‘Meaning?’
‘He could not resist the failing of intemperance. Miscegenation. I had to relieve him of his duties.’
‘And what man has replaced him?’
‘None.’
Nixon said nothing. The commissioner leant forward.
‘There are forty-five police assigned to every bushranger in this country.’
‘I only ask for one more. One more to capture the worst of them all.’
‘What makes them the worst?’
He could not tell this bloated child in front of him, with the power to grant him what he needed. For then he would not send one man but one thousand.
Nixon sighed.
‘They are hard to find. They have many sympathisers. Sympathising families going back generations. But no matter. I’ll find a boy at a mission.’
The commissioner shook his head.
‘Look here, you men know these bandits have embarrassed me. Nothing will look worse than me authorising another hunt that comes up empty-handed. But nothing will look better than one of my men catching the bastards. So I will issue the warrant.’ He drew on his cigar. ‘If you think you can get them, Sargeant Nixon, then you go after them, and I’ll see that you’re funded. Jim Kenniff especially should be arrested.’
Nixon took a warrant for the arrest of Jim and Paddy Kenniff – for the theft of the black mare that had walked to the station.
He set out from Upper Warrego with the Skillington boy.
They spent the night at the hotel in Tambo. The woman at the bar poured Nixon a whisky. He took a wild lime from his pocket and cut it and squeezed the juice and poured in a little water from a jug on the bar and shook the glass.
The Skillington boy surveyed the room and grinned. He had been into this town twice in the seventeen years of his life. The first was at his birth. Now he was in a town, with the promise of more towns, on a police chase like the chases he had read about in his Deadwood Dick books. He met the gaze of every man in the bar and held it. When he walked to the outhouse there was a swagger in his step that made the young women regard him in a way no woman had before. He wished his old schoolmates could see him. He came back and leant along the bar and spoke into Nixon’s ear.
‘Shouldn’t we be puttin together a patrol?’
‘I did.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Here. You and me.’
‘How do you suppose the two of us will bear up against a tribe of blacks?’
‘We find one decent tracker and we’re ready.’
The boy squinted and laughed.
‘Sarge, you ever seen a roamin tribe a black warriors? Back on the old place, when they were on the warpath, Dad and me’d just hide indoors and let them walk through. Even the dogs’d smell the dingoes and go quiet as mice. My folks remember Cullin la Ringo. There could be as many as fifty. They’ll –’
‘There are no blacks, lad.’
The boy squinted and laughed.
‘How do you reckon that?’
‘Blacks don’t kill horses. Not like the ones we saw. Every Aborigine knows the difference between a wild horse and a man’s horse. Did you see the cut hides on those horses? And the teeth were ground down by a bit. Men would’ve been with horses like that. An Aborigine might shoot or spear a wild horse for meat. But not a pair of branded horses. And then leave them in the dirt. No tribe would want to bring that hell down on them for no reason. We’re chasing the Kenniff gang.’
The boy breathed deep.
‘Well, I’ll be.’
‘Your uncle says you know the ranges?’
‘I spose so.’
‘You know where Old Man Kenniff stays?’
The boy nodded.
‘But that’s country I wouldn’t want to ride into alone.’
‘I’ll be with you.’
He sent the Skillington boy to bed early and stayed at the bar.
He drained his glass then told the bar tender to give him the bottle.
They left Tambo at mid-afternoon. On nightfall they crested the Great Dividing Range then rode onto Battleship Spur and looked out at the ridge line of dark escarpment from Purgatory to Parrabooya. There was a goat track to an isolated frontier homestead. The station’s lamps still burned. They rode to the light. The man of the station gave them a meal and a bed. At dawn they rode north into the unmapped mass of mountains and gorges. They rode to an old scalpers hut at Purgatory.
They got a vantage to watch the way in and out, but no man was at the place Old Man Kenniff was said to reside.
They rode down a gorge to a pool.
Nixon got off his horse and stood on the bank. He scratched in the stones.
‘There’ve been horses here since it last rained. More than a dozen.’ He looked down the stream where the prints moved in a line to the south. But it was weeks since it rained last.
That night they camped on the tracks. At dawn they followed them out of the gorge and away from the creek to the east where the tracks were lost.
Two days’ ride and the tracks came back. Shod horses on a bridle path that went down to a stream and on through Early Storms to Albinia. They found a cold fire at Twenty Mile Yards near Orion. They followed tracks towards Arcturus till the light faded. In that fading light they found a bay gelding.
Nixon got beside the horse and put a bridle on it. He told the boy to cinch it to his saddle. They would use it as a packhorse.
They lost the tracks in rocks. They rode up onto a bald and stood their horses. It was cold and near dark and the Skillington boy said they should camp.
‘Anyone can see us up here,’ said Nixon.
‘Yes. But we have half a chance of seein them before they’re on top of us.’
‘We’re huntin the criminals, lad. Not the other way round.’
The Skillington boy tilted his head and looked around and spat.
‘Up here in this stone country, the Kenniff boys can turn a corner round a shelf and be gone. Or appear.’
‘You read that in a newspaper story?’
‘Yes. And heard it. And they can disappear into a cave a hundred yards deep, whose mouth you can’t even see, and when you walk into it you get killed.’
‘Look yonder. There’s a hut a mile on. A station outpost. Likely men there. And bread and beer. They might have seen something, too.’
The Skillington boy shook his head.
‘If, like you say, it’s the Kenniffs we’re trailin, they’ll ride up high when they can. They’re harder to track over rock and stone. Either that or they’ll walk through the creeks. Either way, up here we’re higher than they are. I wouldn’t sleep down in that house now – now that we might’ve been seen snoopin about their old man’s hut. I’d be thinking of them training sights into the windows all night.’
Nixon sighed and looked down at the north fall. Shattered stone.
‘Have you ever seen country more inhospitable to horses?’
‘No.’
‘We need a tracker.’
The storm was at their backs. The lead rider’s cowl was pulled forward. The low cowl meant no one he passed could see easily the pale green eyes half-closed from whisky and want of sleep.
Six men rode with him – his brother Paddy, Alex Stapleton and his young cousin Elden Calhoun, Tom Lawton and Joe Rhine and Michael Carmichael. They rode south with six spare horses.
‘No one can follow us in the hills,’ said Calhoun. The boy wore a hand-me-down stovepipe hat and a green serge coat with his Webley revolver, stolen from a policeman, in plain sight along with a sawnoff Remington shotgun across his back.
Jim looked up out of the cowl and at the darkening sky. He thought, but a rider leaves marks even in scouring rain.
They rode through the storm till the rain was gone ahead of them. They made camp beneath a rock shelf. They unslung saddlebags and dropped them on a sliver of dry ground and huddled with their backs against the rock.
Alex Stapleton took whisky, raw beef and bread from a sack. He
cut the meat in strips and put the strips on a stone that he pushed into the fire with the heel of his boot.
The men ate and drank and then slept.
Jim Kenniff stood watch. No riders came. There was the plain. The dark. The flashing dry lightning like a beacon in the midst of no sea and no ships.
They climbed out of the plain into stone country where wild horses bit the bark off the trees. In the afternoon they saw long-haired ponies being driven down a hillside and breaking around an outcrop like a wave in the sea.
Paddy rode to the lead.
‘What should we do?’
‘Keep ridin,’ said Jim. ‘They may not see us.’
Half a dozen men came behind the horses now. They looked up at the riders slipping their horses along the ridge.
The horse drivers sent a rider up to meet them.
The rider’s eyes opened wide when he saw the black-cowled man at the head of the ragged horsemen.
‘You’re Jim Kenniff.’
‘I’m Jack Lamkin. Ride back.’
‘And these are your –’
‘Hands.’
‘Hell, you look like what I’ve heard of Jim Kenniff! I’ve got nothing against you, Jim.’
‘My name is Lamkin. Ride back.’
‘I say you’re Jim Kenniff. I bet my lads’d like to get a look at you, Jim. Not that we’re looking for …’
‘For what?’
‘Nothin.’
‘A reward?’
‘No.’
The pale eyes set in the red face emerged full from the cowl. His right hand went inside the left lapel of his coat.
‘If I am who I say I am, then you’ve threatened an innocent man. If I shoot and kill you, then it’s your damn deserts. If I draw and you shoot and kill me, with my good men here as witnesses, you’ll be hanged. And if I was Jim Kenniff, then killing you today wouldn’t change my fate. If I was Jim Kenniff I would shoot you through the heart and stake you. Leave you like meat for the crows to pick at as a sign that I had passed this way and that I am at war with the world and with every man who would try to hinder me.’
He opened his coat a little further.
‘If I was him.’
Paddy held his breath. The horse driver saw it. It was this – the man with his eyes half-closed and holding his breath – more than their leader who might have his hand on the stock of a revolver that unnerved him most.
The horse driver tried to laugh.
‘You’re bluffing.’
‘Find out.’
They made camp in a cave. The cave mouth looked across the plain to the north and to a dark defile that cut into the hillside in the east. Their spare horses stood in the stones.
They eased themselves with talk and whisky.
Alex Stapleton and Joe Rhine watched Jim standing at the mouth of the cave. Alex rubbed his hands and looked away. Joe Rhine kept his eyes on Jim.
‘What’s he watching the dark for?’
‘You know.’
Joe Rhine clicked his tongue.
‘Will we live beyond this ride?’
‘He says we will.’
‘What does he know that we don’t?’
‘My ol Nan used to say that some who live close to death are given to see across its border a little.’
Joe Rhine shook his head and got closer to the fire.
‘If that’s where he’s lookin that’s a great fuckin comfort.’
Tom Lawton looked up from the fire.
‘What’s got into you, Joe?’
Joe Rhine stared blankly at the other man who lowered his eyes.
‘Like you don’t fuckin know.’
They sat in silence.
‘You miss your wife?’
He tilted his head.
‘Aye. Why not? I do miss her.’
‘I could do with a woman’s cookin,’ said Alex.
Elden Calhoun came to the fire and laughed.
‘You two bitches are soft as butter.’
‘Hark,’ said Joe Rhine. ‘The voice of fuckin wisdom.’
Alex picked up a stick and dragged a coal towards himself and lit a cigarette.
‘You’re that young and stupid, cousin, you don’t know you’re alive. But maybe you protest because you don’t like girls. Maybe you prefer boys.’
Joe smiled. Elden scowled.
‘Get fucked, cousin.’
‘I hear the Afghans prefer it that way. Maybe we can get a good price for you next caravan we run into. You’re not especially ugly. Still, I don’t spose that matters when your arse is up and your head’s in the sand.’
‘Get fucked, dear cousin.’
‘For a virgin, too.’ said Joe. ‘That’s got to be worth an extra few shillins.’
‘I fucked more women than you two put together.’
Alex grinned.
‘We two put together makes two. Which makes it you’ve fucked all of three girls. And where’d you go on this three-cunt escapade, cousin? Only females I’ve ever seen you with are mares and bitches and old women. You realise none of those count, don’t you?’
‘In the city. I fucked girls all the time in the city.’
‘When were you in the city? What city?’
‘Sydney. I was in Sydney visitin Jim and Paddy’s little brother where he was stayin with their sister.’
‘The one who married fancy?’
‘Aye.’
Joe Rhine raised his eyebrows.
‘Fuck, they must’ve been pleased to see you arrive on their doorstep.’
Alex laughed and drew on his cigarette.
‘You’re pre-civilised, cousin.’
Elden spat.
‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’
‘It means you should’ve stayed with your mother for a couple more years’ education. It might’ve made a difference.’
‘The girls in Sydney didn’t mind I lacked education.’
‘How much did you pay em?’
‘Same as they charge every man.’
The men laughed.
‘Aye,’ said Alex. ‘That makes sense.’
Joe spoke.
‘It’s the love of a woman that counts, boy. Not just layin her. You’re too young and foolhardy to understand that. But anyone can bed a slut.’
Elden Calhoun shook his head and laughed. He put his hand out for the whisky flask.
‘“Love of a woman”? Fuck me, you cunts are soft. Look at these eyes!’ He tipped his stovepipe hat up with the barrel of his Remington. ‘You see eyes like these in the picture books. I’m a killer, not a lover.’
‘You’re a mule-headed shit,’ said Alex.
At the mouth of the cave Jim Kenniff was watching Michael Carmichael and Paddy crouched on the plain at the edge of the pines, drawing lines in the sand and talking to a stark naked black man who leant on a nine-foot spear.
Jim waited till he saw his men mount and the horse turn.
He went back to the fire.
Elden Calhoun asked him,
‘You ever been in love with a woman, Jim?’
Tom Lawton had just come from the cook fire. He turned around and met his cousin’s eyes. Jim looked back at the fire.
‘Yes.’
‘So why aren’t you married?’
Jim looked at Tom then looked back at the fire.
‘I left her.’
Tom whispered.
‘You didn’t leave her, Jim. You just outlived her.’
Jim nodded and stood. He warmed his hands and then went back to the mouth of the cave. Tom lay down to sleep. Alex Stapleton whispered to Joe Rhine,
‘You ever meet the girl they’re talkin about?’
‘I think so.’
Alex shook his head.
‘You don’t “think so” about her.’
Paddy met Jim at the mouth of the cave.
Jim spoke.
‘Friend or foe?’
Paddy shrugged.
‘Tonight they are friends. They bury a man tonight. In th
e morning they will move on.’
Jim nodded.
‘What do they say about the men taking horses down out of the ranges?’
‘They don’t know them.’
‘Didn’t see them?’
‘They saw them. They hid from them.’
Jim nodded.
‘Those men know who we are.’
‘Yes.’
‘If those men can take horses down here without trouble from the blacks then the police can lead a patrol in. Maybe not to our camp, but to where they can lay in wait.’
‘So?’
‘In a few hours the moon will be gone. We’ll get across then. Don’t tell the others they’re gettin woke that early.’
‘And then?’
‘We go west,’ said Jim. ‘Down onto Jericho and on to Mexico. All the way around, then ride in to the Pocket through Consuelo.
Jim took a corduroy jacket lashed to his bedroll that reminded him of days of peace and wrapped it around his shoulders.
He closed his eyes and dreamt dreams with no shape that he could recall. But when he woke in the night he knew his heart had been broken in his sleep.
They rode into a town beached on an ocean of plain. To a house at the western edge. The house was a low, flat-roofed erection, with rough uneven logs chinked in with mud, and a single broken window. On one side was a lean-to where a girl was hanging washing from the low ceiling. She turned at the sight of the riders and ran inside.
The men tied their mounts to a hitching rail and Jim and Paddy walked through the entrance onto a packed-dirt floor.
‘Father McMahon.’
‘Well! Jim and Paddy Kenniff!’
‘We need lodging,’ said Jim.
‘I’m sorry, son, but ye cannot stay here.’
‘One night, Father.’
‘The troopers –’
‘One night,’ Jim said. He was no longer asking.
He nodded at the girl walking out of the room.
‘She yours?’
‘This is lonely country.’
‘You used to fiddle with the girls at Stanthorpe, too.’
‘I get lonely easy. I suppose I’m out here in this empty hell for penance.’
‘So they said when I asked after you. Though they didn’t suppose it. They were specific.’
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