The Ballad of Desmond Kale Read Free

with a shirtsleeve.
    Kale turned, caught Rankine’s glance, and the officer’s mouth resumed its usual lopsided insouciant look. Tom Rankine was reliable mostly where there was provocation and dare, which was, here to say, a compound of love and mercy. Kale was Rankine’s wish that what was done irreparably wrong in another part of lifewould be bettered by hopefulness in this one; that what was won in Spain by treachery would be improved in New South Wales. But no time for wishing — they’d better get on. It took another few minutes for the sheep to be bunched ready. Even then, Rankine was unfinished with feeling. For more than just sheep and repentance folded around Kale in the perilous matter they risked. No telling this to the convict — Rankine loved Kale’s daughter, Meg Inchcape, whatever the threat to his skin and, what he cared for as much, his pride. But Rankine had only just begun a campaign of having her, of making his first moves upon the daughter in time with consorting with the father. He was further advanced with Kale than he was with her. With Meg Inchcape he was not even yet in danger. He was in love at first sight — and with Meg as a prophecy, you could almost say, to which he bent, idealising his life, though they had never spoken more than two brisk words to each other.
    Kale did not know of any sort of connection. He’d fumed that Meg was ruined by an officer once, a matter he made difficulties about, without satisfaction. A regiment had no strategy on love, only its officers had tactics. Now by their look at each other you would think Kale and Rankine were merely stock dealing in this dangerous paradise past Toongabbie, where men worked in irons until they died foul deaths, or made escapes from the stone quarries of which this one was more finely calculated than most.
    Kale got up on the horse behind Rankine and clasped him around the waist. Now he almost fainted. The dog working the sheep came into sight and brought the sheep around behind them, its tongue lolling conspicuously wet. Moreno tripped along on his small foreign feet. They moved off — the three men, the sheep and the dog through the white-trunked gum trees closing behind them.
    A half hour later when the bullock waggon came through headed by the shuffling Irish, Desmond Kale was gone from the world of punishment, gone as if he had never suffered in it.

A WEEK AFTER KALE’S ESCAPE Parson Magistrate Stanton said to his wife, Dolly, of whom he pretended to be more afraid than he was of Irish convicts herding sheep in the bush and shaping daggers out of farming tools:
    â€˜Say, my precious darling, if you were in the way of spreading yourself as I am, with plenty of livestock and no sons, might it not benefit a boy, a prince of the breed, to be taken on and encouraged?’
    In serving his own interests the parson magistrate was able to speak to a moral purpose — ‘Whether it should benefit a boy’ — and his wife had something the same way of thinking, but objected:
    â€˜You forget we already have Titus.’
    â€˜No, I am always thinking about Titus,’ said Stanton, passing a hand across his face to brush away flies and express frustration, making a wish for new beginnings.
    Titus was a boy they had rescued from a native camp when he was estimated eight years old, and sworn to raise in a civilised fashion as their own. The first of them to run sheep out their way, Aaron Tait, had worked Titus’s parents as shepherds, and said they were king and queen of their tribe. Whether it was believably true,Titus was allowed the distinction when spoken about. His parents were no longer living to testify what they were, except pitch black and scurrilous. Titus proved less a son, more a serving boy as he waited at table and otherwise amused guests, living in a hut at the back of the house while the rest of New South Wales looked on, Titus taming lizards, Titus spinning