Wanted Dead Read Free Page B

you?” he muttered.
    â€œYou just keep quiet my boy,” said Riley. “You’ve done quite enough talking for today.”
    In fact Riley felt a certain affection for the unprepossessing youth, partly because he hadn’t shot Riley and partly because, after all, this was Riley’s first bushranger. A small one, no doubt, but a bushranger nonetheless.
    I never thought you’d get this far in your profession, Dermot, my boy, he told himself.
    He kept the pistol pointed at the youth’s stomach and wondered what on earth he was going to do with him. He could take him back to Goulburn, but that would mean coming into contact again with the sub-inspector well before it was absolutely necessary. He could shoot him on the spot, but that seemed unduly harsh and in any case it was unlikely that he could hit him even at that range.
    But then it would be an absolute anti-climax, after this singular victory, just to let him go.
    A kookaburra landed on the branch of a tree some twenty feet away and began its insane cackle, audible even above the blare of the cicadas.
    Riley raised the pistol and aimed at it. He didn’t particularly want to kill the kookaburra, but then he didn’t think it likely he would. He was mainly curious to see whether or not the pistol would have fired if the youth had pulled the trigger.
    Â 
    It went off with an immense explosion and the youth’s horse went galloping wildly down the road, its reins flying. Riley’s own horse went on unperturbedlycropping the grass. The kookaburra didn’t stir or falter in its song.
    Riley took out his own pistol. He’d forgotten to load it that morning, but the youth didn’t know that.
    â€œWell now,” said Riley to the youth who was staring up at him in that diffident and ingratiating manner in which one looks at a lunatic. “Well now, it was just as well you didn’t pull that trigger, wasn’t it?”
    That was a fool of a thing to do, thought Riley. He could reasonably have taken the youth’s horse as spoils of war if he hadn’t scared it away. There was no hope of ever catching up with it on his own mount.
    An empty pistol in either hand, Riley stood considering the youth, aware that he would soon have to make up his mind what to do with him. He couldn’t stand there posturing all day.
    Uneasily a thought began to stir in the recesses of his mind. He caught a glimpse of it and suppressed it hurriedly. But it came back, niggling away at him, tempting him, refusing not to be recognised. Riley had heard about the bushrangers’
telegraph
system whereby they paid, or frightened, a number of people in a district to relay messages of the movements of the police, or of gold shipments or other booty.
    One of the methods in which this information was relayed was to leave messages at the bushrangers
plants
. These were caches of food, guns, ammunition, and sometimes even horses, which the bushrangers placed strategically over the countryside along their escape routes. The main hope of any ambitious trooper was to locate one of these escape routes, or even one of the
plants
and wait there until the bushranger eventually turned up. Of necessity quite a few of the bushrangers’
plants
were known, but only to the peoplethey used as
telegrams
, and these were notoriously reluctant to talk to the police.
    But this abject youth now sitting on the grass before him, thought Riley, might well be such a
telegram
. He might even be a minor member of one of the gangs.
    And what is that to you, Dermot Riley? Give him a kick in the backside and ride away out of here; you don’t want to know where any bushrangers are. But then it
would
be rather stimulating to report back to the sub-inspector that he had found a bushrangers’
plant
and that a force of well trained troopers might well make a capture, if they were patient.
    But who the hell wanted to be stimulated by the sub-inspector?
    Riley scratched