Wanted Dead (9 page)

Collingwood carefully placed the shot gun in a vacant slot in the rack.

“This sort of thing is a bit dramatic, but quite necessary out here at the moment as you'll appreciate,”
he said. Riley was trying to place Collingwood's accent. He spoke perfect English, but it had a clipped and pure quality that made it unlike any English Riley had heard spoken. The man didn't look English. He was very fair and had a small shaped beard that came to a point only an inch or so beyond his chin. It was hard to tell what age he was, but he certainly wasn't over fifty.

“That's quite an armoury you have there,” said Riley.

“Yes, I know,” said Collingwood apologetically, “but then we have to. We've had bushrangers out here twice, you know. The second time they got Cicero. I'm inclined to think they'll have another try for him too. But for Heaven's sake man, don't let's stand talking here. Come and have a drink inside. Why don't you take your sword off and hang it here. It must be a damned uncomfortable thing to wear all the time if you don't mind my saying so.” He spoke very rapidly, but so clearly that Riley had no difficulty following him.

Riley unbuckled his sword and Collingwood took it from him and hung it on the arms rack. He had very long, thin hands, Riley saw, which looked as though they had seldom been used for hard work.

Collingwood led him into a room off the hall with windows so heavily draped that it was quite gloomy. Riley was aware of an unfamiliar sensation about his feet and looked down to see that he was walking on thick carpet. Carpet indeed, this Collingwood must really have money.

Collingwood drew back a curtain and ushered Riley into one of the deep chairs which, with a couple of
heavy oak sideboards and a vast table, made up the furniture of the room.

“Now,” Collingwood was saying, “I have something here which I think might gladden your heart a little.” He was pouring liquid into glasses from a bottle he'd taken from one of the sideboards.

“There now,” said Collingwood, handing him a glass, “I'll guarantee you haven't tasted that since you've been in the Colony.”

Riley cautiously sipped at the liquid. It was Irish whisky. Delightful.

“You are Irish aren't you?” asked Collingwood, “A Dublin man if I'm not mistaken?”

Riley was surprised. Few foreigners recognised his particular accent as Irish. Most people took him for North American. He said as much to Collingwood.

“Well of course the name helped me a lot,” said Collingwood modestly. “But now my dear fellow, tell me the whole story of your encounter with this Hatton man. I know a lot of it, in fact it's fact becoming a legend, but tell me yourself, how did you get on to him in the first place?”

Riley loved talking to an appreciative audience and he loved whisky. The bottle was well diminished by the time he finished telling the story, which, he reflected a little ashamedly, had gained considerably by what the bottle had lost.

“And they actually kept you in gaol for three weeks,” Collingwood was saying incredulously. “That man Madden is becoming altogether impossible. There's quite a move on to get rid of him, you know.”

“No. I didn't know,” said Riley, “but I'm quite in favour of it.”

“He's been absolutely useless as far as cleaning out
the bushrangers is concerned, and he's completely demoralised his troopers.”

“I'm not surprised,” said Riley, “He's demoralised me.”

“Oh come,” said Collingwood flatteringly, “that I doubt. But tell me my dear fellow — some more whisky?”

“Thanks.”

“Tell me what brought you out to these wild parts?”

“Oh I don't know,” said Riley, “just an urge to wander.”

“But why, if you'll forgive me, why into the police force? I mean you're obviously a man of some education . . .”

“For want of something better to do, I suppose,” said Riley, quite truthfully this time. Damn this gentleman to gentleman business, he was thinking. If the man offered him a reward now he'd have to refuse, as one gentleman to another. Heaven send Collingwood would be sufficiently insistent for him to give in gracefully.

“Extraordinary,” said Collingwood, “still I suppose it's an interesting sort of life, as a short term proposition.”

“Oh it's interesting enough,” said Riley non-committally.

“And you're going to keep on at it for a while, are you?”

“For a while,” said Riley, thinking grimly of the ninety-four pounds seventeen shillings he had to find before he could leave the service. Pity he hadn't thought of bringing that out when he was telling his story. It hardly seemed decent to raise the matter now.

“And what exactly are your immediate plans?”

To go as long a way as he could into such bush country as he was reasonably sure was free of bushrangers and rest there for a month, thought Riley, but he said vaguely: “Oh just patrol around I suppose.”

“Going to have another go at Hatton?”

“Oh well,” said Riley, ambiguously.

“Because I was wondering,” said Collingwood, hesitating, “That is if you wouldn't be offended . . .”

Here it comes, thought Riley, striving to look as much as possible like a man who wouldn't be offended by anything.

“It seems to me that all you trooper people are shockingly badly equipped and I was wondering if, by way of a token of my appreciation of your recovering Cicero for me, you would, as a special favour to me, mind accepting . . .”

Get on with it man, thought Riley, I'll accept a lot as a special favour to you. Ninety-four pounds seventeen shillings preferably.

Collingwood was obviously suffering some embarrassment in making his offer of a reward and Riley knew with despair that he'd have to display equally gentlemanly and sensitive feelings and refuse it.

But the offer when it finally came surprised him.

“. . . mind accepting say, a revolver and breech loading rifle from me. I'd be most grateful if you would.”

“Well I . . .” began Riley, calculating with one part of his mind what the sale value of such articles would be and with another knowing shame at his churlish reception of what was in fact a generous and delicate offer.

“After all,” Collingwood continued. “It's nothing short of disgraceful that you should be expected
to fight with the antiquated things you're issued with. And after all, it's people like myself that you're protecting, and it's really no more than common sense on my part to supply you with the proper tools, quite apart from my personal obligation to you.”

“Well,” said Riley, “it's very good of you, but . . .”

“Please,” said Collingwood, “I insist.”

“Well then,” said Riley. “If you insist.”

“Excellent!” said Collingwood, and then as if inspired by his success: “and look, you don't have any particular plan of campaign do you?”

“No, not exactly,” said Riley puzzled.

“I mean you just go out on patrol and more or less see what you can run into, don't you?”

Or away from, thought Riley, “More or less.”

“Well, why don't you make this place your base for a few months. I mean you're right in the heart of the bushranger country. You could cover the whole district in one or two day rides from here.”

“Well I . . .” began Riley.

“And you could use my horses, which means you'd be able to cover a lot more territory.” Riley realised with surprise that the man was desperately in earnest, he really wanted him to stay.

“But surely I'd be in the way, after all, a stranger . . .”

“Not at all,” said Collingwood hastily. “Quite the contrary. As a matter of fact my wife and daughters are in Europe and won't be back for at least six months. You'd be more than welcome.”

“Well, that's very kind of you.” Camping had never been to Riley's taste, and the idea of sleeping in a bed regularly appealed strongly.

“You will then?”

“Well I . . .”

“You will?”

“Well thank you very much. Yes, I will.” What else could he say?

Riley slept deeply and well that night in a feather bed.

He spent the next couple of days practising with his new weapons. After firing about fifty rounds from the revolver he found that if he fired at a tree roughly the width of a man and no more than fifty feet away he stood a reasonable chance of hitting at least some part of it, and was almost certain to hit it if he fired all five shots in the magazine. With the rifle he became reasonably expert, and once even hit a running rabbit at something like one hundred and fifty feet. None of which was exactly brilliant, he thought, but at least his chances of survival were increased if he were involved in another battle. Secretly he preferred the idea of a pistol loaded with bird shot because that, at close range, stood an excellent chance of taking effect provided it were pointed in the general direction of its target. But the mechanism of the revolver would take only made up ammunition—bullet, charge and cap—and he didn't like to experiment with powder and shot for fearing of damaging the barrel of that very valuable weapon.

Riley spent a lot of his time riding around the property with Collingwood. He was particularly impressed with the fact that Collingwood's work consisted entirely of giving general instructions to his workmen who, in their turn, seemed to do relatively little in the way of work. Sheep, it appeared, made
their owners quite rich without any great effort on the part of the owner.

It was different at shearing time, Collingwood assured him, but, when pressed, he admitted that shearing time did not come round all that often. If by any particularly unkind stroke of fate he were forced to remain in the Colony indefinitely, Riley decided, he would take up sheep farming.

In the evenings Collingwood and Riley drank whisky, which was apparently available in unlimited quantities, and Collingwood did his best to find out something of Riley's past life, in which he was quite unsuccessful. Riley, on the other hand, learned that Collingwood was a Swede, his real name was Oestman, but he had taken on his wife's name because he was tired of explaining how to spell his own. He had spent a great deal of his life in England and had come out to Australia ten years ago to take up sheep farming on the strength of the success John Macarthur had had in developing a variation on Spanish sheep.

“It's all been very successful but the girls” — in the “girls” he included his wife along with the two daughters—“were getting restless so I thought I'd let them go back for a while to see that they weren't really missing anything. It doesn't take all that long now that the steamers are running.” The girls had been gone eighteen months.

“You don't miss Europe yourself?” Riley asked.

“What is there to miss? Cold? Snow? Fog? Cities that belch smoke all day and all night. Traffic so thick it's dangerous to cross a road. Look at that . . .” he gestured out a window to the clear starlit night—
“How could a man live with that and miss anything in Europe?”

Riley, who, if he allowed himself, could feel desperately homesick for snow and cold and wet grey skies and the pinched blue faces of his fellow Dubliners, did not agree, but he didn't argue.

“What about the bushrangers?” he asked. “Don't you find them something of a strain?”

“I look on them as a sort of occupational risk,” said Collingwood seriously: “If you're properly armed and look out for yourself they're not all that much of a worry. If I were living in one of the tropical colonies I'd have to take precautions against disease. Here it's just a different type of pestilence. And I put it to you that in India the plague and the cholera kill off a lot more colonists than the bushrangers do here.”

“Mm,” said Riley, unconvinced.

“Besides,” said Collingwood, expansively, pouring more whisky. “Bushranging is just a phase. A few more years'll see the end of it. Gardiner's in gaol. Morgan's dead. They killed Ben Hall only a few months ago over at Forbes.”

“There seems to be plenty more to take their place,” said Riley.

“But few of the stature, if you can use that word, of men like Gardiner and Hall. Most of them are just bush louts that don't last more than a month or two anyway. It's when you get men gaining reputations and gathering followers around them that you get real trouble.”

“Like Hatton,” said Riley.

“Like Hatton. Once Hatton goes, you watch. Bushranging will die out here like—like——” he waved
his glass in the air seeking a simile—“like blowflies in the winter.”

A dog barked briefly and both men sat quietly in their chairs, the thought of Hatton still uppermost in their minds.

“It's nothing,” said Collingwood after a moment. “There's six dogs out there and if there were any strangers around we'd know it. Here, let me fill your glass.”

“By the way, did it ever occur to you that it would be a good idea for you to shave your beard off?”

“No. Why?” said Riley fingering his chin defensively.

“Well everybody in Goulburn knows what happened up there on Lightning Fork Ridge.”

“So?”

“So if everybody in Goulburn knows you can guarantee that Hatton knows.”

“Oh. So?”

“So Hatton is famous for being a very vengeful man.”

“But then I doubt that many people in Goulburn would have any idea what I look like?”

“No. But what about Janey Cabel?”

“Yes. I wonder. She wouldn't have a very clear idea, though,” said Riley.

“Would she recognise you if she met you again do you think?”

Riley realised that he still carried a very clear memory of the girl's face, lit by the fire, her mouth open to scream; but then he had seen her before. Come to think of it, she had seen him before too.

“I don't know. She might at that.”