He rode into spits of icy rain through the cold country scarred by fire. He came to a hut. In the hut was a black woman wrapped in a dingo skin with two small and naked half-caste children. She had no food to give him, but gave him water from a pouch. He drank. The woman watched him with frightened eyes.

He slept on the dirt floor. He woke in the night and whispered aloud from his dream, ‘I would never ever have left you.’ And he did not know from what dream the words came.

The woman sat with one eye open. Half-sleeping against the wall with her arm around her children and a knife in her hand.

The next green evening he came upon an empty scalper’s hut. Goat skulls and carbine shells lay in rows on the floor.

He lay back against the wall. The Winchester lay across his lap. He had no fire. Dead stillness, then the occasional night sound. He might be the only man in the world. He thought that. He smiled. Then he cried.

The night was bright and clear. He rode down onto blowing grass. The wind came from the south and was cold. A train cut the dark on the eastern horizon. Stars bit the edge of the plain.

He unsheathed his knife and wiped the blade clean on his trousers. He looked at the reflection of his face in the blade in the shallow light. Jim Kenniff the outlaw. He laughed. And he thought of the touch of a woman’s hand.

He ground-tied his horse and lay down beside it and looked up at the silent roaring stars. Then he could see her standing in front of him. Watching him sleep. She was close enough to touch and further away than the stars.

‘I would never have left you.’

She was standing in front of him. The wind blew her dark hair across her face. The wind was biting cold now.

‘Why can’t I keep you?’

Now the wind brought sleet.

He was parted now from all his brothers. From his men. And from her.

And onward I go. But I go to God condemned. My eyes to the ground. How can a man live, when he has done so much wrong, caused so much pain? I would suffer anything to be with you now. With all of you. Anything.

He saw a horse and rider in the distance. He was not afraid. Then the rider was gone and he was alone again in the dark under cold roaring stars. Ahead of him was the long night. Curled in the dark, again, he lit no fire. What beauty is mine? What glory have I attained? What wealth? Now I am to be destroyed in flames. Alleluia!

Ice rain came. In rain like this you could get lost ten feet from your horse. But the girl was still there standing in the rain and now she was smiling. He smiled back.

‘Why were you fighting?’

‘I was at a variance.’

She knelt beside him. Though it was she who was leaving him.

‘God calls me, brother.’

‘To where?’

‘Only He knows.’

Tears ran down his cheeks.

‘Don’t leave me here alone.’

‘Follow me, Jim. I know the way home.’

He woke and pale light was on the horizon. He sat up. He turned around to face the high scarps in the northeast. I will burn the world.