloke and gets away with it? I could kill a bloke and leave no clues.’
‘You could,’ sneered Larkin.
‘Course. Easy. You only gotta use your brain – like me.’
Larkin handed over the rations and edged the visitor off his veranda. The fellow was batty, all right, but harmless as they all are.
‘How would you kill a man and leave no clues?’ he asked.
‘Well, I tell you it’s easy.’ The derelict pushed the rations into a dirty gunny sack and again sat down on his swag. ‘You see, mate, it’s this way. In real life the murderer can’t do away with the body. Even doctors and things like that make a hell of a mess of doing away with a corpse. In fact, they don’t do away with it, mate. They leave parts and bits of it all over the scenery, and then what happens? Why, a detective comes along and he says, ‘Cripes, someone’s been and done a murder! Ah! Watch me track the bloke what done it.’ If you’re gonna commit a murder, you must be able to do away with the body. Having done that, well, who’s gonna prove anything? Tell me that, mate.’
‘You tell me,’ urged Larkin, and tossed his depleted tobacco plug to the visitor. The sundowner gnawed from the plug, almost hit a dog in the eye with a spit, gulped, and settled to the details of the perfect murder.
‘Well, mate, it’s like this. Once you done away with the body, complete, there ain’t nothing left to say that the body ever was alive to be killed. Now, supposin’ I wanted to do you in. I don’t, mate, don’t think that, but I ‘as plenty of time to work things out. Supposin’ I wanted to do you in. Well, me and you is out ridin’ and I takes me chance and shoots you stone-dead. I chooses to do the killin’ where there’s plenty of dead wood. Then I gathers the dead wood and drags your body onto it and fires the wood. Next day, when the ashes are cold, I goes back with a sieve and dolly pot. That’s all I wants then.
‘I takes out your burned bones and I crushes ‘em to dust in the dolly pot. Then I goes through the ashes with the sieve, getting out all the small bones and putting them through the dolly pot. The dust I empties out from the dolly pot for the wind to take. All the metal bits, such as buttons and boot sprigs, I puts in me pocket and carries back to the homestead where I throws ‘em down the well or covers ‘em with sulphuric acid.
‘Almost sure to be a dolly pot here, by the look of the place. Almost sure to be a sieve. Almost sure to be a jar of sulphuric acid for solderin’ work. Every thin’ on tap, like. And just in case the million-to-one chance comes off that someone might come across the fire site and wonder, sort of, I’d shoot a coupler kangaroos, skin ‘em, and burn the carcases on top of the old ashes. You know, to keep the blowies from breeding.’
Harry Larkin looked at the sundowner, and through him. A prospector’s dolly pot, a sieve, a quantity of sulphuric acid to dissolve the metal parts. Yes, they were all here. Given time a man could commit the perfect murder. Time! Two days would be long enough.