Shadow of the Osprey (23 page)

‘T
here’s nothin’ out here except rocks and flies Harry,’ Frank said to his companion squatting beside him, chipping at a lump of quartz rock with a miner’s pick. ‘Rocks, flies and darkies,’ he added.

Harry grunted as he stood to take the stiffness out of his back. Their expedition away from the established goldfields of the Palmer had proved to be fruitless. That is, with the exception of the blackfella they had bagged the previous day. He stood and gazed around them at the seemingly endless panorama of stunted trees, rocks and shimmering heat haze. ‘That darkie you shot yesterday spoke English,’ he said, expressing something that had nagged him through the night. ‘Bit unusual don’t you think, for a myall?’

Frank tried to spit but his mouth was too dry. ‘Don’t mean he could be trusted,’ he replied. ‘All blackfellas should be shot on sight.’ He stood and hurled the piece of quartz at a lizard basking on a rocky shelf. ‘How’s your water supply?’ he asked, as he wiped the sweat from his brow.

‘Not good,’ Harry replied, swishing the canteen in his hand. ‘Enough for a day and that’s it.’

‘About the same with me. Think it’s time we headed back to that creek we passed a day back. Fill up and head back to the Palmer.’

Harry nodded. Neither had expressed their concern previously. So intent had they been to seek out another gold lode that they had pushed themselves beyond the limits of safety. Food was not a problem. They carried a good supply of flour, tea, sugar and tinned meat. Water was the vital concern in the semi-arid country they had traversed.

Both men heaved their swags onto their backs and turned to retrace their steps. But they had not gone more than a dozen paces when Harry stopped, shaded his eyes, and peered at the horizon. ‘Frank,’ he said softly. ‘I think I can see a blackfella up there, on that ridge ahead of us.’

Frank stopped and stared in the direction that had been indicated. ‘By Crikey yer right,’ he said. ‘I think it’s the one I shot. Thought the bastard would be crow bait by now.’ He raised his rifle and took careful aim at the tiny figure watching them from the rise.

Wallarie saw the puff of smoke and a second later heard the bang. He smiled grimly at the two tiny dots below him. Stupid bastards should know that he was out of range of the Snider, he thought with bitter satisfaction. Maybe he should teach them how to shoot.

‘He didn’t even move,’ Harry said in an awed voice. ‘It’s like he’s not scared of us.’

‘We need to get closer,’ Frank said, as he reloaded the rifle. ‘Then we’ll see him do a dance.’

But Harry was not so sure. There was something very disconcerting about the wild myall on the ridge. It was as if he knew things that they did not. A cold fear gripped his body. ‘Maybe we just leave him alone and maybe he will leave us alone,’ he said with a shudder. ‘I don’t like the look of this, Frank. He might have some mates somewhere, just waitin’ for us to go after him.’

‘You’ve got that Le Mat,’ Frank said. ‘It’s more than enough to keep any darkie at bay.’ The Le Mat was a powder and ball revolver with the addition of a small shotgun device attached underneath the barrel – a weapon favoured by the Confederate officers of the American Civil War. But its shortcoming was its limited range.

‘I have Frank but I don’t like the idea.’

Frank glanced at him with an expression of contempt. ‘I’m going after the black bastard and finishing him off,’ he said, as he strode away towards the ridge. ‘If yer any kind of mate, you’d come with me.’

Wallarie watched the two men on the flat below him. They appeared to be arguing. His appearance had provoked them as he had planned. He felt further satisfaction when the two men began trudging in his direction as he had hoped they would.

Although his left arm was still too stiff and sore to use effectively he was not worried. He would not need to use it for now as he trailed his long spears in his right hand. All that was important was that the two men pursue him. In doing so he would wear them down and then strike at a time of his choosing. He smiled as the two men struggled up the rocky slope under a blazing sun. ‘Bloody bastards,’ he swore with a chuckle in his curse. ‘Wallarie wait for you.’

All day the spectre of the wild myall taunted them. His image danced in the shimmering haze just out of rifle range as the men stumbled in the body-sapping terrain.

‘He’s leading us away from the creek,’ Harry gasped through cracked lips as he slumped to his knees for a rest. ‘The bastard’s playin’ us like a fish on a hook.’

Frank went down on one knee, using his rifle as a prop. He too had come to realise the situation. The black bastard was cunning, he had to admit to himself. He had altered course in subtle ways and eventually turned the hunt in a direction away from the creek bed. ‘Think it’s time we let the darkie go,’ he reluctantly conceded as he lifted himself to his feet.

~

Bitterly disappointed, Wallarie watched the two men change direction and walk away from him. He had hoped to keep up the chase until nightfall. But he knew where they were going. Like the birds of the arid west at sunset they were in flight for water.

As disappointed as he was Wallarie still felt some satisfaction. He had seen the way the two men had moved across the terrain. He knew that they were weak and thirsty from the arduous pursuit. And a thirsty man was preoccupied with slaking the unbearable torment a raging thirst caused.

In a loping stride, Wallarie set out for the creek so that he would be between them and it just before sunset. For his plan to work he knew he must take a terrible risk, even though his original plan had been to decoy the two men away from the source of life-giving water until the night came. Driven almost mad with thirst they would have been easy to dispatch. But now the odds had unwittingly changed in favour of the prospectors.

Wallarie no longer smiled with grim satisfaction. All commonsense told him that he should withdraw from his plan. But commonsense was not strong enough to overcome his need to wage his own personal war on the Europeans who had once slaughtered his people.

Outnumbered, out-gunned and with his left arm dangling by his side, he did not break his stride. He loped with a distant memory of a night when he and Tom Duffy had set out to hunt down and kill the men who had butchered the last survivors of the dispersal. Against all the odds they had succeeded. Wallarie hoped Tom’s Irish luck was still with him. He knew that the warrior spirit of the cave was; it had told him so the previous night in his visions.

The sun was low on the horizon when Wallarie scrambled up the last ridge. Before him was the apparently dry sandy creek bed and he grinned his satisfaction. He knew that he was ahead of the two prospectors who he had watched wander aimlessly in the scrubby land throughout the day. The shimmering heat and the need for water had meant their condition deteriorated as they had struggled with the rugged terrain. And coupled with nature’s pitiless disregard for them was the unspoken fear that dogged their every step: somewhere out there a man was hunting them as they had hunted him. Critical hours passed before the two prospectors finally found their bearings.

The dull ache of Wallarie’s wound caused him to groan from time to time, an involuntary reaction caused by the relentless strain that he placed on himself to reach the creek before the two white men. But now as he crouched below the rise the pain was forgotten. All that preoccupied him was his plan to place himself precisely where the land worked in his favour. If he were wrong he knew that death was an inevitability.

He slipped his spear on the woomera. The balance felt right and all that was left now was to wait in ambush.

~

The Le Mat in Harry’s hand felt heavy as he trudged a few paces behind Frank. The horizon ahead was a soft blur of mauve shadows creeping through the gullies and the sun a soft orange ball touching the ridge directly to their front. As Harry squinted against the glare Frank took on a strangely elongated shape at the centre of an orange ball. Unable to continue watching him, Harry dropped his eyes to concentrate on his partner’s boot prints which marked the trail they followed. Like a man sleepwalking, he followed the tracks in the dry earth and thought about water. Cool, wet water. The strange myall was forgotten.

Frank’s strangled scream snapped Harry’s obsessive thoughts. Suddenly he felt a fear like none other he had ever experienced.

‘I’m slain Harry,’ Frank choked, as he stumbled blindly into the orange ball.

Harry could vaguely discern that his partner was gripping something that inexplicably was growing out of his front. It was long and slender and Frank gripped it with both hands as he slumped to his knees. Harry froze and blinked against the glare of the setting sun. For a second he saw a ghost-like shape beyond Frank. But it was gone before he could react.

‘Oh Jesus!’ he heard himself gasp. ‘The bastard’s speared you!’

Frank knelt forward against the shaft. His agonised groans grew rapidly weak until they petered out into a low moan. He toppled sideways and Harry instinctively knew that his partner was dead.

Frantically he searched about himself with the pistol raised. But all he saw was a silent land of stunted trees, rocks and red earth. He did not have the strength in his legs to run. Fear had rooted him to the ground as surely as if he were one of the prickly trees around him. Only the unconscious action of firing his pistol – until it eventually clicked on an empty chamber – brought him out of his petrified state. Only then did he drop his gun and run wildly back the way they had trekked.

Wallarie watched the panic-stricken man. ‘Stupid bastard,’ he muttered, shaking his head. He had used another one of Tom Duffy’s favourite expressions. The prospector curled on the ground did not move. He was most probably dead. At ten paces – with the sun at his back – he could hardly miss when the prospector had ascended the low ridge. Wallarie remembered the brief second when the man had squinted uncomprehendingly at the shadow materialising out of the sun. It had been like that, those many years earlier, when he had speared the white squatter Donald Macintosh at a waterhole. The prospector had been in the process of raising his rifle when the spear took him through the chest, his rifle clattering amongst the rocks unfired.

With a grunt of pain, the Darambal warrior rose from amongst the rocks and walked cautiously towards the body. In death Frank still gripped the spear shaft, his opaque eyes staring at Wallarie’s feet.

Satisfied that the man no longer posed a threat, Wallarie squatted beside the body, and tugged away the bed-roll wrapped around the dead man’s shoulders. He unlashed the rope that held it together and grinned at the treasure that spilled out: tea, sugar, flour and tinned meat. And even better still, a twist of dark brown tobacco to savour, after he had eaten the man’s supplies.

With a contented sigh Wallarie used the dead man’s knife to open a tin of meat and wolfed down the warm fatty contents. When his hunger had been sated he gathered the remaining food supplies into the blanket. He ignored the rifle; he knew its possession would mark him as a dangerous blackfella to the army of Europeans around the Palmer. To all intents and purposes he would be an inconspicuous, solitary myall trekking through the land they now claimed as their own. That way, to most he would not be perceived as a threat.

As he walked into the night Wallarie chuckled. Maybe some whitefellas might find the body. They would probably not recognise the distinctive spear barbs as belonging to Wallarie the Nerambura warrior from down south. That was a pity as the local blackfellas would get the blame and his personal war against the Europeans go unrecognised.

Some time during the night Harry collapsed as he wandered aimlessly under the canvas of the southern constellations. He lay on the cooling earth, whimpering his fear and despair. All the horror that was the northern frontier surrounded him in the night.

He and Frank had been good mates who had left the southern city of Melbourne to seek their fortune on the northern goldfields. Out of luck as latecomers to the Palmer, they had set out to claim from the land what they felt it owed them. But they were not men born of the bush. The vast and lonely spaces were as alien to them as the city would have been to Wallarie. The frontier was a place of horrors. And the greatest horror of all was the loneliness of the vast land. For Harry true hell was dying alone and never being found.

F
rench Charley’s stood out in Cooktown as an elegant and sophisticated place of entertainment. An oasis in a desert of uncouth and bawdy outlets of diversion for the frontiersmen.

It was rumoured that the proprietor, Monsieur Charles Bouel, was in Cooktown to avoid
‘Madame Guillotine’
, for one reason or another. Those who could afford to patronise his establishment cared little for the Frenchman’s past transgressions. They came for the excellent food and wines, the lavish entertainment and the prettiest girls in the north. French Charley’s was by far the best restaurant in Queensland’s north. Well-travelled gourmets and raconteurs said it was by far the best in all of the Australian colonies.

Monsieur Bouel was said to have tutored his girls in the French accent and to dance the notorious cancan. The imported furnishings that decorated the palace of pleasure gave the visitor the illusion of being in the best of continental parlours. And it was to French Charley’s that Hugh Darlington had invited Kate to dine whilst he was visiting from Rockhampton.

Kate dressed appropriately for the supper engagement at the elegant restaurant. Gone was the grubby teamster who had worn moleskin trousers. Now the beautiful young woman appeared wearing the latest in bustle designs from England.

When she swept into the restaurant as regally as visiting royalty, her extraordinary beauty turned the heads of the bearded miners. She was escorted by no less than Monsieur Bouel himself who met her at the front entrance. He was renowned for attending personally to those up on their luck and who therefore could afford to wine and dine at his salubrious establishment.

The French proprietor was impressed by the young woman, not only on account of her famed beauty but also her reputation as an astute businesswoman. Although Kate could easily afford to dine at the restaurant every night, it was not normally a place a single woman would go, unless she was looking for a job entertaining the wealthier miners, a job of helping them dispose of the weight of their gold in their pockets when their trousers came down.

Kate swept across the room with all the grace and dignity of one born to command the attention of all those around her. She knew that her entrance had turned heads. She also knew her beauty had brought on the glowering looks from the painted ladies who sat with the bearded miners. But Monsieur Bouel’s ladies consoled themselves with the knowledge that the famous Kate O’Keefe was not in competition with them for the attention of their temporary beaus.

Hugh Darlington felt a painful pang of regret for the fact that he had let the beautiful woman slip from his life. A handsome man in his mid-thirties, his delicate hands and patrician appearance bespoke of a cultured man, so different from the rough and ready miners around him. Cooktown was not a place he would have normally visited. He was only in town to represent a powerful mining company which was preparing to buy out mining leases for future deep mining operations on the Palmer.

He rose to his feet as Kate was escorted to the table. They had parted as lovers five years earlier and their parting had been fiery. But business dealings put them in contact again when they had met in his Rockhampton office to discuss the purchase of the Balaclava Station adjoining Glen View. Bostock’s next of kin in England wanted the property sold and so Kate had made a generous offer to buy the property. But their meeting had been purely professional and cool. Kate would never forgive him for his betrayal of her trust. He had inadvertently exposed his true allegiance to the wealthy Macintosh clan, not for any sentimental reason, but one based on the lawyer’s nose for money and power. He had seriously underestimated the determination of the young woman to successfully forge her own financial empire. Her continuing distrust of him had been very apparent, by the fact that he had been in Cooktown many weeks without her attempting to contact him – until now.

‘Kate, you are even more beautiful than when I first met you,’ Hugh said gallantly as he brushed her hand with a kiss. She smiled and thanked him for his courtesy. Monsieur Bouel pulled out her chair for her. ‘I took the liberty of ordering for us just before you arrived,’ Hugh said. ‘I only hope your tastes in food have not changed as, alas, your feelings may have towards me.’

‘Times change and so do we Hugh,’ Kate replied looking him straight in the eye.

‘Sadly for us both the changes are irreversible.’ The lawyer smiled pensively. At least her attitude to the irreversibility of their past torrid relationship in Rockhampton made it easier for what he must do this evening. ‘Whatever it must be Kate,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I only wish things had been different. But you chose to follow your path.’

Kate could see that he was still as handsome and charming as ever. The tiny fear that she may allow herself to remember the old yearnings she once had for him, niggled at her. But that had been six years earlier, she reminded herself, and much had happened since then to sweep away any fond memories.

An immaculately dressed waiter hovered diffidently nearby holding a napkin-wrapped bottle of champagne. Hugh signalled to the waiter, who poured the wine with a stylish flourish. ‘I have ordered a local fish with oyster sauce and vegetables in season,’ Hugh said, as Kate sipped from her glass. ‘To be followed by fresh fruit and mocha.’

She was impressed by his choice of food and wine. ‘It all sounds very nice,’ she commented pleasantly. ‘At least we have something we can enjoy together before you raise the reason of why I am here.’

The lawyer shifted uncomfortably. ‘Ah, yes. I am afraid what I have to tell you may spoil your appetite,’ he said. ‘So we should leave business until the coffee arrives. What do you think?’

Kate considered his proposal. But after weeks on the rugged and perilous track to the Palmer, anything he had to say could not be half as threatening. ‘No. I think you should tell me now what your business with me is. I doubt that whatever you have to say could spoil my appetite.’

He coughed lightly and took a deep breath. ‘Kate, I must tell you that you should consider selling Balaclava Station. The Macintosh companies are not happy that you own property adjoining theirs.’

‘Is that all?’ she replied serenely, as it was of little concern what the Macintoshes thought of her. She was at war with them and the fact that her ownership of Balaclava was unsettling pleased her.

‘No. I’m afraid I must also insist that you repay me the money I loaned to help you get started. With appropriate interest accrued since ’68,’ he added self-consciously. He was uncomfortable asking her for the money which was not in fact his. But Hugh had aspirations beyond those of a country solicitor. He needed every penny he could put his hands on to further his campaign for a seat in the colony’s parliament. But the so-called loan to Kate was Luke Tracy’s money, entrusted to the Rockhampton lawyer who was acting at the time in Kate’s legal affairs. Luke had insisted that Kate not be told the source of the money. His strong male pride prevented him from revealing himself as the source; he felt Kate might interpret his generous gesture as an attempt to buy her love. But the unscrupulous lawyer had capitalised on the secrecy. Darlington feigned to be the source of the money, casting himself in the light of one who truly cared for her. At the time the lie had worked to help cement her feelings for him.

Kate felt her anger rising. ‘You told me the loan was given interest-free,’ she said in a carefully controlled voice. ‘Now you make me feel as if the money was only an inducement to get me to go to your bed. Do you know how that makes me feel?’ Her voice rose angrily. ‘You have made me no different from the women sitting around us now,’ she said savagely, as she cast her gaze at a table where a pretty young red-haired girl was making a point of allowing the miner dining with her to see her milk-white breasts exposed above the low-cut dress.

‘It is not like that Kate,’ he pleaded. He was embarrassed by the attention being turned on them by the diners. ‘At the time things were different. You must have known that.’

She turned her attention back to Hugh who nervously toyed with his crystal champagne flute. ‘What if I refuse to pay interest?’ she demanded. ‘Oh, I always knew the principal would be due. But this matter of interest was never mentioned. Your letter only said that you wanted to discuss the return of an amount of money. I thought you meant some outstanding fees.’

‘You do not have much choice,’ Hugh replied menacingly. ‘If you refuse I will take action. And you cannot win against me Kate. I am
a lawyer and I know
the law.’

‘You bastard!’ she hissed, her aspersion on Darlington’s parentage not missed by a grinning miner at the next table. He knew Kate O’Keefe from his time on the Palmer. He had a healthy respect for the woman who could manage a bullock wagon along the dangerous track to the goldfields. He almost felt sorry for the man she cursed.

Hugh glanced around, feeling decidedly uncomfortable. He now bitterly regretted choosing French Charley’s. It was all turning sour on him! ‘Kate, I don’t think this calls for a situation,’ he pleaded. ‘We are talking business and I know you understand business. I doubt that the interest will send your company broke. You forget, I know your financial situation.’

Kate glared at the man she had once thought so desirable. She wondered how she could have ever found the slimy lawyer attractive. ‘Then you know that my money is tied up in the Eureka company,’ she replied quietly. ‘Cash is something I cannot readily obtain at the moment.’

‘That is your concern,’ Hugh said bluntly. ‘I can give you two weeks to come up with the money and the interest. If you don’t I will be forced to put you before a court.’

Before Kate could reply the waiter returned to ask politely if they were ready to dine. Hugh said that they were. He hoped that she might be more reasonable on a full stomach. As the waiter retreated a stony silence fell between the two.

The waiter returned shortly bearing a large red emperor fish which swam in a sea of dark, salty oyster sauce on a silver platter. The baked fish was surrounded with tiny boiled potatoes and fresh vegetables steamed with a delicious touch of ginger. But the delicious aroma of the steam rising from the rich platter did not stimulate Kate’s appetite.

‘You will get your money,’ Kate said, not attempting to conceal her anger. ‘Is that all you have to tell me?’ she added.

‘Ah, no . . . ’ Hugh said, as he sliced a section of succulent white flesh from the fish. ‘I have some advice for you. Advice that I pray you will take with the good intentions that I give it.’

‘Tell me, and I will decide,’ she replied, watching him pile the fish on his plate and wondering at his appetite.

‘If you wish to be accepted by your peers in Queensland, I suggest that you make a break with your business partners, the Cohens. It does not bide well with certain powerful people in the colony that you have a strong association with the Jews. I say this to you as a friend.’

Kate was aghast at the man’s condemnation of the two people with whom she partly shared her financial empire. Solomon and Judith Cohen’s business association went beyond a mutual convenience. It went beyond even simple friendship. They were as close to her as her own family in Sydney.

‘I will tell you something Mister Darlington,’ she said, her angry voice carrying beyond the nearest tables as she rose with the half-filled champagne flute in her hand. ‘I owe my very life to the love and care those Jews as you call them granted to me when I first came to Queensland. If it had not been for the Cohens I might be long dead by now. And in many ways, I owe my considerable financial success to their considerate counsel, in the management of the Eureka company.’ Kate paused for a split second and a colourful curse she had once heard Luke mutter came easily to her lips. ‘You are nothing more than a goddamned flea on the back of a hog, you slimy bastard.’

The lawyer was too slow to react to the champagne flute shattering on the table. Champagne spattered him in an exploding shower of crystal. A cheer rose from the tough miners who had followed the beautiful young woman’s rising anger with interest. ‘Good on yer girlie,’ came the chorus from them. They had little time for the likes of Hugh Darlington, who they viewed as one of the uppity townsmen living soft and protected lives, far from their own physical and dangerous lives.

Hugh hung his head in acute embarrassment. Kate had humiliated him in public and he would not forget. No, he would not forget.

Kate swished from the restaurant, pushing past the French proprietor who gallantly promised that Monsieur Darlington would be barred from his establishment. No-one could be forgiven for upsetting the legendary Kate O’Keefe. She appreciated the Frenchman’s chivalrous gesture. At least in the north of the colony she had more standing than the lawyer. North Queensland was her country!

The evening air was cooling to Kate’s angry, flushed face as she strode along the busy street. Big wagons headed for the Palmer track rumbled past her while men, drunk with liquor and new-found wealth called to the beautiful young woman, with invitations to share their money and their bed. At least their motivations were forthright, she thought bitterly as she walked deep in thought along Charlotte Street to her store.

Kate reflected on how much more she was a part of the frontier than she would ever be in polite and genteel society. Her troubled reflections drifted to the only two men who had shared her bed. Both had proved to be worthless. First, there had been Kevin, her husband, who had sworn a life of fidelity. A promise which he broke in just under six months of marriage. And then came Hugh Darlington. She had been seduced by his handsome looks and polished manners. This same man, only moments earlier, had promised to put her before a court of law.

She scowled at the memory of the two men. Men were useless creatures! But she wavered in her attack on all men when she remembered the men of her family – and Luke Tracy. She slowed her pace as she reflected on the American’s meaning to her life. He had never taken from her. Luke had only ever given of himself without asking anything in return – and he had been with her when she needed him most. But he was a restless and roaming spirit, shifting like the tropical breezes. Could such a man ever be content to settle in one place?