Paddy saw his knuckles and asked him what it meant.
‘I was in a fight.’
‘Who with?’
‘Some trooper’s son.’
‘Why?’
He had to think.
‘We were at a variance.’
‘What over?’
He looked over to where she sat with her head down trying to hide her tears.
Paddy shook his head.
‘You’re a damn fool, brother.’
He woke gasping beneath the stars.
Paddy was watching the horizon.
‘You alright?’
‘Yes.’ Jim sat up on his elbows. ‘Alex is on watch. What are you awake for?’
Paddy shrugged and shivered. He looked back across the plain to where they had sent Michael Carmichael on to scout the way south into higher country.
‘I don’t sleep well, Jim. I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep, that’s all.’
They rode beside pillars of sandstone they might use for cover. Eyes heavy-lidded against the glare that came off the white stone, squinting at wisps of smoke from signal fires. Squinting at the cuts in the stones that no white man could read.
Elden Calhoun wailed.
‘For the love of God, let’s stop, Jim. There’s a tree distant.’
‘Rest here and the blacks will kill you.’
‘I don’t see any blacks.’
‘They see you.’
Then the wind dropped and there was the sound of hoofs striking packed ground.
Dust hung in the western distance. Whatever had raised it was out of sight now. Then below the riders’ path were two small shapes moving out of shadow into fading sunlight. Two riders.
Jim pulled his Winchester from his back holster. He sat with the rifle across his lap. But one of the riders stopped and pulled a lamb out of a rock where it had locked its foot. The rider threw the lamb across the croup of his horse and the shepherds passed out of range along a corridor of rock to the east.
At dusk they rode into an old burial ground and made camp. Dead ceremonial fires were scattered on a flat to the south.
They made a low fire.
It was night and freezing. Jim sent Michael Carmichael to scout a pass. A wind gap that might be manned by horsemen or Aborigines.
‘Snake across that open stretch. In about four hours the moon’ll be down low enough for the rest of us to get across.’
In an hour the men heard wailing and for the second time on this ride the death chant. In three hours Michael had not returned.
‘It’s a sign,’ said Joe Rhine. He crossed himself – rusted rosary beads were in his hand. ‘A bad sign.’
‘A sign of what?’
‘Death.’
Jim Kenniff sat up. The fire lit his face. He took the whisky flask.
‘Shut up, you old woman.’
But he thought, Of course it is a sign of death. These barren ranges are a sign. The empty plain in the west is a sign. The stars. And the way the stars singe the edge of the plain. That is a sign. And all at once he knew …
He spoke aside to Paddy.
‘We are followed.’
‘How do you know?’
‘We must be prepared to ride now at any hour. Issue half rations. No fire, so no tea. They can have a little whisky – in case I need it.’
Late in the night Carmichael returned. The camp stood and the men were glad at his return, having thought that at dawn they might have to run at the pass with guns drawn.
‘It’s terrible terrain,’ said Carmichael. ‘And a storm is coming. But we can pass.’
King Edward had lost the tracks that were scoured off the hills by rain. They rode a day in the direction the tracks had last gone, but there was no more sign. They rode three days to the northwest and turned off towards a town.
There were no gaslights. They rode along a street of wind-scarred houses between stone country and a desert plain. Nixon spat tobacco. The Skillington boy’s eyes were open wide.
‘What a red fucking hell!’
‘It’s not so bad,’ said Nixon. ‘See the washing on lines? People here have money enough to have two or three sets of clothes. Further west you won’t see that – a man with only one shirt or woman with one dress doesn’t wash it much. But you’ll see cook-smoke. Further west and north you won’t even see that. People beyond here don’t light fires for fear of what the smoke might draw down on them.’
‘Thieves?’
‘And worse.’
The Skillington boy stared across the tumbledowns. The lines and their rags.
‘A revolver with a stock that holds together,’ said Nixon, ‘and a chamber that turns. A shot gun with a bolt that pulls easy. These would be good acquisitions. You should be thankful King Edward stays up at night.’
The Skillington boy looked at the black boy. Then down at his saddle-holstered shotgun and swallowed.
‘Just let the fuckers try!’
‘We won’t be long here,’ said Nixon. ‘There is a former priest I’m told lives here who I want to see.’
The priest had not seen the riders come. He was asleep in his chair. At the shouting of his name he ran inside. Nixon drew his revolver.
‘Halt!’
The priest pressed his face to a window then scuttled across his corridor.
Nixon and his men sat on their horses and waited. He called the priest’s name again and the priest came to the veranda.
Nixon put his revolver in the rib holster inside his coat.
‘How is it with you, McMahon?’
‘Who are ye? And what business have ye comin armed upon an innocent man at evening?’
‘For an innocent man, you have a guilty way of running when ordered to halt.’
‘Armed men coming to my door at evening rouses my nerves.’
Nixon saw a girl go between rooms in the corridor. The priest looked behind him then back to the riders and squinted.
Nixon thought the priest was trying to decide if and to what degree they were enemies. It would be impossible to recognise all the fathers and brothers of the girls in the towns where the priest had lived.
The priest squinted into the dying light.
‘Do I know ye, sir?’
‘No. But I reckon you know the men I seek.’
‘Aye, and who might that be?’
‘Jim and Paddy Kenniff. And the men who ride with them.’
‘I know the boys. I knew them.’
‘They’re not boys. They’re men of thirty-odd years. And criminals.’
‘Aye, I’ve heard all about that too. But I don’t have much to tell ye. They were only boys when I knew em. I never saw em as men.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Aye. And it’s a fifty-mile ride from here to collect a newspaper – so I can’t even tell ye the gossip.’
Nixon nodded. Looked back down the dark road. The priest spoke,
‘That distance is why so many out here have grown savage – generations who’ve never known the line God drew between good and evil.’
Nixon smiled.
‘Agreed.’
McMahon looked at the black man in faded native police issue. Few things in this country inspired the fear that uniform did.
‘I’ll guess you’re some kind of lawman, yet that one looks as much like a lawman as a wolf with a fleece thrown over its back looks like a sheep.’
Nixon grinned.
‘The uniform? He only wears it when he’s cold.’
‘Your tracker?’
‘Yes. And he tracked the Kenniff gang to here. Near to here. Though I didn’t need him for that.’
‘I don’t know what he’s told you. Or what you know about trackin. But if he thinks he can tell one man’s horse from another he’s lied to you. Many a scalpin party goes by here.’
‘Not like this one.’
‘How is that?’
‘Cut fences a few hundred yards off good stock routes. Fresh fires in the rocks up bridle paths. Dead horse
s with altered brands. Brands of places who’ve recently lost horses.’
‘Like I say –’
‘Yes. I heard what you said. But which way did they ride?’
‘You have a tracker. You could go into the ranges following tracks – there’ll be plenty of them – and see how you get on. Or ride onto the sand plains. You’ll survive if you know where the water lies.’
Nixon laughed. He motioned for the boy and King Edward to dismount.
They tied the horses to the veranda railing.
All three walked onto the veranda. Nixon sat on the only chair and the other two on the stairs. The priest stood in the doorway.
‘Jim and Paddy Kenniff were good boys as I remember it.’
Nixon nodded and rolled and lit a cigarette.
‘They say Jim lay with his cousin. That she was pregnant by him and that’s why she died. Cause they were family. But you know what it’s like. Being alone. Really alone. I mean not just without a woman, but without a civilisation. Like here.’ He leant back in his chair and looked into the dark of the house where he knew a girl was hiding.
‘You can come out, child.’
But she did not come.
Nixon looked onto the plain. There was not a light on the horizon. ‘Like you say, full of men in ignorance of their duty both to God and Man. You can give them stripes with the horsewhip. Sometimes they change a little out of fear. But that is not to take the law into your heart.’
Nixon drew on his cigarette and breathed hard of the cooling air.
The priest spoke.
‘Do you mean, sir, to wait here for men I haven’t seen in twenty years?’
‘Yes.’
‘Even if the Kenniff gang were here, why would they return?’
‘They might. I’ve seen their tracks double back. Whether that’s a trick, I don’t know. Anyway, my horses need rest and water. And if he has gone into that out there,’ he flicked his cigarette at the western plain, ‘then I have time … Father.’
‘You have no love of the priesthood, do you, lad?’
‘On the contrary, you purvey a kind of law. That is better than no law. But let me tell you something, old man. The King of England owns this world because of his power. And you are here at the pleasure of that power. I know who you are. And I know with all your book-learning behind you that you fancy yourself superior to an unschooled man like me.’
The priest sighed and sat down on the floor beside the door.
Nixon smiled.
‘Well here is something for your wisdom to take in – your days remaining are few. If you give the Kenniffs up now – tell me where they are and where they’re going – where they’ve sold horses and to who – and what men ride with them – then you will be left alone. And you will remain under the protection of the government. You can ask for a nurse if you are sick. You can appeal to a policeman if you are robbed. But if you withhold, you will be put in prison.’
The priest laughed.
‘You go chasin the men you are chasin and you could be dead within a week.’
‘A week, you say?’
The priest shook his head.
‘You’re chasing ghosts now that it’s rained. You could have passed them in the timber, and with the run-off there will be no tracks.’
‘Then we might as well sleep here tonight. My men will go inside and help you cook.’
‘The savage too?’
‘He’s good with a knife.’
A whimper came from the next room. A door whined long on its hinge. The sound of a man trying to be quiet. Nixon heard a lock click. He picked up his rifle.
He took a match from his trouser pocket and scratched it against the board partition. Just ahead of him he saw a yellow flare and the Madonna’s face close to the boards and beside the Madonna the face of the girl. Her legs extended. Ankles lashed together with rawhide. The priest was in the room. Frozen still. Nixon trained his rifle on him.
‘And how old is she, Father? Thirteen?’
‘Fifteen. I took her in when her parents were killed. She lost her older brother, too.’
‘You benevolent old cunt. But I say she’s thirteen.’
‘She’s not. Anyway, where would you have her go? No one knows better than me the hospitality of the nuns and their orphanages.’
Nixon took the slack of the rawhide in his hand.
‘And this?’
The priest laughed.
‘A game.’
Nixon cut the girl’s ties. He gave her money and told her to go into town at dawn.
He slammed the bolt of his rifle.
‘In the morning you will show us where the Kenniff gang went, Father. Else I’ll take you to the nearest station – which is not very near – on a charge of maltreatment of that girl, and drag you behind my horse all the way.’
They rode northwest after a mess of tracks to a stand of cypress and a ring of stones and ash.
‘Fire’s cold,’ said the Skillington boy.
The priest spat.
‘Who knows what men made these tracks? Regular lads as likely as not. Boundary riders. Now I’ve told you all I know. Let me go.’
Nixon nodded.
‘Boundary riders like a drink, don’t they?’
‘Aye. When they can get it.’
‘Scalpers sell their pelts in towns.’
The priest nodded. Nixon pointed a few yards away at barbed wire cut off a post. ‘So tell me why this lot take pains to avoid any kind of civilisation.’
The priest sighed.
‘I’m tired.’
Nixon kept staring at him. The priest relented.
‘Because they’ve got stolen horses with them. And Jim’s edgy for some reason. More edgy than I’ve ever known him. Though I swear I’ve seen the man no more than half a dozen times in the last ten years. And never invited him. There! I have nothing else. What do ye want me to do? Ride out there with ye into rifle range of a man who doesn’t give a red rat’s arse whether I live or die? Who’ll be under the protection of every filthy land grabber and hunter in the ranges? Ride on!’
The priest rode back to his house on the edge of town. King Edward got off his horse at the ring of stones and kicked the charred wood, but there was no fire in the ashes.
The tracks went south.
‘They’ll be a long way towards the ranges,’ said the Skillington boy. ‘Should we follow?’
Nixon stared at the line of light in the southern distance. The ridge emblazoned by the dying sun. Then the light was gone and at once the cold came and the ridge was a wall of darkness.
‘No. We ride the towns along the edge. Eventually they’ll come out.’
They came through Devil’s Signpost, left the spare horses in a hidden yard at Early Storms and struck Carnarvon Creek and followed it upstream. They camped on the bank at the junction with Six Mile Creek. They crossed the water then climbed into the desolate southwest side of the gorge. The trail followed the shoulder of the slope. They rode the high western ridge above a chasm. They stepped the horses down into a kidney-shaped valley, two miles long and less than half a mile at its widest. A creek, sandy and boulder-strewn, snaked along the gorge floor. They met the creek and rode up it into an unheard of, unthought place that those few who knew it called Lethbridge’s Pocket.
The track narrowed and they walked the horses in file. They rode to a log cabin – a hut like a fort, with holes bored in the walls for the barrels of carbines and rifles in case of attack by police or Aborigines. Standing at the cabin door a man could see everything to the south and west, and anyone who came from those directions had to come in like these men had, slow and exposed in single file up a track of stone. Behind the hut to the north was sheer rock face. And a man coming from that direction must fall twenty feet before he knew the hut was here, after which fall he would not walk away.
The old man came out to greet them. He had arrived some days before, along with his youngest son. He was red-eyed and cold and wrapped in black duffe
l.
Paddy rode by and held the old man’s hand. Paddy had been in gaol since he had last seen the old man; when he got out, he’d taken a train north to meet his brother on this drive.
Jim put his hand on his father’s shoulder.
‘We sold em, old man. In a single lot.’
Old Man Kenniff smiled at his boy. Jim produced the cheque.
They sat down by a circle of stones and the embers of the morning’s fire.
‘You got anything to eat?’ said Jim.
The old man looked back at the cave that was a store.
‘Some hard cheese and damper. A little rabbit stew.’ He called out, ‘Jack!’
Jim’s teenage brother came out of the cave where he’d been sleeping.
Jim smiled.
‘Well, well. The city boy’s arrived.’ The boy wore a Crimean shirt and was pale and blond-haired like his mother. ‘And soft as butter by the look of you.’
Jim grabbed the boy’s shoulders and stood him straight.
‘You missing Sydney?’
‘No.’
‘You miss your mother and aunts?’
‘No.’
‘And city girls?’
Jack blushed.
‘Not a bit.’
‘You liar. I’ll bet you’ve got a sweetheart. Boy as pretty as you. You’re a damn fool to come out here for all the good you’ll be to us.’
But the boy idolised his outlaw brothers. He alone of the men of his family could read, and he had read about his brothers’ escapades in the national papers. No one in Sydney believed he was their brother when he told them – no one except the extended family, who were at pains to keep the fact hidden.
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