One

by Patrick Holland

  Tom said they should not stop.

  ‘Not till we’ve covered another twenty miles.’

  ‘How far are we behind them now?’

  ‘Two days. Maybe three. They ride eighty miles in a day without thinking of it. Sometimes they ride at night.’ Tom pointed. ‘And look on the horizon. Tonight it will rain again. And then they’ll be impossible to track.’

  ‘You said you knew where they were going.’

  ‘I knew where they were going three days ago. That can change. They will be near Arcadia now. If we don’t beat the rain to there – if there’s rain enough to scour the ground we’ll be guessing. I’d rather know where they are. Runnin into them by accident will be worse than losin them.’ He shaped and lit a cigarette. ‘And they’re hard enough to track at the best of times.’

  ‘How do they hide their tracks?’

  ‘Doubling back. Walking on water and rock where they can. And they know where they can. Dragging switches behind them. Getting friends to cut across the tracks and ride for miles in variant directions. There are many ways.’

  Nixon sighed and threw a stone at the place he would make a fire.

  He looked at the miserable and hungry eyes in the Skillington boy’s sunburnt face.

  The first spits of cold rain came.

  ‘We ride on.’

  They rode to Comet River and stole three horses from the house paddock. A black gelding, a grey mare and a chestnut gelding. The last they used as a packhorse. They left their old horses in the scrub.

  They rode up a blind creek off the Dawson and met Jack Mulholland.

  Mulholland had just got out of gaol for vagrancy.

  ‘I can’t risk it, lads. Neither can you risk it. I reckon you stay at the Boyces’.’

  They rode further north and could see now the dark-blue tableland above Carnarvon Gorge.

  They rode up to the Boyce house. Slab walls, iron roof and antbed floor, but even these seemed fine things after so many days in the desert and on the plains. Mrs Boyce took them in. Paddy saw fear in her face, and that she was not frightened of them but of what their presence here might bring down upon her. But she was afraid too of the flush in Jim’s cheeks.

  She stared at him while she spoke.

  ‘You can stay inside tonight. You need bathing, the both of you. But the police come checking every other day now. Down in the myall paddock on the creek there’s the old stone shed. Near Thurlow’s place. You can stay there.’

  Paddy took Jim to the fire. He went back to the table and sat with Mrs Boyce. The woman shook her head.

  ‘He is not well.’

  ‘He’s getting better,’ said Paddy.

  She nodded.

  ‘I’d hate to have seen how bad he was before.’

  ‘What have you heard?’

  ‘Only that they are hunting you.’

  The patrol visited the stations and the bars and Nixon checked with the spies of the police and appointed new ones. He enlisted them unofficially, paid them cash and called them ‘lookouts’.

  At night he and Tom Lawton and the boys would take separate rooms in a hotel or else sit quiet by a fire not speaking for tiredness. One night Nixon fell asleep at the fire and there was a girl and he spoke to her.

  ‘You are in every dream.’

  He woke and Tom Lawton and King Edward were staring at him. Tom grinned.

  ‘Sweet of you, Sergeant. But do you mean me or Ed?’

  Nixon turned his face away from the flames and put his hand inside his coat on the stock of his revolver and slept again.

  On other nights there was a rider in his dreams. The face was wrapped in a kerchief. Nixon was in a slab hut, and somehow he saw the rider from every window at once, at every angle, saw him riding the edges of the plain of sleep. A shadow against fires onthe horizon. He did not know if in the dream the rider was an assailant or a sentry, and in the dream he thought, who knows but that rider might keep the sleeping folk from worse things than I know.

  One morning they came upon a band of Aborigines scalping with Chinamen. The Aborigines said they had seen men with faces covered, running as though chased.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘North of Roma. Near Injune Creek.’

  The Kenniffs only came out of hiding under cover of dark, to water the horses they kept tied in the bush, or to collect the food and newspapers Mrs Boyce left for them.

  Some nights they went into the scrub and put bridles on their horses and rode bareback to Injune Creek to plan an escape with their sympathisers – the Creevy boys and some of Alex Stapleton’s unschooled cousins. But there were nights the hut they arrived at was dark and no one came.

  Jim read in the newspapers that he was in Durban. In another paper that he was being hidden by an army of Irish rebel sympathisers. He read an interview with a man whose name he had never heard who claimed to have ridden with him and who said that he was already dead.

  One night they stood their horses on the western boundary of Hutton Vale to take in the the dawn.

  ‘The sun will be good for you,’ Paddy said. But when the sky paled in the east and a line of silver sat on the horizon and the shadows became diffuse he became nervous.

  ‘We should go.’

  ‘You go, brother. I will stay just a little longer. You were right. I need to see the light.’

  Paddy nodded and rode the bush track their horses had cut from their hideout.

  Jim watched the stars fade and a fringe of light come after them, just broad enough to touch his face. Then he turned and rode into the woods.

  A newly appointed lookout called Henry Humphreys-Brown had been boundary-riding with his boy along the fence between his place and Thurlow’s. Something moved in the periphery of his vision. He stood his horse very still. He put his finger to his lips for his boy to be quiet. For there, like a figure from a dream, was a man huddled in a black duffel coat, hair and beard ragged and long, eyes fixed on the horizon. Father and son froze. When the figure was gone Humphreys-Brown and the boy galloped back to their homestead. The next evening the man rode alone to the same place and saw the figure again. He sent a rider to Injune Station with a message for Sergeant Nixon.

  Nixon left the Skillington boy to man the camp the patrol made beneath a rock ledge. Nixon, Tom Lawton and King Edward rode from there to Boyce’s homestead.

  Nixon had a full beard now, and his face was aged and hardened by the sun and wind and he thought, Even if she has heard of me she will not match what she knows with this face.

  Mrs Boyce polished her kitchen with turpentine, churned the milk and made soap and cut it into cakes with fine wire, and never thought of the men who inhabited the hut and tract of wood east of her house. She would see Jim from her storm window, bareback on his grey mare, standing the horse and huddled into his coat and looking into the stars like a figure of a dream she could forget on waking. So it did not feel like a lie when Nixon rode in one morning with Tom Lawton and a wild-looking black boy and asked if she had seen the Kenniffs and she said no.

  Tom Lawton tipped his hat to her.

  ‘Mrs Boyce.’

  ‘Tom.’

  She pulled her grey-flecked hair into a bun. She stared at Nixon. Talked down her aquiline nose at him. She was equal to him in height, and the man wore boots.

  ‘And who are you, sir?’

  Tom spoke.

  ‘You remember the lads talking about a trader out west who they’d done business with, Mrs Boyce? Owed them some money. This is him.’

  Mary Boyce nodded.

  ‘Mr …?’

  At once Nixon could not think of the name.

  ‘Roberts.’

  Tom held his breath. He hoped Mrs Boyce had not heard the name McCulloch, but the look on her face said she had not.

  ‘I’m waitin on their arrival,’ said Nixon. ‘Pretty urgently, mam, as I have to ride on soon. I know why you’d be cautious. But Tom here can vouch for me. You sure you haven’t seen them?’

  The woman shook her he
ad.

  Nixon nodded.

  She stared at King Edward. Nixon saw.

  ‘This here is my chief stockman, Ed.’

  The woman did not say a word.

  ‘Any scalpers camped on your country, mam?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any horses you don’t recognise?’

  ‘No. Now please excuse me, I–’

  ‘Could you make us some breakfast, mam? We’ve been riding all night. And all we have is mouldy flour. Not worth the trouble of sticking in a fire.’

  Mrs Boyce looked troubled.

  ‘Of course. Come in, sir. Only if you don’t mind,’ she nodded at King Edward, ‘I’d prefer it if he sat on the veranda. He’ll give the children nightmares.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nixon. ‘But could you spare a little food for him also? He’ll take it on the veranda. I’ll pay you for it.’

  ‘Thank you. But I don’t require money.’

  The sun was not fully risen and Mrs Boyce put a hurricane lamp on the table and lit it. She served corned beef with fried sliced potatoes. She toasted bread and served it with lard and set two apples on a plate.

  Nixon took a plate out to King Edward.

  When he came back in, Mrs Boyce put a pot of tea and three cups on the table.

  ‘I’ve got no milk yet I’m afraid, sir. I have a little cream.’

  ‘Sugar?’ said Tom.

  ‘Yes. I have sugar. And for you, sir?’

  ‘No, thank you, mam. I take it black and straight.’ Nixon sipped his tea. ‘You knew those two missing men, didn’t you?’

  ‘I told you, sir, I haven’t seen them for months and months.’

  ‘Forgive me. I meant Dahlke and Doyle. The policeman and the manager at Carnavon. The ones in the papers of late.’

  ‘Aye. But not well. I knew them to look at.’

  ‘What do you suppose happened to them?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘You shouldn’t. I was just wondering.’

  ‘Who knows? Ambushed by blacks. Fallen down a rock fault. Even lost, given where they were riding into. Or killed by bandits, of course. This is wild country.’

  Nixon sipped his tea. He smiled.

  ‘Yes. Do you know the Kenniffs well? Jim and Paddy?’

  ‘And their father. And mother. Poor woman.’

  Mrs Boyce was watching the window. Searching the dawn and tapping her foot.

  She eyed the black man on the veranda. Then looked at Tom and he would not hold her gaze. She looked at King Edward again then back to Nixon.

  ‘That one looks like a tracker.’

  ‘I don’t know what a tracker should look like, mam. But, true, this one has some skills. He’s from the desert. He’s been helping me take horses out of the hills.’

  ‘What did you say Jim and Paddy Kenniff were to you, sir?’

  ‘Business partners. And old friends.’

  She watched him. His eyes glanced too often at the storm window. But the way he looked at her when she caught him …

  ‘What is it, mam?’

  ‘Only that I never saw a man wait for a friend in the manner you are.’

  ‘Mam–’

  ‘Please finish your breakfast and leave.’

  Nixon sighed.

  ‘Mam–’

  Mary Boyce stood up.

  ‘I say you’re a policeman. I say that out there is a tracker and this man here,’ she pointed at Tom, ‘you’ve either captured him or he’s a traitor.’

  Tom sighed and looked away and threw the crust of bread he was chewing onto his plate.

  Nixon breathed deep and shook his head.

  ‘If anyone is found guilty of helping them they’ll be thrown in prison. I tell you this not as an officer of the law but as a man who takes no joy in seeing a woman put in gaol. And you cannot leave a horse tied in one place for any length of time without also leaving a sign …’

  Her voice shook.

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve got against those boys. But let me tell you sir, they’re the heroes of the poor, the widowed. The dream we dream of freedom. Jim Kenniff is a hero.’

  ‘Mary–’

  ‘Leave, sir!’ She eyed Tom Lawton. ‘And take your rabble with you!’

  They were being hounded out the door as Ada Thurlow came to the bottom of the stairs. She carried wood in a thick cloth. Her eyes opened wide at the sight of Nixon. Mary Boyce saw it.

  ‘You know this man, Ada?’

  ‘No.’

  She walked up the stairs and nodded cursorily at Nixon.

  ‘Here’s that firewood, Mary.’

  ‘Thank you, child. Come in and get your butter.’

  Nixon sent King Edward and Tom back to camp. Then he rode a little beyond the homestead gate and stood his horse in a stand of pines and waited. In time Ada Thurlow came back down the stairs and walked across the yard. She unlatched the gate and walked along the fence. She did not have a horse. He caught her up.

  ‘Mrs Thurlow.’

  ‘Sergeant.’

  ‘Why didn’t you identify me back there?’

  ‘How do you know I didn’t after all?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Mrs Boyce knew you were a policeman, anyhow. You told her as much. I don’t want anything to do with you or your outlaws or anything else. All I want is peace.’

  ‘Now there’s the thing every man wants.’

  She laughed.

  ‘No they don’t! I haven’t seen much of this world, but I’ve seen enough of it to know men. And as soon as they get peace they want anything but. I want it truly.’

  She kept walking. Nixon extended his hand.

  ‘Get up on the horse.’

  ‘I’m alright, thank you, sir.’

  ‘Please, Ada.’

  ‘What good do you think it will do me to be seen riding on the back of a policeman’s horse with my arms around him?’

  ‘You don’t have to put your arms anywhere near me. But you think you might be seen? By who?’

  She shook her head at him.

  ‘You damn fool. How would I know?’

  Early that morning before her husband had left he had warned her not to speak a word to the police about anything. She said,

  ‘You never know who’s in the hills. Maybe friends of my husband. He gets jealous.’

  Nixon nodded.

  ‘Anyway, get on. Please.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’s only a mile.’

  He sighed. He got off the horse.

  ‘Then you ride. I’ll walk beside you.’

  She eyed him.

  ‘Get back on, you fool.’

  She got up behind him on the horse. A way along she put her arms around his waist.

  ‘God, you’ve got thin.’

  He did not say anything. Then he felt her head rest between his shoulders.

  He thought,

  What does a man do to deserve a woman like this? And he thought, Nothing. You never do well by deserts; you get lucky. Like Thurlow. That’s all. And the lucky never know what they’ve got. And I will never ever be that lucky.

  He arrived at the house with regret. He never wanted to stop riding with the lovely weight of her in his back.

  He helped her down off the horse.

  ‘May I come in?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Alright.’

  The children were sitting by the fire, having just woken up.

  ‘God, if your father could see you lot getting out of bed at this hour. Kitty, go let the dogs off. And water them. You go with your sister, Billy.’

  She made a pot of tea.

  He must ask.

  ‘Do you know where they are?’

  She sighed and threw a teaspoon on the table.

  ‘Why ask me? I don’t want to know about them. I don’t want to talk about or hear a damn thing about outlaws anymore. Not from this day till my last.’

  ‘What good do you think you do yourself by harbouring them? Harbouring him. I know whi
ch is the most dangerous of them.’

  ‘You don’t. And I’m not harbouring anyone. Believe me, I have no love of outlaws.’

  ‘Protecting them, then. I know they’re around here. I know Mary Boyce knows. And I’m guessing if you’re on butter and firewood terms with her then you know too. Listen. We will get them. And I will get him. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of the law when it bears its weight.’

  ‘Are you threatening me, Sergeant?’ She stood up. ‘I tell you, I’ve been threatened enough. Just about enough to slap the face of the next man who threatens me, no matter the consequences.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ada. I’m concerned for you, that’s all. Please sit down.’

  ‘You threaten me again and you better be prepared to arrest me!’

  ‘Forgive me. For the love of God that’s not what I meant. I’m not good with words. I … I’d lie through my teeth to defend you. To any authority.’

  She shook her head.

  She sat down. He put his hands across the table so the tips of his fingers touched hers. She scowled at him.

  ‘But he is counter to the law,’ said Nixon.

  ‘You’ve got a hide talking to me of the law. You think I forget the afternoon you cuffed my husband and rode him off this place like a dog?’

  Nixon reached across the table to a plate of apples and oranges.

  ‘Ada, see this apple? It’s an apple because it obeys laws, it knows to be just so round and just so red and that is born into it and it keeps that law. There are things in nature that don’t much keep to laws. Fire, high wind, dark water. And those things destroy.’

  She withdrew her hands.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We must all keep the law. Like the law that says a wife should keep her promises to her husband, no matter how awful he gets when he drinks.’

  ‘That’s your choice, Ada. You know what I said about that.’

  ‘I–’

  Her little boy opened the front door and stood staring at her. She shooed him back out.

  Nixon breathed deep. They sat in silence for a time.

  ‘I want to protect you, Ada. I know that for loyalty and fear I can’t trust locals here for information. I’m better asking blacks and Chinamen. At least they will take a bribe. But the Kenniffs are not heroes like you people say.’