Without movement, Detective-Inspector Bonaparte listened until he could no longer hear the sinister noise controlled either by a maniac or an ice-cold killer. The silence that had preceded the arrival of the two crows returned.

Bonaparte went down to the wreckage, lying on its side. The door in the top side was still closed, but no glass remained in it or the windscreen. The tyres were burned away. He could not get near enough to peer through the distorted steel skeleton to ascertain how many people had been inside.

Still with taut nerves and governed by a most natural horror, Bonaparte walked up the hillside, following the trail made by the blazing car. He had no hope of finding anything identifying the driver, for he had seen nothing detached from the vehicle during its descent, and now not even its numberplate was decipherable. Nevertheless he was mistaken; for, a few feet up the hillside from the place where the car had been bombed, he found a small leather attache case, on which the embossing remained to tell that its owner was Sergeant A. V. Errey. This jetsam, freakishly preserved from explosion and fire, wasall the searcher found.

With hearing still tensed to receive the noise of an approaching aeroplane, Bonaparte stepped down to the road and slowly walked along it to the cabbage-trees, the case tucked under an arm. His mind was concentrated on the mysterious purpose of the outrage. It was a time when his eyes were much less active than normal, so much so that he came within two yards of the camp before his mind accepted the motionless shape of the tall, grey-haired, clean-shaven aborigine standing just within the edge of the trees’ black shadow.

The man’s physique was magnificent. His age was probably less than fifty. He wore no vestige of clothing save the pubic tassel, arm bands made of kangaroo fur and a forehead band to which was glued white birds’ down and which raised his hair to a plume of grey web. In his left hand he carried a spear having a fire-hardened point, and in the right a heavy club fashioned from a mulga root.