“Any guns in the house?”
She sucked in air and tried vainly to speak. “I—uh…. Oh, Luke!”
Luke looked helplessly at Martin.
Martin shrugged as he stood up. “I married one of ’em, and after all these years I still ain’t figured her out yet. You’re on your own. Think I’ll get my gun, though. How about a holiday at Sugarlea?”
Luke nodded. “Sorry, Marty.”
“Sorry? Naw. Let’s give it a burl. I haven’t had any good fun for a couple years now, not since that cattle thief.” He left Luke to figure out for himself what Meg was trying to say and returned to the little room Luke had provided him at the back of the house; sparsely furnished, but comfortable—the kind of life Luke was accustomed to, as was Martin as well.
He generally didn’t carry his sidearm when he was close in to civilization, but Sugarlea didn’t sound too civilized just now. He pulled it out of the valise where he’d tucked it as his train approached Brisbane. Gardell. Gardell. Nope. Couldn’t place it. He was rather surprised “Vickers” wasn’t the enemy named. Maybe she was mistaken in the name. He dug around in his valise for the extra shells, just in case.
———
Samantha listened to the banjo clock force its measured beat onto the murky silence. “Deathwatch beetles. Ye ever hear the deathwatch beetles?”
“No.” Mr. Sloan, asprawl as usual in his chair, could not have appeared less interested.
“They make a tiny tapping sound in the walls or woodwork. Some say their ticking portends a death in the house. Others say ’tis only silly insects beating their heads against the wood. I suppose ye’re to believe whichever strikes yer fancy.”
“I’ll take the silly bug theory.”
“And meself as well.” She glanced for the eighty-seventh time at the banjo clock. “’Tis past ten and not a peep. Do ye suppose I misread him and he intends only to frighten ye?”
“He’s coming. And not to say ‘boo,’ either.” His dark eyes watched her a moment, as if seeking some sign. “Are you sure you won’t leave? Your sisters are safe. You should be, too.”
“Abner Gardell has aught against me. I dinnae think he poses danger for any save yerself.”
He studied her with those menacing black eyes. “I think you’re right.” Samantha expected to see some sort of fear; she saw only a cold and flinty grimness. He was quite ready to die or to deal out death, and that look about him frightened her more than fear would have.
He stood up deliberately, almost casually, and cradled his shotgun on one arm. He picked up the ungainly pistol on his desk and tucked it away somewhere at the small of his back. “Stay out of harm’s way, and don’t let the place burn down while I’m gone.”
“Where are ye going?”
“Out. I never in my life sat down to wait for trouble, and I can’t now.” Before she could phrase an effective protest he was through the door. Gone.
She was alone.
Now she must reach out to the desk and pick up her own pistol, the gun with which she was to defend herself—explicit orders—and perhaps help defend her former master and Sugarlea—implicitly expressed. She laid her hand on the cool steel and felt it suck the warmth out of her fingers. She wrapped around the unyielding grip and lifted. Its sheer weight startled her, despite the fact that she must have picked up this very weapon a dozen times already today. Mr. Sloan had been thorough in his instruction—so he wouldn’t have to fear the troops behind him, he said. She laid it down again and folded her hands in her lap.
The clock ticked. Ticked. Ticked. Deathwatch?
Someone pounded on the front door. Samantha thought she was frozen in fear, but apparently not. She was standing at the door with that pistol in her hand and she couldn’t remember rising, let alone picking up the loathsome thing. She hastened down the hall to the parlor. Outside the window stood Mr. Wiggins’ old roan and another horse. That meant …
She opened the door an inch.
Mr. Vinson stood there smiling. “We’ve come at your sister’s request to escort you to safety.”
“We?” Samantha glanced at the stranger draped against a porch post. He dressed like a pastoralist and looked so casual leaning there, but the pistol in his covered holster betrayed him. He was as dangerous as Mr. Sloan, and probably just as ready to fight. Or kill.
Mr. Vinson was carrying his weapon, too—a big black Bible tucked under his arm. “This is Martin Frobel. When I first came to Australia, to a tiny congregation near Torrens Creek, the Frobels took me in. Got me started. Old friend, and trustworthy.”
Samantha nodded at the man.
Luke dipped his head toward nowhere in particular. “I assume Gardell’s not appeared yet. I would have been here sooner but I had to find Burriwi. Burriwi’s gone ahead, scouting. Wouldn’t let me come along; said he couldn’t hear anything when I was with him.”
“I don’t know if I should trust ye—all the harm ye’ve done him legally….”
Luke looked perplexed, a reaction Samantha would not have expected. “Done to him? I’ve achieved nothing! It’s one of the major reasons I doubt that my efforts here are truly God’s will.”
“Mr. Vinson, when ye—”
“Luke. Please.”
“Luke, he was near ruined before ye stripped away his indentures. Ye did nae see his face, as I did …” She shook her head, near tears. Too much was happening too quickly.
“Whatever magic you think I did with indenture legalities, it’s not mine. I tried, but I couldn’t file because I was not a party directly wronged.”
“But who … ?” A light dawned. “Byron Vickers! I’ll wager he went straight from Cairns to Brisbane.”
The stockman spoke in a warm baritone not the least in keeping with that cold pistol at his side. “Vickers. He’s the one. Bashed the ear of every judge in Brisbane, telling what a slave merchant is Sloan, bad-mouthing him.”
“Mr. Vinson. Luke. Explain the sins of the fathers.”
“It’s a phrase from Old Testament law—punishment for the sins of the fathers being visited on the children. I believe it refers to iniquities against God himself. Why?”
“Abner Gardell used those very words this morning; ‘sins of the fathers.’ Do ye know the man?”
“I met him very recently. That’s why I think I can talk sense to him, assuming Burriwi can find him.”
“’Tis why meself shall remain here. ’Tis possible I can talk to him, maybe stay his hand. Where is Somebody’s Tower?”
“Charter’s Towers? West of Townsville.”
“I believe, until recently, Mr. Gardell mined gold there. He feels Mr. Butts would still be alive if he’d followed his original intentions of bedeviling Mr. Sloan years ago, when first he discovered his existence.”
Luke snorted. “John would still be alive now had he allowed me to follow through on that restraining order. But he was completely convinced of Sloan’s integrity.”
“I perceive Mr. Sloan may have misidentified his enemies.” Samantha stepped back and swung wide the door. “Please come in.”
The stockman lurched erect. “Luke, I think I’ll prowl around the edges a little. Heard a lot about this place.”
Luke nodded and walked inside as the pastoralist turned and headed down the sloping lawn at a casual saunter. The light of Meg’s life sat down at the kitchen table as Samantha made lunch. He thumbed through his weapon, mostly the front end of the book, muttering occasionally, nodding.
The day creaked along. The stockman, Mr. Frobel, came in for lunch and went out again. Samantha tried to bind herself to dinner preparations, but she kept leaping up to pace the house. At a bit past three she stopped the banjo clock pendulum to still its infernal ticking.
At four she built the fire up high. It made the kitchen excessively hot but she wanted tea. She put on a lamb stew for dinner; not only would it feed just about any number, it would keep on the back of the stove and taste all the better for delay.
The tea, though, was the r
aison d’etre for her fire. Here was a drop of sanity in a sea of fear, a bit of the familiar in a world of chaos. She lingered over tea.
Near dusk, Burriwi appeared at the fly screen. Except for a plain headband holding his curly hair up and back, he was utterly unclad; yet he looked not the least naked or out of place. He had just walked or run many miles, no doubt, but he breathed and spoke with ease; he wasn’t even sweaty. He leaned on a long decorated spear. “Fat Dog’s nephews say he came off the mountains this morning. I looked around up there and he’s gone. He’s down here among whitefellers.”
“Seen Sloan?”
“Now and again. Didn’t show myself to him.”
From the south side of the yard came Mr. Frobel’s shout: “Luke! Heads up!”
Two guns fired out there, a large one and a larger one.
Burriwi disappeared, literally; one moment he was standing there propped up by his spear, and the next instant he was gone.
“Marty!” Mr. Vinson called. “Where is he?”
“Coming!”
Samantha heard horses—no, horses and a wagon. They were charging full tilt up the lane toward the house. The guns roared again. She snatched up her pistol from the kitchen table. The office window crashed. Had Mr. Gardell just gained entrance? His Bible still in his hand, Luke raced down the hall. Samantha followed, running.
She heard a kitchen window smashing, but before she could call out to Luke, Linnet’s bedroom window shattered. The wagon clattered around the far end of the house. Samantha smelled coal oil. A kerosene lamp must have spilled in there. The pungent fumes assaulted her nose even out here in the hall. She paused beside Luke at the front door.
She still held this pistol in her slippery, sweaty hands, but at whom would she aim it? Mr. Gardell? She couldn’t. No. Mr. Sloan’s troops here were useless. Another window crashed on the north side.
Out the open front door she saw Mr. Gardell for the first time. He was just coming around the end of the house, shouting to his team of horses. He carried in one hand a smoking, flaring torch. From down at the end of the yard, Mr. Frobel blasted away again and again.
The far horse squealed and lunged high. It lurched aside into its teammate and dropped in its traces. Now the other horse was being dragged down screaming. The toppling animals slammed into the front porch posts and somehow just kept moving, a ton of squirming, kicking, flailing disaster.
The wagon ripped free of its front axle and came tipping right toward Samantha. She wanted to move faster—her legs weren’t carrying her out of the way quickly enough. Luke slammed into her, dragged her to the floor, crushed her with his weight.
She felt the gun in her hand kick as it went off, but she hardly heard it—not for all the other horrible smashing noise. She knew when the wagon hit the house, for the floor beneath her shuddered. After one final creaking crash, silence.
“Luke? Luke, boy! You still with us?” Mr. Frobel’s voice came from somewhere out front.
The weight on her stirred, shifted. She let go of that pistol lest it fire itself again. Luke rolled aside. Where was Mr. Gardell? She groped for the gun. She’d best hold on to it, at least for a while. By the time she was on her feet, Luke was outside.
It wasn’t easy for him, getting outside. Debris from the splintered wagon box blocked the doorway; he had to climb over and through the wreckage. The porch roof had collapsed, forcing him to creep beneath it.
The living horse struggled mightily beneath the dead one.
Mr. Frobel waved his gun at the mess. “Hated to shoot the horse, but the bloody galah was gonna fire the house. I stomped the torch out. No danger now.”
“He’s gone?”
“Saw a glimpse of him ducking into the forest off that way. Quick as a cat, that feller, for as old as he looks. Didn’t seem hurt. Or repentant.”
Luke stared off at the forest wall. He grimaced. “Let’s dig this horse out. Then … well, I don’t know what.”
Samantha clambered over and under splintered wreckage. With only half her attention, she performed her assigned task of sitting on the horse’s head while the two strong men cut its dead companion free and rolled it aside.
Somewhere in that deadly forest, two men stalked each other. She knew them both. No matter who won, she would mourn. She could not win. The woes plaguing her beloved Erin were not limited to the Emerald Isle. They were here with her, now.
There is no such thing as escape to peace. Perhaps, there is no such thing as peace.
Chapter Twenty-four
Fire and Fury
Burriwi particularly relished that breath of time between day and night that is neither, yet both. With clucks and murmurs the birds of day settled themselves, as with rustling and flitting the creatures of night began to stir. The air paused between its rhythms of sea breeze and land breeze. The forest for these few moments dimmed without turning black; it gave him the time needed to reattune his senses from day-brightness to night-darkness.
He dropped to a comfortable squat and leaned his back against a plum tree. With noisy flaps and flibbers, a fruit bat arrived overhead and commenced its breakfast. Burriwi thought of Luke Vinson’s first encounter with fruit bats and smiled to himself. Whitefellers have the strangest attitudes about bats. Luke spent half that night telling Burriwi about vampires, some doctor named Frank Stine who tried to be God…. Sometime Burriwi would have the opportunity to repeat Luke’s own stories to him, word for word. Luke and his books. Burriwi smiled again.
A soft patter of rain began as the day dribbled to an end. This night would soon be here; the rain would dull Burriwi’s ability to hear and the darkness was robbing him of vision. He must be especially careful.
Here came Luke up the path between the house and stable. Luke. Burriwi could feel him without following with his ears, though Luke made so much noise any child could tell you exactly where he was. The man with him, that Martin Frobel, made much less noise and bothered the spirits of the forest hardly at all. The man was a native of the wide open land out beyond Woop Woop; you could feel it in him, that different spirit all the outback natives, black or white, shared.
How strange, this. Burriwi could still discern the spirits, those of men and those not of men. But he no longer felt at one with them. Now that he had cast his lot with the great God of Luke’s book, and with that God’s Son, he was in some way separated from the old familiar realities beyond sight and sound. Whitefellers had erected a dog fence mostway across Australia, they said—to keep the dingoes out of the sheep. That’s how Burriwi felt, like the dingoes must feel; they could see the sheep but they couldn’t get to them. Was his own spirit somehow changed? He must discuss this new thing with Luke. Or perhaps with Abner Gardell. That man understood the bush.
Gardell versus Sloan. A difficult choice. Burriwi might well be called upon to declare his loyalty to one or the other. Sloan, while not generous, did provide tucker and sometimes turps. Sloan had given both his crocodiles to the clan when by rights he could have kept at least portions of each. But Gardell was much closer in spirit.
Luke and his Martin friend were far enough ahead. Burriwi picked up his spear and stood. Was the cook coming? No. She must be remaining at the house. She was a spirit at odds with the voices of the forest! She didn’t just chill the spirits; she antagonized them, and they her.
The rain came harder and louder now. Gunfire erupted up by the stables—a shotgun blast, a large-calibre pistol, another shotgun blast. The shotgun would be Sloan’s and it was spent now. He must have found Gardell.
Burriwi shinned up the poinciana tree just north of the stable area. From here he could see all the open lot, not to mention most of the forest wall around. This high up, he was relatively safe from wild shots.
Sloan, behind Sheba’s hardwood manger, tossed his shotgun aside and yanked a pistol from his belt at the small of his back. There was Gardell, behind the big pandanus near the tin water tank. Bent over double, Sloan scurried like a crab down the length of the stable, from mange
r to manger. He dived around the far end beyond Gypsy and fired wildly at the water tank, three or four fast shots. In gracefully curved streams, water spewed from the neat round holes in the tank.
Gardell stepped out just long enough to return a couple shots and ducked back to safety. “More than time for the piper to be paid, Sloan. Your daddy left you a fine legacy of debt. A life for a life. Too bad you can’t pay two lives, for that’s what’s owed. Maybe even three, if we count the Butts fellow. How does that go … ? McGonigan’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”
“You’re sick, Gardell. That generation’s dead and gone. I’m not my father’s keeper any more than I’m my brother’s.”
Luke’s voice cut in from twenty feet behind Gardell. “It’s God who said that, Abner, and you’re not God. He’s the only one can judge. Not you.”
Gardell cried out, “Leave us alone, Vinson!”
Simultaneously, Sloan shouted, “You interfere and I’ll be on your hammer just the same as his. You’ve done enough, Vinson.”
Undaunted in the least, Luke called, “‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ Abner. Let Him take care of it.”
“I’m doing God’s will. The sins of the fathers are visited on the children unto the fourth generation.”
Sloan popped out and fired twice, his pistol steadied in both hands. Was he shooting at Gardell or at the voice of the preacher in the forest? The gathering gloom of dusk dulled his vision; from his high angle, Burriwi couldn’t really tell.
Luke’s open-country companion swore and said something about being a fool. The forest rustled above the patter of the rain; its voices gasped.
And here stood Luke, like a shag on a rock, out in the clearing. He carried his book. No gun, no spear, not even a stone to throw. He stepped into the thirty-yard-long clearing between Sloan and the pandanus palm behind the water tank. His book! Even from the height of this tree, Burriwi could feel the hostility in the two white-feller adversaries. They were determined to kill and there stood Luke weaponless but for his book. The boy was a bit strange (why count teeth?), but Burriwi would not have guessed he was so utterly foolish and careless of life.
Code of Honor (Australian Destiny Book #1) Page 23
