The Tranter percussion revolver was an outdated weapon – a forty-year old design. Thousands had been imported from the United States of America after the Civil War. They were cheap and readily available. Everyone from drovers to brumby runners carried them.
Obsolescence, though, did not negate the terrible efficacy of the .442 calibre projectile, pushed by twenty grains of premium black powder, that the Tranter guns fired. At close range they were a murderous weapon.
It seemed to Will that Sullivan’s Tranter revolver became motionless for a moment, as if the assassin was making a final decision. Likewise, the room itself seemed to pause in time. Pipes or cigarettes in mouths, cards in hand, cowards face down on the floorboards while others, like Will, attempted to stop something that now seemed inevitable.
Sullivan jerked the trigger, and the discharge was sharp and ear-numbing in the contained space. The revolver kicked back, while the lead ball punched through the middle of John Weir’s chest, destroying his lungs and heart. He made the transition from sleep to death throes in a single bloody moment.
Burned powder smoke filled the room, blurring the drama, and bringing the stink of war and mayhem to that peaceful room. Blood spattered the Irishman’s arms and face, making him appear like a monster from the cover of a lurid gothic novel.
Will reached him first, smashed the revolver out of his hand, and dragged him back. The killer uttered a shout of triumph. ‘Got him, t’e dog. Just what he deserved. Let t’at be a lesson.’
Lainey was one of the first to try to help John Weir, but the time for help was past. ‘Oh the poor bugger,’ she was heard to cry.
Sullivan was still crowing as Will dragged his arms behind his back, then took a grip of his hair with one hand, immobilising him. The poker players and drinkers were on their feet by then, and there was a rapid movement to disarm Sullivan’s two companions, subduing their struggles with brutal force. Kennedy sent Lenny to the adjoining store for rope, and in the continued absence of the law, the three men were bound by wrist and ankles.
‘Why are you tying me up?’ snarled the scarred man. ‘That Irish bastard forced me and Eddie to help him – we weren’t but victims of the mongrel too.’
Sullivan laughed, ‘That’s a lie, but I don’t care one whit, for at least that ape lies dead.’
Will was among the dozen or so men who half-dragged, half-carried the offenders through the front door and outside into the rain. They fought and strained every step of the way, slick with sweat, mud, and in Sullivan’s case, the blood of the dead man.
The police lock-up, four lots along, was a makeshift structure, but solid, clad with saw-pit rounds and corrugated iron. The doors were made of the same material, but with a square hole up high in the centre, about the width of a man’s outstretched hand. Someone had run to fetch the Postmaster, who had the keys. When he arrived, Sullivan was shoved into one of the two cells, and his accomplices in the other.
When the two doors were securely shut, the Irishman started kicking at the walls, swearing and blaspheming, avowing that he had done no wrong, but simply delivered justice to a man who had carried on above his station.
The scarred man stood close to the door of the other cell, his face in the opening, staring silently out at Will. ‘I do know you,’ he said. ‘I never forget a face.’
Will, in no mood for conversing with the accessory of a killer, turned and walked towards the other men from the pub, now standing in a group, armed and organising themselves, rostering a guard duty detail over the prisoners. He accepted the quiet thanks of Kellick and some of the others for his assistance. It had been a harrowing experience. Feeling drained, he walked back to where Lainey, Jim, Sam and Little Blue waited on the verandah of the pub.
‘Let’s get the horses and find somewhere to camp,’ Will said.
‘What about stores?’ asked Lainey.
‘Tomorrow will do for that,’ said Will. ‘We’ve got enough tucker left for tonight. I just want to get out of this damned place.’
***
It was still raining as the four riders turned off from the main street onto a well-worn track, Little Blue trotting beside them. The area behind the main street of Camooweal was covered with an assortment of rubbish and cast-off junk – broken wagon springs and wheels, old tubs, rusted roofing sheets and various ironmongery.
A short ride away, they reached the Georgina River’s wide bed – still no more than a chain of waterholes until the real rains came. They passed by a well-organised market garden, with rows of green, and a couple of coolies in conical hats, standing under the shelter of a rough bough shed, watching protectively as the riders moved past.
Heading downstream, Will urged his horse onwards, brushing through speargrass and light scrub along the high bank, soon reaching the waterhole that was at times so vast that it was called Lake Francis.
They came to a dead river red gum, old and grey with age – with a clearing around it that appeared to have hosted many a camp. There were a few handy saplings that could be used to erect shelter, and a fire-ring of blackened stones.
‘How’s this fer a spot?’ Will asked.
‘Easy walk to the water and plenny feed,’ said Jim. ‘Good enough.’
‘Anything to get out of this blessed rain,’ agreed Lainey.
Dismounting and settling the horses, they strung a sheet of canvas between saplings and unloaded, stacking saddles and gear underneath. With the horses restrained, they sat miserably under the shelter, their minds busy with the murder they had just witnessed, and its implications.
Will was thinking about the scarred man. His face was certainly familiar, but where from? For a while the answer hovered on the edge of his mind, and then he remembered.
‘Hey. I just recalled where I seen that scarred barsted before,’ he said aloud.
‘Lyver Hills,’ said Sam, who had already worked it out.
‘Yeah. That’s what I reckon. He worked at the company battery, always scrapping or causing trouble.’ His name was something European, German maybe, and Will searched his mind for it. ‘What the hell was he called again?’
‘His name were Kahl,’ said Jim. ‘I remembers him too.’
***
Towards dusk, the rain moved on, and they left the shelter. Jim, who could light a fire underwater, soon had a good blaze going. Then, while Sam made johnny-cakes with the last of their weevilled flour, Will, Jim and Lainey led the horses down the bank, and into the shallows. They baulked a little at the mud, but soon relaxed, while the sun sank low, blazing yellow orange.
Together, they washed and brushed the horses, taking their time and enjoying the feel of the water, the scents of mud and hard-worked animals in the nostrils and the shared relief at a break from the unrelenting road. They laughed when a freshened mount left the water and rolled on the bank. As they finished each one, Jim hobbled and belled them for the night.
Later, when they were quiet around the fire, all with their own thoughts, Will got cold and fetched his coat from his bag. This was his most valuable item of clothing – a dark serge jacket – won in a game of cards from a Royal Navy officer on shore leave, from a ship-of-the-line anchored off Garden Island, Sydney, a few years earlier.
Lainey looked morose. ‘I’ve been thinkin’ about this job you’ve signed us up for. Is a eight hunnerd mile ride in the rainy season worth it for twenty quid? Could be a bitch of a trip, an’ it ain’t really started too well with that poor bugger back there coppin’ a bullet.’
‘We need the money,’ said Will. ‘Just cheer up. It weren’t nice, what happened back there at the pub, but it aren’t the end of the world either, and there was nothing we could do about it.’
‘Oh but there was,’ said Lainey. ‘You could’a shot that damnable Irishman yourself, an’ saved the carpenter fella’s life.’
Will raised an eyebrow, ‘Saved a man by killin’ a man? Well, sure enough, but what did Sullivan do to me that deserved a bullet in return?’
Lainey ignored the question, but stood up and turned her back to the fire, hands out to warm them. She had taken off her hat, and her long hair fell free and unrestrained. ‘I jined up with you barsteds for adventure,’ she said wistfully. ‘Back home we had the traps on our tail an’ the world at our feet. What’ve I got ever since? Six months of digging a hole in the ground, then the rest of the year wanderin’ around Queensland, half-starved. I wanted to be a bushranger, not a beggar.’
Will, Jim and Sam looked uncomfortable as she went on, fidgeting with the handles of their mugs.
‘I say stuff the Territory mail. Let’s rob that bloody store, or even better the post office, I bet they’ve got plenty more of them gold sovereigns.’
‘In the normal run o’ things,’ said Will, ‘I might’ve walked that line. But we needs to think ahead.’ He tapped his temple, above the ear, with a forefinger to underline the point. ‘We’ve got enough gold buried, eight hunnerd miles from here, to buy and stock a cattle station of our own. That won’t happen if there’s a price on our heads. We keep our noses clean for a while, until the New South Wales traps forget about us. When we’re good and ready we can take up land without worrying about the barsteds riding in and buggering everything up.’
‘I get it,’ said Lainey. ‘But I ain’t a farmer. That cattle run we get’ll be my home too, but I won’t stay there all the time – I’ll go on by meself and be famous. I’ll ride buckjumpers, and rob banks, and lead the traps on a merry chase all over the North.’
There were times when even Will had to admit that his sister was beautiful. Right then, with the moon peeking out from a brilliant ribbon of clouds, and her hair turning the shade of a pearl newly won from the sea, she looked a sight indeed.
No one said any more. There was more to say. Will had committed them to the mail run, and they would do it. The cattle station was a dream that looked different to each of them, inside their hearts and minds.
Besides, it was time for sleep, with the rolling thunder and flashes of lightning now way off to the west – too far for even Jim’s acute hearing.
Will rolled out his swag then laid down and invited Little Blue in close. The patch of blanket the dog was allowed seemed to increase each night, but Will didn’t mind.
Before Will slept, he followed the usual ritual. He dug in his satchel and removed something small and rectangular. He angled it so it caught enough light from the fire and the moon to see. The image was a daguerreotype of a woman who had come to symbolise everything he wanted in life.
The version he imagined of the station he and the others would one day own was never complete without the girl in the postcard standing beside him. There, on the banks of the Georgina River, the air still thick with the smell of rain and the drone of insects, he conjured a family and a life of meaning and joy, in the dark space between the present and the future.
©2025 Greg Barron
Continued next Sunday
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