He woke at dusk in a hotel in a town whose name he did not know. A train cut the twilight plain. The line went northwest through cattle country to Jericho on the Jordan all the way to Isa. He looked out the window. He watched the train fire along that line. Then all was dark. He wondered what fool had put holy names upon this bitter wilderness. But the Holy Land was bitter wilderness too. It only seemed otherwise when ladies painted pictures of it for church halls. Still, there were true oases in that country. And cities. But there was nothing out there. He stared out the window at that nothing until sleep came again. He wondered that it didn’t trouble him more. That dark waste. Why he would as well be here as anywhere.

He woke and washed his face and went down the stairs.

He sat down at the bar and took whisky. He drank one glass, then a second. Then he asked for the bottle. He stared out the far window of the saloon that looked onto the empty rail depot. At the depot three Aborigines with possum skins around their loins and one with a top hat were pestering a swagman for tobacco. The swagman said he had none. The Aborigine with the top hat said he had seen it. The swagman backhanded the black man who fell to the ground sobbing while the others took him by the arms and fell back into the shadows. Nixon turned to a perfumed English army officer who had come to the bar and viewed the scene out the window.

‘They say civilisation follows the rail. But that doesn’t seem to hold out here.’

The officer nodded and smiled and went back to his table without a word.

Nixon laughed. Polite society thought he was one of them: troopers and scalpers and highwaymen. They viewed them all the same.

He thought, But there are we keepers of Law, and outside us a great kingdom of nothingness. The same kingdom he had glimpsed from the room upstairs before he slept. But to set the Law so far from everything, so far beyond the frontier, on these plains of desolation … That was a task! That was a sweet phrase, too – plains of desolation. He had read it somewhere, in a poem. No, it was in a letter by a Brisbane businessman complaining about the retardation of the north and west. Nixon stared out the near window onto the shallow-lit veranda of the hotel. Across the empty street. Between the gaps in the buildings. Plains of desolation.

He thought of his trips to Moreton Bay to visit his aunt – before she left for San Francisco. He called her his aunt. She was a relation of some kind. Though not near enough to want him around for any more than a few weeks, which charity she congratulated herself for. He remembered standing by a window in her house by a piano and everyone singing by the sea. And there were electric lights along the esplanade. Everyone clapped at night when the electric lights were lit. Some nights by those electric lights you could see into the gardens of the wealthy. Women fanning themselves before brass bands at private banquets and fetes. Garden parties, where the dresses of the ladies were low at the throat. It seemed impossible that such scenes should be going on right now – though surely they were – and yet here was he on the plains of desolation.

The drink had caught him. He stared at his glass and then at the bottle. He did not remember how many he had poured.

Perhaps the Kenniffs were out here somewhere, but disbanded. Impossible to track. And in time they would trickle back into the ranges, along which route their sympathisers would hide them even if a patrol did catch them up.

Those who did not sympathise were afraid. And those who were neither fearful nor sympathetic would prefer to handle Irish outlaws and militant blacks on their own, with shotguns and stirrup irons, than have anything to do with police. What use trying to bring law to these plains of desolation?

There was another officer next to him now. This one sat with a red-headed Irish harlot on his knee. He was not so perfumed as the last officer. He wore a three-day beard and rough moustaches.

‘What use is it, son? What use to try to bring law to bear here?’

‘At least we draw a pay cheque, Inspector.’

‘Inspector?’

Nixon looked and saw the ensign on his shirt’s torn shoulder. His civilian shirt was at the hotel’s laundry. The ensign meant sergeant. But no matter.

He motioned to the barman. Tapped the rim of his glass.

‘Pour for my friend and his lady too, sir.’

‘Thank you, Inspector.’

‘To your health.’

He took a swig and called for another drink.

Said the officer, ‘True, you’ll never rid this backcountry of cockfightin and bull-baitin and bare-knuckle brawlin.’

‘Cockfighting? Prize fightin? Healthy pastimes in my book. Necessary opiates. No, I remember back in … where was it? … Charters Towers. On the outskirts of the town eleven men outraged a Serbian girl till she lay dead. She’d been defenceless. Friendless and alone. Now what do you do about that? What did they do? I’ll tell you. The man who led the pack was flogged twenty-five strokes. Twice in two days. Thereafter he walked with a stoop. The girl stayed raped and dead. The man stayed an evildoer in his heart. I know it by what I was told thereafter. If he’d been black or a Chinaman he’d have been shot without a trial. But you’d see him goin along the road, hear the drums and tambourines of the churches sound – they made him attend the church – while he watched the schoolyard out the window and watched the girls walking home. They say there’s only peace through flogging. Aye, and perhaps they’re right. After the flogging that son of a bitch was peaceful. But it was not the peace of the good. Is that a peace we should desire? The peace of fear? Is that why you and I are here?’

He filled his hip flask from the whisky bottle and poured another shot into his glass. The gas lamps were going off now along the street. He thought again of Shorncliffe at Moreton Bay, the people cheering at the lights flashing on the pier. He was there the first time they lit them. The mayor had made a speech that sounded strange even to a boy. About the lights preventing crime. They were pretty those lights. But there was no crime in that coastal town. Which nonentity neither increased nor decreased due to the firing of a row of lights against the ocean.

He turned to tell the officer about the years he had spent up north, but the officer and the Irish prostitute had gone to one of the upstairs rooms. So he recalled it to himself.

He had worked around Maytown on the Palmer River goldfields. Brothels outnumbered the public houses. The commissioner had said he was to join the ‘lions of justice’. Nixon laughed, he still had the letter somewhere. He was a lieutenant in charge of a district the size of a small European country and the population, not counting slaves, of an Arctic wilderness. But you had to count slaves, as they were always involved somehow in the daily business of rape and murder. He remembered the Chinese coming down dirt roads from the Cape with poles across their shoulders, carrying their tea and flour and mining tools on those poles and in the chests they dragged behind them. One day a tribe of Aborigines lay in ambush. They attacked the Chinese at dawn – those who could not run – the infirm and the women and children – and these were burnt. Right after that you never saw the British and the Chinese get on so well. But the goodwill lasted months only, and he remembered riding north out of Calcifer and seeing Chinese dying of dysentery from heat and exhaustion and tropical fever – dying on the sides of the road like dogs – and white men riding past them without stopping their horses. He remembered the inspector out there having tea and scones with a hired killer called Bill Rhode who boasted of having spent his life shooting ‘niggers’ and that he would be happy to turn his sights on the Chinks if the government ever called for it. There were fights in the field, too. Between settlers and itinerant Chinese and lawmen and just about everybody else but Quakers. Muzzle-loading guns and Snider rifles were traded and they made disputes short, though plenty difficult to bring any justice to bear on afterwards, as typically the best part of every party was dead by the time he arrived, and it didn’t seem to make much sense to make arrests out of the cowering few who remained, or to chase a guilty cane slasher into the scrub where he would likely die of malaria or thirst in a week. In flood season all the water was bad and a man could die of thirst standing in water up to his belt, else drink it and die of dysentery a few days later. The Chinese fought among themselves with knives and cleavers. The Pekinese and Cantonese were always at odds. Those fights were terrible to have to clean up after. He remembered a man with a cleaver gone straight through his jaw, and he thought afterwards that if he could have, he would happily have given those two men revolvers to settle whatever matter of gold or women or opium it was that they had fought over.

Some officers said there was a band of excommunicated myalls up there who were in the habit of picking off the small and fat Chinese for roasting. They reckoned you could tell by the cuts in the bones of the dead that they’d been eaten. He had never seen that or seen any other evidence of black cannibals, though everyone up there believed in them. Who knows, perhaps there were some. Why not? There were Irish cannibals. So he had heard. Rumour said the Aborigines had converted a cave just off the track to the Palmer into a devil’s kitchen where they hung the bodies of the Chinese by their pigtails until they were roasted on the coals. That could not be true. He knew the caves there. But surely there were New Guinean cannibals. A New Guinean warrior brought on slave wages to slash cane, who ended up serving at an officer’s table, had admitted it to him. And the cane farmers kept young children from the fields at dusk.

He looked out the window into the dark again. Plains of desolation …

He thought of the last time he had gone after Jim Kenniff. Staring at the walls of the gorge where the man had disappeared like a phantom. Then glimpsing him out of rifle range at the top of the escarpment. Standing his horse as though he wanted to be seen. Then he vanished for good. Those walls were unclimbable. And to go back the way he had come and circle the gorge would take days. So he and Doyle had gone back to the station to cigarettes and whisky while Jim Kenniff took paths only he knew through the ranges and into the west, or perhaps down to the border. It seemed not to matter. If they didn’t get the gang this season, they would get them the next … but that chance never came. Not until now. And once more he had lost it.

He did not remember leaving the bar and going up the stairs to his room. But he woke in the room the next morning. He washed and dressed and had black tea with fried bread and eggs at an eatery across the road. He rode west through towns and over plainland until he no longer knew where he was nor where he meant to go.

He was drinking whisky in yet another saloon when he heard a thud and a woman screaming on the street. He looked out the window. The street was dark and he could make out nothing. He got up and went onto the veranda. A man was dashing a girl’s head against the hitching rail of the hotel. The girl’s calico dress was bloody. A small crowd of white prostitutes and patrons had gathered. All quiet. The man swore and took the girl’s hair and brought her face into the gaslight.

Nixon drew his revolver and pulled back the hammer.

‘Once more and I’ll shoot you dead.’

‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘Police.’

‘This fuckin bitch told lies to my wife. My wife left me cause of this fuckin darkie harlot.’

The girl said nothing. The man held her up off the dirt road by the collar of her dress. She was only half-conscious.

Nixon kept his revolver trained between the man’s eyes.

The man cried out again.

‘What would you do if it were you?’

‘Not what you’re doing.’

‘This little bitch has lost me everything! I ask you, as one white man to another, what would you do?’

‘Not lie with a harlot if I was married. And not marry if I was wont to lie with harlots. Go home.’

‘I don’t have a home to go to.’

He wrapped the girl’s hair round his wrist and made to dash her head against the hitching rail and Nixon pulled the trigger and shot him dead.

The crowd of prostitutes gasped. Now all the patrons of the hotel were on the veranda or at the windows. The girl lay face down in a trough. Nixon pulled her out. She was still breathing. The publican came onto the veranda.

‘What the hell have you done, man?’

‘I was compelled. I’m an officer.’

One of the prostitutes spoke up.

‘It’s true, Bill. Frank McDonald was going to kill that kid.’

The publican glared at Nixon.

‘You bloody fool. I don’t know who you are or what your jurisdiction is. But it isn’t here. And the man you just shot has standing. Get the hell away from my hotel.’

Nixon scanned the faces on the veranda. There was no sympathy. The publican grabbed his collar and shook him.

‘Get on your horse and run.’

An ageing prostitute broke from the others on the veranda and took his arm and shook him out of his daze. She walked him towards his horse but he shook her off and went back for the girl.

He carried her to the horse. He took his horse by the bridle and lifted the girl onto the saddle. She fit between him and the pommel.

‘Which way?’

The prostitute pointed.