“But the photograph?” interjected Sergeant Morris.

“I have studied all the famous cases of murder,” Bony proceeded gaily. “Murders committed in Australia, Great Britain, France and America during the last hundred years. My wife, who like myself is an educated half-caste, reads and enjoys dozens of crime mysteries expounded in modern novels-”

“The photograph-”

“In real life and in fiction as well as in stage plays, there is always a fresh corpse lying around for the detective to work on. All so sordid and all so simple to a man of my intelligence! I shall be shocked and disappointed and disillusioned if Mr Luke Marks is still living.”

“Yes, yes. But what of the photograph? What have you learned from it?” demanded the tantalized sergeant.

Bony reached into his unrolled swag and produced a copy of Sergeant Morris’s picture taken with a cheap camera, and handed it to his interrogator.

“Look well!” he cried softly. “You see the car. What else?”

“Nothing but the trees in the background,” the sergeant admitted.

“Ah! But cannot you see in that near tree a bleached sheep-bone attached to a bundle of sticks arranged like a woman’s fan?”

“Yes-I can. By gad!”

“That is a blackfellows’ sign which reads: ‘Beware of Spirits! A white man was killed here!’ ”

Chapter Three

The Boss of Windee

JEFFREY STANTON was a squatter of the blunt, downright type that lived and thrived in Australia seventy years ago. At this time, six years after the Great War, he was a living example of what a squatter should be; and, when occasion found him in the presence of our modern squatting aristocrats who reside in one or other of the cities and employ managers, he shocked them by his manners and horrified them by his generosity to his employees. As was his morning custom on weekdays, he left the large “Government House” at half-past seven and walked along a beaten path skirting a deep water-filled hole in a now otherwise dry creek, to reach finally the men’s quarters.