The Bone is Pointed. Arthur W. Upfield
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for her.
History repeats itself! Time to pay again!
Ah, no! No, no, no! It won’t! It can’t! It mustn’t! Oh, why don’t they come home?
No longer could Mary support the intolerable inactivity. Turning back into the room, she slipped on an oilskin coat and lit a hurricane lamp, and with this small light to assist her she stepped off the veranda down to the wet ash path of the small garden and traversed it to the low gate in the wicket fence. Away from the iron veranda roof the night was less noisy and permitted the little sounds to reach her ears—the pattering of the rain on the gleaming coat, on the trees, on the ground. It thudded on her hands and on her face like the tips of nervous fingers urging her to go to him she loved. Besides those made by the rain there were no other sounds, no sound of creaking saddles, of hoof falls, of jangling bits in the mouths of horses eager to be home.
No longer hesitant, she walked across the open space to the out-buildings of which one was the men’s hut. In this there were two small rooms. In the outer room was a rough wood table, a form and several cases serving as chairs. On the table were weekly journals, a cribbage board, a hurricane lamp. Within the inner room stood two beds, one without a mattress, the other with a mattress and with blankets tossed in disorder on it. It was Jimmy Partner’s bed.
Mary’s mind seemed partitioned to-night and one part of it noted that the interior of this room smelled clean despite the fact that its tenant was an aboriginal. But then Jimmy Partner was an unusual aboriginal.
Again in the rain and hemmed by the menacing darkness, Mary walked to the wire gate in the low wire fence enclosing the whole of Meena homestead. She was unable to see it, but to her right stretched away the great bed of the lake that she had seen thrice filled with fifteen feet of water, giving life to countless water birds and heavy blackfish. Passing through the wire gateway, she began to follow a path winding away beneath the wide ribbon of box-trees bordering the lake’s shore, and now into the lamplight came wide-eyed rabbits to stare at her approach and vanish to either side. The rain was to give the rodents another lease of life.
Without a flicker the light went out; unexpectedly, because there was no wind. The night’s blackness struck her eyes like a velvety blow; and, her mind momentarily confused, she halted, the rain drops on the leaves and on the trees like the footsteps of gnomes.
But Mary knew exactly where she was on this path made by the naked feet of aborigines connecting their camp with the homestead, a path first formed more than sixty years ago. Gradually the blackness waned to become faintly luminous, and when her eyes became accustomed to the night light, she continued along the path she was unable to see but on which she was guided by the shapes of familiar trees.
She had walked slowly for five minutes when a ruddy glow illuminating the trees ahead indicated the camp. Presently she was able to see the red eyes of several banked fires and one that burned brightly before a humpy constructed with bags and canegrass. On either side of this fire stood an aboriginal. Its roseate light revealed further rough humpies but no other inhabitants of the camp.
He who stood with his back to the humpy was short of stature. His body was thick with good living, but his legs were astonishingly thin. His hair and straggly beard were white, and the look of him belied the power he held over the entire Kalchut tribe. Nero was an autocrat.
The other man Mary also instantly recognized. In his elastic-sided riding boots he stood six feet in height, with his arms folded across his white cotton shirt, now all steaming from the heat of the fire. The sight of him made Mary Gordon falter in her slow walking. He was Jimmy Partner for whose return with her son she had been waiting.
In heaven’s name why was he talking to Nero at this hour? Nine o’clock is a very late hour for aborigines to be outside their humpies. To be sure, only Nero was outside now in the rain, but something most unusual must have happened for Jimmy Partner to have come to the camp at nine o’clock at night, and in the pouring rain, and to have got Nero to come out of his humpy to talk with him in the light of a replenished fire.
It is doubtful if any woman in all this wide district of western Queensland knew the aborigines better than did Mary Gordon. To her they were not children; nor were they semi-idiots or mere savages. Why, she had raised Jimmy Partner in her own home, and Jimmy Partner had grown up to be a brother to John in all save birth and race. He was a member of this Kalchut tribe, fully initiated, and still he was apart from it, electing to live in the men’s hut, to eat with John and herself in the kitchen-living-room, to work for wages and to be always loyal and trustworthy. Early that morning he and John had left to ride the fences of East Paddock, and now, at nine o’clock at night, he was here talking to old Nero and John was not yet home.
Her mind accepted the extraordinary situation even whilst she made nine steps forward towards the fire. Then its possible significance burst in her mind like a bomb exploding. Jimmy Partner had come to seek Nero’s aid—as she had come to do—to find and bring in her son—alive, perhaps dead.
History repeats itself!
She began to run, her gaze directed to the face of Jimmy Partner, and the face of Jimmy Partner showed alarm. He was speaking rapidly but softly, and he was emphasizing points with the index finger of his right hand. Nero was relegated to an inferior position in this conference. She could not see Nero’s face, for his back was towards her, but she did see his round head constantly nod in assent to what Jimmy Partner was saying.
Now the camp dogs heard her flying feet and set up their chorus of barking. The men on either side of the fire drew farther apart and stared about, becoming tense in attitudes of listening. She saw then that Jimmy Partner saw her. He came swiftly to meet her.
“John! What has happened to John?” she demanded, pantingly.
Now the firelight was behind Jimmy Partner and she was unable to read his face although she did see the white of his eyes when he drew close to her.
“Ah—Johnny Boss is all right, missus,” he replied, his voice deeper than the average aboriginal voice and even more musical. “He left me to put a mob of sheep out of East Paddock ’cos of the rain makin’ the Channels boggy. He sent me on home. He’s all right, missus.”
Relief surged like a tide from her heart to her weary mind, to banish the numbing terror. Yet it seemed to draw strength from her legs and she swayed forward and would have fallen had not Jimmy Partner quickly placed his great hands beneath her elbows.
“I tell you Johnny Boss is all right, missus,” he said, now more confidently. “He’ll be back home any minute. We been droving small mobs of sheep away off the Channels all afternoon.”
“Yes, yes!” Mary cried. “But why didn’t you come home and tell me, Jimmy? What are you doing here when you know the dinner’s getting cold and I’m so anxious?”
“Well, missus, I didn’t think. True. This morning we found over beside Black Gate a sign message for Nero from Mitterloo saying he wanted the tribe to go across to Deep Well where poor old Sarah is very crook and looks like dying. So I rode this way home to tell Nero about it, and the tribe’s going off on walkabout first thing in the morning. Better go home, missus. I’m coming now. Perhaps Johnny Boss is there already. Here, let me light the lamp.”
Thank God that that imp was a liar to keep shouting that history repeats itself. Consciously now she noted Jimmy Partner’s flimsy shirt again drenched by the rain.
“You hurry home,” she said with her old time authority over two boys who would regard their bodies as though they were made of wood or iron. “No hat on your head, as usual. No coat; just a cotton shirt over a vest. And standing here in the cold rain.”
“I’m all right, missus. I’ll get me horse and be home before you.”
Nero had vanished inside his humpy and now the dogs were quiet. With the lamplight to give her feet confidence, Mary hurried back along the natural path, feeling the urge to laugh and knowing the emotion for hysteria. Back again at the wire gate she was joined by two dogs as she was fastening it, and she then wanted to cry out her joy, for they were John’s dogs. Over by the harness shed