“Don’t you hurry, Mr Bony. The inspector isn’t so sharp as Eric makes out. You see, my other boarders all work about the town and never come to breakfast till a quarter to eight. This place is easier when Joe’s at home, what with the woodcutting and the cows, an’ that Mrs Black who always tries to milk them first. And I’ve been busy lately. I’ve had two policemen staying here ever since poor Mr Loftus disappeared. They are gone now, back to Perth.”
“Oh!”
“It’s funny, that affair,” she went on. “I’m sure he’s been murdered. Eric was camped half a mile from his house that night. Although it was raining, it was quiet, and he could hear the dogs howling about two in the morning. When my sister had her husband killed on the railway, down near Northam, her dog howled awful for more than an hour. Dogs know when their friends die—don’t you think so?”
Fifteen minutes after Bony left Mrs Poole’s boarding-house he was watching the changing expressions on the face of the Rabbit Fence Inspector while that official read the letter written by the chief of his department and delivered by the detective.
“You are a member of the Queensland police Force?”
Bony inclined his head.
“I am instructed to assist you in every way. What can I do?”
“Permit me to explain. I am a detective-inspector, at present on leave. My friend, Detective-Sergeant Muir, has been obliged to go into another matter, and, as the disappearance of George Loftus interests me, I have decided, with the sanction of the Western Australian Police Commissioner, to look into it. Outside police circles, your chief and yourself are the only people in this State who know I am a police officer. I rely upon you to keep my secret. People talk and act naturally before Bony, but are as close as oysters in the presence of Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. I want you to give me employment on the rabbit fence, preferably near where Loftus’s wrecked car was discovered. I would like you to take me to see that car this morning.”
“All right. We’ll go now.”
Seated in the department’s truck beside the Fence Inspector, Bony said:
“Please proceed direct along the route taken by Loftus the night he disappeared.”
Bony was driven round the hotel into the main street, then eastward past the shops and the boarding-house and the bank, on past the garage at the extremity of the town.
“Loftus should have taken this right-hand road, but despite Wallace’s objection kept straight on,” explained his companion, whose name was Gray.
“Ah! Has that garage been long vacant?”
“Yes, about a year. The garage on the other side of the railway does all the business now.”
Once past the garage and the wide, good road running up a long, low hill south, they abruptly left the town, the road becoming narrow when it began to wind through whipstick mallee and gimlet trees. Now and then to his left Bony could see the rampart of mullock excavated from the great pipeline trench, with the railway beyond it.
“By the way,” he said, smiling, “I understand that Mrs Poole’s husband is a Water Rat. Precisely in what manner is such an epithet applicable to a woman’s husband?”
Inspector Gray chuckled.
“The men employed along the pipeline are called Water Rats because often they have to work deep in water when a pipe bursts.”
“Thank you. And what are the Snake Charmers?”
“They are the permanent-way men. Now that you are a Rabbit Department employee you are a Rabbitoh.”
It became Bony’s turn to chuckle.
“What are the road repairers called?”
“Well, not being a blasphemous man, I am unable to tell you.”
“Then I must invent names for them myself. Did you know George Loftus well?”
“Moderately well. He was never a friend of mine, although he has been here five years.”
“Tell me all you know about him, please. What he looked like, everything.”
The Fence Inspector hesitated, and Bony saw that he was weighing carefully the words he would use to a police officer when there would have been no hesitation had Bony been an ordinary acquaintance. Why men and women should be so reserved in the presence of members of the police, who were their paid and organized protectors, was a point in human psychology which baffled him. At last Gray said:
“I suppose Loftus would be about twelve stone in weight, and of medium height. He was a rather popular kind of man, a good cricketer for all his forty-one years, would always oblige with a song, and was a keen member of the local lodge. For the first three years he worked hard on his farm, but he slacked a bit this last year. He left most of the farm work to his man.”
“Did he drink much?”
“A little too much.”
“His wife on the farm, still?”
“Yes. She is a good-looking woman, and, I think, a good wife.”
“Any children?”
“No.”
“The farm hand? What kind of a man is he?”
“He’d be about thirty. A good man, too. Loftus was lucky in getting him. Mick Landon his name is. Born in Australia. Fairly well educated. Is the secretary of several local committees and is the M.C. at all our dances.”
“Do you know, or have you heard, what Mrs Loftus intends doing if her husband cannot be found?”
“Well, my wife was talking to her the other day, and Mrs Loftus told her she didn’t believe her husband dead and that she was going to run the farm with Landon’s help until he came back.”
“I suppose his strange disappearance has upset her?”
“Yes, but there is more anger than sorrow, I think. Of course, he might come back at any time. There’s old Jelly, now. He disappears three or four times every year, sometimes oftener, and no one knows where he goes or what he does.”
“Indeed! You interest me. A woman, perhaps?”
“Knowing Bob Jelly, I can think so. Here we are at the fence.”
Chapter Three
The Wheat Belt
A wide tubular and netted gate in a netted fence four feet nine inches high, and topped with barbed wire, halted further progress. Climbing from the truck. Bony made a swift survey of the surrounding country.
The fence ran north and south in a straight line, to the summit of a northern rise and to the belt of big timber to the south. Elaborate precautions had been taken in its construction to keep it rabbit-proof where it crossed the pipeline, whilst the single-track railway line passed over a sunken pit. The fence gate had been repaired, but the wrecked car was still lying partly down on the massive pipeline. The half-caste paced the distance between fence gate and car and found it to be little more than fourteen yards.
About five hundred yards beyond the fence was a house belonging, he was informed, to the Rabbit Department farm, and then occupied by the farm foreman. Also beyond the fence, and on the farther side of the railway, was a farmhouse occupied by a farmer named Judd.
Gray was disappointed when Bony failed to run about like a hunting dog, as all good detectives are supposed to do. For a detective he seemed too casual, and his blue eyes too dreamy. Yet Bony saw all that he wanted to see, which was that the backing of the car from gate to pipeline was done quite naturally, with no tree stumps to make the act a matter