Shadow of the Osprey (4 page)

Hilary had taken a liking to the man who sat opposite him. Maybe it was the effects of the rum that brought on the feeling of bonhomie. Despite the aura of violence the Irishman carried like a cloak he sensed a gentler and even compassionate man.

As far as Michael was concerned his questions were answered. He downed the remainder of his rum and excused himself from the company of the gun dealer and stepped out into the busy street.

Horse-drawn omnibuses, drays and pedestrians crowded him on the narrow city streets. The unseasonal warmth of Sydney’s autumn day was oppressive and Michael felt sweat dripping down his chest under the starched shirt. He longed for the relative coolness of the hotel where he was staying. It was not far from Circular Quay and Michael considered spending the rest of the afternoon in the public bar. He had little to do until the following day when he would go to the Baroness von Fellmann’s house for the afternoon reception.

He had considered a ferry journey to Manly Village but decided against the visit. There were too many painful memories on that side of the harbour that he did not want to exhume from his past. Letting his family in Sydney know he was alive was definitely out of the question. He was still a wanted man.

More important was the uncertainty of his present life. To reveal that he was alive would only subject his family to a second grieving should the mission go wrong. No, it was better that he remain a distant memory so they could get on with their lives.

Michael was not aware that he was being followed along George Street by a short, slightly overweight man who was sweating profusely as he attempted to keep a discreet distance.

Horace had scribbled down the name of the gunsmith in his leather-bound notebook. There were many names and dates in his notebook. To any inquisitive observer the notes made little sense, they were all in code.

Nearer the Quay a breeze from the harbour swept up the narrow street and ruffled the Irishman’s thick curls. When Michael reached the hotel he decided to go to his room instead of spending the afternoon in the public bar. The day had been long and Michael needed time alone to think about past, present and future.

Horace hailed down a horse-drawn hansom cab and directed the driver to take him to the military barracks at Paddington. There was someone he needed to consult on the matter of Mister O’Flynn’s visit to the Sydney gun dealer.

K
ate O’Keefe uttered a short prayer of thanks to God for creating the ox. Her long, plaited stockwhip snaked over the backs of the bullocks and cracked like a rifle, shattering the droning silence of the midday bush.

Spattered with dried mud her normally elegant and beautiful features were masked. Her grey, expressive eyes were as staring as those of the miners who had passed on the track, stumbling back to Cooktown, fleeing the hell that had been the Palmer River goldfields in the monsoonal wet season of ’73/’74.

At first glance she appeared just another teamster, albeit one slighter in build than many who plied the track from the port of Cooktown to the goldfields along the Palmer. But on closer inspection any observer could see she had the curves that were distinctly female under the rough working man’s clothing she wore.

Her eighteen bullocks strained to haul the massive four-wheeled wagon with its eight ton load of supplies. Behind her, a second wagon rumbled and creaked under the whip of Ben Rosenblum.

Ben was no longer the gangly boy who had set out six years earlier to learn the trade of the teamster. The arduous work had turned him into a tall, broad-shouldered young man of twenty-one and his dark good looks had attracted more than one admiring glance from the ladies in the dance halls, saloons and hotels of Cooktown.

Ben was the son of a widow who had recognised that her son would inevitably fall into a life of crime on Sydney’s tough back streets and in an act of desperation had written to her sister Judith asking her for her help. Judith had responded by suggesting a job with Kate O’Keefe’s Eureka company, and, as a favour to her dear friends Solomon and Judith Cohen who had stood by her in tough times, Kate had offered the boy an apprenticeship with her tough old taciturn teamster Joe Hanrahan. Ben’s initial few months under Joe’s supervision had proved successful, albeit a bit rough, as Ben came to learn that work was a discipline that could be installed by a fast right fist.

But Joe was two years dead now and buried somewhere west of Townsville. He had been killed when a wagon being hauled up a mountain track had rolled back and crushed him against a tree. The young Jewish teamster had buried him and said the prayers for the dead over his grave. He had doubted that God was particularly concerned that he had not used the correct procedure as he used Christian prayers from Joe’s battered Protestant Bible. When the solitary service was over Ben had single-handedly continued with the task of getting the wagon and its load through to the outstations of the squatters.

Ben now walked with the long stride of a man. Gone forever was the pale city boy from Sydney’s slums who Kate had hired. Once a surly city boy, he had joined the ranks of the tough frontier bushmen of Australia’s northern colony. Between the two – Irish woman and Jewish man – they had laboured to haul the badly needed supplies over one hundred and sixty miles of ground left by God for the Devil to create.

By night they had taken turns standing guard against the possibility of an attack from prowling tribesmen. Kate would stand armed with a hardhitting Martini Henry rifle and her little pepper box pistol, while Ben always carried the big Colt revolver in a holster strapped at his hip. It was the same pistol Kate had presented him with years earlier on his first trip west with the taciturn and burly Irish teamster Joe Hanrahan.

The long haul from Cooktown to the Palmer River goldfields had taken its toll on both Kate and Ben. Fording rivers still swollen by the monsoonal rains by day, and double-banking the wagons on the steep sections of the track, with the never-ending work of off-loading, then reloading stores, had sapped their reserves of strength. Often they would stumble beside the wagons like sleepwalkers while the big, stolid bullocks strained at the yokes hauling the wagons just that one mile more and then, just one more mile after that.

When those times came, and Kate’s body screamed out for rest, she had talked to the big Irishman who walked beside her. He told her of other tracks in other places, of the devils that tempted with the promise of despair. He would urge her to keep going despite her despair.

Ben would see Kate talking to herself as she stumbled along. At first he thought she had been driven mad by the rigours of the trek, but he soon came to learn that she was talking to her long dead father who, sometimes gently and at other times harshly, encouraged his daughter not to give in.

Sometimes Ben suspected that the spirit of Patrick Duffy was speaking through his daughter when Kate refused to allow them to rest for even one day on the tortuous trail down to the goldfields. Day in and gruelling day out, they pushed forward with only the sounds of the wagons and the lonely bush as their companions.

‘You hear that?’ Ben cried as he stumbled forward. ‘That sound coming from the south?’

Kate could hear the sound. It was a distant murmur of massed voices and clinking of metal against rock as picks chipped at stone. It was the welcome sound that told them they had finally reached the Palmer.

~

The bedraggled teamsters struggled into the town of white canvas tents and bark shanties. They hugged and Ben danced a little jig. They had brought with them supplies worth literally their weight in gold while stranded behind them were the supply wagons of their competitors, pulled by the big cart horses. Unlike the stalwart bullocks, the horses were unable to cross the flooded creeks. The bullocks had again proven their versatility.

Being first to arrive on the fields meant asking your own price. The two wagons were rushed as the word spread up and down the banks of the Palmer and its eroded gullies that the precious goods had arrived.

The miners came, gaunt and hollow-eyed, to jostle for flour, sugar, tea, tinned fish and meat. But mostly the miners came to purchase the most precious of all goods – tobacco. And when they came to the wagons they brought their gold with them.

Within a few hours sixteen tons of goods had been sold to eager customers prepared to pay the inflated prices Kate demanded.

Had Patrick Duffy lived to see his daughter trading with the miners, he would have smiled. His daughter handled the impatient, enthusiastic miners with firmness and fairness.

This was not the first trip Kate had made with Ben to the Palmer. Before the Big Wet they had come in late ’73 when they had used two smaller bullock drays to haul supplies up the track from Townsville. A trek through hell as they had crossed the drought-parched plains and passed the long lines of hopeful miners walking with bed-rolls, pushing wheelbarrows loaded with their possessions, or riding on horseback.

For a fee Kate would carry the personal possessions of the miners on the drays. Together they would trudge past red-eyed men and women stumbling in the opposite direction, lost souls returning defeated to the relative haven Townsville offered. For here, on the drought-ravished plains, the biblical hell of fire and brimstone was preached. Here was a place on earth where a man or woman could be punished for their sins before they died, as they faced the relentless torment of heat, dust and endless plains of tortured trees.

On this visit Kate was astute enough to realise that she would not need all the bullocks for the return trip to Cooktown where she had established a depot. With half the bullocks she could get back to Cooktown with what would be lighter wagons.

When they had reached the newly established goldfields in ’73 the excess bullocks were sold to a goldfield butcher for meat for the hungry miners, the bullocks themselves thus realising a massive profit. But although she had long hardened herself against sentimentality, Kate knew she would not be eating any fresh beef until she returned to the town on the banks of the Endeavour River.

With the cash and gold gained from the sale of both goods and bullocks, Kate had returned to Cooktown to purchase two four-wheeled wagons and new teams of bullocks. She had been acutely aware of the need to leave the Palmer before the monsoonal wet season came to cut the lifelines to the goldfields. But many of the miners were not familiar with the vagaries of the tropical monsoons. They ignored the warnings of experienced bushmen and foolishly remained to stockpile ore. But the ore was soon washed away under the constant hammering of torrential rains. In many cases so too were the lives of those who remained.

Kate was fully aware that as soon as the flooded rivers receded there would be a steady supply of food and goods to the goldfields and the glut of supplies would cause prices to fall. But she did not care as she and Ben had been the first to arrive and the starving miners had paid generously.

Kate carefully packed the delicate gold weighing scales into a small wooden case. The traded gold was now in small chamois bags and stacked neatly on the tray of her wagon. She did not need the gold scales for the last transaction as the wife of a miner paid her in crumpled currency. Twenty pounds for a bag of flour. The same bag would have sold for three pounds in Cooktown. A few of the miners also had paid in coins even though Kate preferred gold as she could make an extra five shillings on each ounce on the Sydney gold market.

The gold and money had come so fast this time that she hadn’t had a minute to count her takings. But she knew it was a small fortune to add to her rapidly growing store in the bank vaults of Cooktown and Townsville. She was a very wealthy woman by any standards.

As Kate stood counting the pound notes by the wagon she had the appearance of a hard and seasoned teamster more at home with rifle and bull whip than a lady in the genteel parlours of polite society, sipping tea from fine china. When she had finished, she folded the pound notes and turned to Ben. He was perched on the edge of the wagon with clay pipe in the corner of his mouth. His long legs dangled over the side while he cradled Kate’s rifle across his knees. He was a formidable sight, armed with his Colt strapped at his hip and on the inside of his boot a long bowie knife. Like most of the frontiersmen he had a dark bushy beard as a sign of manhood, and while he sat guarding the gold even the most daring of would-be thieves steered clear of the wagon.

‘Ben, sit on the takings until I get back,’ Kate said as she placed the notes in a tin box kept for paper currency. ‘I won’t be gone long.’

Kate found some privacy a short distance from the miners’ camp. When she had finished answering her call of nature she made her way back through the haphazardly arranged rows of tents and shanties. She noticed that there were few dogs in the camp to bark and yap at her heels. Most had been killed and eaten during the Wet by their owners.

As she pondered on the subtle changes in the camp she noticed a young girl dogging her steps. The girl gripped the hand of a hollow-eyed boy and attempted not to appear obtrusive. Kate had first noticed the two hovering around the wagon when she had sold the supplies to the miners and remembered how she had been struck by the pathetic sight. Her heart had gone out to the young woman and the child. But she had quickly steeled herself against feelings of pity, they were just another two of many who had become the flotsam on the sea the devastating Wet had left in its wake.

The pair continued to follow. Kate pretended not to notice them until she was near the wagon, then she halted and turned to the girl who she could see was painfully thin. Her long, blonde tresses were greasy and matted. She wore a ragged, filthy dress but under other circumstances she would have looked pretty . . . And she had a strangely poignant expression with an intelligent look in her darkly shadowed eyes, and a very large strawberry birthmark that covered the left side of her gaunt face. Kate guessed that the young woman was about eighteen; at twenty-eight Kate felt old in comparison.

The boy, whose hand the girl held tightly, was a pitiful sight too. Kate guessed that he was about six years old. He was filthy and had a surly expression on his face as he glared at Kate through haunted eyes. Brother and sister Kate thought, as there was a distinct likeness between the two. ‘Do you want to speak to me?’ she asked.

‘Yes . . . Missus O’Keefe. I . . . ’ The girl was trembling and on the verge of tears, yet there the loneliness about her bridged the space between the two women. Kate could see herself mirrored in the girl who was somehow herself those many years before in Rockhampton when she had lived through fever and childbirth.

‘Come with me to the wagons,’ Kate said kindly. ‘You both look as if you need something to eat.’

The young girl’s eyes filled with tears of gratitude. Kate walked over to her and impulsively put her arms around the thin shoulders. The girl trembled under the touch and burst into deep and racking sobs. A woman’s touch of compassion was not something she had ever known in her tormented life.

Kate guided her gently to the wagons as Ben watched curiously. ‘Ben! Get a brew going and make up a stew. Enough for four,’ Kate ordered. And he promptly obeyed.

Unlike many bushmen he did not think it unusual to take orders from a woman. Kate O’Keefe was not only his employer but also a woman who had long proved she was equal to any man he had met on the frontier. He was also just a little smitten with his employer who, when not on the track, was as beautiful as any woman he had ever seen, even more beautiful than the prettiest of Palmer Kate’s painted ladies at the Cooktown brothels.

Palmer Kate ran a very different kind of business to Kate O’Keefe. She was a notorious madam and it was rumoured that she would meet the single women who sailed north seeking their fortunes at the jetty and offer them employment. The alternative to refusing her offer was to be thrown into the crocodile infested river.

Both Kates provided valuable service to the frontiersmen in their own ways.

Kate O’Keefe now sat the young woman on a stump of a tree now long gone for mining cradles, firewood and rough planks for the shanties. The boy squatted silently, watching Ben prepare the stew of tinned beef. He was like a dog waiting to eat scraps from the master’s table. The stew of meat and onions tantalisingly wafted its aroma around the wagons arousing both hunger and suspicion in the boy who reminded Ben of some feral animal.