Chapter 5

 

We’d finished dinner but we still sat at the kitchen table. I asked Jia how they had known the man who had killed her father and her cousin had been Schmidt.

Jia told how her father had still been alive when rescuers found him, broken and tangled amongst the rocks and trees at the base of the cliff. Before he died, he described the man that had been looking over the cliff edge. Daway Ma, who had been in the next basket along had seen him, too. Other men told how Moose Schmidt had been working in the camp, but he disappeared after that incident. And later, in his early travels across the Territory, Schmidt boasted about the killings, too.

‘And me?’ I said. ‘How . . . Why?’

‘My mother,’ Jia said. ‘You met her.’

‘Yes.’

‘She told me that your father was the only one who ever came close to killing Moose Schmidt.’

My mother said, ‘Sam would still be alive if all he’d had to do was kill that man. I believe your mother wanted Schmidt alive.’

‘Yes. That is true. But now . . . Me . . . I just want him dead.’

‘Me, too,’ I said.

My mother stood up and put a pot of water on the stove in the corner, her back to Jia and I. She hated the idea of my going after Schmidt, but had long been resigned to the fact that one day it would happen. It wasn’t that she didn’t have faith in me, but she knew – more than I did – just how evil, resilient and slippery Schmidt was. To my mother the whole thing felt pre-ordained, like one of those ancient Greek tragedies. I could see it in her eyes some days that she thought she had already lost me, but that it just hadn’t happened yet.

Jia said, ‘That’s why I came. I know you want to go after him, too.’

‘How did you know?’

‘There’s talk.’

My mother turned and looked at me. She didn’t need to say anything. I knew what she was thinking, and she I. If there was talk about my intentions and Jia had heard such talk, what were the odds that Moose Schmidt had heard it too? Not that I was going to shoot Schmidt in the back, but a certain amount of surprise would have been a good thing.

‘Together,’ Jia said. ‘We will succeed.’

‘You wear a gun,’ I said. ‘And that thing you did to Morgan Taylor. . . .’

I was intrigued about Jia’s capabilities, but I was also keen to reassure my mother that together Jia and I might indeed succeed.

Before Jia could answer, the street door opened, and a moment later the kitchen door.

Amos Bowler was one of my mother’s boarders – at the moment her only boarder. A short man who always wore a blue suit and a bowler hat. I don’t know what his surname really was, I just called him Bowler because of that hat. His cheeks were red as if he had been hurrying, or drinking. Or both.

‘Oh you’re here,’ he said, looking at Jia and I.

‘Good evening, Amos,’ my mother said. I said hello, too. Then I introduced Jia who stood up and did that little bow from the shoulders again.

‘I heard about you,’ Amos said, smiling at Jia. Then he turned and addressed my mother.

‘Nash Lane and Morgan Taylor. . . .’

‘I know,’ my mother said.

‘You know what?’

‘I know what happened.’

Now Amos looked at me. ‘He’s coming after you. Nash Lane, I mean.’

‘I guessed he wouldn’t be able to leave it.’

‘Soon as he can stand up,’ Amos said.

‘Can’t he stand up?’

‘He keeps falling over. You did something to his balance, by all accounts.’

‘It’s probably drink,’ my mother said. I could hear the water starting to bubble on the stove.

‘No. They say he sobered up quick enough after the fight,’ Amos said. ‘But he can’t walk more’n two steps without needing to hold on to something.’ He looked at me again. ‘He’s really mad. I mean, really.’

‘He initiated the trouble,’ Jia said.

‘Don’t doubt that,’ Amos said. He looked at Jia and pulled a face as if he didn’t really want to say what he was about to. ‘Morgan Taylor ain’t happy either. I wouldn’t be surprised if Nash doesn’t come after Cal with a gun. But Morgan Taylor says he has other plans for you.’ Amos’s uncomfortable expression grew a little more strained. ‘He says you’re a Chinese whore and there’s only one sort of thing a whore understands.’

Jia blushed a little. Maybe it was anger.

‘He can try,’ she said. I don’t think she knew she was doing it, but her hand moved as she spoke and rested on the gun that she still had strapped to her waist.

‘They’ve got friends,’ Amos said. ‘My advice would be to lay very low for a while.’

For a moment the kitchen was silent, then my mother said, ‘Who would like coffee?’

 

When I had been younger and my father had spent time at home there was a place he used to take me – and sometimes my mother, too – for an overnight camp. It wasn’t that far from St Mary’s Gap, just a couple of hours ride, but it was far enough for it to be an adventure for a young boy.

It was a tiny settlement that had long been abandoned in a hollow with trees and hills surrounding it. A creek flowed not far from the edge of the settlement. My father said it had been a surveyor’s camp that had one time been in the middle of nowhere. There were several log cabins – and the fact they were all aligned nicely in a square and the walls were straight and the roofs solid and they had windows did suggest surveyors, or at least some group of people with attention to detail and pride in their workmanship. There was a privy built over a deep drop hole, and a hundred yard trench that had been dug to divert the creek. In one of the log cabins there was still a pile of tangled rusting chains – not normal chains, but chains with long straight links. Surveyor’s chains. There were some old picks and spades, too. Rabbits had colonised the place and the shooting – and eating – was good. They were fun times, if infrequent and few.

Jia and I collected our horses from the livery mid-evening and around two in the morning we prepared to slip quietly out of St Mary’s Gap and head towards that camp.

My mother hugged me, and after a slight pause as if neither she nor Jia quite knew the etiquette, she hugged Jia too.

I told Ma that we wouldn’t be long and she gave me that look again, the one that tried to instil belief in me and in herself, whilst still feeling the weight of fate bearing down upon us.

I asked her about Nash Lane. What would she do or say, if – when – he came around.

‘Don’t worry about Nash,’ she said. ‘I can handle him. I’ve been handling him for years.’

Then Jia and I rode out beneath the soft moonlight, with one intent: to kill a man.