The Legend of Winstone Blackhat by Tanya Moir Page A

They rode, and the range grew wide around them, and the road ahead was empty and they were alone.
    The range grew wider yet, and the road ran on until it slipped off the edge of the world and there, small and red, at the very brink, a fire burned beside it.
    Closer, someone stirred the fire and the sparks swarmed orange and gold and the embers blushed and crumbled. Beyond the fire there was a blanket and under the blanket there was a girl with yellow hair, long yellow hair spilling into the grass, yellow hair with red in it, and it was everywhere yellow and red and thick, red and yellow, and Winstone woke up and the camera rolled back to where it belonged, tracking Cooper and the Kid as they raced the night on a white dust road.
    We’re close, the Kid said, we aint never been this close, but the palomino was walking now and his neck was low and his hooves were heavy. No one could run for three days and three nights, not even the grey, and up ahead his foot buckled over a stone and Cooper said, Whoa easy now, and reined in. I’m sorry Kid. We got to rest these horses.
    We’ll lose em, the Kid said. They’ll be through the pass.
    We got to rest.
    We’ll be too late.
    We’ll find em, Coop said. Trust me.

    Yesterday’s sausages were all gone. The vanilla rice too. Just two dark greasy stains on the rock outside the cave. Winstone hoped the kitten had got them. He imagined it tucked up in the rocks somewhere, its stripy belly stretched and fat, warm in its fur and sleeping soundly. It was cold this morning, a new kind of cold he’d felt on his cheeks, in the tip of his nose, as soon as he woke up enough to feel anything, cold enough to put his khaki fleece on and climb through the grey to the top of the gully to get warm and when he did he saw why.
    There was snow on the backs of the mountains beyond the range to the west, not the usual patches but a thick cover glowing peachy yellow and pink above the shadows of ranges and valleys soft as smoke. The backs of the mountains, because Winstone had been in front of them once and there was a lake with a steamer and a wharf and an old hotel where cowboys from Califor-ni-AY stayed in the Gold Rush. Winstone had sat on the wharf watching the steamer come in and he’d looked at the old hotel with its name carved into the stone and Todd Jackson had taught him how to say it right which wasn’t how it looked at all.
I-carts,
Todd had said,
like pie carts,
and Todd laughed and Winstone didn’t know what a pie cart was but he said it like that anyway and he laughed too and the steamer took a long time to come and he looked at all those stealthy letters that made no sound until he could see them with his eyes shut.
EICHARDT’S.
It was German.
    That had been a long time ago. He was behind the mountains now, at the back of beyond, and Todd wasn’t laughing any more. He wouldn’t show Winstone anything ever again, leastways nothing that Winstone wanted to see, and the last time he saw Todd was the kind of mean and maggoty thought that would eat you out and buzz in your bones if it got inside and he could feel it coming for him, crawling up the white dust road in the driver’s seat of Todd’s Pajero.
    Winstone turned around and went back down to the cave and found the tin of All Day Breakfast he’d been saving and heated it up and sat in the shadowed gully and ate and waited for the world to get a little lighter.

    IT’S NO GOOD, the Kid said with his ear to the ground in the grey breaking dawn. They’re too far ahead. We’ll never make it.
    You wanna give up?
    No, the Kid said, and it was a lie and Coop knew it, the whole wide waking world knew it, even the buzzards up in the sky. But what do we do Coop?
    Only thing we can do Kid.
    And so Cooper and the Kid saddled up and rode, rode the cold trail west, away from the rising sun and into their own shadow. They had their faces to the tattering dark and the country ahead was the colour of ash and the road ran through it and out of