The Will of the Tribe. Arthur W. Upfield

there one day when Captain came and saw her. And he laughed and teased her, and she wouldn’t go in again ever. Can you swim?”

      “When I fall in. Your father and mother don’t mind people swimming in the dam?”

      “Oh, no. There’s plenty of rain water for the house in the tanks,” replied Rosie, and Hilda further explained, “It comes down off the roof when it rains.”

      “I see. D’you play much with the little boys and girls from the camp?”

      “Sometimes we do, Bony,” Hilda said. “That’s when we all go for a walk with Captain. He takes us out on the desert and we all pretend we’re tracking a Musgrave black. Alfie or someone is the Musgrave, and we track him, and he tries to throw us off by wiping out his tracks, and Captain shows us how to find them again.”

      “You like Captain, I can see.”

      “Captain’s the most wonderful man in all the world excepting Daddy,” declared Hilda, and her sister took her up on this point.

      “He’s not. Old Ted is.”

      “He is not,” vowed Hilda. “Captain beat him in the fight. We saw it.”

      Rosie slipped off the log to confront her sister and scold, “That’s a secret. We promised Tessa never to tell. You know we did.”

      Little Hilda bit her nether lip and looked like crying, and Bony said that perhaps Tessa meant not to say anything of it to anyone at the homestead. As he wasn’t anyone at the homestead, it wouldn’t matter about the secret. This dried the tears before they fell, and he asked if they had any pets to show him.

      Each took a hand, and they showed him Mrs Bluey and her small puppies. From these they escorted him to a large aviary, containing some hundred lovebirds, and then to call on Bob Menzies in his own yard, Mister Lamb following faithfully and, now and then, trying to jog Bony’s memory by nudging a leg.

      “We saw you give Mister Lamb a cigarette,” he was accused by Hilda.

      “Did you now. He seems to like a cigarette.”

      “He likes cake-tobacco, too,” supplemented Rosie. “He steals it off Jim if he can get into the kitchen without being seen. Steals the potatoes, too.”

      “And what does Jim say to that?” inquired the enchanted Bony.

      “He rushes Mister Lamb outside and tells him he’s going to shoot him. Course he won’t, you know. Would you like to ask Jim if he’s baked raspberry tarts this morning?”

      “Ooo! D’you think he would give us some? Let’s try.”

      Approaching the kitchen they could see that the door was open, and Jim Scolloti working within. The little girls hung back with seeming bashfulness, and Bony advanced to plead with the cook. He was about six feet from the door when he was struck from behind with tremendous force. The ramming lifted him off his feet and, without contacting the door frame, he was thrown into the kitchen where he landed on all fours at the cook’s feet.

      “That ain’t no way to come into a man’s kitchen,” complained Jim Scolloti, walking round Detective Inspector Bonaparte as though interested in a pet crocodile. “Suppose it was that flamin’ sheep what sort of shoved you. He’s liable.”

      Dignity slightly ruffled, Bony stood and turned to look out of the doorway. There was Mister Lamb eyeing him with satanic triumph and, beyond him, were the two small girls gazing solemnly, as though anxious to know the cook’s verdict about the raspberry tarts. Beginning to feel sore, Bony’s sense of humour yet rescued him.

      “The flaming sheep is decidedly liable,” he agreed. “I’ve never been tossed by a bull, but the sensation must be something like. What I actually came for was to suggest that, if you had baked raspberry tarts this morning, you might be generous.”

      Scolloti’s lively dark eyes appeared to flicker, and he pulled at his grey beard thoughtfully. On a bench behind him were several large dishes of various confectionery and, to test a theory, Bony asked if this was his pastry-baking morning.

      “Yes, Inspector, so it is,” replied Scolloti. “Those imps know it, too. What you came for was to be pocketed. I got pocketed once. Mister Lamb’s the greatest snooker play in Orstralia.

      “I’m beginning to feel I was pocketed by the greatest snooker player in Australia,” Bony averred, and sat on a case beside the main table. The cook occupied a chair. His eyes flickered from the doorway back to Bony.