The Bachelors of Broken Hill. 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 edition published by ETT Imprint, Exile Bay in 2020.
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.
ETT IMPRINT & www.arthurupfield.com
PO Box R1906,
Royal Exchange
NSW 1225 Australia
First published 1958.
First electronic edition published by ETT Imprint in 2013.
First corrected edition published by ETT Imprint in 2018.
Reprinted 2019.
Copyright William Upfield 2013, 2020
ISBN 978-1-925706-67-3 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-922384-58-4 (ebk)
Digital distribution by Ebook Alchemy
Chapter One
The Place of Youth
Long, long ago the aborigines came and called it Wilya-Wilya-Yong. It was a dark, barren hill formed like a scimitar, its back broken, its slopes serrated and pitted and scarred, naked, sunburned, and wind-seared. One day a white man talked with a black man and learned that Wilya-Wilya-Yong meant the Place of Youth.
White men brought their sheep and a poor German named Charles Rasp was employed to herd them. Rasp gazed at the Place of Youth, climbed the slopes, and found what he found. He knew nothing of precious metals, and so travelled to the nearest city and purchased a copy of The Prospector’s Guide. On his return he broke off a piece of the Place of Youth—it didn’t matter where—and experts declared it to be loaded with silver-lead.
The fame of it sped across the surrounding sea-flat plains to the distant coasts of new-found Australia, and men came on horseback and on foot, in wagons and Buffalo Bill coaches, and they sank holes and rigged machinery. Others came and built a mining camp about the Place of Youth, which they called the Broken Hill. The camp became a shanty town named Broken Hill. Paupers became rich overnight, and rich men became paupers in a matter of minutes. Champagne was a flood; water but a trickle.
Rasp and his partners faded out. Men were buried hastily in shallow graves: those who were lucky. Yet more men came to Broken Hill, lingered, departed—generations of them—and the shanty town became the third city in the state of New South Wales. Famous men came—engineers, scientists, industrialists; and eventually, in their turn, there came Jimmy the Screwsman and Napoleon Bonaparte, DI, CIB Queensland.
Broken Hill wasn’t Jimmy’s objective when he left Sydney on completion of a burglary, the planning of which had called for mental concentration over a period of three weeks, and Jimmy had looked forward with keen expectancy to a long holiday. He had arranged with a transport driver engaged in black-marketing to convey him to Melbourne—trains and aircraft being out owing to expected rigid police inspection at the state border. Then when the transport was nearing Albury and the driver stopped to converse with another of his gang bound in the opposite direction, he learned that, because of the escape of the Great Scarsby, all road transport between the capitals was being checked.
On the outskirts of Albury three utilities had met the transport, and into them went part of the cargo. With it went Jimmy the Screwsman, who eventually found himself at the inland town of Balranald.
In Balranald a newspaper informed Jimmy that the Great Scarsby was still at large, and police of three states were looking for him. He had been incarcerated during the Governor’s pleasure in a criminal lunatic asylum, following trial for abduction in 1940, and as he had been a world-famed magician, hope of recapturing him was not high—in the view of the newspaper. Melbourne was now ‘hot’, even for Jimmy the Screwsman, and Jimmy decided to go west and take his vacation with a married sister in distant and far-away Broken Hill.
He arrived at Broken Hill on 2nd October, entering the city on the mail car from Wilcannia, and there, sick of big cities and tired by his mental activities, he proceeded to relax.
There is nothing parochial or bucolic about Broken Hill. There is no city in all Australia remotely like it excepting perhaps the golden city of Kalgoorlie. There is nothing of the snobocracy of Melbourne, or the dog-eat-dog taint of Sydney, in the community of Broken Hill, and there is no thoroughfare in Australia quite like Argent Street, Broken Hill’s main shopping centre.
Argent Street is unique. Besides being a street of shops it is the universal place of rendezvous. ‘Meet you down Argent Street’ is the phrase employed by husband to wife, by friend to friend. You may pause before a building erected in mid-nineteenth century; proceed and gaze at a section of a mining camp of the 1870s; stay at a hotel the exact replica of those from which emerged the American Deadwood Dicks; eat at ultra cafés run by smart Greeks and Italians; hire a gleaming automobile and shop at lush emporiums.
Down Argent Street, Mr Samuel Goldspink had begun business in the clothing trade when Queen Victoria found little at which to be amused. He had prospered less because of his own acumen than by the growth and the wealth of the city he had watched mature. He was an ingratiating little man, having an infectious chuckle and a store of jokes against himself, so that his customers found it pleasant to be overcharged.
Mr Goldspink was fifty-nine and a bachelor, seemingly hale and hearty, yet he collapsed and died inelegantly right in front of his own haberdashery counter. The doctor was dissatisfied with the manner of his passing, and the post-mortem revealed that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning; and, as it was quickly established that Goldspink had been in no mood to commit suicide, the effect was not dissimilar to that of a stick thrust into a bull ant’s nest—Detective Sergeant Bill Crome being the chief bull ant.
Crome