“Last Friday week,” the squatter answered. “But Clair said he was away setting dog-traps.”
“He may, and he may not, have been.”
“Anyway, Trooper Dowling has gone to find out.”
“I’m betting that Clair will show him the traps all right. The moving finger points to Clair, and then to Dugdale, and then back again to Clair.”
“I cannot agree with you about Dugdale,” was Thornton’s emphatic response. “I’ve known Dug intimately for ten years. What he says he heard I’m sure he did hear. And, as he said he saw no one, I’m sure, too, that he saw no one.”
“Maybe,” Knowles conceded. “I am not quite so positive that he lied when he denied seeing anyone in the lightning. Still, when I pressed him on that point, he flushed under his skin. If he’s a liar, he’s a darned good liar.”
“Knowing him as I do, I can guarantee that he’s not a liar. I’ve never yet found him out in a lie.”
“Well, I don’t know.” The sergeant sighed. “Straight-out murder I don’t mind, when I know the killer. But these Mysteries of the Rue Morgue are beyond me. Anyway, Dowling and I will get on back. I must send in my report, and then try and work out the puzzle. We might be able to learn something of Clair from the Winton police. Time, too, is always on our side. I’ll keep in touch with you, night and morning, by phone. Oh, here’s Dowling waiting for us.”
The trooper was standing at the edge of the water at the mooring-place.
“Were the traps there, Dowling?”
“Yes, Sergeant. Clair set them some three miles down the river in a bend.”
“Humph!” The senior man got out of the boat and climbed up the steep bank, followed by the others. “We’ll examine the scenery,” he said. “Take a line from this tree to the garden gate. You quarter the right side and I’ll do the left.”
The squatter, taking yet another cigarette from his case, watched the two uniformed men examining the soft dark-grey soil from the high bank or natural ramp dividing the billabong from the river. He experienced not a little irritability at the whole wretched affair. That such a to-do should be made over the killing of an ordinary abo was ridiculous. He heard the sergeant say:
“Don’t expect to discover anything. If the murderer remembers dropping anything, he had plenty of time to recover it before we arrived this morning. See any fresh tracks your side?”
“Several,” Dowling answered. “But all making from the boats to the homestead via the tennis-court. Hallo! Here are small shoe-prints going to the garden gate.”
“They’ll have been made by Nellie Wanting, the black girl who’s working at the homestead this afternoon,” stated the sergeant.
Thornton was absent-mindedly examining, on the trunk of the gum near which he stood, a deep incision some nine to ten inches in length. The tree-wound was fresh and still bleeding sap. He noticed two raised bumps in the centre of the gash, at equal distance from the ends. He took no further notice of it. He did not even mention it to the two policemen.
Had he known, this was the one and only clue to the murderer of King Henry.
Chapter Eight
A Round of Inspection
The police returned to Wilcannia without having secured a clue to the murder of King Henry. By the sergeant’s orders the body was interred in the tiny cemetery near the homestead, which already contained five graves.
There was one point that occurred to Sergeant Knowles two days later, and, ringing up the station, he said to the squatter:
“That girl, Nellie Wanting—does she live in the blacks’ camp?”
“Yes.”
“Then how did she cross the river the afternoon she met us on her way to the homestead? I noticed no boat at the camp.”
“I’m afraid I have no information on that point,” the station-owner replied. “I’ll see her and find out. You’ll agree that she didn’t swim the river like her alleged father.”
“No. She didn’t swim.”
The explanation, when forthcoming, was simple enough. As has been said, the level of the river was very low, and at a point about half a mile above the blacks’ camp an outcrop of rock formed the bed of the river at the lower rim of a deep hole. Most of the rocks were now uncovered and provided easy and safe stepping stones.
Although Thornton was in daily communication with the police-sergeant at Wilcannia, nothing occurred to help forward a solution of the mystery. The week’s work went on, that of Barrakee with its usual orderliness and regularity. The squatter prayed for rain.
Blair, with McIntosh for his offsider, was sent out to the back of the run with the bullock team to clean out a dry surface tank with a scoop. Clair went about his odd jobs, gaunt and taciturn. The only person for whom the murder still had a painful interest was Frank Dugdale.
At the time he denied having seen anyone revealed by the lightning, he could almost have sworn that the white-clad figure hurrying through the garden was Kate Flinders. This was his reason for suppressing that fact.
Whilst scouting the possibility of Kate having killed the black fellow, he could not but conclude that she was implicated. The why and the wherefore of this worried him to distraction.
And then one evening he saw Alice, the maid, and Mabel, the laundress, leave the house to stroll up the river, and experienced an unaccountable sense of relief when he noted that both girls were dressed in white. Upon that came instant recollection of having seen the young lubra, Nellie Wanting, dressed all in white, on more than one occasion. Mrs Thornton, too, generally wore a white costume. So that, instead of the hurrying figure at the garden gate being definitely Kate Flinders, it might, with equal plausibility or otherwise, have been that of one of four other women.
On realizing this, Dugdale felt immeasurable relief. His conviction that he had seen Kate Flinders in the lightning flash was now replaced by the conviction that he had not. And so indifferent did he become, as did Thornton and the other men, that this murder of a mere semi-civilized aboriginal was very quickly relegated to the sphere of forgotten crimes. Had King Henry been a white man, this indifference would have been impossible.
One morning in early April, when the sun was rapidly losing its summer intensity, Thornton ordered Dugdale to get out the big car for a run to Thurlow Lake.
The squatter never had taken to car-driving and usually delegated the job to the sub-overseer. Dugdale had the car outside the double garden-gates that morning about ten o’clock, when Ralph appeared carrying the last of three hampers and a moment later was followed by the squatter and Kate. Dugdale’s heart missed a beat, and he could have groaned and shouted at one and the same moment in anticipation of the bitter sweetness of being in her society most of that day.
Thornton and his niece occupied the rear seat and Ralph sat beside the driver. After an assurance from the book-keeper that the out-back mail was all in the bag in the boot, they glided away over the grey river flats.
Once out of the home paddocks and off the flats, they had a straight run of twelve miles over a good hard track, across a blue-bush plain. It was the finest piece of road on the run, and the great car leapt into its stride like an unleashed kangaroo-dog. On the elderly man the speed made no emotional impression but the girl it almost thrilled.
Looking between the two in front, she watched the speedometer register forty, forty-five, fifty five, sixty-two miles an hour. From the indicator her eyes went to the small powerful hands caressing the wheel, iron hands that could handle equally well a spirited