The Book of the Bush

WHEN Edward Bennett was found dead in his hut on the outskirts of Merino he was in his eighty-second year. In life he had looked but sixty, in death, according to the Merino undertaker, he looked-well, not peaceful.

He had retired from hard work at the age of seventy. His wife was dead. His only daughter, married to the Merino butcher, had said to her willing husband: “Father must come and live with us.” Old Bennett had snorted: “Be hanged if I will. I’m living in me own house.”

Old Bennett had built himself a two-roomed hut on the eastern edge of Merino, some few hundred yards north of the hall, which stood on the lower left-hand corner of the street. It faced over the vast area of country falling gently away toward the Walls of China, which appeared to be much higher than actually they were; and it was, therefore, less than a quarter of a mile from the post office, where the ancient battler had drawn his old-age pension.

“I expected it,” the doctor was saying. “Told him he was liable to drop dead any minute, and advised him to listen to his daughter and go and live with her.”

Bony did not enter the hut with the policemen and the doctor. To him, of primary interest was this open page of the Book of the Bush awaiting hisreading. What had happened within the hut could be established by the three men who had entered it. What may have happened outside the hut no one of them could establish better thanhe.

The hut was built of four-gallon petrol tins cut open and nailed as sheets to the wood framework. The roof was of stouter corrugated iron. The building was enclosed by a brush-wood fence in which was only one low gate in the front. Inside the fence old Bennett had laid the rubble of termite nests, watered and tramped itlevel, and thereafter had kept it swept. It was almost cement-hard, and the tracks of no man would be registered upon it.