Wanted Dead (10 page)

“Here, have another drink. No, what I was thinking was that it might be amusing for you to shave
your beard off, cut your hair differently, possibly even dye it, change your clothes entirely—I can fix that for you—and go out to the shanty and have a talk to Janey.”

“What on earth for?” said Riley, appalled.

“Well, you might get a lead on Hatton,” said Collingwood.

Riley was about to repudiate the very notion that he was not simply a semi-permanent guest in Collingwood's home. The idea had been that he should use it as a base for his bushranger patrols.

“Hm, yes,” he said thoughtfully.

“As a matter of fact,” said Collingwood, warming to his subject. “It has occurred to me that we might be able to lay Mr. Hatton by the heels ourselves.”

“Oh?”

“You consider. Suppose you, as a stranger, drop into the shanty and let it be known that you're working on my property. Go a couple of times, pretend to get drunk, get a name for yourself as a talkative fellow; then just drop it around where Janey can hear you that I keep a lot of rough gold on the premises, or better still that I've been dealing in gold and usually have a lot of it on the premises on Friday nights. I'll wager we have Hatton and his crew out here the following Friday.'

What a weird ambition, thought Riley, but all he said was: “Can I have another drink?”

“Of course, here help yourself. But you see what I mean? You and I could lie in wait for them, lock up the dogs so that they can come right in and then, well, we'll work out the details later, but you see what I mean.”

“Yes,” said Riley sadly, “I see what you mean.”

“Of course we could get some troopers in to help us,” said Collingwood, “but I don't feel that we're likely to get any sensible co-operation from that man Madden, do you?”

“No,” said Riley.

“Right. Then you feel we should go it alone, eh?”

Riley didn't see that that was necessarily the only alternative, but felt that now he'd been hopelessly forced into a false position.

“And do you really think it would be essential that I shave?”

“I think it would be wise. Anyhow it's getting quite fashionable now. You'll see quite a few clean shaven men around Sydney.”

Riley looked into the sparkling blue eyes of the expatriate Swede and couldn't bring himself to argue against all that wholesome bloodthirsty enthusiasm.

“They usually have a sort of dance at the shanty on Saturday nights,” Collingwood was saying. “You could start working your way in then.”

Riley started to say that he didn't care for dancing, but then realised that that was irrelevant. Perhaps he had drunk too much whisky. He poured himself another glass.

They went to bed very late that night and Riley awoke next morning with the curiously purified feeling that comes from having drunk too much Irish whisky. He also woke with a hazy recollection of Collingwood, towards the end of the evening, having advanced the suggestion that, when the bushrangers responded to the bait, they be met with an expanded version of Riley's cave mining device. That at least, Riley felt, could be disregarded on the grounds that
it would almost certainly result in the homestead being blown to matchwood.

But the rest of it — what had he agreed to last night? Riley buried his face in the pillow and groaned softly.

Diffidently Riley drew the razor down his heavily lathered cheek. It sliced through the hair remarkably easily. Stroke by stroke there was revealed to Riley a face that was still surprisingly like the face he remembered in the days of his youth, before it had finally become submerged in a decent veil of hair. The chin was rather too long for the other features, and his mouth now seemed abnormally wide. Moreover his nose seemed to stick out more. The whole thing had been better balanced with the beard, he thought sorrowfully. For a moment he toyed with the idea of retaining a moustache, but decided that it made his mouth look even wider than it was.

When he wiped away the remnants of lather he found the newly shaven parts of his face were a different colour from the rest. A sort of pale ghost of his beard remained. Perhaps that would be an excuse for putting off his visit to the shanty for another week.

But by the end of the week the sun and wind had done their work and Riley's face was the even copper colour of the other inhabitants of the southern tablelands.

ANYHOW, HE TOLD HIMSELF as he jogged down the road towards Lightning Fork on a superb gelding that Collingwood had lent him, anyhow nothing much would happen that night. All he had to do was drink
too much and let it be known that he worked at Collingwood's. He had no fear of the girl's recognising him. In fact he was so confident of his changed appearance that he was seriously thinking of deserting the police service secure in the knowledge that nobody would be able to recognise him to charge him with desertion or to claim the money he so unjustly owed. But then that might cause undue complication when he wanted to leave the Colony.

Riley heard the sounds of dancing long before the shanty itself came into sight. There were a couple of fiddles, being played incredibly quickly, laughter and loud voices, snatches of song, and across the lot like a blanket of sound the regular crash of boots on a wooden floor. Two light crashes and one heavy, as though the dancers were taking two preparatory hops before leaping high in the air and dashing their feet to the boards in unison. Which was more or less what they were doing, Riley found, when he arrived at the shanty.

Several fires had been lit on the cleared ground in front of the shanty and lanterns had been hung on lines running from nearby trees to the building itself. The barrels and boxes Riley had seen before inside the shanty were now outside, half of them occupied by men who stamped their feet on the ground and banged their pint pots on the barrels in time with the music. The door of the shanty was wide open and the smoky glare inside showed the place crammed with wildly dancing couples. Riley guessed that the men sitting outside had been unable to secure partners. There was sure to be a shortage of women at this sort of thing.

The noise level was almost unbelievable and it
seemed to Riley that the whole shanty shook and trembled to the rhythm of the music and the crashing feet. It possibly did. A couple of men in white aprons emerged from the shanty with trays of beer and began serving the drinkers sitting outside. One of them told Riley to tether his horse round the back of the shanty, but he decided to take it across to the scrub on the other side of the road. He didn't anticipate trouble, but if there were any he didn't want to scramble for his horse amongst the confusion of buggies, traps and hacks that he supposed he would find behind the shanty.

As he walked back towards the building it struck Riley that the scene outside, the men sitting at barrels, the flickering yellow light everywhere, the gay strains of music and the shouts and laughter, created an atmosphere not unlike that of the outdoor drinking places he'd seen in France and Spain. This one certainly had a personality of its own, but the principle was the same. It would be interesting to see whether this Colony eventually developed an English or Continental tradition in its social habits.

Personally Riley disliked the whole thing. His tradition was in the nature of friends gathering at each other's homes to sing and drink and to talk. He saw no point in gathering together a crowd of strangers, or comparative strangers, with liquor and noise their greatest bonds.

Probably this place would go the way of the Continent, he thought morosely. The climate would make for this sort of outdoor life, and there were certainly enough Europeans here already.

Riley sat down on one of the boxes and bought a pot of beer from a waiter. He determined to make it
last all evening because he was not going to make vast inroads on the only two pounds he had in the world. He had only to pretend to be drinking too much anyway. It was unlikely that anybody would notice how much he actually drank and besides, there was no way of telling that he hadn't been drinking heavily long before he came here.

Soon the dancing inside reached a crescendo, then stopped abruptly, and couples began to spill out of the shanty.

Two young men, hand in hand with a couple of girls, claimed the barrel at which Riley was sitting. He abandoned it gracefully, and drifted into the shanty. He wanted to see whether Janey Cabel was there anyway.

The floor of the shanty had been cleared apart from a platform made of beer barrels and planks at one end. That would be for the fiddlers, Riley thought. The fiddlers themselves, instruments in their hands, were at the bar, and, Good God, there was the old man, still in the same place, still motionless. Not
still
Riley corrected himself,
again
surely. He couldn't have been there since Riley saw him last. But the effect was eerie, particularly when he heard the old man's voice replying to some remark by one of the musicians. As before there was no visible movement among the hair that hung round his mouth.

Riley walked over to the bar and set his pot down. The musicians glanced at him and one nodded, but the old man never stirred.

Riley wondered how he was supposed to go about introducing himself into this circle. No-one seemed remotely interested in him. Probably the best would be to ask somebody to dance, but then there seemed
to be such a dire shortage of women that he'd probably get killed in the rush.

The two fiddlers downed their beer and tramped back to their improvised stands. Riley wondered what they did when they weren't fiddling. Probably station hands. Most of the men here looked as though they could be station hands.

The fiddlers looked at each other, nodded and then broke into a frenzy of sawing at their instruments. The sharp vivid sounds seemed to physically draw the dancers into the shanty and in moments the whole place was again full of couples, jigging and twirling. Riley eased himself into a corner made by the bar and one wall of the shanty.

He saw Jane Cabel dancing with a tall, clean shaven young man. She looked rather ill, he thought. He wondered whether the young man was one of her bushranger friends. Quite possibly there were a number of bushrangers in this gathering, amateurs or professionals-. The shanty had become hot and stuffy with the influx of the crowd and Riley began to wish he'd stayed outside.

There seemed to be some sort of disturbance near the doorway. The people there had stopped dancing. Probably someone had fallen over. Or perhaps it was a fight. Riley couldn't see very clearly.

Then the dancers in the middle of the shanty stopped and some of the men cursed someone who was trying to struggle through the crowd. One of the fiddlers stopped playing, then started again, but out of time now with his companion.

There was a fight. A thin young fellow was struggling with another older man. The young one broke away, and pushed through the crowd. One of the
dancers shoved violently at him and he reeled, then scrambled on. The man he'd been fighting was thrusting through the crowd after him.

The young man reached the bar and scrambled over it, near the old shanty-owner, who still didn't move.

Then astonishingly, the young man grabbed the shanty-owner's arm and hung on to it. His face was distorted and wet with tears.

Riley recognised him then. It was the youth who'd tried to hold him up when he was riding out along the road from Goulburn.

The shanty was in an uproar now. A few determined couples were still trying to dance in the far corner, but most were staring at the tableau in front of the bar. The old man, motionless, leaning on his elbows; the youth cringing behind the bar, clinging to his father and weeping . . . the man who'd been chasing him standing with the palms of his hands on the bar as though to vault over.

One of the fiddlers cut out again; the other struggled on alone for a few moments then his scraping too died away.

There was some sort of confusion in the doorway again, Riley could hardly see over the heads of the crowd, but more men seemed to be coming in and forcing their way through.

The harsh voice of the old shanty-owner sounded over the babble of talk and scraping feet: “Just stay where you are Martin Kingston. Just stay where you are.”

He seemed to be talking to the man who was threatening to leap over the bar. The man answered, but Riley, who was only ten feet away, couldn't hear him.

The crowd began to fall back from the middle of the shanty and Riley saw half a dozen men, revolvers in hand, coming through towards the bar.

Leading them was James Hatton, huge and bearded, a revolver in each hand and several more stuck in his belt.

Riley for a moment regretted the revolver he'd left in his saddle bag, then was glad he had because otherwise he might have been tempted to do something absurd. Not that the temptation would have been great. The crowd was falling back before the armed men and Riley found himself crushed into the corner, finding it difficult to breathe, much less move. But because of his position against the bar he could now see quite clearly everything that was happening.

The men with Hatton spread out on either side of him, urging the crowd back towards the walls. A few women screamed, but everybody moved back, the men warily eyeing the revolvers being aimed at their stomachs.

The man who'd been chasing Johnny Cabel, Riley remembered that that was the youth's name, fell back when Hatton approached.

Hatton stopped within a few feet of the bar. He gestured at the cringing boy, but spoke to his father.

“I want him, Dan,” Hatton said, his deep vibrant voice rising clear above the noises in the shanty. As he spoke everyone fell silent and still, as though striving to listen.

“Why?” came the harsh gravelly monosyllable from the old man. Riley realised that the old man's head, bent over the bar as he was, was still on a level with Hatton's. And Hatton, he knew, was six foot three.

“He's a traitor,” said Hatton. The youth had stopped
whimpering now and was staring fixedly at Hatton. He still clung to his father's arm, like a small boy.