No man ever has. But I know what you mean. Could you spare your men for the day?”
“Yes. I had work set for them, but it can wait.”
“Thank you. After breakfast, could we have them gathered somewhere that I may talk to them?”
“Of course. My office is large enough.”
“Kind of you. I will try not to inconvenience you more than necessary. This part of the Eyre Basin needs rain. When was the last rain?”
“Five months back. We want rain all right, but the ground feed is holding out. See anything of the floods up in Queensland?”
Bony could add nothing to Wootton’s knowledge received over the radio, excepting to add his opinion that the water might reach Lake Eyre via Coopers Creek and possibly down the Warburton River. The cattleman sensed the determined avoidance of the subject in both their minds, and escorted Bony to the guest room.
At breakfast Bony raised the subject of Yorky’s singular title.
“Oh, that!” Wootton said, chuckling. “It happened years ago, before my time, anyway. I think Yorky is known, by repute, all over the back country. He’s quite a character, or was before his mind must have become unhinged. No horseman, and useless as a stockman, but handy to have in dry times managing a pumping station, or riding a boundary fence.
“Like most of his type, he’d stick to a job for months, then suddenly leave with his cheque and make for a town. After drinking a cheque at Loaders Springs at the time I’m talking about, Yorky humped his swag out this way, intending to ask my predecessor for a job. The next thing was that the policeman at Loaders Springs—not Pierce, of course—rang through to say he’d received a report that Yorky was living with the blacks down on the creek, and would the owner of this place go along and bring him out. You know how it is, the law against a white man living in an aborigines’ camp.
“Anyway, the cattleman, name of Murphy, rode to the camp. There was no one about excepting Chief Canute and a few of the lubras, including Sarah, now cooking for us. Sarah being more civilized than the rest, he called her and she came out of her humpy. Murphy said: ‘They tell me you got a white man in camp, Sarah. Tell him to come out at once.’ Sarah denied she had a white man in the camp, but Murphy persisted, until Sarah said: ‘No white feller in my camp, Boss. Only my ole fren Yorky.’ It appeared that Yorky turned up suffering badly from the booze, and Sarah took him in and was nursing him with soups and things.”
“Hence the Ole Fren Yorky,” supplemented the amused Bony. “How old would he be, d’you think?”
“Difficult even to guess,” replied Wootton. “I’d say in his early sixties.”
“Did you employ him ever?”
“Oh yes. He left here with his last cheque three weeks before he shot Mrs Bell. He’d been on another bender then, you see, when I found him at the blacks’ camp. There were no aborigines there then. They were all away on walk-about.”
“Tell me about finding Yorky there.”
“Well, you see, it’s my custom to go to Loaders Springs every week, and always on a Thursday. On that particular Thursday, I left about half past nine, per car. Half a mile along the track there’s a gate, and just under another half mile there’s a creek. The creek’s always dry except after heavy rain, but between the road dip and the creek mouth with the Lake there’s almost a permanent waterhole. They tell me the blacks have made it their headquarters for generations. Murphy let them fence it in from the cattle, and I’ve never interfered with them or the water.
“Well, that morning when I got there, I saw Yorky squatting over a bit of fire and drinking tea from a jam tin. I wondered why he’d camped there, when he had only to tramp another three-quarters of a mile to get here, and stopped to speak to him. He said he was sick, and he certainly looked it. He’d hoped the blacks would be there so’s Sarah could look after him. And he pleaded for a drink—just a small reviver.
“I had a bottle of whisky in the car, and I gave him a hefty nobbier and told him to get along to the homestead and ask Mrs Bell to give him a feed. He said he would, and I drove on. A minute later, when I looked into the rear-vision mirror, I saw him on the track, swag up, even his rifle strapped to the swag.”
Bony pushed his empty plate a little from him, and drew closer the second cup of coffee.
“How did he appear to you ... mentally?”
“All right, I think,” replied Wootton. “Of course he was shaking a little, having been on the spirits for three solid weeks. The nobbier I gave him certainly bucked him up but no one will ever make me believe that drop of whisky drove him off his rocker enough to shoot Mrs Bell and clear out with the child. It’s something I don’t understand.”
“We shall,” Bony said, and rolled a cigarette.
Chapter Five
Digging
The four hands were invited into the office, Charlie and another aborigine being told they could take the day off. All four were familiar with the interior of this large room, and so noted that on the wall behind the desk had been tacked a large-scale map of Mount Eden.
Wootton occupied the chair behind the desk. Bony stood beside the desk, almost lazily smoking, while the four men sat and made themselves comfortable, at the invitation of their employer. Finally, obviously wondering what this was all about, they regarded Bony with deep interest.
“As you know, it is now several weeks since Mrs Bell was killed and her daughter abducted,” he began. “Five weeks ago a man and a small child vanished, and both man and child were known to you better by far than I am known to you.
“Since that tragic day, you and many others were engaged in an intensive search for Ole Fren Yorky. You know the details of that search, and the balance of human effort within the extent of the country about Lake Eyre. No doubt you have assessed the chances of locating two human beings on an area of country many people outside would think to be a limitless world, in which fifty, a hundred, men could easily be lost. Thus you will agree with me that, despite all the hunting, all the planning, the chances of Yorky getting away, or holing up somewhere, were good from the beginning. The hunters held four kings, but Yorky held four aces. Correct?”
“Could be, and could not be,” doubted Arnold Bray. “I don’t reckon Yorky planned it. He was too sozzled to plan much. I said, and I still think, that the blacks helped him.”
“Knowing that Yorky was fairly close to the aborigines,” Bony proceeded to argue, “knowing that all the aborigines were camped on the Neales River, the first thing Constable Pierce did was to send riders at top speed to cut off that line of retreat for Yorky. When the trucks for the trackers arrived at the Neales River, they made sure that every aborigine was there. As you say, Arnold Bray, Yorky never planned the murder. It was committed on impulse.”
“And then he was lucky enough to find he held four aces,” interrupted withered William Harte. “In the first place, Yorky knows this country better than any of us, and, better than us, he can think closer to the abos. Put yourself in his place. ... He done a murder before he even thought about it. He knows we’re all away, that no one ain’t likely to come around till middle afternoon. He’s shot Mrs Bell, and he can’t shoot the kid ’cos the reason he shot the woman ain’t strong enough for him to shoot the kid. So he’s got the kid on his hands ’cos the kid seen him doin’ the shootin’. He’s like a bloke having to walk with one boot on and the other off. So he looks over his cards, and decides he holds better cards than anyone else.”
Seated on the floor with his back to the wall, Harte paused to roll a cigarette, and Bony prompted him, the others apparently conceding his superior knowledge and experience.
“When he shot Mrs Bell,” resumed the ageless man, “Yorky knew the country was wide open to him. He knew just where all the abos were fifty miles something up north. He knows them abos pretty well, knows how their minds work, and the reason why