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The Sands of Windee

1931

No white man would have noticed the small detail in the background of a police photograph of an bandoned car, but the message he read there told Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte plainly that the mysterious disappearance of Luke Marks near Windee Station was anything but accidental.

To the infallible Bony, small, almost unimportant things were a tremendous help in this case: the ants out in the scrub country moving stones to warm the eggs in their nest showed him a cut sapphire buried in the earth.

In a place where silver would not occur naturally, he found a small disc of silver plate; and then a boot nail came to light where he had hoped it would be.

Why had Luke Marks driven specially out to Windee? Had he been murdered or had he, as the local police believed, wandered away from his car and been overwhelmed in a dust-storm? Bony felt that the questions lay somehwhere in the sands of Windee.

Taken from 1959 Angus & Robertson edition