When William Delaney was born in 1855, men were men and the West was wild. There were Indian troubles for settlers, but not for the Delaneys; old Shamus had cannily invested one of his sons in a marriage to the daughter of an Apache chief a year or so before young William’s birth, which quieted things considerably.
Of course, William, like his uncles before him, gleefully borrowed the Indian custom of counting “coup” and on occasion rode pell-mell through peaceful Apache camps screeching madly and attempting to touch as many braves as possible before they angrily chased him back to Killara, the Delaney homestead.
If he had run true to form, old Shamus, never one to spare the rod, would have punished his grandson severely, but he didn’t. He’d learned it was useless in dealing with William. Trees were scarce in southern Arizona, and more than one eastern-made Addie had been worn out on William’s unrepentant bottom.
William’s father, Desmond, second of Shamus’s nine sons, was killed in the Civil War in 1862, leaving seven-year-old William in the care of his mother, Anne, his grandparents, and various uncles, aunts, and cousins. If he had lived, perhaps Desmond would have controlled his son, for the boy had worshipped him.
Of those left to guard him, only his grandfather had any sort of control over the boy, and that was little enough. Old Shamus, loving his grandchildren as he had his sons, certainly tried. Since William possessed the Delaney charm and was smart enough to turn it to good effect, even Shamus found himself easing up on the boy and remarking that his misdemeanors were products of high spirits.
The Apaches, understandably annoyed, disagreed; good Irish whiskey was called for then to ease the pain of lacerated temper.
But as William grew, it began to require more than a friendly drink to repair the consequences of his reckless actions. William rode wild horses, searched far and wide for wild women, and discovered both cards and drink a good ten years before he should have.
At the age of sixteen William had perfected the rather dangerous art of escaping out bedroom windows, enraged husbands and loaded guns one step behind him. He had, with forethought, trained his savage mustang to stand just so beneath those windows, and husbands in jealous pursuit found themselves choking on dust and listening to hearty laughter carried away by fleet hooves.
By the time he was eighteen William had searched out and conquered women within a two-hundred-mile radius of Killara. Indeed, betting in saloons held that a pair of his boots could be found under the bed of every woman under thirty except those William was kin to.
And since old Shamus was no fool, he was well aware of why his grandson often arrived home sketchily attired in only his trousers. Shamus could forgive the womanizing, merely remarking somewhat irritably that he could have raised all nine of his sons and shod them handsomely in the boots William had left behind him.
However, men were men then, and the West was still somewhat wild. And, inevitably, William was a bit lazy in leaving a warm bed one night. The jealous husband had burst in prepared, gun in hand and temper raging. William wasted no time with his pants, but grabbed his own gun instead, and when he left that window there was a badly wounded man behind him.
William might have stood his trial: he might even have been acquitted. But he was a gambler, and he knew the odds; at least half the men on any jury would be men he had wronged. So he climbed aboard his bad-tempered mustang and headed west.
He took with him little in the way of material things, confident of his luck, but he did “borrow” a single treasure from the Delaney family coffers. As treasures go, the necklace was worth little. It consisted of three silver medallions, each bearing a turquoise stone. Perhaps William was thinking of his grandfather’s lucky number: in any event, he took the necklace.
On the Barbary Coast he found men even more dangerous than those he had left behind him; though there were warm beds aplenty, there were also eager guns and short tempers. William, ever ready to conquer virgin territory, cocked his eye still farther west and boarded a ship.
He wound up, somewhat to his own surprise, in Australia, and liked it enough to remain for a while. He worked when he had to and gambled when he could, arriving at last on a sheep station—where he hired on happily after a glance at the boss’s very pretty daughter.
It was in 1877 when William went to work there, and he lost no time in leaving yet another pair of boots under yet another bed. But William had reckoned without Matthew Devlin, the quiet man whose only child was his daughter, Mary. William went to his wedding as lighthearted as always, unperturbed by the shotgun that guided his steps to the altar.
William remained for a short time, long enough to tell his bride all about his family in Arizona, about Killara. Truly of Shamus’s blood, he wove a splendid story about the relatives half a world away, gifting them with even more wealth and power than what was actually theirs at the time. Then, being William, he cheerfully abandoned his bride and sailed for home, trusting of forgiveness behind him, welcome before him, and having no idea that he had left in Australia something more than a pair of boots and an old necklace.
William found, at Killara, that there was indeed welcome, and that past misdeeds, if not forgotten, were at least viewed as dim and unimportant. He returned to the bosom of his family and never thought to mention the small matter of a wife left behind in Australia’s outback.
Unfortunately, none of William’s adventures had taught him to curb his recklessness, and he lost no time in reminding people of why he had left Arizona years before. He went his charming way from bad to worse, until even his loving grandfather freely predicted that he would end by getting his neck stretched.
Which, regrettably, is exactly how things turned out.
Mary Delaney was not surprised by William’s abandonment; she had loved him and, perhaps remarkably, understood him. She would have as soon attempted to chain the wind as tie William to her side. And she was a strong woman, a proud woman. So she bore her son, Charles, and raised him on the station alone after her father died. She told him often the story of Killara and the Arizona Delaneys, that and a necklace being the only birthright William had left his son.
In his turn, Charles married and fathered a son, passing on the tales of Killara—which was, in reality, by that time, all that William had described and more.
As with many families, the Australian branch of the Delaney clan could boast at least one mystery, and William’s son, Charles, was responsible for theirs. At some point in his young life, he attempted to mine gems, and having barely fathered his own son, he was murdered because of a fabulous gem it was believed he had found. His killers were never caught and the gem, if it existed, vanished.
By the time Spencer Delaney, William’s great-grandson, was born in 1935, Killara had become a legend; with news spreading worldwide overnight because of advanced technology, hard facts upheld the legend.
And pride being a strong Delaney trait, Spencer did not turn to his wealthy American relations when he found himself in financial trouble. Instead, he sold off the larger part of the station to a neighboring station, requiring only that his family be given a two-month option to repurchase the land if it came up for resale.
Killaroo, as the station had been renamed by Mary, was small, and the sale of the land was only temporarily helpful to the family. Spencer, realizing too late what he had given up, worked his fingers to the bone to see his family prosper so the land could be restored to them. As the years passed, it became his obsession. He suffered two minor heart attacks and, ignoring warnings by his doctor that a third would be likely to kill him, continued to work and scheme to get his land back.
Since Delaneys tended to sire male children, it was somewhat surprising that Spencer had fathered three girls. And though Spencer may well have felt the lack of a son, he loved his girls and wanted the best for them. Sydney, Matilda, and Adelaide, however, wanted their father healthy and free from worry.
And so, when the land once belonging to them came up for sale, the girls resolved to raise the staggering price. They knew, of course, of their American cousins, but none of them even suggested that those strangers be applied to.
Each had a scheme. Each had a talent, or a means to make money quickly. And each was driven, as never before in her life, to attain a very specific goal. They were fighting for their birthright, but, even more, they were fighting for their father’s life.
They had two months. Sixty days to do the impossible. And if they knew it was impossible, the knowledge was unimportant to them. They were Delaneys, and it was bred into them to know that even the impossible road was traveled one step at a time.
And so they began.