Ada Thurlow narrowed her eyes at him.
‘They’ve wreaked havoc on the country,’ said Nixon. ‘And for what? You read the stories about them in the papers. Maybe you read them to your boy and girls. The violence there is without blood. Have you ever seen real violence?’
Her mouth twisted. She stared at the apple in his hand.
‘You pious fool.’
‘Ada, have you ever seen someone shot through the head with the kind of shotguns the Kenniff gang carry at their hips? I’ve seen them up close. 10 inch pellets. A ball of them. In the pictures men draw to go with the newspaper stories, those guns make neat little bullet holes.’ Nixon pinched his fingers. ‘And there is a little pool of blood. In the magazine stories a man is shot and he falls dead. But I remember once down south, in my own country, a wo– … a man shot at close range with such a gun.’ Nixon paused and breathed deep. He looked out the window. ‘This … man … he tried to chase down a thief. Pellets all through his face. Crawled bleeding onto a road. Bleeding and crawling and dying on the ground for a day and a night and a half-day again. And he just lay there. He was found by a ringer. Still breathing. But he could not move. And when I got to her– to him … I could not do anything. I was so young. And I swore at God in his heaven who had let a woman crawl so long and not allowed her to die.’
And all at once Nixon wept.
Ada Thurlow opened her eyes wide.
‘Crawling and …’ Nixon wiped his eyes with his sleeve. ‘Do you know what I felt, mam? Not hatred for the men that did it. Not any sense of vengeance. Only love. I thought how beautifully the human face is made. And though I was without faith, I thought that the priests are right to call that face the image of God. The eyes that see. The mouth that speaks. The glow of skin. The light of a smile. The little water that is in the eyes and the mouth. All of it so perfect, and how easy it is to destroy. How fragile we are against every other force in this world. There is enough in this world that can hurt us already. Forgive me, Ada.’
He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. She held his hands tight. She cried.
‘You darling man.’
She thought once more of her husband and his warning. Mary Boyce had warned her too. She saw her daughter, peering round a wall behind which the children’s bed sat on the floor. The girl stared in bafflement at the man crying along with her mother.
Ada put her face in her hands.
‘But if I tell you, you catch them. You have to catch them!’
‘I will.’
‘I know where they are.’
Nixon dismounted and squatted on the ground. Horses had been pawing at the dirt that was scraped back into trenches. There were rings around the trees.
‘The horses that were here were tied for more than a week. Mary Boyce must have tipped them off.’
The Skillington boy nodded.
‘This is their camp, alright.’
Further on, the boy found a riding saddle and a pack saddle with a billy can and a slip bag with rations – corned meat, onions, camp bread and a tin of jam. Nixon handled a tin of fresh homemade butter such as he had seen Ada Thurlow take from Mrs Boyce. They found blankets and a water bag.
‘Leave it all here,’ said Nixon. ‘Mount up and ride.’
Jim and Paddy Kenniff rode through thick bull oaks at dawn. Jim’s horse stopped lame and would not be spurred into another step.
Jim dismounted and took off the saddle and blanket. He left these by a tree. He took the bridle and put it in Paddy’s saddlebag. He leapt up behind Paddy’s saddle and they ran the horse into gallery woods on Six Mile Creek.
They ran the horse ten miles to the edge of Westgrove Station. They waited in the dark and watched the station but no rider came to the gate. The lights went out in the house. There were three horses in the yard. They waited till the stars said it was midnight then went to the yard and caught two of the horses with bridles and tethered them to a railing post and went to the store shed. A thirteen-year old girl woke and stood on the veranda in a white nightdress in the starlight, staring at them. Paddy put his finger to his lips.
King Edward stood up from where he had been studying the ground. ‘They ride two horses now. Before only one. Jim is sick, or his legs got weary from hangin without stirrups. They stop more than they want.’
‘Are we near them?’
‘Near.’
Nixon turned to Tom.
‘Where now?’
‘The gorge. I can lead you in – as safe as possible, though that isn’t safe.’
King Edward raised his hand.
‘Boss?’
‘Yes.’
‘I want a gun now.’
Nixon took a Remington shotgun from his saddle holster.
‘You know how to load it?’
‘I’ve seen you do it.’
He threw the boy a belt of shells.
‘Tie that round your waist.’
The Skillington boy spat and cursed under his breath. Nixon saw it.
‘What’s wrong, boy?’
‘Ride into a shootin gallery, Tom says. Now the savage has a gun. You’ve seen these two stay up late at the fires after we’ve gone to sleep. How do we know they’re not in cahoots? Leadin us away from anyone who can hear a shot? And after that they could throw us in a cave where no one’d find our bodies for a thousand years, then they ride back in with the outlaws.’
Nixon stared at the Skillington boy’s eyes. He wondered if the boy’s fear was as bad as it sounded.
‘Don’t talk like that, lad.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because men who get that tone have a habit of dying in just the way they predict.’
The Skillington boy shook his head and laughed without mirth and turned his horse away from the others.
‘Fuck me.’
‘Boy?’
‘Yes?’
‘Turn around and face me, boy.’
The Skillington boy pulled his rein.
‘What is it, Sergeant?’
But Nixon could not think of what to say. He turned to Tom Lawton.
‘If they make it all the way up into the rocks before we can get to them, what then?’
‘There’s an outlet. But it’s three days’ ride from the entrance. Like I say, they can hold up in there as long as they like, and when they’re ready they can ride through that outlet in the west. There may be other ways out. And if there are, Jim knows them. But I know that one.’
Nixon turned to the Skillington boy.
‘Ride back to Injune. Go to the station there and enlist Constable Scanlan, Constable Holland and Senior Constable Tasker. Tell them to take whatever weapons and provisions they need. Tell them why. And tell them first to send a cordon along the gorge to the north, around Consuelo pushing up onto the table, even to Purgatory if they’ve got the men.’
‘And then?’
‘Come back. We need you!’
‘Meanwhile you’ll ride straight after their tails? So they can swing round in their saddles and fire on you the minute they hear you?’
‘I’ve let them go twice now, boy. Not this time.’
Nixon reined his horse in the direction of the gorge.
The Skillington boy rode south alone.
Jim and Paddy rode through the night. Jim was tired and sick. The horses that had galloped riders thirty miles through thick timber and over rocks were spent. In the yellow morning Jim fell off his horse and fell down beside a water hole. He took water up in his hands.
They slept on beside the water on loose stones.
They woke three hours before dawn and rode onto Kooramindangie flat then into the gorge.
The patrol rode two hours northwest. There were signs of men. But there was no moon and in this dark they must stop. Tom Lawton and King Edward built a fire.
Nixon bit the end off a cigar and lit it in the fire. He looked up at the dark mass of shadow that was the tree-lined escarpment of Hell Hole Shelf. He thought, We could spread out and work up the
hill, but it would be very hard going, and we could get isolated.
Tom Lawton was asleep under his hat. King Edward stared at Nixon across the fire.
‘Let me go up, boss. Another day and we lose em in the stones. Let me go ahead.’
Nixon sighed.
‘The horses are unsaddled. They need rest.’
‘I don’t need a saddle, boss. Just a bridle. Let me ride on.’
‘You report back to me. You understand?’
‘Yes, boss.’
‘You don’t fire on anyone unless you’re in mortal danger.’
‘Yes, boss.’
‘Unless your life’s in danger. You understand?’
‘Yes, boss.’
‘And you come back!’
‘Yes, boss.’
Nixon nodded and pointed at the horses.
He lay down and watched King Edward ride out of camp.
They rode to beneath a ridge. They began to climb the upthrust bedding planes of sandstone. They rode past columns of white sandstone.
Jim slowed his horse and got close to Paddy.
‘You see that glint up there in the trees?’
‘Maybe.’
‘It’s a gun.’
‘It could be anything.’
‘I say it’s a gun. I say it’s that black boy that rides with Nixon.’
‘It could be wild blacks,’ said Paddy.
‘Not if the plate is so polished it shines.’
Then the black boy was standing in plain view on the edge of the rock face.
‘I’ll shoot him off there,’ said Paddy.
He unsheathed his rifle but Jim put his arm down across the barrel.
‘You don’t shoot anyone, brother.’ The black boy was gone. Jim’s eyes did not shift from the place he had stood. ‘There could be a troop of police in that gorge under him.’ Jim thought he saw movement higher up in the rocks. ‘How the fuck are they so close?’
But then the black boy was gone and did not return.
They rode beside a stream. Frost smoke lay on the water. Paddy’s gaze crawled over the wilderness – over the slanting gorge walls, brush trees and scattered boulders where nothing moved. They rode through moss covered rocks towards Hell Hole Gorge. Riding and slipping on the stones. The fog lifted and they rode under ragged shredded cloud.
Paddy looked up the escarpment for a shelf. He stopped his horse.
‘Jim.’
‘Yes.’
‘If one of us is caught …’
Jim’s face twisted. ‘I know.’
‘If one of us is captured and the other has a vantage.’
He thought, My dear sweet brother I am sorry. He whispered.
‘I know, brother.’
They would climb a way up the escarpment, but the horses smelt water and they pawed the ground and threw their heads.
They walked the horses to a pool. The horses drank enough for two days. The men tied the horses and filled their skins. Then there was a gunshot, the high whine of a bullet glancing off a rock, and rifles opened up on them. The horses screamed and ripped at the bits and danced at the ends of the reins.
The Kenniffs mounted and rode for a ledge on the west wall and shelter.
A bullet kicked up sand a few yards in front of Jim’s mare. The next bullet ripped Jim’s pants and buried itself in his thigh. They rode hard along the basalt rocks and then the rifle fire was behind them, out of range, and they rode into Hell Hole Gorge. The rifle fire stopped. Two-hundred-foot walls of stone rose steep on both sides, bracing boulders and giant fallen trees, narrowing at the far end to a dark and climbing defile that allowed only one horse and rider to pass.
They walked the horses up through the defile, around the boulders and rills of freezing water, marking the crevices that a man might hide in if he must.
They camped in a cave. Paddy took the bullet out of Jim’s leg with a skinning knife and cauterised the wound with whisky and the hot edge of the blade.
Jim slept with feverish dreams. When he woke it was dark and the stone walls did not admit any kind of light and he did not know the hour nor where he was.
He sat up and breathed deep of the cold night air. Paddy brought him whisky.
‘Drink.’
‘They haunt me, Paddy. Every time I close my eyes they are there. Not saying anything. Just standing there. The men I’ve killed. The women of those men.’
‘Ask them to forgive you, brother. Then they will go away.’
Paddy lit a carbide light to keep away the dark.
Jim shook his head.
‘Brother–’
‘Only till you sleep.’
But late in the night Paddy extinguished the carbide light as a glow in the northwest lit the stones. A rim of fire burnt all the way to Purgatory, shutting off the way to their hideout at Lethbridge’s Pocket and the way out.
God, Paddy thought, Let it rain. Let that fire go out.
Jim woke and saw the fire.
The Skillington boy caught up with the patrol. Nixon met him.
‘Is it done?’
‘They’re riding. All three.’
King Edward brought the patrol to the mouth of the gorge where he reckoned the Kenniffs had gone. There was only one way up.
Nixon turned to Tom Lawton.
‘You know that way?’
‘Maybe. But Jim Kenniff knows every crack in these rocks and where it goes. If he’s gone in there then, like I say, they can put their backs to a wall and fight off an army.’
‘So?’
‘So I’d rather walk down this creek naked with my hands in the air than be the first man who rode into that ravine with a gun.’
Nixon nodded.
King Edward said,
‘We could lose a long time, boss. Days. Weeks if there’s an escape.’
‘So you ride in there,’ said the Skillington boy.
King Edward eyed him.
Nixon had them ride back to the creek in the main gorge and camp behind a high boulder that osbscured them to the west.
Every once in a while King Edward looked up at the rimrock. At a kite leaving its nest. At wind blowing sparrows from a tree. The Skillington boy’s eyes never left that high line. Nixon watched it too, and he watched the Skillington boy and thought, What if there’s something in his fear? He said,
‘Tom, you and Edward ride along the gorge a way to scout. You ride point. Look straight ahead, hands on your reins. You make any kind of signal and you get a bullet in the back.’
Tom took his eyes from the rimrock and took a plug of tobacco and bit off the end and laughed.
‘I swear to God I would not have ridden anywhere near you fools had I known the manner in which you run your operation. First you’re afraid I won’t take you to Paddy and Jim Kenniff. Now you’re afraid I will. Either way you’re gonna be disappointed.’
They rode till dusk when the night turned bitter cold despite the season and a wind rose in the south and rushed through the corridors of stone. King Edward smelt the air and said, ‘They’re camped on a hill here somewhere.’
Tom turned his horse on the stones into the the wind. His eyes darted along the rimrock.
‘So let’s ride the fuck back.’
Nixon watched the high passes. He rolled and lit a cigarette. He smiled.
He said,
‘I remember as a boy, waitin with my mother’s body in the house, waitin for the authorities to come and take her away. I sat watching the night, ready to kill any man or thing that would come at us. I thought every wild black and Irish outlaw was my enemy.’ He raised his eyes. ‘But look at him up there.’
They all saw him – Jim Kenniff standing his horse at the edge of the ridge in the northwest against a wall of freezing wind. Just out of rifle range.
‘Watching the horizon like some kind of sentry,’ said Nixon. ‘What do you imagine he’s watching for? Occasionally he looks down on us. Don’t you think he’s beautiful? Though he’d kill us to a man if he got the chance.’
The Skillington boy squatted low and shivered.
‘What the hell are you talking about, Sergeant?’
Nixon laughed. He drew on his cigarette and looked back at Jim Kenniff.
‘I don’t even know. I don’t know how one is linked to the other. Only that they are joined. The beauty of my mother’s face before it was broken. Me watching the dark. And that man standing his horse up there on the hill. These are moved by the same hand. They are one.’
The Skillington boy shook his head.
‘Sergeant, we should shoot him. I reckon your rifle might just about get him from here, if you moved on a bit. And so, his rifle could reach us.’
Tom Lawton shook his head and spat.
‘You think he doesn’t know we’re here, boy? If you rode down that gorge he’d disappear. Then you’d see him again just a little further on. Then you’d go further and you’d see him again.’
‘And then?’
‘You wouldn’t see him.’
‘And then?’
‘You’d hear a shot and you’d go back to Injune draped over your horse facedown. If there’s any one of us left to lead it.’
Nixon sat without a fire with a bottle to his lips. When the bottle was empty he let it roll down the rock floor into the creek.
The Skillington boy had not rested. Nixon looked at him and smiled. Tom was watching north down the gorge.
Tom said, ‘Look, boy. Look hard at the ridge.’
There, at a long decline on the western scarp, a pitch-black line and a suspicion of light over it, and something was moving.
Nixon squinted at it.
‘Wind in the bushes.’
‘Or men creeping,’ said Tom Lawton.
‘Should we send up a white flare?’ said the Skillington boy. ‘Those Injune policeman can’t be far away tonight. They’ll come to our aid. They’ll see it and they’ll come. Or at least the light will scare off what’s over there.’
Nixon shook his head.
‘It’s your fear moving out there.’
‘I can see something.’
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