‘Meteors.’
‘Duruga.’
‘Lucky. Make a wish!’
‘Bad sign, boss.’
Nixon and the Skillington boy followed King Edward’s lead into a stand of desert bloodwoods to a house swathed in mist that came like the ghost of water from a dry creek beside.
They tied their horses a hundred yards distant.
‘Draw your guns,’ said Nixon. ‘I’ll go to the front door. You two keep low and walk to the windows.’
Nixon kicked the door and ducked behind the wall and a shot came from inside. Another shot came through the open door. A man called out,
‘Who are ye?’
‘Sergeant Nixon of Warrego police station! I’m here to take you in, Jim Kenniff. You and your brother and your gang.’
But there was laughter inside.
‘You’re too late, Sergeant.’
‘Drop your weapons!’
‘They’re dropped. Come in.’
Nixon looked around the edge of the door. There were two men. One tall and unshaven, the other, short, scarfed and red-faced, and with his bowler hat set on the table in front of him. The tall man was holstering his weapon.
‘What the hell manner of men are you two?’
‘Hunters of men,’ said the tall man.
‘Pursuers of justice,’ corrected the short man – a Scotsman.
At the table too was the body of a man dead for months. Maybe years. A mummy.
‘The salt off the pan gets in the air out here,’ said the Scotsman. He pointed at the mummy with his cigar. ‘Comes out of the ground. And there’s no water. That keeps em fresh. To a degree. I must a seen half a dozen a these old prospectors and hatters dead in their chairs over the years.’
The tall man spoke.
‘We checked his teeth for gold. But it’s no friendly thing to wake up in the middle of the night and see a dead man grinnin at ya.’
‘Indeed, no,’ said the Scotsman. ‘You never quite get used to their company.’ Then to Nixon, ‘We only came in here outta the sun. We’ve ridden through the night.’ He pointed at the mummy again. ‘I leave em where they are. Let the dead bury the dead, says the Good Book. And I intend to remain alive long enough to pick up my cheque from the commissioner.’
‘What commissioner?’
‘Now I’ve given myself away, haven’t I? Is there another one?’
‘Our boss?’ said the Skillington boy. ‘Would he do that?’
‘He might.’
‘Hell! It’s not like we’ve been idling.’
Nixon thought about that last note he wrote to Warrego. He had given too much away, even while he told them to hold the wanted posters. He said,
‘If the likes of these men got to the Kenniffs before we do there need be no trial, no burial, and so no martyrs. No cost to the government.’
‘Aye,’ said the Scotsman. ‘And it’s them we’ve bagged.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said the Skillington boy to Nixon. ‘I’ve lived in Kenniff country all my life.’ He turned and looked at the bounty hunters. ‘You two fools couldn’t have tracked down and killed Jim and Paddy Kenniff any more than that old bastard at the end of the table could dance.’
The tall man grinned. He reached behind him and slapped a bushel sack on the table.
‘Then whose ears have I got here in this burlap sack?’
A fork-tailed kite circled cattle stuck in a dam. The troop horses were weary and half-starved from travelling over drought-stricken country.
They rode into a town lit by gaslight. Swagmen and hawkers sat along the edges of the road and there was the smell of woodsmoke. In a barroom were a half-dozen soldiers destined for the Karoo, recruited that day by the moustachioed general who stood amid them. At the far end of the barroom was a two-up game.
Most of the town had come out tonight because of the general and because a cinematograph had had its first show.
Nixon addressed the people. He asked them to come forward if they had seen or heard anything of the Kenniff gang.
The barroom that had been full of noise was silent. All eyes turned to him.
‘Listen to reason, people. Jim Kenniff is dangerous. Dangerous to you and your families. To every good thing you expect life to contain.’
And yet they were silent.
‘Men lie in unmarked graves because of him.’
A man shouted from the wall.
‘Jim Kenniff is dead.’
‘Aye, I heard that one too. But I do not yet believe it. And if he is alive, he will be seeking help. Horses. On some night not long I think from now he may come to you. Maybe he will send one of his men. A stranger may come to any one of you with plenty to say about their cause.’
‘Like you?’
Laughter.
‘Better talk than mine. And money also. Before you agree to help him, I want you to remember this public house the way it looks now, but with ash where the door should be. The roof burned out so the rain and wind comes in.’
He had seen that. A house in Arcadia Valley. An Irish gang herded the family into the yard and burned everything that would burn. Then they pulled apart the man’s yards and scattered his horses. Nixon was called out in the morning. He saw the blackened walls. The roof collapsed and the beams still smoking, and the people standing shivering in what clothes they had on when they fled the house, the look in their eyes saying, Why were you not here yesterday? What good are you?
He sat down at the bar and no one came near him.
They rode west. A kite circled in the distance. They rode to the kite. There was a saddled horse pulling leaves off a tree. And further on a boy, barely out of his teens, lying in a gully with his neck broken. There were prints of another horse and two calves going into the scrub. At the edge of the scrub was another dead man, also a boy, and this one with blood on his collar and his hair short so you could see the wounds where his ears used to be.
Nixon spat tobacco. Looked at the horizon at the dune fields at a gathering cloud of red dust.
‘Take their guns and ammunition.’
The sun rose on the riding patrol. They rode through ironwood and spinifex along the edge of the dune fields. Late winter rains brushed the desert to the south. There was water in there, but it came and went with rain that fell far from here. And you could never know which creeks had shifted their courses and which wells had dried and where the wind had blown the rain.
At dusk there was fire in the south. Maybe lightning strike, or the mosaic burning of the local tribes.
They rode to a trading post where seashells and a dugong-tusk dagger lay in the sand.
King Edward showed Nixon tracks that went into the sand. Tracks that came from nowhere and went nowhere. That were blown away by the wind blowing down channels, just as the water flowed in that country after rain.
‘Fuck me,’ said Nixon.
But they followed the tracks into the desert.
In the night King Edward dug down into a soak below a creek bed to replenish what they had drunk in the day. He collected grubs to roast from the rare bloodwood trees they camped beneath.
Nixon and the Skillington boy were tired and slept deep. Nixon woke in the middle of the night and King Edward was gone.
Nixon watched the blue night. Something moved in the dark. Edward, or a desert rat? He deliberately kept himself from gripping his revolver. Then whatever had moved was gone. The air was cold and the sky washed out with stars. He dreamt he was alone – the last man on earth – and there was nothing left for him to defend or keep vigil against and he smiled. He uncapped the bottle of Irish whisky he had been saving. He looked up at the stars. He thought, How beautiful the light. But what if King Edward was gone. So long as this night and this whisky held out out he did not mind. But tomorrow he would have to find water, and they were at least a day away from any water he was sure of. Far enough away, with an error of judgement, or with bad luck, to die. He stared at the cold stars. Then the black plain. Then the stars.
And something moved in the belt of dark beyond the embers of the fire.
King Edward returned out of the darkness. This time with white ash and leaves in his hands.
‘What is it this time?’
‘Pituri, boss.’
The boy emptied his hands on a bit of bark. He pinched the mixture and put it in his mouth and chewed.
‘What does that do?’
‘I can see what demons are about us.’
‘True?’
‘True.’
He looked in King Edward’s eyes.
‘You really chewin that?’
He looked hard into King Edward’s smoke stung eyes.
‘Yes, boss.’
Nixon pinched a little and chewed.
‘That’s what ash tastes like, alright.’
But then he too could see shapes in the dark. He looked at King Edward who was neither smiling nor recognising the shapes nor giving encouragement of any kind.
Nixon pointed.
‘Out there.’
King Edward nodded.
‘More, boss?’
‘No.’
Nixon pointed.
‘What do you see out there, lad?’
The boy looked at the fringe of firelight.
‘Yakajahs.’
The boy edged closer to the fire. Now Nixon saw he had his hand on the Skillington boy’s shotgun.
Each eyed the other.
‘I’d hunt better with this, boss.’
‘Hunt them?’
He pointed at the dark.
‘Can’t hunt yakajahs, boss. Don’t say that, boss.’
‘You ever used a gun like that before?’
The boy stared at him.
‘Before now,’ said Nixon. ‘Past.’ He made a motion with his hands like pulling a bolt and aiming. ‘You ever use one? Before now?’
The boy nodded.
‘Possums and rabbits. Not like this one. Breech-loadin carby. They give six bullets. We bring six scalps. And six cases fareload. Else no pay.’
‘You stay long?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t like that boss. That boss don’t like me too.’
Then low and guttural, then high like a desert wind, King Edward sang.
‘You’ll wake the boy,’ said Nixon. ‘Leave your singin till the morning.’
‘But the yakajah’s, boss?’
Jim stopped his horse dead. He held up his hand. A rhythmic sound, a keening sound, came on the wind.
‘You hear that?’
‘No,’ said Elden.
‘Quiet.’ They waited. ‘You hear it, Paddy.’
‘Aye.’
‘Singing.’
‘Something’s following.’
Elden Calhoun kicked sand.
‘Bastards.’ He drew his sawn-off Remington shotgun from his hip. ‘I say we ambush and whack em, Jim.’
Jim looked up and saw the violence in the boy’s eyes.
He got off his horse and lay down and put his ear to the ground and heard a dull rumble in the plain. He stared at the horizon. The wind blew dust into the sky.
Paddy spoke.
‘What do we do?’
‘Joe, you ride to Boulia and send word from there to McCulloch that we’ll be a week or so late.’
Tom Lawton spoke.
‘And the rest of us?’
‘We go deeper into the desert. I know rocks we can hide in.’
The patrol followed tracks towards a dry creek. These tracks were the freshest they had seen.
‘Edward.’
‘Boss?’
‘Quit your singing.’
They climbed a shelf of red rock above the creek and looked down and Nixon raised his hand. They stopped still and stared at the outlaws.
Nixon backed up his horse. He turned it and the others turned after him.
They rode onto a flat between rock towers.
They got behind cover. Nixon flexed his finger on the trigger and sighted again.
He had given the Skillington boy a rifle. He kept the boy’s shotgun in the Winchester’s scabbard. King Edward had only a skinning knife.
Now the bandits were in sight. Four riders.
‘Take out the horses,’ Nixon said. ‘The men, we bring in. Especially Jim Kenniff. If no other man, then him.’
Nixon aimed at the lead horse.
Paddy moved his horse next to Jim’s and whispered.
‘Something’s shining up there. But I can’t make out what it is.’
Jim glanced then looked back at the path they rode along the creek.
‘It’s a rifle alright.’
Elden took a short rein. Jim checked him.
‘If we kick into a run or turn too fast, we’re likely to get a bullet. You don’t want to take a chance on whoever’s up there being the nervous type. And if we just start shooting, we haven’t got anything to hide behind when he shoots back.’
‘We can get behind our horses.’
‘I’d just as soon get shot as have to walk over this country.’
‘Try and cock your weapons discreetly. We walk out of –’
But a bullet ricocheted over their heads.
Nixon fired. The horse’s momentum carried it along for the space of time it took to load another cartridge and squeeze off again at the lead animal. The horses swerved against each other, still running, then two pairs of legs buckled at once, and two other pairs raced on, trampling the fallen horses, thrashing.
They had Jim Kenniff. The others had got away into the rocks.
Nixon and the Skillington boy cuffed their captive and tied him and sat him on their packhorse. They rode him east over the red plain.
‘What about the others?’ said the Skillington boy. ‘What if they return in the night?’
‘They’ll be too frightened,’ said Nixon.
He looked over his shoulder at the man with hands tied behind his back. His face was burning in the sun but his eyes did not betray an ounce of fear.
A band of black men stood on the shimmering horizon. A caravan of native slaves with iron chains around their necks, driven by howling mounted Aborigines in torn uniforms, unbuttoned, with muzzle-loading carbines and Sniders on their shoulders.
The two sets of riders drew abreast. The captain of the detachment rode to the fore. He nodded at King Edward. He spoke to Nixon.
‘That black fella you got there look wild. Look like trouble. You bringin him in?’
‘No. Look at his uniform. Like yours.’
‘Not like mine. Look old and stolen.’
Nixon pointed to Jim Kenniff.
‘He tracked this outlaw for us.’
‘He know English?’
King Edward stared at the detachment unflinching and silent.
‘Yes,’ Nixon said.
‘He look like trouble,’ said the captain of the detachment.
‘Why are you concerned?’
‘We lookin for the leader a this gang ere.’
He raised his hand and pulled up the chin of the first man of the half-dozen warriors in chains.
‘This one with me is only a boy.’
The native policeman spoke again.
‘What’s that one’s markins?’
‘He is not the man you are looking for. He is a boy. And he is in the employ of the government. You understand?’
The native policeman grinned.
‘Hmmm. Yes, boss. But you should let me look at is markins. They cannibals, this lot. Guilty. Proved.’
‘I know how you prove guilt.’
‘How’s that, boss?’
‘With the threat in that weapon on your shoulder.’
‘You givin cheek, sir?’
‘No. Only saying what is true.’
‘But you see, sir. The government instructed us to keep the roads clear of the natives.’
‘This native belongs to me.’
Nixon put his spurs into his horse’s flanks.
The mounted Abor
igines howled and cooeed and drove their prisoners on into shimmering heat.
The Skillington boy looked back with eyes open wide.
On dusk Nixon shot a wild goat and butchered it on an outcrop where they camped.
The Skillington boy lit a cooking fire. Nixon and King Edward brought their captive down from his horse and sat him at the fire. Leant him against a flat stone.
The Skillington boy glanced shyly at Jim Kenniff. Glanced and looked away as though apologising. Nixon saw it. The Skillington boy thought Jim recognised him, and that this recognition put his life and the lives of all his family in jeopardy. Nixon saw fear and awe in the boy’s eyes and wondered what it might do to him. He would take his mind off the man in chains. He spoke.
‘What about those native police, lad?’
‘Aye,’ said the Skillington boy, breaking with Jim Kenniff’s gaze. ‘Do you believe those blacks they had in tow were cannibals, Sarge?’
‘No,’ said Nixon. He looked up at King Edward who was staring into the fire. ‘I’ve never once seen proof of it. Cannibalism.’
The boy spat into the fire and shook his head.
‘Bloody hell! I’d never seen em till today. That was somethin I won’t forget easy!’
Jim Kenniff spoke.
‘They’re bloodhounds. They track the Aborigines that wealthy men want to be rid of. They kill, rape, torture. And the men who hired them have clean hands, cause no one can control a savage. If there are black men in this country capable of eating another man’s flesh it’s those native police. Not the poor bastards they’re draggin behind em.’
Nixon stared at him but did not speak.
Jim spoke to the Skillington boy.
‘They get blood money for every arrest. Sometimes they go after blacks for raiding a homestead or spearin a bullock. But I’ve known them to go after a man for as little as absconding from work.’ He spat. ‘They’re trained so as not to retain the sympathies and doubts of a man.’ He glared at Nixon. ‘Am I telling the truth, law man?’
Yes, thought Nixon. But he said nothing.
‘And they’re given free rein to slaughter the myalls,’ Jim said. ‘Track them down and butcher them like that goat there. Wherever they find them.’ He nodded at King Edward. ‘That’s why they were eyeing your lad here so keenly.’
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