His shout stopped the young man from freeing the horse, brought him to them, large spurs jangling, red neckerchief flapping.

“You’ll want your horse,” Arnold said. “There’s been a shooting. Mrs Bell is dead and Linda has vanished.”

“Hell!” exploded Harry. “Linda couldn’t have shot her ma. What else happened?”

“Ain’tthat enough?” demanded Eric, and waited for instructions from Arnold.

“You fellers get going. Ride around. Look for tracks. Look for… you know. Look for Linda. Somebody came after the boss left for town. The bloody crows didn’t shoot Mrs Bell.”

They obeyed without question that steady authoritative voice, and Arnold went back to the quarters and leaned against the front wall and chipped at a tobacco plug. He was cold deep down in his mind, so enraged that, now no one was near to see, his grey eyes were wide and blazing.

The question tormented him. Who had done this grim thing? A traveller? Hardly. No tracks went beyond Mount Eden, save the little-used track to the old homestead called Boulka, and he himself had just come in by that track. A traveller was as rare as an iced bottle of beer on the centre of Lake Eyre. All the blacks were away on the Neales River, fifty miles to the north. The nearest town, Loaders Springs, was more than forty miles to the southwest, and the nearest homestead was something like a hundred and ten miles away round the southern verge of the lake.

There was left… what? Five white men who had eaten breakfast here at Mount Eden, and any one of those men, including himself, could have returned, unknown to the others, and murdered the woman. And the kid? No… no! That Arnold wouldn’t accept. Every man of them loved Linda. Knowing he would find no tracks, Arnold yet sought for tracks of strangers, or tracks betraying unusual movement out of time.