Wimmera Gold

by Peter Corris

  'What are you driving at?'

  Perry sighed. 'Cruelty is in my nature, Mr Bracken. Unless you tell me where the gold is I will subject you to quite terrible pain. As I say, my ancestors have flayed people alive and watched unmoved while infants starved. Do you imagine I care about the life of a fat lawyer?'

  Bracken blotted the sweat on his forehead with a handkerchief. 'Y … you said you didn't intend to hurt me.'

  'That was earlier. I asked you where the gold was and you didn't answer me. Your silence in the face of that question changed everything.'

  'I don't believe you. You are obviously an educated man, judging from your speech. You can't possibly mean to torture me,'

  'I prefer not to, but I will, believe me.' Perry darted forward, grabbed Bracken's handkerchief and stuffed it in the lawyer's gaping mouth. He pulled him to his feet, forced him into a few stumbling steps and wrenched his jacket from his shoulders. Perry tore a sleeve from the coat and bound Bracken's wrists before thrusting him down and bending him over the back of the chair. Bracken's screams were muffled by the cloth in his mouth. Perry opened a clasp knife and held the tip of the blade above the burning wick of the nearest lantern. When the metal was glowing he presented the knife to the straining, weeping eyes of Daniel Bracken.

  'You will tell me everything I want to know about the whereabouts of the gold?'

  Bracken's head jerked in a desperate affirmative.

  'Is it here, in your house?'

  A shake of the head was Bracken's answer.

  Perry reflected. Where would the lawyer be likely to keep the booty? In the bank? Probably not. His experience of gamblers and other chancers was that they liked to keep their windfalls close to hand, as if fearful they might wake up one morning and find them gone. His mind flicked back to the offices of Gladehill & Browne, particularly to Browne's inner sanctum. There was something … It came to him suddenly. He moved the hot tip of the knife almost close enough to singe Bracken's beard. 'Mr Bracken,' he said softly. 'Is the gold in a safe in your office?'

  The sigh that escaped Bracken almost pushed the handkerchief from his mouth. His head nodded vigorously and then dropped in defeat. Perry laid the knife aside and went across to a sideboard where there was a drinks tray. He poured a measure of whiskey into the glass and brought it back to where Bracken was bent over the chair. He pulled the handkerchief from the lawyer's mouth, and half-lifting him, guided him into the chair. 'Drink this. You'll feel better. Your worries are over.'

  Fumbling, Bracken took the glass in his bound hands and lifted it to his mouth. He gulped the spirit down and a little colour returned to his face. 'What are you going to do?'

  'I'm going to go to your office and take the gold from the safe.'

  Bracken snorted. 'You won't get through the street door.'

  'You'll be good enough to give me the key then, since you have nothing to fear.'

  Bracken pulled out his key ring and began to detach a key. Perry shook his head. 'I'll take them all, if you please. You're a pretty resourceful fellow. In your place I'd try to pass off the wrong key.'

  Bracken handed the key ring to Perry, who pocketed it. 'You've committed about six serious offences already, my friend. I wouldn't give a penny for your hide. I still say you won't get into my office.'

  Perry reached into his waistcoat pocket, took out his card case, opened it and flipped one of the cards into Bracken's lap. The lawyer turned it over and let out a yelp. 'My god, that was you!'

  'I've had the privilege of an interview with your Mr Browne and, by the greatest good fortune, I said I'd see you at ten o'clock tomorrow morning. You won't be there, of course, but I think I'll wait in your office.'

  'You bloody black devil. What d'you plan to do with me?'

  'Make you comfortable for the night, Mr Bracken. You've been extremely cooperative.'

  Perry found a quantity of the mixture Bracken had taken to relieve his tooth pain. He persuaded the lawyer to accept a large dose along with several solid measures of brandy. When he was almost unconscious Perry tied him to his own bed, permitting him a little movement but no possibility of escape. He contrived a gag which allowed Bracken to breathe but muffled any attempt he might make to yell. He left him sleeping peacefully in an almost natural position. He waited until there was no movement in the vicinity before leaving the house and returning his dogcart to the hiring station. He caught a cab back to the Lancaster Hotel and spent the night in comfort. In the morning he paid his bill and left the hotel, to the distress of the staff he had been liberally tipping.

  At ten o'clock he entered the office of Gladehill & Browne accompanied by the building's porter, who was carrying one of Perry's imposing cases.

  'Some papers for Mr Bracken to look at. I trust he's in?'

  'Er, not yet, Prince,' the head clerk mumbled.

  'I'll wait in his office.' Perry swept into the room, instructed the porter to return in thirty minutes and closed the door behind him. His entrance had momentarily paralysed those in the outer office but he had no certainty that this would last. He might have very little time. His pulse was racing but his fingers were deft. He opened the safe, removed the two heavy objects wrapped in canvas and inspected them briefly. Satisfied, he put them in his case and seated himself behind Bracken's desk. He was in that position twenty-five minutes later, reading a newspaper, when William Browne knocked and came into the room.

  'Good morning, Mr Browne. Your Mr Bracken is a trifle late, I fear.'

  'I'm sorry. Perhaps someone else can be of assistance.'

  'No, no.' Perry folded the paper. 'Perhaps Mr Bracken has not yet recovered from his bad turn yesterday. Please, Mr Browne, have him send a message to the Lancaster to arrange a mutually suitable time. Ah, here's the porter. I must be off.'

  Perry left, striding ahead of the porter whom he tipped as the case was handed up into the cab which had been instructed to wait. Perry directed the driver to Bracken's address. When he was inside he took off his stylish hat and coat and flung them down on a chair. Several hours of playing the nabob, along with the tension of acquiring the gold under the noses of a set of lawyers, had been a strain. He stripped to the waist in Bracken's bathroom, washed his hands and face and rinsed the pomade from his hair. He used the lawyers razor to remove his moustache and beard. When he entered Bracken's bedroom he was wearing serge trousers, old boots and a seaman's sweater. Bracken had scarcely moved and the gag was still in place. Perry removed the gag and cut some of the ropes. He helped Bracken to raise himself up and gave him a drink of water.

  'You've got it, have you?' Bracken croaked.

  'I have, yes.'

  'Then get to the hell out of here.'

  'There's a little more talking to do, Mr Bracken. I want to hear exactly how you went about your scheme and I want to know where I can find Wesley Lincoln.'

  Bracken gaped as Perry released his ankles. 'I thought you were hand in glove with Lincoln.'

  'An interesting choice of phrase, perhaps. No. I've never met Lincoln. You were mistaken.'

  'God damn you.'

  'You are repeating yourself. I still have the option of informing your partners about your behaviour. I will not exercise it if you tell me what I want to know.'

  'I'm bursting, man. I need to use the convenience.'

  'You can use the chamber pot after you've said your piece.'

  'Ah, all right then. What the hell difference does it make now? I was never a lucky man.'

  'There was correspondence between Henry Fanshawe and your office?'

  'To be sure. Fanshawe had found something but not on his own land. It seems that the land might belong to the niggers … '

  'Be careful, Mr Bracken.'

  'To make a long story short, Fanshawe needed help to get title to some land. He was after bribing a set of politicians which is the way such things are done. I got wind of it and enlisted Lincoln's help.'

  'What did he do?'

  'He seduced the lady of the house and found out wh
at Fanshawe was up to. He followed him all over the country. He'd hidden the gold in a creek bed, the fool. We took it. You seemed to know all this already, though I'm damned if I can see how if Lincoln didn't tell you.'

  'Where did he go?'

  'You want his gold, too, do you, you greedy black bastard?'

  Perry sighed. 'It's hard to know what to do with a sorry specimen like you. You've got just enough courage to be obnoxious. But I'll ask you something, Mr Lawyer Bracken, and your life depends on your answer to this question: where do you believe Wesley Lincoln was headed after he left that cave?'

  'I swear to you, the only place I ever heard him talk about was somewhere called Snake-hole—in the state of Texas.'

  Perry kicked the chamber pot into the centre of the room and cut the rope around Bracken's wrists. 'I was afraid that's what you'd say.'

  PART V

  Wesley Lincoln

  and

  John Perry

  30

  True to his impulses, Wesley Lincoln rode west after leaving the mountain cave. The weather turned foul and he and the horse Jackson made slow going. The gloomy, leaking skies depressed him; the cold, damp mornings made his hand ache and he began thinking more and more of the warm summer air of Texas. Even in winter, he reflected, things never got quite so grey and dismal as this—as if life had stopped. And the country was so goddamned flat! He realised that he was thinking like an American—moving anxiously towards a border, although he had no idea about the legal set-up in the Australian colonies. He knew he'd feel safer in South Australia, but he doubted that he'd feel any happier.

  When, after days of damp riding and cold, windy camps, a low rounded hill appeared on the horizon, he stared at it as if it was a mirage. When he found a crudely lettered signboard identifying the feature as Mount Gambier, he burst into laughter which caused Jackson to skitter. Wesley patted the horse's neck and urged him into a trot. 'That is the sorriest looking mountain I ever did see,' he said. 'But it sure is a change to see something.'

  The weather had cleared momentarily and from the high ground he could see the coast and the outline of a semi-sheltered bay with ships at anchor and lighters moving between them and a short stone jetty. A powerful urge to be quit of Australia came over him and, instead of turning towards the town at the base of the hill, he took a track that led down to the coast.

  Nelson was a small village that housed a fishing fleet and from which some of the produce from the good country behind it was shipped. Wesley trotted down the muddy main street to the wharf and tethered Jackson near a clump of grass. While the horse grazed he shaved peelings from a plug of tobacco he had bought from a hawker in the course of his trek and packed his pipe. He squatted in the shelter provided by a shed at the end of the wharf and watched the movement of the lighters and boats.

  An elderly man dragged a sack of oysters along the beach and struggled to pass them up onto the jetty. Wesley leaned down and used his good hand to haul them up.

  'Thank you,' the man said. 'Not near as strong as I once was. Time was when I could carry two of these bags and walk up steps with 'em on m' shoulder.'

  'You're still doing all right,' Wesley said. 'Where's this here going?'

  'Adelaide, I expect. I just scrape 'em off and sell 'em. Where're you from, if I might ask?'

  'America,' Wesley said, surprised to find how good the word sounded. The oyster man was looking enviously at his smoking pipe. Wesley pulled out his tobacco plug and knife and shaved a pipeful into the cracked and calloused hand. When the other's pipe was drawing he pulled up his coat collar against the wind and joined Wesley in the patch of pale sunlight by the shed.

  'America, eh? What brings you to these parts?'

  Wesley kept an eye cocked on the horse and the load in the saddlebags. 'Long story, friend. This Adelaide, big place is it?'

  'Middlin'. I'm from London myself, long time back a'course. You could drop Adelaide down somewhere in London and no one'd know the difference. But it's the biggest place hereabouts.'

  'It's a port, right?'

  'It is. Where were you thinking of going, young feller?'

  'Back home.'

  'Well, now. You'd have to get to Melbourne town for that, I reckon. Then on to Sydney. That's a place where a good-looking young bloke like you could have some fun. I should never have left it and it's too late for me to get back there now. Stuck here, I am, for the rest of m'days.'

  'Why did you leave?'

  'Gold, boy, gold. Why thousands of poor fools left comfortable billets all over the world. Scarcely a speck did I find and here I am, scraping shells off rocks to feed myself. You could call it scraping a living.' The old man roared with laughter, hefted his sack and walked creakily along the jetty towards a lighter.

  Wesley knocked out his pipe and stared out at the horizon. He stood, swivelled around and looked east. 'Seems as though you're going to have to change direction, boy,' he said.

  He rode back into Nelson and took a room in the Discovery Bay hotel. Three days later, as Tom Shelby, he negotiated the sale of Jackson to a local landowner for £30. He had insisted on seeing the man's property and investigating his treatment of his animals before concluding the sale. A day after receiving payment and farewelling the horse, he secured a berth on the Hamilton packet, a mail and passenger carrying vessel, to Melbourne. After a rough voyage he spent just long enough in the shipping offices of Melbourne to buy a passage to San Francisco on the steamer Blue Jacket, travelling via Sydney and Honolulu.

  On the night the steamer passed through the heads of Sydney Harbour, Wesley Lincoln sat on the deck with his pipe and a bottle of brandy. The sea was choppy but the big vessel handled the conditions easily. Wesley had his own cabin on the port side and anticipated a comfortable voyage. The gold, described by Wesley as 'curios', was securely locked away in the purser's safe. Wesley had represented himself for the ship's passenger list as 'Thomas Shelby, bachelor, cattle rancher of Cochise County, Arizona'. His fellow first-class passengers appeared to be of no special concern—a recently widowed woman travelling with her two children to join a sister in California, a couple of British military men on some kind of tour of inspection of colonial fortifications, a shipping agent with interests in Sydney and San Francisco and a fat man who described himself as a coal merchant.

  Wesley sipped from the bottle and gazed towards the grey heaving expanse of sea. He did not intend to get drunk, just to calm himself into a state of acceptance of whatever was to come next. His Australian sojourn had been a success in the way that his time in Argentina had not been. He was anxious to breathe American air again and move in familiar surroundings. He took a pull from the bottle and put a match to his pipe. He would land in California where no one had ever heard of Wesley Lincoln and if he had to pass through Arizona to get to Texas, surely there'd have been a hundred hold-ups and shoot-outs and lynchings to take the official attention since the Gila silver mine robbery.

  The steamer pitched and Wesley raised the uncorked bottle at the top of the rise. 'To the good folks of Snakehole, Texas,' he said. 'I'm comin' back and I hope you're ready, you sons of bitches.'

  John Perry unwrapped the lump of gold and let it sit in front of Henry Fanshawe. The light in the shepherd's hut near the south boundary of Fanlock where Perry had designated the meeting to take place was poor, but the metal glittered where it had been cut by the saw and where it had been rubbed by the canvas wrapping. Fanshawe picked it up and tested the weight. Perry watched him through narrowed eyes. The squatter turned the heavy object in his hands, letting his fingers play over the surfaces.

  'Extraordinary,' he said. 'I was sure I'd never see it again. Extraordinary.'

  'This is the larger of the two pieces I've recovered.'

  'Indeed. Well, I'd like to see the other.'

  Slowly, Perry shook his head. The squatter looked up from the gold to see the movement. His face fell into hard lines. 'Perry, we had an arrangement.'

  'You didn't tell me that you were d
efrauding the blacks.'

  'How dare you speak to me like that! You … '

  'Mind your tongue, Mr Fanshawe. I know all about it—where the gold was found and the lengths you went to get some sort of title to it. I take it you've never been to the Aboriginal mission—Hertzberg?'

  'Of course not!'

  'Why do you say that?'

  'A miserable set of half-castes, mongrels, and a mad German. What business could I possibly have with them?'

  Perry sighed and leaned forward across the rough table. He spread his hands and placed them over the piece of gold, almost covering it. 'You are trying my patience, Mr Fanshawe. Trying it to the limit. Let me tell you what I am prepared to do. You may keep this lump of gold and I propose to go in search of the rest of it. If I recover it I will return half of it to you. The rest, including the other lump, in some way, will go to the benefit of those Aboriginals.'

  'Damn you, I'll not … '

  'You'll accept my terms, sir, or you'll get nothing. How would you propose to stop me picking up this object and riding away? Would you go to the law? Would you hire someone else the way you did me? I would not advise it. Cut your losses, Mr Fanshawe. Cut your losses.'

  'You're going to keep it for yourself.'

  Perry stared at the florid face which was damp with perspiration although the air in the hut was cold. Fanshawe's frame had thickened still further and loose flesh hung around his chin. The man looked worried and haunted, as if he had not drawn a peaceful breath for weeks. Perry wondered if the squatter knew or suspected that he had been cuckolded and that his wife was bearing a child unlikely to be his. It was possible and, if so, a word could plunge him into a special kind of hell. To his surprise, at that moment Perry's pity outweighed his anger. 'Mr Fanshawe, I can see that you find it hard to believe me. Perhaps we could ride out to the mission. You would meet dark people who can speak several languages. There is a young woman who plays the organ as well as I have ever heard it played.'