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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.

      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 1962.

      First electronic edition published by ETT Imprint in 2013.

      Copyright William Upfield 2013, 2020

      ISBN 978-1-922384-25-6 (paper)

      ISBN 978-1-922384-26-3 (ebook)

      Digital distribution by Ebook Alchemy

      Chapter One

      Lucifer’s Couch

      Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte gazed upon Lucifer’s Couch and marvelled.

      The Stranger must have been of considerable size to have made such a mark on this land of lemon-tinted sand and red-gold rock. He arrived, it is recalled by people who lived at Hall’s Creek, late in December 1905, to dig a pit several hundred feet deep and one mile in circumference, and to raise about it a rampart of rock and rubble some hundred feet above the surrounding plain. Such was the impact, the shock upthrust three observable rings of rock-rubble; the inner half a mile from the pit, the middle about three-quarters of a mile, and the outer a full mile from the centre.

      It was no glancing blow but a direct fall, for the wall about the pit is perfectly circular and, save at one place, uniform in height and width at the summit. The occasional heavy monsoon rain and the high winds of spring and autumn have removed from the rubble the earth which originally cemented the hard micaceous sandstone forming the wall, producing a polished monument as conceived by a Pharaoh’s architect and built by a Pharaoh’s slave labour. Inside the wall the earth and sand of the floor of the pit now slope gently to the central soak-hole, about which grow several desert hardwoods.

      “A hundred feet above the plain, Howard, and from two to three hundred feet down to that soak,” observed Inspector Bonaparte. “Give me the history.”

      First Constable Howard, tough and seemingly as polished by the sun and the wind as the wall on which they were sitting, complied, “The meteor fell in 1905, and the people who saw it fall won’t take it from a couple of geologists that it fell three hundred years ago. The people at Hall’s Creek watched the flaming mass and heard the detonation. They were only sixty-five miles distant.

      “In those days this country wasn’t taken up by cattlemen, the outlet for Hall’s Creek being at Wyndham on the north coast. No one travelled down this way to investigate. When Beaudesert was taken up their stockmen never troubled to climb up here, for from any point the place looks like a low flat-topped stony hill. This crater was actually discovered as late as 1947 by a party of oil prospectors who happened to fly over it.

      “After the discovery,” Howard proceeded, “barely a dozen stockmen came here, but in 1948 members of an expedition sent by the Australian Geographic Society photographed and reported on it.¹ Later another party came, following the truck tracks of the first.

      “Now we come to the present year; again a plane chanced to fly over, on 27 April, and the people aboard saw in the pit what they thought was a body. It was a body right enough, white man dead several days. How he had got there, who he was, no one could tell. He was without swag, water-bag, any equipment. His clothes were soiled and damaged, and his boots needed repair.

      “You know, of course, that no one gets around in this country without being reported on the radio network. No matter if he’s a touring politician or a prospector, a stranger is news, an item of gossip for all the station homesteads to talk about. We’re three hundred miles from Derby on the west; Wyndham on the north is two hundred miles, and it’s something like five hundred miles from Darwin. Inside those points there are many homesteads and more Aboriginal tribes, and no one, black or white, ever reported the dead man.”

      “The nearer homesteads, Deep Creek and Beaudesert,” suggested Bonaparte, “people at one or the other could have been concerned with the death of this man.”

      “Must have been,” agreed the policeman. “But these homesteads are both comparatively close and no stranger could have got to them without being reported as having passed through homesteads beyond them. You can see Deep Creek Homestead. The track down from the Hall’s Creek-Derby road through Beaudesert doesn’t go beyond. Beyond is desert for a thousand miles and more, and the people in this desert are a hundred per cent wild Abos. We haven’t been able to track the dead man from any point, let alone identify him. The only theory, and that isn’t really a theory, is that he fell from a plane, but he didn’t because nothing is broken bar his skull.”

      Bonaparte stood to gaze over the surrounding desert, facing north. He could see the inner and middle rock rings and the demarcation of the limit of country burned to ash by the heat of the Stranger. Beyond that line the scrub trees were older and beyond them grew the ancient gums bordering Deep Creek. The Creek trees appeared to be the hem of the multi-coloured rug of the Kimberley Ranges with their flat-summit red residuals, razor-edged green escarpments, and deep black gullies.

      Three miles to the west could be seen the homestead of Deep Creek cattle station, and even casual examination of a map would show the officially named Wolf Creek Meteor Crater to be situated at the northern edge of the great inland desert of Western Australia.

      “The trees on the plain aren’t any older than those down at the soakage,” Constable Howard was saying, “proving, I’d say, that the meteor fell less than sixty years ago, not three hundred.”

      To the east as well as towards the west, the feet of the mountains

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