Man of Two Tribes. Arthur W. Upfield
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Bony novels by Arthur W. Upfield:
1 The Barrakee Mystery / The Lure of the Bush
2 The Sands of Windee
3 Wings Above the Diamantina
4 Mr Jelly’s Business/ Murder Down Under
5 Winds of Evil
6 The Bone is Pointed
7 The Mystery of Swordfish Reef
8 Bushranger of the Skies / No Footprints in the Bush
9 Death of a Swagman
10 The Devil’s Steps
11 An Author Bites the Dust
12 The Mountains Have a Secret
13 The Widows of Broome
14 The Bachelors of Broken Hill
15 The New Shoe
16 Venom House
17 Murder Must Wait
18 Death of a Lake
19 Cake in the Hat Box / Sinister Stones
20 The Battling Prophet
21 Man of Two Tribes
22 Bony Buys a Woman / The Bushman Who Came Back
23 Bony and the Mouse / Journey to the Hangman
24 Bony and the Black Virgin / The Torn Branch
25 Bony and the Kelly Gang / Valley of Smugglers
26 Bony and the White Savage
27 The Will of the Tribe
28 Madman’s Bend /The Body at Madman's Bend
29 The Lake Frome Monster
This corrected edition published in 2020 by ETT Imprint, Exile Bay
ETT IMPRINT & www.arthurupfield.com
PO Box R1906,
Royal Exchange
NSW 1225 Australia
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers
First published 1956
First electronic edition 2013
This edition published 2020
Copyright William Upfield 2013, 2020
ISBN 978-1-922384-23-2 (paper)
ISBN 978-1-922384-24-9 (ebook)
Digital distribution by Ebook Alchemy
Chapter One
Nullarbor ‘Friends’
Senior Constable Easter was roused by the alarm clock at three-forty-five a.m. He told his wife to sleep on, and passed to the kitchen where he fired the wood stove and filled the tin kettle, intending to boil water quickly.
He left the kitchen for the side veranda when the chill of the false dawn was dimming the stars, and there gazed eastward, seeking the first sign of the four-twenty express from Port Pirie. Beyond the house the world was without shape or substance.
Easter moved silently to the front veranda facing the railway buildings, the water tower, the oil containers for the new diesels, and the few cottages occupied by the permanent way men and staff. Other than all this, there was nothing of Chifley: no streets, no shops, no hotel. Save for one illumined window there was nothing of Chifley to be seen at four in the morning.
On a moonless night there is nothing to be seen of the Nullarbor Plain, or of the railway which crosses it for three hundred and thirty miles without an angle Euclid could detect, nothing of all those square miles of table-flat, treeless land beneath which the aborigines believe Ganba still lives and emerges at night to hunt for a blackfellow rash enough to leave his own camp fire to lure a wench from her lawful owner. Now were hidden all the caves, the caverns and blow-holes, and the miles on miles of foot-high saltbush searched by Senior Constable Easter and assistants for Myra Thomas, who disappeared from the four-twenty, five weeks and three days prior to this October morning.
Myra Thomas appeared to have walked off the train at one of the stopping places along the Transcontinental Railway, or had fallen from the train between stops, and in either case, old Ganba had gobbled her up for being out at night to snare another woman’s lawful brute. Damn her, anyway!
Easter returned to his kitchen, brewed tea and set cups on the table without making one sound to disturb his wife. His face and neck and hands were the colour of weathered copper, his light-grey eyes a striking contrast. The sun and wind had bleached his hair and wrinkled his skin, making him look forty when he wasn’t yet thirty. Such was his size and build that only a drunk would dare to start an argument.
His second cup of tea he took to the east veranda, and now light, neither false nor of the true dawn, arched above the edge of the world until it became a long blaze of white magnificence. The express was travelling this section at eighty miles an hour; and still fifteen minutes before it arrived at Chifley.
Well, he had done his utmost to find that blasted woman. Sixteen, eighteen hours a day had he toiled across the endless Plain, organised his trackers, who could find the imprints of a jerboa, but not the trace of a woman’s foot, shod or naked. Week after week the search had proceeded without let-up, and never a scarf or a slipper had they found, let alone a body.
Yes, he had done his damnedest, and so had his trackers. His divisional inspector knew it, and had agreed that the fool woman must have disappeared intentionally.
Then why bother? Why search all over again, as though the woman was the wife of a Railways Commissioner, instead of being a murdering bitch who should have hanged by the neck to stop her ever seeing the Nullarbor Plain? Well, he had better shine himself up to meet this top-notcher from the Eastern States who was coming to teach him, Senior Constable Easter, how to follow his forelock.
Shaved, and wearing drill tunic and slacks, Easter poured tea for his wife and swore at the train driver for hooting more than once at the long distance. His wife sat up, smiled her good morning, and asked him had he added coffee to the pot.
“Yes. What a slave I am! I put the grilling chops in the safe. Better go now to meet this bird.”
“Sweet, you are. I’ll get up now. Don’t worry. We’ve had inspectors here before—hundreds of them.”
Lightly kissing her hair, he moved to the door, looked back at her, and grinned because he didn’t feel like smiling this morning.
She heard him pass along the short passage to the front door and down the veranda steps. The train was rumbling into what was called the station, there being no platform, when she slipped into a gown, added fuel to the fire and proceeded to dress. ‘Just too bad,’ was the thought in her mind. After all that work, all the upset routine. Now it would seem that bigger and better brains were to take over.
What did they think her husband was? A new chum? Hadn’t he been born and reared at a homestead down on the south-west corner of the Plain? Hadn’t he been stationed here for six years, and wouldn’t take promotion because he loved every blessed mile of it? And why all the bother about such a woman?
It was all there in Elaine Easter’s mind as she watched the coffee bubbling and heard the chops sizzling.
Toward the end of the previous August, Myra Thomas had faced the charge of murder. The trial was staged in Adelaide, and in South Australia justice is rarely influenced