Tom Lawton rode back towards the lights they had passed earlier in the night. He rode into the town and went to the hotel. Two white-haired drunks with whisky-stained moustaches were still at the bar. One turned in his chair to look at the stranger.

‘Not another policeman?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll say not,’ said his companion. ‘This one looks like he’s just ridden out of hell.’

Two other men who had been sitting at a table in a dark corner of the saloon came to the bar. A tall bushman and a short and red-faced Scotsman with a bowler hat.

‘So what matter of man are ye?’

Tom Lawton did not answer. He stared at the men and laughed. He turned back to the bar and put down money for a bottle of whisky and filled the two old timers’ glasses.

‘And you two can fuck off.’

‘You look like a man I know,’ said the short man. ‘A man I am lookin for.’

Tom took a shot of whisky and turned on his seat.

‘Is that a fact?’

‘I say you’re Thomas Fiacre Lawton.’

‘Well done.’

‘Do you know where Jim Kenniff and Paddy Kenniff are?’

Tom laughed and poured another shot of whisky.

‘Yes.’

The red-faced Scotsman nodded. He took off his bowler hat and squinted at Tom and spoke with great solemnity.

‘It is given to me to kill those men. And Jim Kenniff especially.’

Tom drank again. He smiled.

‘Well, well. That’s a hell of a thing to be given to. I’d hate to be given to it.’

‘You will tell me where they are.’

‘Will I?’

‘Yes. Or my friend here will drag you off that chair and shoot you in the street.’

Tom looked at the dull-eyed low-browed rake of a man who stared at him with stupid menace writ on his face.

Tom smiled.

‘If he tried, I’d kill him dead.’ The tall man stepped closer. Tom eyed him. Then looked at the red-faced Scotsman. ‘Then you wouldn’t be much good, would you? Then I’d shove a crowbar up his arse and impale you along with him and stand you both in that same street for the lizards to pick at as they pleased.’ He shook his head. ‘Fuck me, I could do that, too. Once I was a man. I hope to be a man again. But God help you if you run into Jim Kenniff.’

‘Laddy, we two have killed black chiefs and ringleaders of miners and Irish down south.’

‘Well, you’ll be done your killin if I tell you where Jim Kenniff is.’

The Scotsman stood silent. Waiting. Tom shook his head and laughed.

The Scotsman drew a revolver and pointed it between Tom’s eyes.

‘Talk.’

Tom smiled. He said nothing.

The Scotsman spat and sneered and put the gun in his belt.

‘No matter. We can follow your tracks.’

‘I hope those tracks lead you to him.’

He took half a bottle up to a room above the bar and drank and watched the night. The town’s two gaslights were out. There was only the shallow moonlit street. The wind. A stray dog chasing rubbish.

He thought on he and Jim and James Homer and all those boys … when they were boys … And he thought on how Jim had loved his sister. Fought for her. That day he throttled a boy for dishonouring her, when every other man and boy of them had been frightened to touch the bastard, for he was well-born and she was without family. He had gone to the lockup for her, and in his mind Tom saw Jim’s face. Bloodied and broken with the same marks across his cheek that he bore now, from where that boy’s father had pistol whipped him before dragging him by a rope to the lockup. Tom spoke to his sister now as though in prayer, as though she were standing beside him. Standing beside him or somewhere in that infinite dark without.

‘Forgive me, little girl.’ Tom cried. He leant his face on the windowpane. ‘But he’s beyond everything now. Forgive me sweet girl.’ But when he pictured his sister’s face he could not make the face smile at him.

He cried.

‘So you tell me what to do!’