Code of Honor (Australian Destiny Book #1) (28 page)

“Maybe, looking at it after the fact. But in the heat of battle, when all I could think of was defense, I did what I felt I had to do.”

“Nae. Nae, Mr. Sloan, that’s not it. Either Constable Thurlow be shielding ye or he did nae see as much as he thought he saw. Yers was nae an immediate response to danger. Mr. Butts lay vanquished and there was a pause, however wee. A fraction of time for thought. Ye pulled the trigger on purpose. ’Twas a considered action.”

“That’s not what you told Fish.”

“I was sleepwalking when he asked me story. Still am, in truth. Me mind and me memories be just now starting to wake up. Nor shall I change me testimony. Fear not. How would I define a brief moment as being long enough to think in—or not, as the case may be? ’Tis only me feelings, at the very end of it, and that be nae enough to start a fight over. Or a legal action.”

He chuckled mirthlessly. “Sam, you’re a wonder.”

“So I’ve heard, sir.” She stood up. She didn’t want to glance at the bloodied bedsheet, the mess on the floor, but she did anyway. “Ye might yerself tell Meg and Linnet to clean this up. When I give an order of that sort, they tend to ignore me. On the morrow meself shall send one of Fat Dog’s nephews to the chemist for peroxide. That should bleach out the blood that’s seeped between the cracks in the floor boards.”

“You and Meg and Linnet no longer work here. Remember?”

“Ye did nae tell them yet, aye?”

“Not yet.”

“If ye’re wise, sir, ye’ll not tell them ’til after the floor’s been tidied.” She walked to the door like an awkward wind-up toy and paused, turning. “Forgive me boldness, sir, but I suggest ye not jump out the window, either, regardless yer troubles. Ye’d drop three feet into those bottle-brush bushes. Ye don’t want to look so stupid, aye?”

“Aye.” His eyes managed to twinkle in the drawn face. “Good night, Sam.”

“G’night, sir.”

She walked down the cool, black, silent hall. The memory of her last view of him—asprawl in his chair, looking weary and in need of comfort—and the view before that—standing over the poor tea farmer with that pistol blazing—wrought chaos in her mind. It was like two orchestras playing entirely different pieces at once. Who was Cole Sloan really?

Before dawn the next day she put on her new riding skirt and walked up to the stables. She gave sleepy, stumbling Fat Dog the written request for a bottle of peroxide and wrapped it in a one-pound note. That was taken care of. She climbed into her new saddle and rode Sheba out into the wooded hills.

How could she possibly find that clearing again? Every square foot of this forest looked just like every other square foot of it. It might be twenty feet from her and she’d never see it. Constant rustling, bird calls, chirps and croaks told her the night crew was retiring as the day crew took up the watch. The forest seethed with activity—birds, creeping things and others.

A mat of strangler vines like the pipes of a monstrous organ stretched from floor to canopy. She remembered this place. She urged Sheba on up the hill. Was she nearing the crest? The dense vegetation here blocked vision beyond a few feet.

She stopped Sheba and listened. She sniffed. Bacon? Couldn’t be. Or perhaps it could. “Mr. Gardell?” The forest activity around her ceased instantly. Hushed, a thousand tiny ears listened with her for a response. “Mr. Gardell!”

Sheba turned her head slightly to the left. She could hear things Samantha could not. Samantha reined her aside and took off in that direction. She stopped and called again.

“A little to the right.” The forest broke up his voice and she could not tell its direction. She gave Sheba a nudge in the flanks and the mare scrambled up the hill.

Here it was. Sheba stepped out into that sheltered glade.

He sat cross-legged beside his firepit, watching his bacon wrinkle in a shallow pan. Except for a shotgun laid casually across his legs, he looked peaceful. He smiled at her.

She tied the horse to a low branch and walked over to join him. He said neither yea nor nay, so she sat down by the firepit.

She watched the embers wax and wane a while. “I need ye, Mr. Gardell, for I be sore confused.” She looked beyond the bushy eyebrows to the eyes within. “Prithee tell me about Cole Sloan.”

“First you must tell me why you want to know so badly that you’re up by dawn on this mountain.”

“He’s an attractive man, a strong man, who’s seized me fancy. And yet, he’s also—well, there be a whiff of evil about him that be just as fascinating as the good—and far more dangerous to a woman’s emotions. Methinks he finds me attractive—or at least unusual …”

You were different, Sam, from the first…. Don’t go, Sam.

“ … But I know not where me heart lies, or his. I be hoping ye can straighten me thoughts around to where I can handle them.”

With the tip of that huge knife he flipped his bacon over. “They were young men—twenty or so—and full of life when they heard there was gold in the hills of California. My father Winston Gardell, Clancy McGonigan and Conal Sloan, all from Sydney. They sailed to the goldfields penniless and returned with enough money to buy passage to the next gold strike. That was at Ballarat the very next year.”

“What would that be, 1850?”

“Fifty-one. They say a man who had also been to California came back to Australia, sought out geologic features here that resembled those he saw in America, and started digging. Before you knew it, there were gold strikes all over. Fitzroy River in fifty-eight, sixty-seven here in Queensland. An exciting time it was, lass; a happy time to be alive. Zesty. Perfect time for young men out to seek their fortunes, and there’s not been another time like it, before or since.”

She smiled. “Sure’n these times be nae so bad. The telephone and the telegraph, steam ships, and I’ve seen a talking machine that plays a whole orchestra and a singing voice.”

“Foo foos. Doovers. They add nothing to the stature of a man. The gold strikes, they tested men and made better men of them—or crushed them.”

He pushed his bacon aside and broke a couple eggs into the pan. “My father married along the way, but Sloan and McGonigan did not. Then my father died during the height of the Fitzroy strike and was buried without my mother ever seeing the remains. I was three. Clancy McGonigan made himself a sort of father to me and took me along when they reported gold here in Queensland.”

“At three?”

“Twelve. I was twelve. Sixty-seven. Now here it gets sticky. McGonigan called me a ‘partner,’ but Sloan of course would never sit still for a snip of a lad taking a third the profits. I knew that. Especially because Sloan treated me like a houseboy.”

“Like a slave?” She watched the edges of the egg whites curl.

“Very astute. Aye, lass. A lackey. And tender as my years were, I thought I deserved a third part. After all, Clancy said I was a full partner. Now Sloan had this notion that down under all the ferns and tree roots and vine tangles in these mountains, there was more gold than in Sovereign Hill, if we could just scrape down to it. We worked stream cuts mostly, near waterfalls and in gorges.”

“These very hills! Forty years ago.”

He nodded. “You couldn’t have had breakfast yet. Here you go.” Without benefit of spatula or implement, he slid a strip of bacon and an egg onto a little tin plate and handed it to her. “Hot on the bottom. Don’t burn yourself. We found a little color here and there. Promises.” He gave her a fork.

He slipped his own breakfast onto a plate. “Sloan and I went crooked on each other constantly. One day he had me digging a drift in a gorge and I quit. Climbed out of my hole, and decided to walk home to Sydney and forget it. Didn’t get far when I heard dirt sliding. Ran back and the drift I just came out of had collapsed. And there was Sloan throwing more big rocks in it!”

She stared. “Sure’n ye don’t think he deliberately tried to bury ye!”

“Kept myself hid. When he left I worked my way around and back to our camp. He was gone, McGonigan was gone, and it was just me and the cassowaries. Took me over a month, with the help of some coast aborigines, to get home. North coast here wasn’t developed then like it is now. Besides, I didn’t want to be anywhere Sloan might be.”

“What about Mr. McGonigan?”

“I learned years later that Sloan brought Clancy’s rotting body out, claiming he died in a cave-in. Ten years later, when I was twenty-two and old enough to take care of myself, I came back up here. Cairns was a real town then, and they were finding gold in the interior behind the mountains here. They started Cairns in seventy-six, but the road in from there was too steep to be useful. So they started another road in from Port Douglas up the way, and that one was better.”

“I heard both towns were once booming.”

“You shoulda seen Port Douglas in its heyday; early eighties. Eight thousand people, two dozen hotels and more going up every week. Dancing girls in every pub. Polished brass everything, from bedsteads to bars. Buy anything, if you had enough money. And a few of the men coming out of the interior had enough and then some. But that kind of glory never lasts. The gold slowed up from a rush to a trickle. Still coming out, but in measured amounts now. Then the railroad came to Cairns instead of Douglas, and that was the end of Port Douglas ’til the sugar got started.”

“Sugarlea?”

“One of the first. I think old Conal Sloan got his start-up money from the very dig Clancy died at—and I ran away from. I think he made enough out of that hole for one man but not enough for three.”

“You’re talking murder, sir. Sure’n ye dinnae know for certain.”

“It’s happened more’n once, lass. Greed’ll do that. Sometimes the reason need be no more than simple inconvenience. Sugar really got big around sixty-eight and there on. At first it took a lot of hand labor. Clear land, break it up, plant, harvest; every step by hand. They imported colored labor by the thousands for that, just to keep the sugar cheap enough to sell on the open market.”

“Kanakas.”

“You’ve learned the word already. Kanakas. Thousands and thousands of them. And hundreds of them in Sloan’s cane fields.”

“So Cole Sloan inherited more than just sugar fields. More a whole heritage, ye might say.”

“More than you know, lass. More than you know, he’s inherited. Right away, white labor panicked and the do-gooders cried out ‘slavery.’ In ten years there was a whole sheaf of laws, out of Brisbane and out of London, to aid and protect colored labor. By the time the lawyers got done, the cost of colored labor was double, and it didn’t pay any longer. Besides, by then the fields were all cleared and tended by machinery.”

“Except Sugarlea.”

“One of the last. Part because Sloan couldn’t afford to change and part because he was too hard-headed to change. In ninety-two the Parliament of Queensland abolished black labor policies and Sloan’s world fell apart.”

“And he fell out the window.”

The man chuckled. “Aye. That year and the next were bad. Very bad. Strikes, labor problems, people fighting and killing over working-class privileges. The young Sloan would’ve had an uphill battle under good economic conditions, and this was Australia at her worst. The birth pangs before her federation, you might say.”

Samantha forced the last of her egg down because it was the polite thing to do. She nearly choked, for it lodged in her throat along with her heart. “Cole’s father may have been a murderer.”

“Not ‘may have,’ lass. Was.”

“Ye dinnae know that unless there’s more to’t than ye’ve said. Circumstantial. Dreadful circumstance, aye, but circumstance. Sure’n the secret—the certainty, if ye will—died with Conal.” Why was she defending the father? She felt nearly certain the son was a murderer. She had watched him, and the more she rehearsed that horrible moment in her mind, the more certain she became.

Abner Gardell was staring at her. “What is it, lass?”

She shook her head. “Yer story disturbs me so.”

“More than that. Don’t be devious with me. Your whole soul is vibrating.”

It was common knowledge, or would be as soon as the gossips and the newspapers spread it. Why try to hide it? “A man named John Butts—do ye know him?”

“Know the name. Tea planter, I think.”

“He’s dead, sir. Last night … uh, a misunderstanding.”

“Cause of death?”

“Gunshot, sir. He, uh … ’Twas his own gun.”

“And Cole Sloan’s hand on the trigger, whether suicide or murder. Which?”

“They were fighting.”

The man darkened, as if a light went out—or a very black light flared on inside him. He withdrew into himself in an unexplainable way. “Of course. I should have acted when I first heard of him instead of waiting until after I’d run out that Charter’s Towers claim. And then I wandered around for months, wasting time, dropping little hints, letting him stew.”

Samantha drew in a breath. “Notes. Ye sent him hints in notes, about vengeance.”

“You know about them. Didn’t think he’d tell a soul about them. Aye. Let him know God’s not turning His back. But I made a bad mistake. You see, I diddled around here doing what I wanted instead of taking care of the important business. I wasted a lot of time looking for the old claim. The big one. Wanted to be able to rub him with that, too—that there be gold right under his nose all these years, but it took McGonigan’s partner to find it; and he the loser, y’see.”

“Ye said, I recall, seeking gold keeps ye honest.”

“Putting it off, was all. Dwelling on it. If I’d done what I was supposed to when I first purposed in my heart to do it—sacrificed my own desires for God’s will—your Butts would be alive now. The sins of the fathers. Well, I know now what I have to do, and Luke Vinson be hanged.” He twisted around to lock her eye to eye. “You run down the hill to Sugarlea, little lady, and you tell Cole Sloan he’s about to die. Him and Sugarlea and all. And get your sisters out of there lest they be destroyed with him.”

“Ye can’t be … ’Tis madness!”

“Run!” His bull voice roared to heaven and rattled hell.

Samantha leaped to her feet. She snatched Sheba’s reins off the branch and dragged herself into the saddle. She jammed her heels into the startled mare’s ribs, not that Sheba needed added inducement. She lay forward, pressing against the horse’s neck, lest the harsh leaves and branches slap her right out of the saddle.