Jem half-consciously lifted the whip beside him and whirled it round his head, then brought it down in a sharp crack beside the coach. The horses picked up their rate of trotting. They’d make what speed they could now, Jem decided, though the horses couldn’t sustain a canter yet.
Would Cobb & Co take the cost of the poor dead horse from Paw’s wages? Sometimes the company made the Whip pay for a horse lost or a coach damaged, but Paw had never lost a horse before . . .
‘Like me to take the reins for this stretch, lad? It looks straight enough.’
‘Yes please, sir,’ said Jem gratefully. His arms felt like they’d been pulled from their sockets, his shoulders ached, his wrists ached. His back might have been stepped on by an elephant.
He watched as the other man held the reins tentatively, but with the growing confidence of a man who knew horses better than his own boots, and who had been watching Paw and Jem at the reins too.
Trees passed, showing white trunks in the growing light. The first kookaburra called in the dawn, then almost as if a blanket had been swept off their cage a thousand birds lifted song to the morning sky. It shone pale blue now, though the sun had yet to slide above the horizon, washed fresh by the night’s mist.
Jem lifted his face to feel the first ray of sunlight as it poured gold across the land. He loved this moment, every morning, a fresh day dawning, even this morning, when his body felt as heavy as a lead toy soldier.
The horses began to labour. Mr Smith let them slow to a pace they could sustain. ‘You’d better take over now, lad. Too many twists and turns for me. Are you up to it?’
Jem nodded grimly. His wrist and back still screamed with pain, but he could go on. He would go on.
He took the reins, using both hands now, unlike Paw who always handled the reins one-handed. Mr Smith took the bugle, then pulled out Paw’s pocket watch again. He said nothing as he looked at its face, but Jem knew the train was due to leave shortly after sunrise.
He glanced at the man beside him. ‘You should have taken one of the horses, sir.’
Mr Smith shrugged. ‘Maybe I bet wrong this time. All that fresh air and the stars went to my head. It’s been ten years since I’ve seen the stars.’
‘What was it like in prison, sir?’ Jem ventured, his eyes on the road.
‘About as bad as you think it is, then a bit worse. They call Darlinghurst Gaol Starvinghurst — bread and water most meals, or a scrag end of meat boiled with half a potato. I would have starved, too, if my sisters hadn’t bribed the gaolers to give me food. Luckily it doesn’t take much to bribe a gaoler.’
He gave a bitter laugh. ‘The gaolers even take away your spoon at night so you can’t sharpen it on the stones of the floor, to find your freedom in death. A four feet by eight feet cell, dripping water down the walls, an iron door and a six-inch slit for air. Straw on the ground, and rats running over your face. Can’t hear the sounds from outside, the walls are so thick. Can’t hear enough to talk to the man in the next cell. All you can hear are the screams sometimes, when they’re whipping a man in the courtyard.’
‘Did you stay in the cell always, sir?’ How could a man have survived for ten years like that? Jem wondered.
‘Most of the time. The strongest men work in the quarry, cutting stone to build more of the prison. I managed that for almost three years. Fresh air enough, and sunlight too, but hard work and starvation kill you. I collapsed coming out of my cell one day, so they threw me back in. That was the end of my quarry work.’
‘What did you do then, sir?’
‘Nothing. Day after day of watching the mould grow on stone walls and sometimes a cockroach scuttling in the corner. Oh, sometimes I’d dream of the stars or the moon, or even of the bed and the meal I’d have, if I managed to live out my thirty-two years. But mostly I did nothing. Only Sunday was different, finding out who’d died in the night when they took us for a shuffle across the courtyard to the chapel. And whippings, of course — made a nice change for the gaolers, the whippings. They knew just how hard to strike to keep a man conscious. Some of us had to watch, to keep us tame, and all of us had to hear. There were the hangings, too. Crowds came to watch a hanging. We didn’t get to see them — they were just outside the gate. But we knew. If a prisoner had his number stamped on his uniform, instead of sewn, you knew he was due to be hanged. Couldn’t speak to them. You learned to speak with your eyes, to say goodbye.’
‘You . . . you knew people who were hanged, sir?’
‘Oh yes. Poor John and Tom Clarke were hanged at Darlinghurst — just young lads, and never killed anyone, though the court said they did. John Dunne was just nineteen when they hanged him.’
‘Couldn’t you even speak to them?’ whispered Jem.
‘Speak a word and the warders bury you alive for a day and night, no food, no sounds.’ Mr Smith looked into the distance. ‘They chain you, of course, coming or going to chapel or going to the quarry. Even chained me on the day they let me out, as if I’d make a run for it minutes before I was legally free. Chains as thick as my thumb around your wrists and ankles. You can’t walk in them, just shuffle, can’t even scratch your head.’
He looked as the sky, the trees, the shadow dapples, as if he could swallow it, as if he never wanted to look away. ‘There’s a narrow space between each of the barracks. You get to shuffle round it all in a line. Keep step, the warders yell at you. Keep step, 86, or 152. You’re a number in prison, not a man. There’s a high stone wall around it all, so all you ever see are other stone walls, and it’s mostly in shade too. A scrap of sunlight to walk in was as precious as a loaf of bread. But they never let you see the stars, lad,’ he added softly. ‘Oh, a glimpse through the slit in your cell sometimes, but never the vast wheeling glory of the sky.
‘Your skin turns prison white. Your voice gets the prison whine, from prison dust and mould in your throat. You crave sunlight. You crave meat, or proper bread. You crave most of all a word of friendship, a smile or a hand that is kind.’
‘Sir . . . sir, I’m sorry . . .’ That’s what Mr Smith is going back to, thought Jem, if he misses the train this morning. And he was going to miss it, because the team could not go faster. Even if Paw had been driving, with all his skill, he could not make exhausted horses rise to a brisker trot.
Mr Smith blinked, as if he had just remembered Jem was there. ‘I’m sorry, lad. I shouldn’t have spoken of this to you. It’s not your fault. Prison visitors get shown the polished floors, and proper stew in a pannikin. They never get to see the truth — and a man who manages to survive to freedom doesn’t talk, if he has any sense, in case they slam him up again to keep him quiet. But the other prisoners let me alone, as least. I was the bushranger who shot a constable.’
Jem eased the reins as little as he dared as they approached a corner. Speeding up and slowing down were extra tiring for the horses. Mr Smith blew the bugle to warn anyone who might be round the bend.
‘You said you’d never shot anyone,’ Jem said, as the sound died away, and the track lay empty in front of them again.
Mr Smith leaned back, the bugle in his hand. He suddenly looked exhausted, not just from weariness, but as if he had given up. ‘Maybe I should have said I didn’t mean to shoot anyone. I just meant to frighten him a bit, and he wasn’t hurt bad. A bushranger doesn’t need to be a good shot, lad. He just needs to make people think he is.’
‘What else does a bushranger need?’
‘The sense to stop being a bushranger,’ said Mr Smith shortly. ‘Hardly any one of us makes old bones. I’d arranged to go, to give it all up and leave for San Francisco with Bess before that fight at Sherwin Flats. Would have come back for her in a few days, too.’
‘But you married someone else?’
‘I did, and I loved her too. Not that we married officially, because Kate was married to someone else — and that’s not a story I’ll be telling you. Lad, one thing I’ve learned in life. There’s always a second chance, and a third and fourth and te
nth, and if you have any sense you take every chance that comes along to put your mistakes right. Kate and I nearly made it up in Queensland. We had our son and kept a general store.’
He gave a wry smile. ‘The trick when you have a lot of . . . books . . . and don’t want folks to know you have them is to have a business that makes just a bit less money than you want to spend. Don’t look too flash or spend too much too soon.’
‘No one suspected you, sir?’
‘They did not.’ The voice was relaxed now, as if the man beside him had given himself up to his fate. He didn’t even glance at Paw’s pocket watch again. ‘Reckon half our neighbours had heart attacks when I was arrested. I was such a nice man, they thought. It was the New South Wales police who tracked me down, arrested me and brought me back. I believed I was safe in another colony, you see. I wasn’t an outlaw in Queensland. But once they’d fetched me back no one was going to let me go.’
Jem nodded. Tiredness had overcome him, too, as suddenly as if someone had thrown a blanket over him. But he had to stay awake, alert.
He had to deliver Mr Smith to the train in time and to freedom. And he could then get Paw to a doctor and Mrs Pickle to comfort. No matter what the pain he had to keep on going.
‘Why did you become a bushranger, sir?’ he asked, as much to stop himself gradually losing focus and nodding off as from genuine curiosity.
Mr Smith shrugged. ‘Boredom, and a dash of envy. I was hoeing mangelwurzels for fodder on a small farm while the rich squatters rode past on their fine horses.’
Mr Smith was talking for the sake of it too, Jem realised. Or maybe because after today he’d have no one to talk to for another twenty-two years, locked in his tiny cell.
‘I began with stealing horses down in Victoria under another name, so if I was caught I wouldn’t shame my family. And I was caught, too. I was caught and escaped, and served my time and earned a ticket-of-leave, then changed my name again and took up bushranging. At least, I thought, if I was going to be banged up it may as well be for a good prize, not a small one. Not that I thought I’d be caught, even though I’d been caught before. No thief in this world probably thinks they’re going to be caught. And you know what?’
‘What, sir?’
‘We’re all of us wrong. We may get away with it for a time — and we feel on top of the world when we do. We think: I’m smarter than them. I can outride the troopers any day and outfox them too. Oh, it’s a wonderful feeling, while it lasts. But the day comes when the troopers track you down. Ben Hall — ah, you know about him? The famous outlaw Ben Hall. He was my friend, and he was giving up the bushranging too. Bought a ticket to America. But there’s always someone or something that will give you away. They shot Ben Hall while he was sleeping, all peaceful like, thinking he was safe.’
‘What was he like?’ asked Jem, nudging the team to skirt a tethered sheep grazing on the edge of the road.
‘A good man. I had no reason to turn to theft, except having too little sense to build more in my life than what I’d been given without breaking the law, but Ben was sent to prison for a crime he didn’t do by a crooked trooper who was after poor Ben’s wife and jealous of his farm. Ben came back from prison to find his wife gone and all his stock rounded up, left in the yards and dead from thirst. It put a rage in him, that did, but it didn’t last, and nor did Ben.’
Mr Smith shook his head. ‘Poor Ben. He caught the troopers who were chasing him once. They’d have shot him on sight, but all he did to them was make them undress, then tie each other to the trees by the road to wait till someone passed by to untie them.’
Jem blinked. ‘Naked, sir?’
‘Naked as the day they were born, and I wish I’d been there to see it. Ben never took a penny from a poor man, nor a watch nor necklace that someone valued. But I was lucky — they took me prisoner instead of shooting me and now I’ve got a second chance.’ Mr Smith grinned. ‘Or maybe it’s my tenth chance, or my twentieth. I’ve had half a dozen names too, lad. But this time when they lock me up, there won’t be any other chances. Lad, look out!’
The coach was turning a corner and there, in the middle of the road ahead of them, was a farm cart loaded with last summer’s pumpkins.
There was no time to stop. Jem pulled on the reins to slow the horses slightly, as well as to get them to veer to one side. Mr Smith grabbed the bugle and blew it hard.
Perhaps the farmer heard it or the pounding hooves behind. He urged his horse faster too, moving to the other side of the road. They passed with inches to spare.
Jem let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.
‘Well done, lad.’
Badly done, thought Jem. He shouldn’t be going so fast. He was putting all the other passengers in danger, and the horses too.
But the road was straight ahead of them for a while, and clear. And there was a chance. Just a chance, though he didn’t know if Mr Smith knew it.
Sometimes — just sometimes — the train arrived late, if there’d been floods or even snow. Jem didn’t think it had been cold enough for snow, nor wet enough for floods, either. But just maybe, up in the Highlands, the train had been stopped, and the timetable changed . . .
They could keep up this speed till the next turn. Jem glanced at a farm house on the right, smoke sifting like flour from its chimney and a whiff of fresh bread. His stomach lurched. It had been a long time since the pasties. And even longer since he had slept . . .
Another corner. Mr Smith sounded the bugle again, and kept on blowing. Jem slowed for this one and a good thing too, for geese cackled as they fled across the road. The leaders tossed their heads, but Jem managed to keep them steady.
The bugle was a constant now, but Jem was used to it, though on all his other journeys it had been he who had sounded it for Paw. A milk cart lumbered along behind a sag-bellied horse.
They were nearing Goulburn. The road here snaked through the valley behind tree-topped Mount Gray, past substantial stone houses and slab huts, and others even more temporary, walled and roofed with stringybark. Pigs snorted at a swill-filled trough, ignoring the speeding coach. Small children ran through orchards of bare-branched trees or through gardens of leeks and cabbages to wave as they rolled by.
Jem was vaguely aware of Juanita behind him, waving back at them out the window. The only strangers most farm children ever saw came on the coach from Cobb & Co. A dog bounded out of a cottage door and chased the coach wheels till it was left behind, panting.
Jem glanced at the man beside him. Mr Smith almost seemed to be holding his breath, peering up at the sky as if trying to glimpse the stream from a train. Jem gazed back at the road. Another turn, another, and suddenly there was the river, mud brown with a touch of green, as Goulburn’s refuse flowed into it.
His hands were numb, but somehow he kept hold of the reins. His body screamed at him. He ignored it.
They were nearly there.
Jem let his eyes rise from the road for a moment. The train station was just over the bridge. If the train hadn’t left they’d see smoke. But there was none . . .
Then suddenly there was.
‘Smoke,’ said Mr Smith tightly. Not chimney smoke, but the dark grey puffs of the steam train. Nor were they moving. The train was still there! But if it was building up steam, it would leave any minute now.
There was the bridge: rough-sawn wood over stone supports. Mr Smith blew the bugle again but a cart with three crates of hens, all clucking furiously, was already beginning to trundle over the bridge towards them. Jem reluctantly reined in the horses, till slowly, slowly, slowly the cart rumbled past.
‘A curse on every hen who ever lived,’ muttered Mr Smith.
Jem cracked the whip twice above the exhausted horses, who were panting and blowing hard, with foam flecks all down their chests. Yet still they plunged forward at the signal, clattering over the bridge and down the street.
Mr Smith blew the bugle once again, then kept on blowing it. People on the footpath
turned to stare. Women peered from windows.
Jem cracked the whip. He let the horses have their heads now as the team broke into a last desperate gallop toward the station courtyard. Jem was vaguely conscious of other vehicles, dogs, and men on horseback moving quickly out of their way.
Was the smoke from the steam train moving yet? The breeze blew so strongly it was impossible to tell. He didn’t pull at the reins till they were nearly at the station. The horses wheeled inside then stopped at a touch, their heads down, rivulets of sweat pouring down heaving sides.
Jem stared at them, realising what he had done.
He had driven the night mail coach to Goulburn. And out beyond the station house he could hear a vast hissing and snorting, as if a dragon were held captive.
The train was there! Freedom for Mr Smith!
CHAPTER 12
AT THE STATION
‘Run!’ yelled Jem.
‘Not without my trunk.’ Mr Smith clambered down. Jem followed him, clumsy with his numb hands and aching back, as Mr Smith lurched stiffly to the luggage and struggled with the knots.
‘Sir, get on the train! It’s better to be free —’
‘Fetch a porter,’ interrupted Mr Smith. ‘Hurry!’
But a man in a blue porter’s uniform was already wheeling a trolley towards them. ‘You’re cutting it fine, sir. Stationmaster doesn’t delay the train for anything. Lucky for you there was a cow on the line. Wouldn’t move till it was whacked on the hindquarters and would you know it wandered back just as they were about to start again? Here, I’ll help you down with that trunk.’
‘Be careful — it’s heavy — what are you doing?’ Mr Smith yelled at Jem.
‘Getting the mailbags. Sir, just get on that train. Please! They’ll get your trunk onto it if they can.’
Jem turned his back to him to haul the big canvas bags off the luggage rack. He was cold and stiff and every part of him ached from fingers to feet, but he’d made it! If he could get the mailbags on the train the company wouldn’t have to pay a penalty. Paw had never let the mail be late yet! He found Juanita beside him.
Night Ride into Danger Page 9