The sundowner stood up. ‘Good day, mate. Don’t mind me. He, he! Flamin’ hot, ain’t it? Be cool down south. Well, I’ll be movin’.’
Larkin watched him depart. The bush waif did not stop at the shed to camp for the night. He went on to the windmill and sprawled over the drinking trough to drink. He filled his rusty billy-can, Larkin watching until the mirage to the southward drowned him.
The perfect murder, with aids as common as household remedies. The perfect scene, this land without limits where even a man and his nearest neighbor are separated by nine miles. A prospector’s dolly pot, a sieve, and a pint of soldering acid. Simple! It was as simple as being kicked to death in a stockyard jammed with mules.
‘William Reynolds vanished three months ago, and repeated searches have failed to find even his body.’
Mounted Constable Evans sat stiffly erect in the chair behind the littered desk in the Police Station at Wondong. Opposite him lounged a slight dark-complexioned man having a straight nose, a high forehead, and intensely blue eyes. There was no doubt that Evans was a policeman. None would guess that the dark man with the blue eyes was Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte.
‘The man’s relatives have been bothering Headquarters about William Reynolds, which is why I am here,’ explained Bonaparte, faintly apologetic. ‘I have read your reports, and find them clear and concise. There is no doubt in the Official Mind that, assisted by your black tracker, you have done everything possible to locate Reynolds or his dead body. I may succeed where you and the black tracker failed because I am peculiarly equipped with gifts bequeathed to me by my white father and my aboriginal mother. In me are combined the white man’s reasoning powers and the black man’s perceptions and bushcraft. Therefore, should I succeed there would be no reflection on your efficiency or the powers of your tracker. Between what a tracker sees and what you have been trained to reason, there is a bridge. There is no such bridge between those divided powers in me. Which is why I never fail.’
Having put Constable Evans in a more cooperative frame of mind, Bony rolled a cigarette and relaxed.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Evans said and rose to accompany Bony to the locality map which hung on the wall. ‘Here’s the township of Wondong. Here is the homestead of Morley Downs cattle station. And here, fifteen miles on from the homestead, is the stockman’s hut where William Reynolds lived and worked.
‘There’s no telephonic communication between the hut and the homestead. Once every month the people at the homestead trucked rations to Reynolds. And once every week, every Monday morning, a stockman from the homestead would meet Reynolds midway between homestead and hut to give Reynolds his mail, and orders, and have a yarn with him over a billy of tea.’
‘And then one Monday, Reynolds didn’t turn up,’ Bony added, as they resumed their chairs at the desk.
‘That Monday the homestead man waited four hours for Reynolds,’ continued Evans. ‘The following day the station manager ran out in his car to Reynolds’ hut. He found the ashes on the open hearth stone-cold, the two chained dogs nearly dead of thirst, and that Reynolds hadn’t been at the hut since the day it had rained, three days previously.
‘The manager drove back to the homestead and organized all his men in a search party. They found Reynolds’ horse running with several others. The horse was still saddled and bridled. They rode the country for two days, and then I went out with my tracker to join in. We kept up the search for a week, and the tracker’s opinion was that Reynolds might have been riding the back boundary fence when he was parted from the horse. Beyond that the tracker was vague, and I don’t wonder at it for two reasons. One, the rain had wiped out tracks visible to white eyes, and two, there were other horses in the same paddock. Horse tracks swamped with rain are indistinguishable one from another.’
‘How large is that paddock?’ asked Bony.
‘Approximately two hundred square miles.’
Bony rose and again studied the wall map.
‘On the far side of the fence is this place named Reefer’s Find,’ he pointed out. ‘Assuming that Reynolds had been thrown from his horse and injured, might he not have tried to reach the outstation of Reefer’s Find which, I see, is about three miles from the fence whereas Reynolds’ hut is six or seven?’
‘We thought of that possibility, and we scoured the country on the Reefer’s Find side of the boundary fence,’ Evans replied. ‘There’s a stockman named Larkin at the Reefer’s Find outstation. He joined in the search. The tracker, who had memorized Reynolds’ footprints, found on the earth floor of the hut’s verandah, couldn’t spot any of his tracks on Reefer’s Find country, and the boundary fence, of course, did not permit Reynolds’ horse into that country. The blasted rain beat the tracker. It beat all of us.’
‘Him. Did you know this Reynolds?’
‘Yes. He came to town twice on a bit of a bender. Good type. Good horseman. Good bushman. The horse he rode that day was not a tricky animal. What do Headquarters know of him, sir?’
‘Only that he never failed to write regularly to his mother, and that he had spent four years in the Army from which he was discharged following a head wound.’
‘Head wound! He might have suffered from amnesia. He could have left his horse and walked away – anywhere – walked until he dropped and died from thirst or starvation.’
‘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.