“Why, an Inspector of—” began Old Lacy, when Bony cut in.
“Of nothing, Miss Lacy,” he said, bowing. “I am made happy by meeting you. I am supposed to be a policeman, but really I’m not, as Colonel Spendor would be ever ready to agree. My name is Napoleon Bonaparte, and I am an officer of the Criminal Investigation Branch.”
Diana Lacy was petite and dark. She stood now regarding the dark handsome face of this stranger with whom her father had become quickly familiar, in itself a remarkable thing. The light switch tapped softly the leg of her jodhpurs, and her blue eyes were wide open despite the glare of the sunlight.
Bony was swift to see the forceful personality behind the eyes of this Karwir woman who was still a girl. She was more like Old Lacy than was Eric her brother. Now debonair, his manner a trifle too polite, he was yet quick to see the flash of alarm in her eyes before it was replaced with an expression of faintly amused interest. She looked as though she had stepped from the pages of a society paper.
“Inspector Bonaparte has come to solve for us the mystery of Jeff’s disappearance,” boomed Old Lacy. If the girl heard this she gave no indication of it. Her mind was working fast—and Bony knew it. She had perfect control over her features, but she had not thought of her hands—until she saw Bony glance at them. Then she knew that her hands were slowly clenching and unclenching, and casually she thrust them into the pockets of the jodhpurs.
“It has been a great day for a gallop, Miss Lacy,” Bony remarked pleasantly. “And fine country to gallop over, too. I shall enjoy taking The Black Emperor out to-morrow.”
“You should, Inspector,” agreed Old Lacy.
The tension had ended and the girl turned to gaze between the yard rails at The Black Emperor.
“You will want to be careful, Inspector Bonaparte,” she said without looking at him or her father. “Mr Anderson often said he had never ridden a horse having an easier action.” She turned towards them, glanced at the sun, and suggested crossing to the house for afternoon tea.
“How did you come?” she inquired of Bony.
“Your brother brought me from Opal Town in his aeroplane.”
To her father Diana said:
“Has anything been done for Mr Bonaparte’s accommodation?”
“Yes. The lad got Mabel to fix a room. We’ve already had a drink of tea, but another won’t come amiss.”
“I promise not to make more trouble than I can help, Miss Lacy,” Bony said when they were crossing to the garden gate. He was wondering a little at her coldness, and thought he could guess the reason of her unease immediately after he was presented to her. “Unfortunately for Karwir, I may be here some time. You see, beginning an investigation so long after the paramount events means great difficulties to be overcome.”
If he successfully impressed her she did not let him know. She appeared to take him as she doubtless would take a fence—for granted. After a little silence she spoke, and now he decided that she was going to be one of the difficulties he mentioned.
“Your stay here will not put us out, Mr Bonaparte,” she said, with disapproval but thinly veiled. “We can, of course, understand your difficulties, but you have come rather too late to do any good, don’t you think?”
“Forgive me for disagreeing, Miss Lacy,” Bony assured her with undaunted cheerfulness. “You know, if I failed to solve this mystery I should be truly astonished.”
They were now arrived at the gate which Bony held open for Old Lacy, who was chuckling, to pass first into the garden. He smiled at her whilst she stood waiting for her father, noted her trim small figure, her haughty face, the cold blue eyes with their violet irises. Then she was passing him, to flash at him a sidewise glance and to say softly, as though for his sole benefit:
“It’s quite likely that you will be astonished.”
Chapter Six
Beside a Little Fire
It had not rained over Meena since that night of Mary Gordon’s suspense, and the pastoral prospects were very dark for vast areas of inland Australia. Hope, engendered by the April rain, slowly evaporated as the spring sunshine evaporated the moisture that had given a short impetus to plant life.
Riding northward in the late afternoon of the day that Napoleon Bonaparte arrived at Karwir, John Gordon was feeling depressed, a condition of mind caused not by the imminence of a worrying summer so much as by the seemingly inevitable see-saw of life. At the beginning of the winter Meena Station had stood financially upon a sound foundation, but now at the beginning of the summer the foundation would have to be strengthened by the materials of economy and greater care for the stock.
There was still an abundance of feed in the paddocks, but there was little prospect of this being replenished before the hot winds of summer wiped it off the face of the burning earth. Fortunately, thanks to the forethought of the second John Gordon who had put down many bores and wells, there was no water shortage on Meena even when the lake occasionally became dry.
John Gordon the Third had spent all day in the Meena South Paddock, riding over the plain-stubble of ripened tussock grass, through the mulga-belts, and across the wide, barren depressions named the Channels. Often he had ridden by small communities of rabbits, isolated and with no young ones to prove that this was a normal summer.
He approached Meena Lake from the south-west, his horse carrying him over a grassy plain and up an imperceptible gradient. The top of the gradient was reached without warning, and quite abruptly John Gordon came to look down and over the great bed of the lake. Save at three points, the lake was surrounded by sand-dunes backed by box-trees. One point was where the Meena Creek fed the lake with water from the distant hills to the north-west; another was the high plateau to the east whereon stood the red-roofed and white-walled buildings comprising the homestead; the third was the outlet creek which carried the overflow for two miles to spread it into the various channels.
Although the water was gone, the blue jewel itself, the brilliant setting still remained. Outward from the lake’s bed, roughly circular and some two miles across, lay a wide ribbon of pure white claypan, edged by the reddish sand-dunes that in turn were bordered by the green of the trees. Ah, what a place when the jewel itself was there!
And now when Gordon rode down the slope to the trees he came upon not isolated rabbit communities but the camp of a mighty host that entirely encircled the lake that was swiftly devastating the land that had given it birth.
Evening was come and life that drowsed all the warm day was bestirring itself to fill a gigantic stomach. Along the ground slope outside the tree-belt rabbits sat cleaning themselves like cats, or gambolled about like kittens, before the entrances to countless burrows. Within the tree-belt itself untold numbers were eating the windfalls of the day—the leaves—and were nibbling at the bark of the surface roots. Gordon saw several of them high in the trees beneath which he passed; they had climbed a sloping trunk to get at the tender bark of young branches.
Eagles, the great golden kings and the wedge-tails, planed low over the land or sailed with never a wing-flap high against the burnished sky. The crows were following the eagles, or cawing among the trees, or strutting over the earth like moving blots of ink. It was too early for the foxes, but they were there waiting to take their nightly toll of the rodents.
The horse, now eager to be home, carried Gordon through the tree-belt and across the sand-dunes that now were wearing a garment of fur. Then onward down to the claypan belt where the going was easy. Here the man pressed his right knee hard against the horse’s side and the intelligent beast turned sharply to follow the white ribbon that would take them round to the homestead.
Still a little of the herbal rubbish remained in the very centre of the lake, and the vanguard of the rabbit army was already on the move to feed upon it. Both before and behind