Cry of the Curlew: The Frontier Series 1 (33 page)

‘I spoke to a priest, Father Murlay. He was a very nice man,’ Judith continued. Kate knew Father Murlay. He was a French priest whose attitudes varied somewhat from his Irish colleagues and he was less judgemental about matters dealing with the heart and marriage. Possibly it was his Gallic upbringing that made him more tolerant.

‘And what did Father Murlay say?’ she asked.

‘He told me that in your religion there were ways to get an annulment. I think that is what he called it. He said you should talk to him when he next visits Rockhampton.’

‘I will speak to him on the subject,’ Kate said as she placed a chicken bone on her plate.

She had not thought about seeking grounds for an annulment and she was vaguely aware that the canon laws were as complex as any laws on earth. She knew that in the Vatican there were priests who were employed to examine cases just as a lawyer would. Divorce was one part of the canon law.

‘Good. And when you get your annulment you will find a good man and have children,’ Judith said, as if the matter was finalised before it had commenced.

Solomon had listened to the conversation in surprised silence. He was also stunned to hear that his wife had gone to see a priest. But he knew how much his wife cared for Kate. They were bound to each other in that most sacred time for a woman – the birth of a child. It had been Judith who had brought Kate’s child into the world for its very short life. And Kate was one of the first to hold the wet and slippery Deborah, squalling in her arms. After the midwife had done her work, it was Kate who had passed the baby to Judith’s breast. That sort of thing could make a Jewish woman go and see a priest, he thought ruefully.

‘Luke was in the district last week,’ he said for something to say and he noticed the sudden expression of interest in Kate’s eyes. But he did not know whether it was just curiosity . . . or something else. For that he would have to ask Judith when they were in bed that night.

‘Oh! I didn’t know that. I pray he is well,’ Kate said casually. Judith thought that she detected just the slightest note of interest in her over-casual reply. ‘I did hear talk at the hotel that he was planning to go north into the mountains,’ Kate said in an off-handed manner. ‘Some of the bushmen said he was foolish to try. They said the myalls further north are reputedly hostile. I suppose he would see the sense of turning back.’

‘No, he didn’t turn back,’ Judith said quietly. ‘Luke Tracy
is
Luke Tracy and God only created a few men like him. But the devil has made him pay. Luke has gone north a very sick man. He has the fever.’

Kate registered visible concern in her expression. She had often heard the bushmen yarn about the legendary but crazy Yankee prospector who, alone, crisscrossed the vast colony in search of his El Dorado. But they spoke with respect.

Although she had not seen the gentle and courageous prospector in over four years, she often found herself thinking about him. Was he alive and well? Why did he not return to Rockhampton to visit his friends?

It was on those occasions that she had wondered at her own deep concern but she had dismissed her thoughts as nothing more than what one would feel for a dear friend. Only once, many years earlier, had she cried alone in her bed as she remembered the man who had been beside her when they embarked on the dangerous journey in search of her father’s grave. Although they had hoped to make contact with her infamous bushranger brother, the closest she had come was to hear the stories told around the bar at the hotel of his legendary exploits. Like the American prospector, her brother was a ghost in her life.

She instinctively felt that the lack of any communication from Tom was prompted by his deeply ingrained sense of honour, that he did not wish to bring shame on his sister by allowing any contact whatsoever. It was stupid male pride. But the American’s total lack of contact had no explanation.

‘How bad is his fever?’ she asked calmly, carefully hiding her feelings.

‘He would be a lot better if he had someone to care for him,’ Judith answered and Kate did not miss the note of slight anger in her snapped reply.

‘I would have thought Luke might have at least contacted me . . . us,’ she retorted.

‘And what reason would he have for that, Kate?’ Judith asked with an edge of sarcasm. ‘You are, after all,
just
friends.’ Kate’s face clouded with hurt at her friend’s obvious recrimination and Judith regretted that she had been so hard on her. But it was hard to bite one’s tongue under such circumstances.

‘Do you know where he is now?’ Kate asked, addressing Solomon.

‘I’m sorry, Kate, but I do not know,’ he replied.

Kate stared at him and asked icily, ‘Why hasn’t he written – at the very least – to us?’

‘He is a man,’ Solomon replied lamely, suspecting correctly that she would not understand because she was not a man. ‘And some things a man has to do
because
he is a man.’ Oi, but there were terrible and irreconcilable differences between men and women, he thought bleakly. And hoped that he would not have to try to explain himself as he did not know how to do so. All he knew was that Luke had told him he must do very important things before he could ever return and face the beautiful young woman as a man she could be proud of.

Solomon Cohen could not betray the promise he had made to his friend that he was in receipt of a letter that had arrived two weeks earlier from up north. Luke had written optimistically that he had a feeling in his bones where his El Dorado lay and it was only a matter of getting there and back alive that counted for the present.

But Solomon did not share the American’s optimism, as he had heard disturbing stories of the northern districts of the colony. It was said the land belonged to extremely fierce and warlike tribesmen who practised headhunting and cannibalism in little-explored country of high jungle-clad mountains and searing arid plains.

Kate did not pursue the philosophy of the irreconcilable differences between men and women. Solomon breathed a sigh of relief. And the subject of Luke Tracy was quickly dropped from the conversation.

Dropped or not, it did not stop Kate from feeling anger towards the man who had chosen to ignore her. She was not used to being ignored by any man. But with the anger there was also a yearning to once again hear the slow drawl and see the bronzed face above the beard of the man who had come to find a place in her heart. It could not be love, she convinced herself. Merely a very deep affection for him.

THIRTY-ONE

T
he malaria had taken its toll on Luke Tracy and the fever was still on him as he shivered uncontrollably, slumped in the saddle astride his mount.

He knew from the bearings he had taken with his small brass compass that he was somewhere south of Cape York Peninsula in the shallow dry valleys of low and spindly trees left brittle by the long dry season. He also knew that his big and faithful mare was close to collapse as she plodded on without questioning the foolishness of man’s quest for the yellow metal.

Together horse and rider had faced jungle, desert, scrub and hostile tribesmen. And together they had forged a bond based on mutual need. The big mare was tough and carried an old scar on her flank from a spear wound and she had many more scars from the terrible cuts of the rainforest vines as badges of her courage.

Time had lost all meaning for Luke as he swayed in the saddle, fighting to stay conscious, his existence now measured in the fact that he was alive to see the sun rise and set each day. The fever came to him in alternating waves of burning hot and icy cold deliriums, with each malarial attack threatening to be the fatal last.

His precious supply of quinine, his two packhorses and most of his prospecting equipment were long gone to the terrible tangle of gullies and jungle that now lay behind him in the craggy mist-covered mountain range he had traversed weeks earlier. At least now he was beyond the terrible rainforest hell and back down on the plains. He also knew it could get worse if he persisted in pushing himself north. He might have survived the dark and green hell of the tropical rainforests but he still had the endless miles of scrubland and craggy hills that spread west, north and south ahead.

According to his last estimation, he was still eighty to ninety miles south-west of the river and if there was gold in payable amounts it had to be between his present location and the river.

Unconsciously he touched his damaged shoulder where the long hardwood spear had ripped through his body a year earlier in Burke’s Land, when he had been camped by a water hole at night. His first inkling of danger had drifted on the balmy night breezes to his camp fire. He had immediately recognised the sweet and not unpleasant scent of burning followed by the crackling hissing sound of grass blazing with its deep orange glow that could be seen through the stark scrub trees of the red earth plain. A grassfire front sweeping down on his camp site in a place where he was alone, or at least he’d thought he was!

He had snatched for his pistol and rifle as the wall of flames silhouetted the lines of naked Aboriginals advancing on him with spears fitted to woomeras. A volley of shots from his pistol had caused the advancing warriors to waver. Then a deadly shower of fire-hardened spears had plunged down around him and one of the spears had found its target.

Luke had been flung sideways as the barbed spear tore through his shoulder. The pain was beyond anything that he had ever experienced and he accepted death as inevitable. His revolver was empty and the ball and powder weapon too cumbersome to load under the circumstances. Badly wounded, he was helpless in the face of the overwhelming number of tribesmen advancing on him. It was only really a matter of how he would die: by a spear or a bone-crushing blow from a hardwood club. What occurred next gave the normally agnostic American a greater respect for the Divine Being whom he had taken for granted during his thirty-five years on earth.

Out of the night sky came the shattering explosive crack of lightning to hit between himself and the advancing warriors. Stunned, he stood and watched without comprehending that the tribesmen were scattering into the night to escape the spirit world’s irrational bad temper. He had slumped with a groan and fallen heavily into the rich red earth of the Gulf Country as a gentle breeze played across the plains to force the grassfire away from him.

Throughout the night he lay in a throbbing haze of pain, and when the morning dawned he was dimly aware that two bearded faces hovered over him, muttering how lucky he was to be alive.

The fellow prospectors had seen the grassfire from their camp site miles away and, acting on a hunch, they had ridden across the plain to the water hole. As they had suspected, the fire denoted an attack on one of their fellow trekkers on the vast plains of the Gulf. At the worst, they might find a body and they would provide a Christian burial for it, as such was the unwritten law of the frontier. Instead they had found Luke unconscious with the spear protruding from his shoulder.

The operation to remove the spear had almost killed Luke. One of the bearded prospectors had served in Britain’s colonial army and his service had taken him through the campaigns in Africa, where such wounds were not infrequent.

With a thin knife blade honed to razor sharpness and sterilised in the fire, he’d cut and probed the wound from front and back while Luke was tied to a log and given the traditional gag of the wounded soldier – a lead musket ball which he succeeded in biting through in his searing agony. But the former soldier was a talented amateur surgeon and the operation was successful. Infection did not set in and, after two weeks of recuperating with his newly acquired friends, Luke was well enough to strike out alone again.

The parting carried no sentimentality. What had been done to save him was simply an expectation of bushmen for each other on the frontier. A few grunted words of thanks and good wishes and then the shimmering plains of the Gulf Country swallowed men who were most likely never to see each other again.

Alone, astride his mount on the lonely plains, Luke had often thought about the miraculous lightning strike that had certainly saved his life. The lightning had come from the northern sky. Providence dictated that his salvation meant that he should ride as far north as possible in search of El Dorado.

But first he had returned to civilisation to replenish his supplies. From Townsville, he had posted his letter to his old friend Solomon Cohen in Rockhampton, informing him of his plan to trek north into the Palmer River region.

But perseverance had a limit and now, finally, he had reached his. To go on was certain death from starvation or fever. To turn back now gave him a chance. To the south lay the white man’s outposts and maybe a lonely homestead or even one of the tiny towns sprouting in the wake of the bullock teams where he could rest up and recover from his gruelling ordeal.

He now knew that it had been a terrible mistake to think he could take on the tropical rainforests that covered the coastal mountains of north Queensland. The tangles of liana vines that strangled the giant trees had been like binding ropes to hold him back and, in the dank and gloomy forests, he had found himself in a world of primeval cycads, ferns and fungi that lived off the wealth of rotting death under a canopy of tall trees whose majestic crowns paid homage to the sun.

On the ground were the phosphorescence of decay and the bone-chilling mists that swirled slowly, wraith-like between the trunks of the trees. And as he had climbed higher on the range, the colder the eternally swirling mists had become. Day after day of being beaten back by the parasitic vines that strangled the forest giants had sapped his strength and that of his brave and sturdy horses.

In the haunted forests of ghostly twilight, the carcasses of his two packhorses now became fodder for the buttress roots of the giant trees. The American had spent long and lonely nights ranting in a nightmare of fevered dreams at a world devoid of light. And there were days of sweat and exhaustion crawling ever upwards onto the ridges with the pygmy-like inhabitants of the forests watching curiously his every move from the silent shadows.

He had stubbornly pushed on until he was at the top of the majestic range where the rainforest gave way to the lightly timbered and undulating plains of the west. Then came the time of stumbling and crashing down into the narrow valleys in a cycle of pain, sweat and exhaustion that would have killed lesser men than the determined American.

The warming sun of the plains could not take away the cold mists that had seeped into his body to remind him of the silent terror that had been the tropical rainforests high in the ranges.

He now found himself in a land equally as hostile. It was a lonely place to die.

His mare picked her own way along a valley floor. She did not need his hand on the rein to guide her as she was an intelligent animal and she sensed that it was up to her to keep them going.

‘We aren’t going back that way, old girl,’ he promised her wearily as he rode slumped in the saddle, too sick and spent to care any more. He had pushed himself beyond the established white man’s frontier. To continue was certain death and it was time to turn back. He pulled down on the reins but the mare propped of her own accord.

At first he thought in his fevered mind that she was able to read his despairing thoughts as she stopped with her ears pricked forward and pawed at the ground with her hoof. Something had caught her attention.

Luke dropped the reins and eased his Sharps rifle from its scabbard by his knee. He thumbed back the hammer and raised the rifle to his shoulder. The mare snorted as he scanned the silent scrub, searching for the shadows that moved. The fever was still on him and he knew that he had little hope of defending himself against a concerted attack by hostile tribesmen and he was in territory where a man needed all his senses to stay alive. The fever had effectively dulled his mind as surely as if he were in a drunken stupor. Luke felt very vulnerable in the sparse scrub.

He scanned the surrounding area searching for movement and saw nothing except the straggly rough-barked trees eking out a tenuous living from the termite-infested soil. A nerve at the corner of his eye twitched. What would it be? he thought in his despair. A stone axe or a throwing stick that might suddenly whirl through the still air? Or maybe the swift and silent hardwood spear to pluck him from the saddle?

His scrutiny came to rest on the bundle of rags to his front in a place where there should not be European rags. The bundle moved!

He kicked his horse forward until he reached the rags and slid from the saddle to kneel beside a white man, blackened by long exposure to the sun.

The man reacted by flinging up his arm as if to ward off a blow when Luke bent to help him. A fetid smell of decaying flesh rose and Luke could see that the stranger’s leg was swollen with putrefaction under the remains of his tattered trousers. A broken shaft of a spear could clearly be seen embedded in the flesh. The man was dying.

‘You a white man?’ The man croaked the question feebly as he brought his arm down and turned his head slowly to blink at the framed silhouette kneeling over him.

‘I’m a white man,’ Luke replied to reassure him. ‘Luke Tracy out of California.’

‘A Yankee.’ The man groaned painfully as he struggled to sit up. ‘Help me up, Yank.’

Luke rolled him gently onto his back. It was obvious that the man was beyond any hope of surviving his exhausting ordeal. His skin was hot to touch and the rotting leg stank of advanced decay. He let out a loud groan when Luke moved him.

‘Tried to get the spear out,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘But the bloody shaft broke off in me leg. Don and Charlie gone. Myalls got ’em. Almost got me. Don’t think they have seen many white men before. Not many guns anyway,’ he gasped in short and pain-racked bursts. ‘What are you?’ he asked when he was able to focus on Luke.

‘Prospector,’ Luke answered and the dying man gave a choking and bitter laugh as if mocking the American. The laugh took much of the man’s reserves of strength. ‘Another bloody fool like meself,’ he whispered.

Luke left the man to fetch a water canteen from his horse and he returned to press it to the man’s lips. The prospector had trouble swallowing the brackish water and he sighed when he had finished drinking. An expression of serenity came over his bearded face.

‘Thanks, matey,’ he said gratefully, grasping Luke by the wrist. ‘Almost as good as a cold beer on a hot day.’

Luke helped the man into a sitting position and placed him with his back to a stunted tree. The prospector gazed down at his putrefying leg where flies crawled on the wound seeking a place to lay their eggs. From death comes life.

‘Too late to take the leg off,’ he said more as a statement than a question. Luke nodded.

‘Then I’m goin’ to die soon,’ he added bitterly. ‘Die just when we found the River of Gold. Don, Charlie an’ me. Found the bloody river. An’ the myalls found us. Hit us on the river. Don an’ Charlie never had a hope. The myalls was big bastards. An’ their spears went straight through Don an’ Charlie. But I got a few of ’em before they got me. Been a running fight . . . don’t know how long. Two days . . . maybe three.’

Luke listened patiently to the dying man. ‘You think I’m ravin’ mad, don’t you?’ he said fiercely and he thrust his hand in his pocket. When he brought his hand out Luke’s registration of utter surprise pleased the prospector, who held up a nugget of gold as big as a hen’s egg. ‘Just picked this one up as easy as you please. An’ I got more.’ He struggled feebly to retrieve the other nuggets in his pockets but Luke stopped him. The dying prospector’s exertions were overpowering his weakened condition. Each word brought him a step closer to death.

‘I believe you. Just take it easy and I’ll get you something to eat,’ Luke said gently.

‘Keep the tucker, matey,’ the prospector countered. ‘No sense in wasting good food on a dyin’ man.’

Luke ignored his protests and rummaged in his saddlebags for some strips of leathery beef jerky. Although the prospector had protested, he finally relented and took the food gratefully. Luke watched the prospector pop a piece of meat into his mouth and chew slowly, savouring the strong meaty taste.

Luke guessed the prospector was his age . . . or thereabouts . . . and he had what Luke had come to recognise as an Australian accent, as opposed to the rich variety of predominantly British accents from all Britain’s regions. He must have been one very tough man in his time, Luke thought. To have survived as long as he had. The prospector was near starvation and it was obvious that he had engaged the Aboriginal tribesmen of the north for more than two or three days. Luke could see that the leg had been rotting for some time.