‘You reckon who could be what?’ Macca plunked himself down beside Will, rum in hand. Extra rum appeared from his back pocket, and quickly replaced Will’s now-empty can.
‘About bloody time you appeared, mate. Glad a man’s not dying of thirst. Where’ve you been?’
‘Not sure you want to know the answer to that. Then again, if you plan on staying warm in that swag of yours tonight, maybe you do.’ Macca sounded like he was considering another angle.
‘What’s going on? What don’t I want to know?’ Will took a deep suck on his can to ready himself.
‘Well . . .’ Macca sounded pensive. ‘To tell or not to tell, that remains the question, old boy. Just how much do you need to know, is what I’m asking myself right now. Let’s just say a certain curly-haired blonde has appeared on the radar . . .’
‘Bella? Here at the Muster?’ Will felt his spirits lift in an instant.
‘Your sister too.’
‘Well, now there’s a surprise. Where there’s one, there are usually two.’ The twist on Will’s lips was wry. ‘What exactly have they been up to? I overheard a conversation about someone organising a women’s drinking competition. Those girls haven’t been at it, have they?’
Macca hunched over his rum. ‘Mmm . . .’ He relived the events in the marquee in his head, two girls riding each other like a cowboy and his bull.
‘Macca? Oh no. What have they done?’
‘Well . . . they haven’t been complete idiots, but they haven’t exactly been angels either. You know those two, Will. They’re either in or they’re out. No in-between. Let’s just say they’ve been wallowing in Bailey’s and butterscotch schnapps up to their pretty little necks.’
‘Fuck!’ Will half-rose but Macca pulled him back down on the log.
‘It’s okay, mate, they’re okay. They’re a pair of pissheads but they’re still walking. They’re fine. We’ll catch up with them in a bit.’
Will made a mental note to carpet his little sister. He wouldn’t have her making a spectacle of herself, and then being talked about across the mountains. It was a small community and everyone knew everyone else’s business. Patty had a good nursing job to come home to, which required a certain amount of respect from the patients she treated. That’s not what she would get by carrying on like a drunken idiot on the Nunkeri Plains.
‘You were saying someone was going to do something?’ Macca prompted Will.
‘Huh?’
‘Who was going to do something?’
‘Oh. Trin. Trinity Eggleton. Old Wes Ogilvie’s grandson. He’s a dentist in the city and he wants to work up with Wes on Ben Bullen Hills.’
Macca looked morose. ‘I can understand that. I know I’d rather be working on the station at home than driving a bloody truck for me old man.’
Will looked across at his mate, sympathetically. Macca’s father Bryce had both a high-country station outside Burrindal and a successful interstate cattle-trucking business. With the meanness of the drought, Bryce had all but shut down the farm and was concentrating on the trucks. With the dry, cattle were being trucked up north to feedlots and temporary agistment.
Will clapped Macca across the shoulders. ‘The drought’s got to end sometime. At least you got a trip to Mount Isa scouting for business. If the drought hadn’t been so tough, I couldn’t have come with you. Would’ve been too much work at home. So at least we got a bit of a holiday out of it.’
‘Yeah,’ Macca’s eyes glinted. ‘And what a trip that was.’
Will gave Macca a steady look. ‘If you go out with her and sleep with her, then you stay with her, old man. You hurt my sister and I’ll nail that bloody big ugly mug of yours to a gum tree. And I’ll add that black hat just for decoration.’
‘Twenty-six years of friendship wouldn’t come into it?’
‘Not when it comes to my own, mate,’ replied Will. ‘Or Bella,’ Will added under his breath.
‘Speaking of sisters,’ Macca said as he stood up and stretched, ‘how about we jump in my ute and move on down to the band? I reckon that’s where we’ll find those two cowgirls, that’s if they haven’t passed out under a tree somewhere. We need rum anyway, and I should move my ute before I’m over the limit.’
‘You okay to drive a few hundred metres? How about we walk?’
‘Nuh, I want to dump off your swag somewhere cosy, so I can have my ute to myself tonight – and that stand of old gums over there looks a pretty good spot for you.’ Macca pointed to a cluster of eucalypts down the paddock a little way. ‘I reckon you’ll be wanting some privacy yourself, seeing my cousin’s here too,’ he added. He peered at Will from under his black hat.
‘Okay.’ Will’s dimples danced. ‘You’re an ideas man, that’s for sure.’
Together they walked in the direction of Macca’s ute. Trin and Old Wes had disappeared, and Will could see the crowd was slowly moving from the bonfire towards the band playing on the back of the semi-trailer, down the valley.
Looking up into the sky, he could see swirling cumulous clouds overtaking millions of stars lighting up the heavens with their brilliance. On the backs of the ridges, in the mountains above the Nunkeri Plains, lightning flashed and forked, causing the whole sky to come alight. The cool change was on its way.
But it was all nothing compared to the brilliance of his Bella. He already thought of her as his. Her vibrant spirit, keen mind and gorgeous body coupled with a wilful temperament – determined but kind. Nothing could compare with her sheer delight in living or the way she danced through her life. Into his.
A life together? His subconscious tried the thought. To Will’s surprise he didn’t feel the need to bolt in the opposite direction. As lighting flashed around him, he moved with a determined step, his heart and soul on fire.
Anticipation.
Yearning.
Forward towards love.
Chapter 16
Bella came to, lying on the grass. Cold shivers snaked through her body from her damp singlet pressing against her chest, underneath her oilskin vest. Looking around, she saw that Patty and Caro had disappeared, leaving two areas of squashed grass on either side of her. Hauling herself slowly to her feet, Bella realised the spew session had cleared her head but had left a spearing headache in its wake.
Cupping her right temple where it felt like a knife blade was on the prowl, she looked around for Patty but saw only swathes of swaying backs as the crowd moved to the music from the band on the flat-bed tray of the semi-trailer.
She glimpsed an auburn head passing through the gaping doorway of the beer tent. Another shiver ran through her body, and Bella realised she needed to get her wet singlet off or she’d be coming down with something worse than a flaming headache. Looking at her vest, she contemplated what body parts it covered. Enough. The vest alone should do. She headed towards the loos to take off her wet clobber, but when she got there she found someone had hung a sign up on the port-a-loo’s closed door: ‘Loos buggered. Use other toilet block.’
Just great. She shivered once more.
The other loo trailer was halfway up the valley, and she’d be blowed if she was going to stagger all that way in complete darkness, just to take her singlet off. She glanced around.
Beyond the glare of the overhead lights, she spotted the tumbledown walls of the old Nunkeri Plains homestead. Smothered in blackberries, the homestead had been the hard-won creation of the original settlers; a house full of dreams of a summer settling family who hoped their farm would be prosperous on a lush, open plain high up in the mountains. But after a few years of battling with variable seasons, along with snow for up to six months of the year, the original settlers had obviously given in and moved on. Time had wrought its destruction on the house that was not much more than a rough shanty really. The clay in the walls had been mined from the nearby creek bed, the timber cut on site. Amazingly for something which looked so fragile, sections of the house still stood over a hundred years later. For now, though, all Bella wanted was
a little privacy, and it would do the job. Trying to ignore the pain in her head, she moved towards the relative shelter of the dark and crumbling wattle-and-daub walls.
Eddie Murray had always been a patient man. He was used to sitting quietly and waiting for his chance. Now he couldn’t believe his luck. He wouldn’t have to go anywhere, or do anything, because she was coming to him.
‘There is a God after all,’ he whispered to himself as the glorious riot of ringlets moved in his direction. Her rounded hips swayed, and her luscious breasts swung with the momentum of the loping gait of her long legs. Her left arm moved up once again to push those curls from her stunning face and at the upward lift of a tanned, smooth arm, her breasts seemed to thrust their way towards him with welcoming glee.
Manna was coming to him and he hadn’t moved a muscle.
Bella reached the blackberry-covered walls of the old hut and made to push her way through the opening that had once been a doorway.
A blackberry bramble slapped against her bare skin.
‘Youch.’ She grabbed at the spike-laden branch with its thorny barbs now stuck in her flesh. ‘Bloody blackberries.’
Her arm came free only to have the thorns snag her shoulder, drawing blood. She flung away the offending brambles.
Closing her eyes to protect them, she blindly moved past the remaining leafy canes, through the doorway to open ground, and into the waiting, sweaty arms of Eddie Murray.
‘Holy crap!’ Bella yelled as she slammed into a solid mass. Opening her eyes, she found herself staring at a perspiring, white forehead and the top of a balding male head. She tried to spring backwards but found herself held within an iron grasp, two hands clamped on her bum cheeks, squeezing with a grip that made her yell again.
‘Youch! What the—’
Mid-sentence, Bella’s reflexes kicked in and with them the basic human instinct – flight or fight.
Bella fought.
She struggled hard to move out of the lecherous arms.
Eddie grunted as elbows smashed into his chest, and he responded with a thrust of his hips pushing Bella away from him, bending her waist to an impossible angle. Bella felt a set of hips grind into the tops of her legs and a very male bulge try to mount her thigh, like a lusting dog on the make.
She lifted her leg to ram her knee into his groin but he was too quick, whipping his stocky leg around and through Bella’s feet, tripping her over and slamming her onto the ground.
‘Whoommff.’ Bella’s breath dived deep into her body. The pain of her back hitting the dirt drilled into her tail bone.
And then he was on top of her.
Fat and pudgy fingers mauled at her body, grasping at her waist buckle and pulling at the press-studs on her vest. Hot, fetid, sloppy lips mashed against her mouth, her cheeks, her neck, slobbering saliva.
The crack of the stockwhip rang through the night air.
Once.
Twice.
The man on top of Bella reared.
Once.
Twice.
Baying like a dingo, Eddie frantically rolled away from the biting sting that was crashing around his arse, leaving a stunned Bella alone on the ground. He could feel blood rising, steamy and hot as the cuts through his moleskins were laid bare to the night air. Only a flicker of his brain wondered at the origin of the welts. He’d felt them so often before in the bordellos of his city, an anonymous sweetener to his carnal entertainment, it just added to his sexual excitement, his lust-filled brain failing to register a warning bleep.
He scuttled to slam his body down on a stunned Bella, his throbbing dick now threatening to explode.
‘No you don’t, arsehole. Get the fuck OFF HER!’
The whip came down again.
Across his back. His shoulders.
A volley of cracks, unrelenting in their attack.
Eddie staggered up onto his feet and spun, lurching, confused, reaching out for his attacker.
He grabbed at the leather that was coiling like a snake out in front of him and succeeded in taking hold of the thong, reefing it from the hands of his assailant. Stepping away with his prize, he tripped over Bella’s now kicking legs and fell hard, losing hold on the whip. Bella flung herself sideways, snagging the handle with her outstretched hand and throwing it in the direction of her saviour. Eddie jumped to his feet, grabbing at space, just missing the flying whip by inches.
The shape in the darkness caught the whip and quickly moved it back and forth inscribing a figure of eight into the night air. To Eddie’s horror, there were two whips in motion.
With the pair of stockwhips clasped firmly in her hands, Patty deftly flipped into a Queensland Crossover and thrashed the bloke in front of her across his face, not caring if she blinded him.
In fact, she wanted to blind him, to flog him to within an inch of his hairy white butt, for what he had been trying to do to Bella.
‘Move, Bella, MOVE!’ Patty roared at her friend, not losing her beat as she pelted Eddie with her whips.
Bella rolled over and lurched to her knees. All she could see was Patty’s flying arms at one with her whips, pulling all the moves that had made her the Nunkeri Muster Ladies’ Whip-Cracking Champion for the last five years.
The wooden stock of the whip rose as one with Patty’s hand, the plaited thong flicking the Fall – a single strip of leather near the whip’s end – hard at the man in front of her. The cracker at the end wreaked its relentless damage on the soft facial features of Eddie Murray.
Eddie was screeching as he tried to grab at the woman causing him so much agony.
But she was unassailable.
A bevy of stockwhipping moves learned at her father’s knee and finetuned under the tutelage of a master in outback Queensland: a Sidney Flash followed by the Victorian Cutback. And then just as Eddie, in pain-driven terror, decided it was time to cut and run, Patty threw her red kangaroo whips into The Train.
A formidable movement of dual whips cracking out a sound like a train bearing down on an unending set of tracks. A movement that drove Eddie away from a swaying Bella and into the old hut’s remaining walled corner, in an effort to stay clear of the menacing leather.
Eddie was pinned down. His face and hands a bloodied mess, he cowered in the corner like a wounded dog.
Bella finally made it to Patty’s side, steering clear of the flashing leather, and wincing with pain as her bruised vertebrae shot into place down her racked spine.
‘Oh. My. God. He was trying to—’ Bella couldn’t finish the sentence, didn’t want to formulate the thought.
‘I know.’ Patty threw one of the whips to her friend, runner-up champion of the same stock-whipping challenge.
In perfect concerto the two girls finished the whipping display with an original and impressive Cattleman’s Crack, drawing the plaited thongs around over their heads and allowing the whips to fall with a dual crisp thwack at Eddie’s feet.
As one, they flicked both stockwhips to rest across their shoulders.
‘But he’s leaving now, aren’t you, city slicker!’ Patty ground the last two words out through clenched teeth.
Eddie Murray didn’t reply.
He couldn’t.
His bloodied mouth wouldn’t cooperate and he couldn’t see his own hand in front of his face. His eyes were swollen, blood-filled slits and his only thought was of escape – from these crazed mountain women, back to the city, where at least his kind of women knew their place.
Bella and Patty watched as he disappeared into the night, crashing through the blackberries like they weren’t even there.
‘I suppose we should’ve reported him.’ Patty said.
‘Nah, mate,’ mumbled Bella. ‘Don’t really want anyone knowing what just went on.’
‘But what if he tries it on someone else? What then?’
‘I don’t reckon we’ll see him again, Patty. Not after the hiding you just gave him. You were pretty impressive, you know.’
‘You didn’t do too bad
yourself. Besides, he deserved every bit of it and more. Wish I could’ve got a go at his bare bum and then he’d have really known what pain was.’
‘You did good, Patty. Thanks.’ Bella shook her head. ‘Jeez, if you hadn’t come along just then, I’d have been in trouble. How’d you know I was here?’
‘I saw you when you were caught in the blackberries. I was just getting us another drink.’
‘Thank God you did.’ Bella’s voice trembled. With the adrenaline of the fight now seeping from her veins, she could feel the aftershocks of horror shuddering through her body. It had been close. Too close.
Violation and revulsion was all she could feel now. She found herself reliving the touch of those creepy, clammy sausage-like fingers pawing across her body.
‘It’s over now, mate, with no harm done, ay?’ Patty slung an arm over Bella’s shoulders and grasped her into a sideways hug. Bella ducked her head onto Patty’s shoulder, feeling the warmth of her friend’s body reach out to the coldness of her own.
‘Bella?’ Patty brought them both to a halt and spun her friend around to face her. ‘You’re okay, aren’t you, mate?’
‘Yeah, I suppose so. It’s just . . . I don’t know. He was so creepy, and I couldn’t protect myself.’ Refusing to look at Patty, she dug a booted toe into the ground, digging divots from the dirt.
‘Listen to me, girl.’ Patty forced Bella’s chin up and let her brown eyes bore into the opposite blue ones. ‘It’s finished, it’s over. He didn’t get you. We fought him off together. He couldn’t get his shiny white arse out of here quick enough. We can defend ourselves. It just takes a little country creativity, that’s all.’ Patty tried a smile. She leaned forward and grabbed hold of the stock of the whip resting across Bella’s shoulder.
‘For a runner-up, you didn’t do too bad a job yourself. I’d better watch myself in the championships this year.’
‘Yeah, right.’ The sarcasm was back in Bella’s voice. ‘Where’d you get the whips from anyway? I haven’t seen these two before. You been stashing some secret arsenal? Are you that worried I’ll whip your arse?’
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