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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 by ETT Imprint, Exile Bay 2020

      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 1961

      First eBook edition published by ETT Imprint 2013

      Published by ETT Imprint in 2019. Reprinted 2020

      Copyright William Upfield 2013, 2019

      ISBN 978-1-925706-71-0 (pbk)

      ISBN 978-1-922384-68-3 (ebk)

      Digital distribution by Ebook Alchemy

      Chapter One

      The Homing Prodigal

      Karl Mueller was an old-timer in the deep south-west of Western Australia. His parents had migrated from Hamburg to settle north of Albany, and there Karl and his sister were born. Karl’s sister had married well, and with her children lived in Albany. Karl, however, lacked ambition. All he had inherited was his father’s love of the sea and his mother’s love of the mountains and the trees and the farm animals.

      For twenty-odd years Karl had worked for the Jukes who owned a farm and large grazing lease a few miles inland from Rhudder’s Inlet, and almost within sight of the famous Leeuwin Lighthouse which is said to signpost the approach to Australia’s Front Door. Now fifty years old, he looked less than forty, being nobbly rather than stout, blond of hair and blue of eyes, possessed of one virtue, loyalty, and one vice, alcohol.

      Every year he departed to spend the Christmas and New Year with his sister and family in Albany, returning always in the first week of January. He had a great aversion to spending money on rail and road services, and invariably walked both ways, and no aversion to spending money on booze and on presents for those whom he held in high regard, including his employer’s wife. He tramped the hundred-and-fifty-odd miles, keeping as close to the coast as rivers and inlets permitted, the western half of the journey lying over unsettled country of forest and gully and stream.

      For the record, this year he left Albany on 2 January, and on the evening of the ninth he made early camp beside a long disused logging track. All this day he had tramped up and over the tree-massed hills bordering the Southern Ocean, fording one river and, without removing his boots, tramping across the streams and sluggish water-gutters. He had greeted in his open simple fashion particular trees and rocks he remembered from previous journeys, and in three days he had not passed a house.

      Making camp in this quarter of Australia at this time of year is no chore to men like Karl Mueller. He chose to sleep in the lee of a robust bush, and instinctively built his small fire on clear ground. He boiled water in a quart pot, brewed tea, added a dash of rum, and, having supped, emptied the residue of the tea upon the embers of the fire. He unrolled his swag hard against the bush that he would not be disturbed by the moonlight, and having smoked his pipe and downed another double nobbier of rum, laid himself on the blankets, shut his eyes and slept. He was awakened, so he thought, by someone humming a tune.

      That anyone should be humming a tune in the middle of the night in this wildly virgin country was so unusual that Karl attributed it to the dwindling effects of the many bottles of rum he had consumed during his holiday. He lay there in the shadow of the bush beside the track, thinking he would like a snort but remembering there was but one left in the last bottle, and deciding to reserve that for breakfast.

      The night was as silent as the inside of a possum’s nest in winter, and the sound of a stick snapping on the leaf-and-debris covered track could not be ignored. Karl now knew that someone was coming along the track and humming the tune of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.

      That was when the nightmare began, the creeping warning of terror. Karl was lying parallel with the track, and without raising his head he could see beyond his feet the figure of the man coming from Albany way. The clear moonlight fell full upon him, and his face Karl had hoped never to see again. He was six feet tall, and would scale at least two hundred pounds. He walked with the peculiar gait which Karl remembered, head up, chest out, shoulders well back, like one accustomed to being stared at and admired. The beret was worn at a rakish angle, and the moonlight glittered on the ornament, or badge, worn at the front.

      One part of Karl’s mind claimed it must be the booze that brought about this visitation; and yet another part warned him to remain still and try not to sever the ropes binding him. The man advanced, waving his left hand to the beat of the tune he hummed. In the other hand he carried a suitcase. When beside Karl, when about to pass him, Karl gazed up at his face, and it was, indeed, the man whom no one wanted ever to remember. The face was large, the flesh slack under the eyes and about the mouth. The forehead was broad, but the chin was weak. The hands were broad and fingers were stubby and powerful. The left hand still beat the time of the tune, and as the hummer was about to pass Karl the humming was interrupted to permit the voice to say:

      “Onward, you bastards, onward.”

      The widely-spaced, black eyes fixed their gaze directly forward, failing to notice the victim of nightmare lying within a yard of the large feet. Another stick snapped, and the ropes about Karl snapped. The terror waned, and he swung his body over to lie on his chest and gaze along the track to see the figure emerge from shadow into moonlight, and beyond the moonlight again into shadow, and vanish.

      “Must be having a touch of the horrors,” he told himself, and drawing a blanket up and over his head, slept dreamlessly until sun-up.

      Karl tossed the blanket aside and sat on the ground-sheet. The bush was dark green and mountainous upon

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