A Kindness Cup by Thea Astley

forward and in, shooting steadily and reloading and shooting until the ground was littered with grunting men and there was blood-splash bright upon the rocks. Only five men confronted them now.The four or five women crouched wailing against the far barricade.
    â€˜Leave the gins!’ Sweetman roared in a moment of sanity. ‘Leave them!’
    There was a sudden silence and the five blacks still standing turned slow circles as they inspected the line of whites girdling the rocks. Words, at this point, failed. Freddie Buckmaster kept thinking, ‘Oh, my God! What now, what do I do now?’ He really didn’t know, having discovered blood and death. There was one gin he noticed, knew well by sight, having seen her on the outskirts of his town. She was holding a baby closely against her breast and now and again it wailed.
    â€˜Make an arrest,’ Barney Sweetman advised urgently. ‘For God’s sake make an arrest!’ He wanted things formalised. Already he interpreted the scene in terms of motions to be discussed and put, perhaps even as agenda.
    Fred Buckmaster took a step forward. It was prizegiving day and the gauche fellow had never achieved such distinction before. His rifle was as limp as he. Some formal words seemed to be dripping from his mouth. The blacks moved back before him till they made a pitiful knot against his advance. He could see this pitifulness and the wretchedness of their defence so that some gland in him was disturbed to the point of his wanting to cry with shame.
    And at that moment the gin whose face so moved him sprang with a tiny cry upon one of the rocks. Balanced there she looked in quick terror all about her and then, with no sound at all, hurled herself, still clutching the child, straight over the western scarp.
    It was such a final gesture no one moved for a few seconds, numbed by the force of it. And then the white men rushed forward to peer down two hundred feet where they could see some shapeless lump lying still on the lower slope.
    Onlythe crows kept going over with their lost cries. And the men, purged now and gazing emptily at the boulders and the dead, knew that no arrests would be made as the blacks, their faces drilled into nothing, stood motionless in this shock of tragedy.
    Mr Boyd, rounding the base from the north and fighting clear of the straggly trees, saw a body hurtle from the cliff-top to the lower slope before the scarp. At first he thought it was some strange bird diving on prey, and he cantered his horse along easily to the spot where he discovered it was the prey itself he was looking at.
    â€˜My God,’ he breathed.
    He dismounted and walked closer to bend over the crushed figure with its limbs stuck out at four grotesque angles. The skull had burst open and the rocks about were spattered with blood-flecked grey. And then, heaving at this, he saw the small body rolled to one side, howling at the end of a lifeless hand. His mind informed him it couldn’t be as he bent over the unharmed child. Yet it was so. A miracle of salvation.
    He picked it up and cradled it while it wailed thinly. It was naked save for a silver piece strung round its neck. The noon sun struck off the metal in small brilliant flashes and Boyd read Dorahy’s name and puzzled. Puzzled for minutes, it seemed, when he became aware of figures at the top of the cliff looking down also and heard the rattle of hooves coming up behind him.
    The three horsemen reined in. Dorahy’s face was set in its usual sour and gentle lines, but there was an underlying tension of excitement. Jenner and his boy had an angry kind of bafflement about them.
    They dismounted and joined him. Without words. The heat of the sun was full of speech. The baby wailed again as Dorahy came closer to examine the dead woman, thesadness of it, and then to look upwards where the posse was outlined against searing cobalt.
    Young Jenner, whose voice was choking, said something the others could not