The Barrakee Mystery. Arthur W. Upfield

the white mind. “I come down from Dunlop,” he went on. “Ted Rogers breaking-in horses up there.”

      “He’s still there?” was the young man’s first speech.

      “I think,” said Clair dreamily, “that I said it.”

      The conversation was carried on disjointedly, punctuated by meditative smoking and tobacco-chewing. Then Clair put the question he had asked at countless camps in the course of many wandering years. No one present, not even the suspicious gossiping blacks, would have thought that his visit was solely for the purpose of asking this question:

      “I knew an abo once, a terrible good horseman, feller called Prince Henry—no, not Prince Henry, some other name—tall big feller, old feller now. You know an abo called Prince Henry?”

      “No Prince Henry,” demurred Pontius Pilate, the gravity of a great chief having settled over his ebony features. “You no mean King Henry?”

      Not a muscle of Clair’s face moved. Not a sign betrayed more than ordinary interest.

      “Maybe he was King Henry,” he said slowly. “Worked one time here at Barrakee, I think.”

      “That’s him, boss,” agreed the elderly black. “King Henry, Ned’s father. This here is Ned—King Henry’s son.”

      “Oh,” drawled Clair, glancing from one to the other. “And what’s your mother called, Ned?”

      “Sarah Wanting.”

      “Humph! Sarah believes in change.”

      “Oh, but Sarah she leave old Mokie now King Henry come back,” chimed in Pontius Pilate, pride of knowledge shining in his eyes.

      “Ah!” The exclamation came like a sigh from the gaunt man. “Then your father isn’t far away, Ned?”

      “Nope. He come down from Nor’ Queensland.”

      “What’s he been doing up there? Thought he was a Darling abo.”

      “Dunno,” interjected the elder, and then innocently contradicted himself. “Him bin do a get from white feller wanta killum. White feller him dead now.”

      “Oh! So the coast is clear at last, eh?” And then came Clair’s momentous question:

      “Where’s King Henry now?”

      “Him down Menindee. King Henry him bin come up alonga river with Sarah. Going to camp with us.”

      The puffs of tobacco-smoke came with unbroken regularity from the gaunt man’s lips. The gleam of satisfaction, of triumph, was hidden by narrowed eyelids. After a moment’s silence, abruptly he turned the conversation, and ten minutes later rose and left the camp.

      Back at the boat, without sound, he unmoored it and stepped in. Without a splash, he pushed it across to the further tree-shadows, and, merely keeping it on its course, allowed the current to drift him gently by the camp, down to the station mooring-place.

      He was at the open fireplace outside the shearing-shed half an hour later, drinking jet-black tea, and eating a slice of brownie. Between mouthfuls he hummed a tune—not a white man’s tune, but the blood-stirring chant of some war-crazed tribe.

      “Well, well, well!” he murmured. “My years of tracking have brought me in sight of the quarry at last. William, my lad, you must go first thing in the morning to the prosperous Mr Thornton, abase yourself before him, and ask for a job.”

      Chapter Two

      The Sin of Silence

      Mrs Thornton was a small woman whose fragility of figure was somewhat deceptive. Her age was forty-three, and, although it is not generally politic to state a woman’s precise age, it has here to be done to prove that hardship, constant battling against odds, and self-denial, do not necessarily impair the bloom and vigour of youth. Vitality, both physical and mental, radiated from her plain yet delicately-moulded features.

      On the morning following the visit of William Clair to the blacks’ camp she sat sewing on the wide veranda of the Barrakee homestead. The weather was warm, Nature drowsed in the shade, and the only sound came from the big steam-engine operating the pumps.

      Now and then Mrs Thornton glanced between the leaves of the morning glory creeper shading the veranda to observe a tall, blue-shirted man digging the earth above the roots of the orange-trees beyond the lawn. Which of the men it was she could not make out, and uncertainty made her irritable.

      At the sound of a heavy iron triangle being beaten by the men’s cook, announcing the morning lunch, the worker disappeared. For a moment the mistress of Barrakee allowed the sewing to fall to her lap, and a look of balked remembrance to cloud her brown eyes.

      A moment later the house gong was struck, and the little woman went on with her task with a sigh. Came then the sound of ponderous steps on the veranda boards, and round an angle of the house there appeared, carrying a tray, an enormously fat aboriginal woman. Like a tank going into action the gin rolled towards Mrs Thornton, near whom she placed the tray of tea-things on a small table.

      Mrs Thornton gazed up at the beaming face with disapproving eyes. Without an answering smile she noted the woman’s flame-coloured cotton blouse, some six times wider at the waist than at the neck, then at the dark blue print skirt, and finally at the bare flat feet. At first the feet were stolid, immobile. Then at the continued steady gaze the toes began to twitch, and at last under the pitiless silent stare one foot began lightly to rub the other.

      When Mrs Thornton again looked up, the gin’s eyes were rolling in their sockets, whilst the beaming smile had vanished.

      “Martha, where are your slippers?” asked her mistress severely.

      “Missy, I dunno,” Martha gasped. “Them slippers got bushed.”

      “For twenty years, Martha, have I tried to encase your feet in footwear,” Mrs Thornton said softly, but with a peculiar grimness of tone. “I have bought you boots, shoes and slippers. I shall be very angry with you, Martha, if you do not at once find your slippers and put them on. If they are bushed, go and track them.”

      “Suttinly, missy. Me track um to hell,” came the solemn assurance. Then, bending over her mistress with surprising quickness in one of her avoirdupois, she added in a thrilling whisper:

      “King Henry! He come back to Barrakee. You ’member King Henry?”

      For fully thirty seconds brown eyes bored into black without a blink. The white woman was about to say something when the sound of a wicket-gate being closed announced the approach of her husband. The gin straightened herself and rumbled back to her kitchen.

      Almost subconsciously the mistress of Barrakee heard her husband banteringly reprove Martha for the nakedness of her understandings, heard the woman’s mumbled excuses, and with an effort of will regained her composure. She was pouring tea when Mr Thornton seated himself beside her.

      “Martha lost her shoes again?” he asked with a soft chuckle.

      He was a big man, about fifty years of age. Clean-shaven, his features, burned almost brown, denoted the outdoor man and dweller under a sub-tropical sun. He had clear, deep-grey, observant eyes.

      “Wasn’t it Napoleon who, after restoring order in France, tried all he could to make her one of the Great Powers, if not the greatest?” she asked, with apparent irrelevance.

      “I believe it was,” agreed the squatter, accepting tea and cake.

      “Wasn’t it his ambition, when he had brought chaos to order, to maintain order by a European peace?”

      “Well, what of it?” counter-queried Mr Thornton, reminded of his wife’s hero-worship of the great soldier of France.

      “Only, that every time he enforced peace on the continent of Europe, to allow his governmental machine to run smoothly, it was constantly being put out of action by the grit of a fresh coalition