Cry of the Curlew: The Frontier Series 1

by Peter Watt

  ‘Bastards!’ One of the men swore as he swung himself from the saddle and examined the bullet wound that had attracted a cloud of flies. ‘White man did this. Too good a shot for a blackfella.’

  The attention of the one black horseman was not on the dead beast but the hoof marks a short distance away. He squinted and frowned as his eyes fell on the footprints near the dead steer.

  As a station stockman and sometime tracker, his keen eyes were already providing his mind with a clear picture of who had been the killers of the stray animal. ‘One blackfella, boss,’ he said softly from astride his horse, and the man standing over the carcass looked up at him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘One blackfella, one whitefella ride ’im away quick time. Ride ’im away that way.’ The Aboriginal stockman pointed to the south-east and the dismounted man grabbed the reins of his horse to swing himself back into the saddle. The three European stockmen looked to him for a decision as he sat staring towards the east.

  ‘A blackfella and a whitefella riding together,’ he mused. ‘Must be that bloody Irish bushwhacker Duffy and his myall mate.’

  ‘We go after them, Charlie?’ one of the stockmen asked. ‘Or we tell the traps in Burketown?’ Charlie scratched at the stubble on his chin irritably as he pondered his decision. They had finally closed in on whoever had been butchering the station’s strays. Some of the strays had been speared by hungry Aboriginal hunters roving the plains, but he had not expected to come so close to the infamous and reputedly very dangerous pair of bushrangers who were wanted the length and breadth of the colony. In the past, whenever they had found what was left of other dead cattle, the state of the stripped carcasses had left no trace of how they had died. Nor any tracks to indicate who had killed them. Now they knew why. But the knowledge did not cheer him. Even with his four armed companions, Charlie did not underestimate the wanted men. It was said that Tom Duffy had already killed three men without the slightest sign of mercy.

  Charlie took off his broad-brimmed hat and stared up at the gathering storm clouds billowing over the parched plains. ‘Where would you go when the wet time came?’ he asked the Aboriginal stockman as he continued to gaze at the purple-hued sky streaked with flashes of lightning.

  ‘Go big rock ground, boss,’ he replied without hesitation. ‘Plenty good place when wet come.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Charlie said as he pulled his hat low over his eyes and pulled down on the reins. ‘We go north to Burketown. Let the Native Mounted go after them. That’s what they get paid for.’

  Tom and Wallarie rode hard until they could feel their mounts tiring under them. Then they slowed to a canter and finally brought the horses to a walk.

  Wallarie signalled a stop as he slid from the saddle and walked a short distance from his horse, which stood sweating and exhausted with its head down. Tom did not have to ask Wallarie what he was doing. He knew he was scanning the horizon for a sign that only his acute eyesight would see. He stood very still and Tom knew he was also listening.

  Overhead a deep rumble rolled in the sky and heavy, fat raindrops spattered the dusty earth like a hail of lazy bullets. Wallarie turned and walked back to his horse, which had lifted its head and snorted with equine pleasure for the wonderful rich and fecund scent of newly wet earth.

  ‘Not following us,’ he said with a grunt and swung into the saddle. ‘They go that way,’ he added and pointed to the north.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now anyway, you black bastard,’ Tom whooped. ‘The wet might be late this year, but it’s sure as Hades going to stop anyone ever tracking us. Let’s go home.’

  Wallarie glanced to the north as Tom kicked his mount forward. The riders appeared to have gone north, but this did not make him easier in spirit. It was most likely that the party had an Aboriginal tracker with them and he would have seen their tracks near the dead steer. Wallarie had a bad feeling.

  He shook his head when he glanced across at Tom, who was grinning from ear to ear as they rode east. Maybe Tom was right about the rain causing any pursuit of them to be abandoned for some time.

  The late afternoon was turning to a premature early evening as the rain settled into a steady downpour drenching man and beast to the bone. The horses slowed to a miserable plodding pace but Tom felt his spirits rise as the rocky outcrop of low hills came into sight. They had reached the place of the big rocks – and the place of their sanctuary – where Mondo and his three children waited for him with stoic patience.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Emma James knew the sounds well: the shouts of men bawling orders, the jangle of saddlery metal and the whinny of horses, who seemed to know when they were going on patrol. The sounds drifted to her small cottage a short distance from the Mounted Police barracks at Burketown.

  She went to the back door of her timber-and-iron-clad home and gazed across the rain-soaked paddock where she watched her husband approaching with his distinctive limping stride. Even at a distance, she could see the grim expression set on his face.

  She turned away to go to the latticed food chest to take out a loaf of bread, a jar of melon jam and a tin of tea leaves. She would prepare her husband a thick-sliced jam sandwich and a mug of tea. It was a simple tradition that had evolved in the years of their marriage whenever he had to leave on one of the patrols into the vast and lonely bush of the colony. Sometimes he would be gone for a few days. At other times, weeks and even months. But such was the life of a mounted policeman on the frontier and the life of the women they left behind to raise families.

  Long lonely days and nights living in one of the most isolated places on earth, it was a far cry for the young woman who had spent most of her life in the crowded and noisy tenements of an English industrial city. In England, human-created sounds were taken for granted. On the frontier the sounds were primitive: the screech of a hawk in the azure sky, the lazy murmur of the Mounted Police laughing and talking in the single men’s barracks at the back of the police station, and the comforting babble of her son, Gordon, toddling around the house or playing contentedly in the yard in the ever-present red dust of the Gulf Country.

  And regularly each year, the rain came to roar a pounding tattoo on the iron roof, deafening all other sounds from existence as it had all night when she had lain beside her husband in their big double bed, listening to the rain while holding each other. She loved her big burly bear of a man with an almost childish awe for his strong spirit as much as his hard body. He was to her the epitome of masculinity: tough but gentle, courageous yet sensitive to her feelings and needs. In his arms she felt protected and desired.

  The privations of living in the isolated outpost of Burketown mattered little. When they were together, the bed became their universe – as the great Elizabethan poet, John Donne, had once written. Had the bed been located in the finest of homes in the finest of cities, it would have made no difference to her. That it was located in a tiny timber cottage on the flat lands around Burketown, under an oppressive tropical sky, was irrelevant to her when she was in the arms of her husband. But now she was afraid that the one thing that made her life bearable on the frontier was going to be taken from her. Henry was going on patrol.

  He scraped his boots on the back step and wiped the rain from his face with his hand while Emma poured boiling water from the soot-blackened kettle into a china teapot that had been a belated wedding gift from Kate O’Keefe. She glanced up at her husband’s face and her intuitions were confirmed. Whatever he was about to do was worrying him.

  ‘What is it, Henry?’ she asked as she sat at the table and rotated the teapot to stir the leaves with the hot water.

  ‘We have been called to duty to go out after Tom Duffy,’ he replied in a flat voice. ‘Mister Uhr has intelligence from a party that got through from Lily Pond station. They think he is holed up with Wallarie in a place they call the Big Rocks.’

  Emma ceased rotating the teapot and stared at her husband. ‘Do you think they are right? Do you think that Tom
is hiding out in the district?’ she asked.

  The big police sergeant slumped down onto a chair at the table and placed his hands on its rough wood surface. ‘I think Tom has run out of places to hide,’ he reflected miserably and Emma gently took his hands in hers.

  ‘You do not want to go on this patrol, do you?’ she asked softly and he shook his head with a miserable forlorn look.

  ‘Mister Uhr is the best policeman in the colony,’ Henry answered. ‘I don’t think Tom has much of a chance. When Mister Uhr goes after a man he does not give up, and I think Tom has finally met his match.’

  ‘You don’t want to be there . . . when Mister Uhr finds Tom,’ Emma said, voicing her husband’s troubled thoughts.

  He glanced down at the table to avoid letting her see his fears and mumbled, ‘It’s not only Tom, but the blackfella, Wallarie.’ He did not have to explain what he meant, as Emma had long known of her husband’s guilt for the years he had hunted and dispersed the tribes of central-west Queensland. She suspected that her husband’s guilt would be further deepened if he felt responsible for the death of the last warrior of the Nerambura clan. It was something very deep – almost a primitive superstition. She had grown to realise it existed in the soul of her gentle giant of a man, whose life had been scarred by war and the brutalities of policing the frontier.

  ‘I cannot see why Mister Uhr would risk going out in this weather,’ she said, squeezing his hands hopefully. ‘Surely he would not risk being cut off by the floods when they come.’

  Henry glanced up at his wife miserably. ‘Mister Uhr knows that when the floods recede, Tom and Wallarie will move on. They have always kept on the move to avoid being trapped. He suspects that Tom thinks he will be safe for the very reason that the floods will provide him with a kind of barrier to our movement. But Mister Uhr is prepared to take the risk. The Big Rocks are only a few days’ ride from here and we leave within the hour.’

  He stared grimly at the teapot and his thoughts drifted to that time when he lay helpless, staring up into the barrel of the rifle Wallarie had aimed at him. He remembered the dark eyes, devoid of pity, and how Tom had stopped the Nerambura bushranger from killing him. And he also remembered how Tom Duffy had risked his freedom by getting him back to the grog shanty for medical help. Tom Duffy was not only the brother of Kate O’Keefe, who had grown to be one of Emma’s best friends, but he was also a man capable of great compassion. And now it seemed that Henry would repay the debt of gratitude for his life by being part of a mission to capture – or kill – him.

  He knew his duty to the oath that he had sworn years earlier, to obey orders and uphold the law regardless of personal feeling. But this was very different. He instinctively knew that Tom Duffy would never allow himself to be captured and, if cornered, he would go down fighting. He would most probably take a few of the police with him to hell. Maybe even himself.

  One way or the other, he knew that one of them was fated to die.

  Emma released her hands from his and poured the tea into a big enamel mug in which she added a generous spoonful of sugar. ‘I am surprised Mister Uhr does not leave you behind,’ she said, stirring the tea, ‘to take charge of the station while he leads the patrol after Tom.’

  ‘He realises that he needs every man available,’ Henry replied as he wrapped his fingers through the handle of the mug. ‘He does not underestimate Tom in any way. He has all intentions of taking him alive but . . . if that is not possible . . .’ his voice trailed away and he sipped at the sweetened black tea.

  Emma gazed at her husband’s face. She could see the agony there and, for the first time, she realised that she might never again have his strong arms hold her in their bed or feel his bushy beard against her face. Nor would Gordon grow up in the protective shadow of his big gentle father. Frontier policing was dangerous at the best of times, but it was even more dangerous when the patrol was going out after two men like Tom and Wallarie.

  She fought back the tears which she knew would come when he was gone and pushed her chair away from the table. ‘I will make you a sandwich,’ she said in a controlled and calm voice with her back to him. She did not want him to see her distress. ‘You will need something to eat before you go.’

  He nodded vacantly, as his thoughts were elsewhere. He was going over in his mind the supplies and kit he would need to ensure were taken on the patrol. Ammunition was at the top of his list and he hoped there was enough in the police storeroom for the confrontation. Despite his personal feelings concerning the mission, he was also concerned for the men he rode with. Their safety took priority over Tom Duffy’s life. Even his own . . .

  Emma stood in the red mud in the backyard of their cottage and watched the blue-uniformed police ride out of the barracks in single file with their bodies hunched against the drizzling rain. Little Gordon James stood holding her hand and sucking his thumb as she waved to the big man who rode at the rear of the file. He turned and raised his hand. Henry flashed a smile which Emma felt rather than saw from the distance, and she did not care that the rain was soaking through the cotton dress clinging to her slim body.

  She remained watching the patrol until it disappeared in a line of scrub trees on the horizon. Only then did she turn and walk slowly back to the cottage to sit at the table where her husband had been minutes earlier. He had not touched the jam sandwich she had made for him. It lay on the enamel plate forlornly, like part of him left behind. The sight of the uneaten sandwich triggered great racking sobs.

  She bent her head and the emotions, which she had so carefully controlled for her husband, flowed as if without any hope. In her grief, she had a fleeting guilty thought that wrenched her with its utter selfishness. She hoped that when Henry and Tom met again, it would be Kate O’Keefe who would be crying her tears of grief. It was a terrible thought for the woman whom she considered almost as close as a sister.

  Little Gordon James stared wide-eyed at his mother sobbing inconsolably at the kitchen table. Although the toddler did not know of such things as the existence of death, he did understand sorrow. And he knew there was nothing he could do for the woman in his life. Except share her sorrow.

  Little Gordon James hugged his mother’s legs and howled his distress. It was beyond his childish comprehension that the big and gentle male creature might not be a permanent fixture in his life.

  FORTY-SIX

  After a short sea trip on a coastal steamer from Rockhampton to Townsville and a round of meetings with stock and station agents, Kate was driven by a jolly middle-aged agent to inspect Harry’s residence, now hers. As they drew close to the house, she immediately fell in love with it.

  It was a high-set rambling timber house with a wide verandah. Tall eucalypts provided shade and Harry had planted a grove of mango trees whose thick and spreading foliage gave a coolness in the tropical heat.

  The journey to Townsville had been prompted by a need to consolidate the estates old Harry Hubner had left her in his will. She had not forgotten the oath she had sworn after learning of the old teamster’s generous gift to her. And to honour his memory she wanted to bring his Townsville home alive with her presence.

  Kate alighted and strolled around the building, examining its structure with the eye of a professional. The house had not fallen into disrepair. The agent told her that Harry had lived the last days of his life here. She smiled and promised the old teamster’s spirit that in his home she would one day provide the laughter of children and the voices of a happy family and friends.

  Oh, there was work to be done to make the house the place she imagined for the future. But time and money would easily do that. And the money would be there as her transport business flourished under her astute business management. She may have come to the new colony to build a hotel, but her dreams went further even than that now. One day she would be the richest woman in the colony . . . nay . . . the richest woman in Australia! Her dreams might be grander than her means at the moment, but she had youth, capital and ambition
on her side. She was a Duffy, she reminded herself. And the Duffys had overcome greater adversities than merely acquiring a fortune.

  For a brief moment she felt a kind of uninvited bittersweet sadness intrude on her thoughts as if, somehow, the ghosts of her father and Old Billy were there with her. Curiously, she could not feel her beloved brother Michael’s spirit. Was it that she would feel his presence under other circumstances? she wondered. Would he come to her in some time of need?

  How could it be that she had so much good fortune when the men in her family had suffered so much? Michael dead in far-off New Zealand. Her father buried in central-west Queensland and her brother Tom living life where a bullet from a police trooper or a hangman’s noose always shadowed his life.

  The ghosts faded from her thoughts and she turned to the agent. ‘I think we should inspect inside, Mister Cafe,’ she said lightly and followed him up the broad wooden steps with their ornate timber supports. With a critical eye, she was already redesigning the house: a wall out there to give more room to the rather small dining room, a new polish to the teak floor, and paint to replace the peeling wallpaper which had suffered from the constant heat of Townsville.

  ‘The house has six bedrooms, Missus O’Keefe,’ the agent said as he stood in the room that was obviously designed as a place to dine. It appeared the old teamster had grandiose ideas for his retirement, but he had lacked a woman’s fertile imagination for style. His functionalism tended to compartmentalise the house into practical areas.

  ‘Big enough to start a family . . .’ the agent bit his tongue as he remembered the tragic stories he had heard about the beautiful young woman, deserted by a worthless husband years earlier. Being a staunch Catholic himself, he realised that Missus O’Keefe probably considered herself still married, regardless of the long separation, and as such unable to remarry. Divorce was out of the question under the circumstances.