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Fire in the Blood
The Epic Tale of Frank Gardiner and Australia's Other Bushrangers
By Robert Macklin Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2005 Robert Macklin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74115-891-5
CHAPTER 1
In for the kill
The moment he stepped off the neat little steamer Warrego and onto San Francisco's Barbary Wharf, I knew it was Harry, the son of my old comrade-at-arms, Ben Hall. And I knew he had come to kill me.
My sisters in Sydney had sent me warning, but I'd have known anyway. Once you've been hunted as I have, you never lose the instinct and Harry had all the earmarks of a young hunter after dangerous game: the set jaw, the tight carriage, the knuckles white on the hand that carried his carpetbag.
As he approached in the afternoon light, I could see he had Ben's good looks but his features were finer and softer than those of his father. Delicate almost. If he hadn't been on a mission to kill Frank Gardiner, I'd have called him handsome. Hell, he was handsome anyway.
I watched him, waiting for the moment. The usual mix was scattered across the wharf: bustling business types, sharp-eyed customs men, the occasional strumpet and pickpocket ducking among the arrivals and the welcomers. Harry stopped, pulled a folded paper out of his back pocket and studied it — a mud map apparently, directions to some venue in the big city, The Twilight Saloon perhaps. The moment was right. I bowled up.
'Howdy young fella,' I said. 'You look like a man just in from a long sea voyage in need of a drink and some directions. Welcome to America.'
He looked up, gave me a quick grin, then set that handsome jaw again. He searched my face and I saw him calculating. But he hadn't laid those blue eyes on me since he was a babe in arms, and I'd changed a lot since they'd plastered that picture of me on every public building in the country, the one where I'm sitting with Johnny Gilbert, dressed to the nines and with the full waxed moustache. A bit of a dandy.
I still look after myself, still take care of appearances, but that young dandy is long gone. 'Curtis Allenby,' I told him, introducing myself with a handle I had ready and with a Yankee accent so thick it would bog a duck.
'G'day,' he said. 'My name's Taylor.'
He looked at me for a reaction. I gave him nothing but a wide smile and a pat across the shoulders.
'And what brings you to San Francisco, Mr Taylor?' 'Cattle,' he said.
'Import? Export? Breeding stock?'
'Bit of everything ...'
'Well, it's a pleasure to have you here, all the way from Australia, I take it.'
'Just so.'
'That's a place I have always wanted to visit. Nearly made it once in the big goldrush of the fifties. But family responsibilities kept me chained to hearth and home.'
'It's a big country.'
'It is indeed,' I said. 'I have cargo aboard. It'll be a while before they unload it; how about that drink?'
He hesitated then nodded. We strolled across the rough planks to The Hornpipe, Harry picking his way like a young prancer. 'Takes a while to get your land legs,' I said.
'Yeah.'
I set him at a table before I went to the bar, as I was pretty well known in The Hornpipe. But I needn't have worried; the barman was new and he was good at his job — filled the beer mugs and my shot glass with the smooth speed of a professional.
Back at the table Harry took a draught, replaced the pot on the table and wiped away the suds with the back of his hand. 'Good drop,' he said.
'California's finest.'
I jumped in with both feet. 'No doubt you'll make the acquaintance of a famous countryman of yours — Mr Frank Gardiner, the proprietor of The Twilight Saloon.'
He looked up sharpish but gave nothing. 'You know him?'
I was tempted to spin a yarn about what a wonderful fellow he was — respected citizen, community leader, friend to the poor and homeless — but I knew it wouldn't wash. He was Ben Hall's boy, after all, and I could see that when those blue eyes started to flash he could become a handful. So I offered some vague words about Gardiner's colourful past.
'I've heard of him,' he said. 'Someone said the saloon was in Kearny Street.'
'I believe so — corner of Kearny and Broadway. Not more than a half a mile.'
He nodded. 'I probably won't have time,' he said.
'Where are you headed then? You looked like you were getting your bearings ...'
'No, I'll be fine. I'd better get going.' He smacked the glass pot down and extended a hand. 'Good to meet you, Mr Allenby.'
'Likewise,' I said, giving his paw a solid squeeze. 'You take care.'
He left without turning back. I finished my drink then ambled out to the dockside and breathed in the salt air. Fact is, I did have some cargo on the ship — letters from my sisters Archina and Charlotte, no doubt with the usual newspaper cuttings and memoirs from the men I'd dealt with and others who claimed some knowledge of me to squeeze their way into history. The girls usually sent them with the purser to be hand delivered. But the Warrego was a newcomer to the Pacific trade and I'd have to check it out below decks.
Harry Taylor. Understandable, I guess — it was James Taylor who took the place of father in the kid's life when Bridget walked out on Ben. And, after I'd been incarcerated, it was James's young brother Richard who took my lovely Kitty to the New Zealand goldfields and the tragedy that followed. So, now he's Taylor and he's come to take his revenge. Well, we'll see about that.
I collected my letters and the small, chunky volume they'd sent to me: The Life of William Westwood (Alias Jackey Jackey), The Outlaw of New South Wales. It had been published last year and I'd read of it in the Sydney Herald. The girls had had it rebound in leather, beautifully smooth to the touch.
I flicked to the first page: 'Edited by the Rev. Thomas Rogers, formerly Chaplain of Norfolk Island. Published 1879.' I knew of Rogers. He'd provided the pen and paper to young Westwood, the poor devil, in the few weeks he had left after he'd been sentenced to hang, back in 1846. He'd probably helped him with his spelling and grammar as he laboured in the shadow of the gallows. I knew Jackey Jackey's story to the last detail. He was all the talk of my childhood. As a young whelp I had been to the places where he roved. And later I had heard the chronicle of his life and death told and retold a hundred times by the lags on Cockatoo Island and in Darlinghurst. But I wanted to read it from his own hand, for at such a time a man's words are touched by grace.
I walked up Washington Street from the pier, passed Battery and over Sansome to Columbus Circle at the edge of China Town. I was well known among the Celestials and I heard my name shouted half-a-dozen times — 'Hey, Mr Flank' — on my way to The Scarlet Letter. I waved back to them — I have always found them square dealers and cheerful with it; they had a bad deal in Lambing Flat during the gold rush, a rotten deal, and I wasn't too proud to say so. Such word gets about and it did me no harm at all in the dens when I needed a little something to while away the hours when the memories got too hard. I call it the Exile's Companion. The authorities have a harsher name for it.
When I reached The Scarlet Letter in Clay Street, I sent a boy to Fanny at the Saloon with a message. She knew I was meeting the ship and she wouldn't rest easy until she heard from me. I had decided to give the Saloon a wide berth for a couple of days; let Harry stew for a while. When he turned up — as he surely would — she should tell him I was away on business but expected back soon. And she should be generous with the measures. He'd never been in a place as big and bold as 'Frisco. By the time I turned up, I wanted him wondering just what the devil he'd got himself into.
Big Tess at the Letter had a warm welcome for me and not without reason; I had spent more than my share on the pleasures of the flesh over the years and I tipped the girls well. And there were other avenues of understanding between us. From time to time we'd been in a position to help each other out on matters that might otherwise have involved the unnecessary intervention of the law. We both knew that in our line of business it pays to have friends. So, after a cup of coffee from her best chinaware in the fancy parlour, I betook myself to an upper room, intending to read my mail and flick through the fearful yarn of young Westwood before whiling away the hours with one of the young beauties from Tess's stable.
But, when I opened the envelopes of Archina and Charlotte, I barely got past the salutations before the script blurred with my own damned tears. Doesn't happen every time. I used to be able to take their news from home in my stride, file it away in that part of the mind where lives the past in all its joys and regrets, and get on with the business of the day. But whether it's the advancing years or, more likely, the arrival of young Harry Hall, I just couldn't peg it. A great Pacific roller seemed to sweep over me and send me tumbling. Felt as though I was drowning in my own foolish emotions. Nothing for it but to make the call for a buxom young filly to distract me.
Tess had one of Bell's electrical speech machines in the room connected to her parlour. I spoke into it. 'I'll send Josie up right away,' she shouted through the thing.
'And a bottle of Bushmills,' I shouted back.
I would like to say that Josie's munificent charms worked their magic and cast out the demons, but it would be stretching the truth. Fact is, I performed badly and, though she tried all the tricks of her roguish trade, I was not able to join in with my usual enthusiasm. I remained distracted. I never thought I'd say these words but I was glad to see the back of her.
I poured myself a whiskey and took out the book. I opened it and read the first lines. 'I was bred and born in the village of Manuden in the County of Essex, 'Westwood had written. 'My parents were poor but honest. But I thought more of spending my time in rambling with those who like myself were fond of danger and enterprise. Often my mother's advice was slighted and many a pang has my conduct caused her.'
That struck close to home. A picture of my own mother formed itself on the inner eye as she bustled around the kitchen of the homestead on Spring Plains Station. She was making pancakes on the griddle and she rolled a special one for me and filled it with plum jam. I could taste it again, the sugary jam and the melted butter running down my chin. Such memories came unbidden these days, a sign of age, perhaps. Ah well, at least I've survived long enough to be plagued by them, not like Jackey Jackey, the poor bastard. He was not even sixteen when, as he wrote, 'I was taken for robbery with my companion and on the 3rd of January 1837 was transported for fourteen years.'
They gave him a final meeting with his parents and sent him off with 200 others on the Mangles bound for Sydney, New South Wales. On arrival, he was assigned to Captain King who sent him to his farm in the Goulburn district. 'The treatment I received there was such that I would rather have met death in any shape,' he wrote.
That was an old story. That went right back to the earliest days when the bolters would break out from the hell they lived in and try to find some sanctuary in the bush — characters like Black Caesar, a negro from the Indies, and many others who either perished or were killed by the Blacks. Of course, most of them gave up and copped their 25 lashes — laid on hard — and returned to the iron gangs where the beasts of burden were treated a hundred times better by the scum who oversaw them. There, at least, they'd get a feed and they'd live on hope that some day the heavens might open and the fist of some errant fate descend on their tormentors and crush the very life out of them.
I put the book aside. I knew the Goulburn that Jackey Jackey knew. I was there, almost within reach of him, but I saw it with the eyes of a small child. I can remember the triangle the troopers had set up by the stockade and the men who were flogged there till the flesh and blood flew from their backs and their cries rent the morning air.
It was no place for a sixteen-year-old boy like Jackey Jackey with his fair features —'small white teeth, so small and so white as to give a somewhat feminine appearance, made more feminine by thin red lips, small mouth and well-shaped chin' — and gentle nature. His words penetrated my bones and not just with the sharp sadness for a young man so ill-used, but the kind of rage that simmers deep inside when life provides no court of appeal to natural justice, when the oppressors make the law and their lackeys take pleasure in its cruelties.
I took a long pull at my glass. In the dusky afternoon it seemed as though I was suddenly in their presence. They were my mates, all of them, all the men of the road they lumped together as bush-rangers, whether I knew them face to face or whether I'd made it my business to learn their stories. From young Westwood hanged on Norfolk Island to John and Tommy Clarke, hanged in Darlinghurst Gaol; Johnny Gilbert, my best mate, shot down at Binalong when that old bastard Kelly betrayed him; Henry Manns who had his face ripped off when the hangman's rope slipped; Mickey Burke and John O'Meally, shot to death; Dan Morgan, the traveller's friend, cut down and dismembered; Thunderbolt, John Dunn and, of course, Ben Hall himself, all of them shot to pieces or departed this place dancing the hangman's two-step. They all passed before me in single file. I filled my glass to the brim ...
The rest of the evening and, indeed, the next day was lost to me. From time to time, no doubt, I called for a return match with Josie or another of Tess's young ladies and no doubt I acquitted myself better than in my first bout for I have never found alcohol the impediment to performance that others do. However, the liquor drew a veil across the memory until the morning when I settled my account and made my way to Di Angelo's for a shave and a hot towel, and thence to Granny O'Leary's for breakfast.
I left her table well fortified for the task ahead. When I entered The Twilight Saloon by the Broadway alley, Fanny was all business.
'He's been haunting the place,' she said in her husky French-Canadian. Honting zee plaize.
'Is he out there now?'
'Naw — ee stayed until three ... but ee'll be back. Ee is very ... one-minding.'
I headed for my office. 'Let me know.'
'Frank,' she said, 'Fr-o-n-g-k, what will you do?'
'Guess I'll have to kill him first,' I said and quietly closed the door.
The office had become more like a library than a place of business, and when the curious arrived from home to see the famous desperado I took my pleasure when they gawked at it. They expected some snivelling, broken wretch. But I never gave them the satisfaction. Instead they got the bound newspapers, the books of history and memory, and the photographs in the polished mahogany shelves. They got the grey-green carpet the colour of gum trees and, above it, the tinkling chandelier that cast its soft gaslight across the leather chairs and the rosewood desk. It was my place. My final cave. And now this young buck wanted to invade it and finish me, Frank Gardiner, Prince of Tobymen, the great survivor. I don't think so.
The .32 Colt revolver was in the top drawer of the desk, newly cleaned and loaded. It was a beautiful piece of armoury, far superior to the weapons Ben and Johnny and I had carried in those wild days on the Lachlan. I took it from its holster and felt the deadly weight of it. Power. Just the feel of it in the hand and the power of the firearm returns — the power to put fear in the eyes of a stranger, to bend him to your will and, yes, the power to take a life.
I ran a silk handkerchief over it and, with barely a backward glance, returned it to the drawer. I had never yet killed a man and I wasn't about to start now. And certainly not with the son of my old mate.
There were other ways of skinning that young possum. I could have Chicago Dan beat the bejesus out of him and run him back on to the Warrego before she sailed. I could call in some markers from my friends in the constabulary and get him bundled into the pokey for a week or two till he came to his senses. In fact, I'd been bouncing between those two ever since I left him at The Hornpipe. But there was something about the kid that niggled me — those flashing blue eyes, that slim figure, that fire in the belly. It triggered a sense of fellow feeling I couldn't toss.
I knew what he'd been through. I'd witnessed the death of my own father and I'd felt the lash of a stepfather's hatred. I, too, had been ready with my blame and quick to hit back at any handy target. I had my sisters to give me comfort whereas all Harry had was Bridget's rage for companion all the months and years of his young life.
She didn't blame Ben, not the great Ben Hall, who'd become a bigger hero to the people with every passing year since the troopers shot him down. Ah no, not Ben. And she didn't blame herself for walking out on him. She didn't blame the slab-handed Taylor who slapped her down every time he took one over the eight and who flogged the boy till he couldn't stand. She didn't blame the coppers who never let up on anyone with the name of Hall. She didn't even blame that bastard who'd taken her sister, my lovely Kitty ... No, every slight and every blow turned her back to the figure of Gardiner, the Darkie, the evil spirit of the bush who began all their troubles with his siren call to a life on the road. According to my sisters, she even blamed me for Ben's shocking end as the troopers emptied their guns into his lifeless body — bullet after bullet, 27 in all. From that moment, it seemed, from that very day when little Harry was no more than eight years old, Bridget decided I must pay. And, the worse her circumstances became, the more fiercely she pursued me.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fire in the Blood by Robert Macklin. Copyright © 2005 Robert Macklin. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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