the guest and to indicate the other set table.
“Will you sit here, please?” she said, her voice low.
Bony bowed and sat down. He was offered the written menu and made his selection. He noted that the girl’s hands were roughened by work and her make-up badly applied. She did not wear her clothes with the distinction her brother did his.
He was still waiting for his dinner when she and Simpson left their table and passed him on their way to the front entrance. Simpson walked with the grace of a trained man, preceding the girl and forgetful of holding open the swing door for her. Bony was reminded of an aboriginal woman following her lord and master.
A frail, aged woman entered the dining-room from the back, carrying a tray. Her straggly hair was white, she was grey of face, and her brown eyes were distinctly wistful. As she placed the soup before Bony she said in thin tones:
“You mustn’t mind me waiting on you tonight. My daughter has gone to Dunkeld with her brother. She doesn’t often have an evening out.”
“Are you Mrs. Simpson?” Bony asked, rising.
“Yes,” she replied, her eyes widening as she gazed up at him. “Now sit down and eat your soup. I think you’ll like it. Do you like roast potatoes well done?”
He was drinking coffee when she said:
“I hope you won’t feel lonely tonight. I’m going to bed early. I haven’t been too well. Thank you for consenting to give my husband his tablet. He suffers dreadfully at times.”
Again on his feet, for, despite this woman’s work-a-day appearance and the fact that she was waiting upon him, there was that indefinable attribute in her personality which demanded respect. He said:
“You need have no concern for Mr. Simpson. I’ll look after him. He’s been telling me how you had to battle when first you settled here.”
A smile lit the faded brown eyes, and the worn features caught the smile. Then, abruptly, the smile vanished.
“It wouldn’t do to believe everything my husband says,” she said. “He’s very petulant. Those early years were hard, indeed. We both had to work and work. Then came the easier years, and I’m afraid my husband drank too much. Now he’s paying for his sins. We all have to do that, you know. Now please excuse me, I have to get the yardman his dinner.”
Bony sipped his coffee and smoked a cigarette. His mood was pensive. Man and woman had suffered hardships. They had worked and slaved and denied themselves to create a home in a wilderness. And Time had dogged them, worn away the youth and the strength, had given a little of joy and much of sorrow. These two, old Simpson and his wife! What had they achieved through hardship and toil and frugality? The one an emptiness—the other pain! They and their like had achieved a nation and saw not the splendour of it.
He sat on the veranda, watching the night steal across the clearing and listening to the birds going to roost. The son was reaping where the old folk had sown. How come that this small country hotel could afford smart clothes and an expensive car if the old people had not saved and scraped and denied themselves?
It was ten o’clock when he went to his room for the whisky. On his way out through the hall he picked up the glass of water and the tablet. The old man was awake, and he talked with him for ten minutes and managed to pass in through the bars a little comfort.
On the veranda the darkness was like scented velvet, and as he was about to pass under the bird-cage he directed his flashlight to it. The bird muttered, and he stooped and said softly:
“You and the old man are imprisoned for life, but he did have his fling.”
Chapter Four
The Man from Texas
The next morning Bony left the hotel as the sun was slipping above the summit of the rock-faced range. The sky was patterned by tiny puff clouds, and the wind played upon the strings of the scrub bordering the clearing. He crossed the little white bridge and strolled along the road to Lake George, and a white-haired terrier came racing after him. From beyond the hotel came the proud call of roosters, and within the bordering scrub bellbirds announced his passing.
Peace! Security! Tranquillity all-pervading! Certainly not an atmosphere of tragedy. Tragedy could, like an ogre, emerge from the creases of that face of granite and drop down silently upon those two girls, luring them off the road, luring them deep and deeper into the bush, herding them away from water and then snapping at their weary feet, to hunt them farther and farther from help, until help was no longer so frantically urgent.
They had come to this quiet and homely hotel, two girls in their early twenties. And then one morning, when the sun was not much higher than now, they had slipped their arms through the straps of their packs, had shaken hands with Simpson and his sister. Here, just beyond the bridge, they had turned and waved to the licensee and Ferris Simpson, who were standing on the veranda. Then they had walked round this bend, and lo! no longer were they within sight of those at the hotel. They had walked on, and then what? It was as though that mountain face, or another, had bent down and with its iron mouth had devoured them.
It was now March, and that had been in October. In early December had come a man who, throughout the first twenty years of his life, had lived among mountains higher and wilder even than these. He was a trained investigator, the product of a hard school, and he had had ideas of his own concerning the bush and its powers. Had he succeeded in lifting the coverlet lying so heavily upon the scene of that vanishment? Had he found a sign and, finding it, had the discovery brought steel-jacketed bullets to his body? Bolt smelled blood beneath the coverlet when none other did. To date, Bony could not smell blood, and in this he experienced slight disappointment.
He examined his impressions. First take that of James Simpson. Because he kept himself nattily dressed and wore expensive clothes when he visited the town, because he owned an expensive car and raced horses, one could not automatically suspect he had done away with two young women. The sister was quiet and minus her brother’s somewhat forceful character and certainly did not fit into a background of violence. As for her mother—as well to imagine the old lady capable of competing with Joe Louis. That Old Man Simpson was a wreck on the shore of life, that his mind was not so agile as once it had been, was all too evident.
These people could have no motive for murdering their guests and, therefore, none for murdering Detective Price. Price had paid his bill, stowed his baggage in his car, had got in behind the wheel and shut the door. Then for a little while Simpson had stood beside the car chatting with him, expressing the hope that he would come again, promising to send word if a clue was found concerning the fate of the two girls.
Price had taken the track from which the girls had vanished, this same track trodden by Bony. He had driven past the guest-house at Lake George. There the people had recognised his car as, on two previous occasions, he had run over to take lunch. On then for five miles to reach the Dunkeld-Hall’s Gap Road, and on over the slightly dangerous cross-over and down into the valley, at the lower end of which was the tourist resort. He was approximately twenty-two miles from the hotel when he was found dead in his car.
The evidence pointed to the assumption that he had been shot at the place he was found. On the door beside the wheel were Simpson’s finger-prints, left there when he chatted to Price. There were no other prints save those of the mechanic at Dunkeld, who had serviced the machine.
The picture of the hotel and its inhabitants was brilliantly clear. It bore, however, one small smudge placed upon it by old Simpson, a garrulous ancient, a trifle spiteful towards those who guarded him from the Thing which had wrecked his body and brought his mind to the very verge of collapse.
Was the smudge on the picture more significant than a fly-speck?
The old man had uttered words which could have meaning. He had said that he possessed a key to the spirit store, and he had invited Bony to raid the store with him, a proposal obviously the product of a weakened mind. Then he had said that if his will was discovered, the door of the spirit store would be left open for him, “so’s