Only Killers and Thieves(44)
“Fuck off. Got snakebit.” He spat tobacco juice on the ground.
“How careless of you. Hope it wasn’t poisonous. Hate to lose you so soon.”
“Well, I’ve bloody warned you. So there it is.”
“So there it is,” Noone repeated. “Consider me suitably warned.”
Noone was smiling at him. The troopers hadn’t moved. Locke nodding and nodding at the others as if convincing them of something, convincing himself.
“Alright,” Sullivan said. “We’ve a bloody long ride ahead, don’t the pair of you start. I suppose you’ve already got the track on them, Inspector?”
“I told you: the only tracks I found at the house were yours.”
Sullivan looked about anxiously. “So, what are we going to do, then?”
Noone beat the dead tobacco from the bowl of his pipe, stowed the pipe in his longcoat, and reached for a wide-brimmed slouch hat balanced behind him on his pack. He squared the hat on his head and began turning his horse around.
“We already know where the Kurrong are,” he said. “The best thing about natives is they stick to their own lands. We ride west beyond the ranges and we’ll come up with them soon enough. One way or another, John, we’ll find your man.”
The troopers parted to let him pass, then circled into a column and followed on behind. Sullivan glanced at Locke, at the brothers, the slightest hesitation in his eyes. Almost immediately it was gone. He clicked his horse forward, the others did the same, and one by one each of them joined the back of the line.
16
They were a whole day crossing Sullivan’s station; Noone and the troopers fell back in the line and allowed the squatter to take the lead. A thin column of horses snaking through undulating yellow scrubland, through pasture, through brigalow, through sparse stands of gum trees and the shadows they threw. There was no other shade. Their backs burned all morning, then their faces all afternoon, and their pace was slow and measured in the unrelenting sun.
Tommy rode in the middle of the group, Billy in front of him, the first of the troopers directly behind, the young one with the bat-like face and grin that never seemed to fade. Tommy tried to keep a gap between them, rode tight to Billy’s heels, but the trooper was always there, the sound of his hoof fall, the other noises he made. Spitting or laughing or chattering, to whom it wasn’t clear. Tommy risked a glance backward, pretended he was studying the terrain. The trooper was watching him. Wide-eyed under that low slabbed brow, smiling and nodding and keen. Beyond him the others were in reverse order: Noone at the very back, the old man in front of him, as easy and nonchalant as if taking a Sunday ride.
Tommy turned forward, stared at Billy’s back, tried imagining the troopers were not there. He thought of Mary, back in her bedroom, Mrs. Sullivan on the chair, Shanklin might even have been there by now. He knew what he was doing. Better than some bloody vet. With his medicines and his doctoring, he’d see she was back on her feet to meet them by the time they came home.
Tommy shook his head. The reasoning didn’t hold. Weeks had taken the ball out, patched the wound, made her comfortable, and still she wouldn’t wake. What more could Shanklin do? How could he fix her if she was already bled out? Tommy looked about nervously. As if searching for an answer, a sign; the bush gave only silence in reply. He wasn’t the only one twitchy: Billy rode like he was expecting a sudden war. Reins pulled short, back rigid, hand resting on the revolver Sullivan had loaned, ready for an ambush or the chance to set one himself. Not worrying about Mary, anyway—Billy was already seeking their sister’s revenge.
For a while they followed the line of the ridge, then angled away south through a thick band of scrub, keeping clear of grazing sheep and new cow-and-calf pairs. The ridge fading into the distance until all that remained was the jagged imprint of its spine against the sky, tapering down low in the west. The old people believed the ridge was a crocodile, or made by a crocodile, or something like that. Arthur had told Tommy the story, but he couldn’t recall it now. He could see the resemblance: the downslopes contoured like limbs, head, and jaw; the swell of a belly where they met the land; the spine and the tail and outcrops like scales on the sides. So what was to say Arthur had been wrong? Why couldn’t a crocodile have made the ridge? Tommy doubted Arthur even believed those stories himself anymore, pictured him sitting against the bunkhouse wall weighing his beliefs in his hands, each as insubstantial as air. He’d looked utterly lost that day. A man without faith or a place in the world. Was that why he’d left them, to find wherever else he thought he belonged? Where else was there? Way out in this nothingness, his family and people dead . . . the others were still saying Arthur was involved, that he’d joined up with Joseph, been part of what was done. Tommy didn’t believe it. In just a few weeks Arthur would be coming back, oblivious to everything. Stay gone, Arthur, he thought to himself. Stay gone.
Strange how the land plays its tricks on the mind: Tommy was used to heat haze and mirage, but now beyond the dots of cattle grazing the faraway plains he thought he saw waterbirds swooping to the ground. Long-legged things, egrets maybe, looked to be feeding but surely not. He tipped back his hat and watched them. The ground up there shimmering, different to heat haze, glistening in the glare of the sun. If Tommy didn’t know better he’d have said it was a floodplain, but how could there be a floodplain when it had rained only three days in the year?