Bony Buys a Woman. Arthur W. Upfield

with him. If they wants to, that is. He knows that if he kills the kid they’ll want to; if he don’t, they won’t. That was his cards.”

      “The aborigines thought much of Linda?” pressed Bony.

      “They surely did. Like everyone else. One time we was playin’ poker over in the quarters, and I drew a Queen of Hearts and snaffled the jackpot, and I said without thinking: ‘That’s my Linda for you, fellers. The Queen of Hearts.’ And that’s what she was around these parts.”

      “The aborigines, however, did try to track Yorky,” Wootton reminded him, and Bony was delighted at the course his conference was taking.

      “Too right,” agreed Harte, who then had to go to the doorway for another spit. “What happened? They’re up on the Neales, half-starved, livin’ on goannas and flies. They get brought back, and they’re given lashings of beef and flour and tobacco to start ’em off right. Instead of huntin’ a perenti or another feller’s gin, they’re set to huntin’ Yorky.

      “But do they hunt for Yorky? I got me doubts, and I got ’em because they knew he got aces. ‘Good ole Yorky,’ they’d say. ‘We’ll look around, sort of, and feed up on the boss’s beef, an’ smoke the boss’s baccy.’ But they didn’t just look around, as you said, Mr Wootton. They set to work all right, but not because they hate Yorky for killing Mrs Bell. They set to work like bloodhounds to make sure Yorky hadn’t killed Linda and planted her body somewhere, and when they reasoned that Yorky hadn’t been that ruddy stupid, that he’d got clear away with the kid, they sort of got tired and gradually eased up till they quit. That’s why I say Ole Fren Yorky knew when he collared Linda that he held all the aces.”

      “And he will continue to hold them while he keeps Linda Bell alive?” encouraged Bony.

      “That’s so. While he’s got Linda with him, it’s Yorky’s game.”

      “And you still don’t think that the blacks know where he is?” drawled lanky Eric Maundy.

      “No, I don’t think they do, Eric. To find that out would mean work, and they’d be satisfied to know that little Linda was safe enough. They’d say Yorky and the kid was around somewhere, that Yorky would come out of smoke when it suited him, and meanwhile Charlie will be chasing Meena, and Canute will scratch his neck ’cos he’s too old to take her even though she was promised to him when she was born. You gotta know them abos, Eric”

      “Reckon you know ’em?” jibed the young man named Harry Lawton.

      “If you think you know ’em better, put up a better yarn,” advised Arnold with asperity.

      “If we accept your idea,” Bony contributed, “where is Yorky obtaining food for himself and the child?”

      “At his camps,” replied Harte. “Perhaps you don’t know that when Yorky left here for a bender, he had a job riding the boundary fence.”

      “That’s so,” added Wootton. “The boundary fence is some hundred and fifty miles round the station, bar where it cuts into the Lake. Yorky rode it with camels. He had a camp every twenty miles, with water at every second camp.”

      “And them camps were stocked with tucker,” inserted Harte. “You know, flour and tea and sugar kept in tins and tinned dog and fish if he was stuck. I asked him once about the abos getting down on his tucker and tobacco, and he laughed and said they wouldn’t steal from him.”

      Bony studied the wall map of Mount Eden Station. To Wootton he said:

      “Mark the camps, please, and mark additionally those camps where the water is.” To Harte he said: “What’s outside the boundary fence?”

      “Nothing. Open country, excepting down south and southeast.”

      “Wild aborigines?”

      Harte shook his head, saying:

      “Not till you get up about the Simpson Desert, and they ain’t as wild as they used to be.”

      “The country ... dry all the way up north and west?”

      “Same as around here. Haven’t had no rain for months, and that fell at the wrong time. Still, there’s water if you know where to find it. Water holes up on the Neales. Water under the Lake mud, if you can stomach it.”

      “H’m! We seem to be going somewhere.” Bony looked at each in turn. “I want you to mark on this map where each of you went that day Mrs Bell was shot, and note also the time when you were farthest from the homestead. That is, as close as possible. A blue pencil, Mr Wootton, please.”

      They did as requested. Then Bony said:

      “I understand that you four men have been in this part of Australia for many years, much longer than Mr Wootton. You have been most co-operative, and I ask you to continue so. It is good to know that you believe Linda is still alive, and that rescuing her must take priority. I would not have expected such full co-operation, were it not for the possibility of recovering the child.

      “You will see clearly that the actual rescue could well be attended by grave danger to her from the man who abducted her. To save himself he might kill her. It is of vital importance to know exactly the kind of man he is, or was, before he shot Mrs Bell. First, let us try to understand why he shot Mrs Bell. Had he ever expressed dislike of her?”

      “Not that I ever heard,” replied Arnold. “He was one of them inoffensive poor bastards. Never hardly spoke unless spoken to. You had to get him alone, and sort of talk soft to him, before he’d open up. He’d talk fast enough to Linda, and the black kids.”

      “When drunk or recovering from a bout, did he think of women, talk about them?”

      “No.”

      “Did Mrs Bell ever express dislike of him, ever strongly criticise him?”

      “Just the opposite. Mrs Bell sort of liked him, I think. Patched his shirts more than once.”

      “After he’d washed ’em,” chuckled young Harry Lawton. “She’d do that for any of us.”

      “You’re too flash to have old shirts to be patched,” drawled Eric.

      “She never objected to Linda talking to Yorky?”

      “Don’t think. Had no reason to. He was harmless enough.”

      “Yorky must have gone wonky to have shot her,” insisted Eric.

      “All right! Then let us get down to his association with the aborigines,” pressed Bony. “You have said he was close to them. In what way? Did he live secretly with a lubra?”

      Harry Lawton broke into laughter, and was silenced by the glare in Arnold’s grey eyes. It was Harte who replied.

      “Look, Inspector. Yorky was older than me. Not much, but still he was so. I remember Yorky coming into this country about thirty-five years back. Not much to look at but real rough: always small and a bit wispy, if you know what I mean. And I can’t say he’d had much education, less, sort of, than Meena and Charlie and the other abos who went down to Mission School for a spell.

      “Yorky could read the papers, follow the races and all that. But he got to know more about the ants and things than ever I wanted to, and he got to know the ways of camels when he was frightened of horses. I don’t think he was more taken up with women than most of us. Camped for a night or two with one down at Loaders Springs. You know the sort. Some say that there was times when he camped with Sarah, and I have heard that there was times when he had a young lubra with him on the boundary fence. A long time ago, though.”

      Harte went again to the door to spit.

      “But this is what I am trying to get out. Yorky was more interested in watching ants and birds than he was in talking about cattle and horses like the rest of us. He’d get the black kids to take him out and show him things. All the kids took to him, and they run like hell from me. Gradually he got in with the blacks. And I’m