bearded face reflected astonishment and terror as a fountain of fire and smoke boiled up from the overcharge in the flash pan on the pistol, and he rolled to one side.
Her teeth clenched, Alexandra ignored the fire as it singed her eyebrows and covered her face with soot. She squinted through the smoke and swung the pistol, tracking Crowley with it. An instant later, smoke belched from the pistol as it fired with a loud report. A large hole appeared in his shirt above his belt, the heavy ball ripping into his stomach. His face twisted in agony and shock for an instant, then in rage as he lurched up from the ground and swung his musket toward Alexandra.
As Crowley stood up, Alexandra prepared to jump back into the thicket brush, then a shot rang out down the hill. The musket ball tore through Crowley's neck, and his throat was suddenly a mass of raw flesh, blood spurting. His eyes and mouth opening wide, he dropped his musket and collapsed. He uttered choked, gagging sounds as his limbs jerked convulsively, stirring the foliage, and his life ebbed.
At a distance to the right and down the hill, Hinton fired at the stockman who fired back. Her eyes stinging from the gunpowder soot and her hands trembling with tension, Alexandra blew down the pistol barrel and on the flash pan to dispose of any hot sparks. She reloaded the weapon, setting the ball and powder charge with the ramrod under the barrel, then poured gunpowder into the flash pan and closed the lid. While Hinton and the stockman occasionally exchanged fire, Alexandra picked up the musket and crawled down the slope toward the bushranger.
When she was about forty yards from Hinton, he apparently became concerned because the other bushrangers had stopped shooting. "Crowley!" he shouted. "Where are you? Are you all right?"
"He can't answer you, Hinton!" Alexandra called, laughing in satisfaction. "He's burning in the fires of perdition! When you join him presently, you and he will be in suitable company again!"
Hinton roared a stream of profanity, then the foliage thrashed as he crouched low and ran down the hill. Alexandra raced after him, determined to keep him from getting a horse and escaping. The wiry limbs clawed at her and caught the musket barrel as she dashed through the brush, but Hinton ran with a slow, clumsy pace, and she gained on him.
At the foot of the hill, the bushes were smaller and thinning, and Alexandra glimpsed the bushranger. She stopped and dropped the musket, then cocked the pistol. As he zigzagged between clumps of foliage, she held the weapon at arm's length and took aim, waiting for a clear shot. When he ran across an opening, she squeezed the trigger and tracked him as the hammer fell and the flash pan flared.
The ball clipped twigs behind Hinton and forced him into a burst of speed. Pushing the pistol under her belt, Alexandra picked up the musket and dashed from one thicket to another while crossing the valley, reaching the other side without Hinton's stopping to fire at her. Certain that he would, she veered to the left as he went straight up the slope on the other side of the valley.
Over the noise she made as she ran, Alexandra clearly heard Hinton's awkward, pounding footsteps and his heavy crashing through the growth. Some fifty yards to his left, she gradually pulled abreast of him. He stopped, evidently intending to wait and shoot at her. She slowed to a fast walk and moved quietly up the slope. When he resumed running a few minutes later, Alexandra had reached the trees near the top of the hill.
Entering the forest, she crossed the hill and went down the other side. At the dry creek bed, she moved stealthily through the edge of the trees toward the camp. Just as she saw the horses, she heard Hinton sliding and stumbling as he hurried down the slope.
Alexandra eased forward from tree to tree until the camp was in full view, then she stood behind a large eucalyptus and peered around it, cocking the musket.
Hinton slid to a stop beside the saddles and baggage, looking back and holding his musket ready to fire as he panted breathlessly from running. After a moment, seeing no pursuit, he relaxed. Lowering the musket, he watched the forested slope as his breathing gradually became even. Finally, he loosened the pistol in his belt as he put down the musket, then he picked up a saddle and turned toward the horses. Alexandra stepped from behind the tree, aiming her musket at him.
Hinton recoiled in shock as he dropped the saddle. Moving toward his musket, he stopped as her finger tightened on the trigger. The unblemished side of his face was pasty white, his pale blue eyes gleaming with fear as he licked his thick lips. "I didn't do anything that really hurt you," he muttered defensively. "It wasn't anything that somebody else wouldn't do sooner or later. Let me take one horse, and I'll leave you all my money and everything else."
"No. You destroyed my life, and now I'm going to take yours."
Beads of sweat shining on his ugly face, he licked his lips again. Then he waited for her to pull the trigger, ready to try to avoid the bullet in the fraction of a second between the flare of the flash pan and when the weapon fired. Alexandra braced herself to swing the heavy musket and keep it pointed at him as it fired, then she tugged on the trigger.
As the hammer fell, fire and smoke shot up from the overcharge in the flash pan. Hinton threw himself to one side, falling to the ground and rolling. Her eyes stinging from the fire and smoke, Alexandra ignored the pain and tracked the man with the musket, keeping it aimed at him. Then the smoke dissipated, and the weapon misfired.
Hinton scrambled to his feet, jerking the pistol from under his belt and training it on Alexandra. As he seized control of the situation, his fear was instantly replaced by his usual overbearing, swaggering attitude, and he laughed in gleeful triumph. "So you're going to take my life are you?" he sneered. "You'd best think again, you stupid bitch!"
A movement at one side catching her eye, Alexandra glanced and then looked. The stockman had just stepped quietly through the trees, out of Hinton's line of vision, and was aiming a double-barrel musket at the bushranger.
As she looked back at Hinton, he smiled sourly. "You conniving slut!" he jeered. "Trying to make me look the other way so you can run into the trees, aren't you? Well, I'm not that stupid, and you'll never get rid of me. I can get rid of you, but you'll never be rid of me."
He started to say more, then broke off in shock as both hammers on the musket fell with a loud snap. As he started to turn his head to look, the weapon fired with a shattering roar, a cloud of smoke boiling from the barrels. Hinton's hat flicked off, the hair on the left side of his head stirred, and the right side of his skull exploded into a spray of bloody tissue, bone, and hair. The impact of the bullets pitched him sideways, his pistol firing harmlessly into the ground as he fell.
The stockman stepped through the gunpowder smoke, and Alexandra immediately recognized him from when they had met in Parramatta. The shock of recognition, combined with the overwhelming relief she now felt, rendered her momentarily speechless. The stockman, too, seemed very withdrawn, gazing at her in somber silence. Alexandra was the first to recover herself.
"My name is Alexandra Hammond," she told him, "and I'm most grateful for your timely assistance. You helped me once before when my situation was far less dire. It was in Parramatta, and you replaced a wheel that had come off my buggy. But perhaps you don't recall the incident."
Still reserved, it appeared that he had to exert an almost physical effort to draw his gaze away from her. Then he nodded, turning to the baggage. "Yes, I remember it well," he replied quietly.
Puzzled by his aloof attitude, it suddenly occurred to Alexandra that her grimy, disheveled appearance might have led him to believe that she was the bushrangers' woman and had turned against them for some reason. "In the event you think I wanted to be with those men, let me assure you that you're entirely mistaken. They abducted me near Sydney"
"How could I think such a thing?" he interrupted impatiently, frowning at her. "It's obvious that you were abducted." He turned back to the baggage and began sorting through it. "I can see that you're anything but a trollop, Mistress Hammond, as could anyone with eyes in his head."
"Then I'm on beam's end
s in trying to understand the reason for your manner," she retorted. "Could you at least be so kind as to tell me your name? Even though our conversation is strangely halting, considering the circumstances, I would like to know to whom I am speaking."
He glanced at her again, then picked up two pack-saddles and carried them toward the horses. "I'm David Kerrick."
In the aftermath of the rapid flow of events during the past hour, it took Alexandra a second to recall why the name was so familiar. Then she gazed at him in shock, realizing that he was a convicted murderer and her family's deadly enemy, the man who had killed her cousin.
An hour later, at the hut below the fold, Alexandra was still trying to come to terms with what had happened. She looked down the hill, watching David Kerrick. After stacking the baggage beside the hut, he had used three horses to take the bodies to the foot of the slope, where he buried them.
When he finished and came back up the hill with the horses, Alexandra experienced a growing discomfort that overcame all her other feelings. It was something entirely new to her, a reaction to David Kerrick simply as a man and unrelated to him personally. Analyzing it, she realized that the brutal mistreatment by the bushrangers had created a lingering effect of distrust within her toward men in general.
He stopped at a tree near the hut, where he had tethered the other horses. As he untied them, her gaze met his in mutual wariness, a silent acknowledgment of the abyss of hostility between them. Gathering up the halter ropes, he started to turn away, then looked back at her. "That mutton hanging beside the hut is fresh," he told her. "Make free use of it or anything else here that you might need."
Her sense of courtesy demanding a response, Alexandra managed a cold nod.
David led the horses to the fold where he untied his dogs. Then he opened the gate, and the sheep poured out and down the slope. As the dogs raced beside the sheep and kept them in a wide column, David followed the flock, riding a horse and leading the others.
When he was gone, Alexandra sat beside the smoldering ashes of the fire in front of the hut. She idly tossed twigs on the coals, a confused muddle of thoughts tugging at her mind. Most of all, she remained dazed by the twist of fate that had freed her from the bushrangers only to leave her with David Kerrick.
For weeks, her every waking moment had been dominated by her urgent need to escape from the bushrangers. Now that she was free of them, she remained trapped in another way, this time by hundreds of miles of deserted wilderness that separated her from her family. Even trying to find the stockmen to the south would be perilous. She could get lost or die of thirst and starvation. And of all people on earth, no one was near except her cousin's murderer.
Wisps of smoke rose from the twigs as she threw them onto the coals, then the wood burst into flames. Alexandra looked at the fire, her innate refusal to be defeated asserting itself. While she was far from her family, the bushrangers were dead and she no longer had to live in constant terror of being brutally raped. Somehow, she would eventually make her way back to her family and try to rebuild her life.
Alexandra stood up, thinking about her immediate needs and forcing aside other matters for the moment. She was hungry and weary, but her ragged, grimy state was her first concern, having galled her for weeks. At the foot of the hill, the pond fed a brook, a place where at last she could bathe in privacy. She searched the baggage for a dress and other things among the clothes the bushrangers had stolen.
Looking back, David saw that Alexandra was moving about the hut. Although she had resurrected the array of tormenting emotions that he had thought he had left behind, he felt sympathy for her. He knew how she must have suffered as a captive of the bushrangers, and he was relieved that she was busying herself instead of merely sitting dejectedly, as before.
He wanted to help her and to comfort her, and at the same time, he had a driving urge to run away from her. The agonizing memories of betrayal that she had brought back to him were a somber warning of the penalty he had once paid for being drawn to beauty and charm. Cracking his whip, he kept the sheep moving at a fast walk up the valley until it curved, wanting to leave the hut and the beautiful woman behind.
Near the head of the valley, the sheep cropped the foliage. He hobbled the horses and sat under a tree, watching the animals. The valley looked the same as before, yet at this moment it was entirely different.
During the previous days, it had been a scene in the new life he had made for himself. Now his past had reached out and caught up with him, his old life and all of its turmoil intruding upon the new.
The bushrangers had been little more than an annoyance, merely a physical threat. Disposing of them had been hazardous but straightforward. However, they had brought with them one who was completely innocent of any wrongdoing, but who was a far greater danger. She created an attack from within him, one he was unable to fight.
In a sense, it was also an assault in which he conspired, savaging himself. Although his love for his former wife was poisoned with a sense of betrayal, turning it into a caustic, devouring force that was agonizing, he resisted giving it up. Instead, he had put it aside and occupied his mind with other thoughts, but that love still remained too much a part of his very being for him to exorcise it from his life.
For the first time in almost two years, he took out his watch and opened it, looking at the miniature. From when they had first met, his love for his wife had been his sole purpose in life. Everything else had been subordinate, including his work which had merely been a source of money to buy presents that would bring a smile to her lovely face. His lack of moderation had laid the ground for disaster, blinding him to her faults, and leaving him with no refuge when that infirm foundation of his life had collapsed.
The hours passed, as Kerrick sat gazing at the portrait. When late afternoon arrived, he had mixed feelings as he moved the flock back down the valley. He was reluctant to return to the hut, wanting to avoid Alexandra, but he was concerned about her after her ordeal and wondered what she was doing. At the same time, which created a far more severe conflict within him, he also looked forward to seeing her.
The hut came into view. Smoke rose from the fire and as he drew closer to the hill, David saw that Alexandra had on a dark dress instead of the ragged clothes she had worn, and she was cooking. The flock reached the pond, the thirsty sheep and dogs wading into it to drink. David rode into the water to let the horses drink, then he signaled the dogs and drove the flock up the hill.
As he followed the sheep to the fold, he passed several yards from the hut. Alexandra ignored him, not even glancing up as she knelt beside the fire and stirred a pot. Upon reflection, it was nothing more than the attitude that David had expected her to have toward him, a convicted murderer who had killed her relative.
He tried to regard her with similar reserve, but it was impossible. She was bewitching, her face having a delicate, classical beauty, yet revealing the proud, determined spirit that the bushrangers had been unable to break. It was framed by long, thick brown hair that caught highlights in the setting sun. Wearing a shapeless dungaree dress and heavy shoes, she was still incomparably lovely, just as she had been in the costly clothes she had worn the first time he had seen her.
After securing the sheep, David tethered the horses for the night and went to the hut with the dogs following him. Having eaten nothing since the previous evening, he was famished, and the food that Alexandra was preparing smelled far more appetizing than when he cooked. She continued to ignore him as he put his musket down beside the hut and walked to the fire. A strained, hostile silence hung between them.
Glancing around, David saw that she had been hard at work during the day. The baggage and cooking utensils around the fire and hut were in meticulously neat order, and a large pile of firewood was stacked tidily at one side. ''There's no need for you to do any work here," he told her. "It certainly isn't expected of you."
"I don't like to be idle," she replied coldly, still not looking at him as she turned t
he mutton on the spit. "While I'm here, I'll do my share of the work. Dinner will be ready soon."
In the hut, David gathered up his shaving gear and went to the pond. Later he returned to the hut, put his things away, and sat down beside the fire.
There was a tense, awkward quiet between them again, a wall of silent distrust. Alexandra took one of the mutton roasts off the spit and cut it up, feeding the dogs, then dished up the food for David and herself. She concentrated on what she was doing, trying to control the uneasiness she now had over being near any man, and her aversion to David in particular. Taking her plate and tea, she sat on the other side of the fire.
As he ate, David found that the food not only smelled more appetizing than what he cooked, but it tasted much better, and Alexandra had supplemented his supplies with those in the baggage. The roast was tender and juicy, and the excess fat that sometimes gave mutton a strong flavor had been trimmed off. The peas and beans were seasoned with bits of fried pork, and the pickled cabbage was a delicious accompaniment.
"The food is very tasty," he commented.
Alexandra shrugged, glancing across the fire at him, then looking away. "It will suffice for a meal," she replied indifferently.
With the firelight shining on her lovely face, she was a vision of beauty, and David had to keep himself from staring at her. After a moment, he spoke again, "I know you want to return to your family as soon as possible. Wayamba Station is south of here, and it's owned by Patrick Garrity. He can help you get back to Sydney, but I can't leave my flock and take you to Wayamba. However, I'm sure that Pat will visit, and you can go back with him."
The remarks indicated concern which surprised Alexandra. David's reserve had led her to expect nothing of that nature, and after the weeks of the bushrangers' callous brutality, being treated with kindness by a man almost seemed strange to her. "I realize that you can't leave your sheep," she told him. "When do you expect Mr. Garrity to visit?"
"It'll probably be late summer, after the worst danger of grass fires is past. When you leave, you can take those horses and the bushrangers' belongings because they're yours as far as I'm concerned. They're worth more than enough to hire an escort to take you to Sydney."
Outback Station Page 21