When Colts Ran by Roger McDonald Page A

he’s got a chance without you.’
    â€˜He still wants to see me?’
    â€˜Of course.’
    â€˜Where is he, then?’
    â€˜On the grounds,’ said Veronica, ‘that you were stationed in the area, and one of his cricketing greats is there, Randolph Knox, he’s agreed to being sent to the Bruces’ pastoral concern, Eureka, to try his hand at jackarooing.’
    â€˜Eureka! When?’
    â€˜Left yesterday. Before I learnt you were here.’
    And just as well , was the unspoken thought to that.
    Buckler saw Colts in a jacket and tie, sweltering in that walloping great finishing school, Eureka homestead dining room, being handed a goblet of black wine by Oakeshott over a saddle of saltbush mutton, and having to choke it back.
    â€˜They’ve been advised he’s ready to run, and if he does it’s your concern. You’ll have to deal with it.’
    Buckler smiled and thanked her for the information, and they stood. Downstairs with the lawyer hovering they agreed they’d speak further. But neither honestly thought they would meet the next day or even long after.
    *
    Buckler set about getting a discharge from hospital and cadging a workable motor. A rendezvous with Jack Slim close to the Territory border was clinched by radio. Buckler went along, foot to the floor, getting away from Adelaide through the last abandoned farms, the sour washaways, the sheeted burrs and purple carpets of Salvation Jane, out past the gibbers and salt-white tracks of his home state and birthplace, sashaying north into the deserts and hotlands of sheep while he made himself right with the rocks, keeping an eye out for a boy who might just lurch from the scrub and flag him down.

FIVE
    FROM A ROCKY HILL RANDOLPH KNOX watched the road leading north and army trucks at intervals kicking up dust. The trucks floated into the sky in mirages, their dusty metalwork breaking into blobs of mercury shine. Engine sounds crossed the air from five miles away, looping and fading. Sometimes they knocked like a tooth being broken.
    Randolph waited for the noise of trucks coming closer, belting across the gypsum flats to seek him, though why they would ever do so was a question he didn’t ask.
    Mornings showed wedge-tailed eagles in thermals, the ends of their wingtips trailing. A telephone wire on leaning poles sang a lonely tune as Randolph waited for Captain Oakeshott to call through after dark – two short rings, one long. Some of the seven nights Randolph was out there per month, reporting on broken fences and dead stock, fouled waterholes and broken windmills, Oakeshott missed calling. There was always the threat he would turn up unannounced at one outstation or another and give a reprimand of the sort that broke kids’ spirits. Four years before, when Randolph had started, Oakeshott claimed he’d go loony in the boundary rider’s hut and talk to his sheep. The manager didn’t know Randolph then, whose reply was if you didn’t talk to your sheep you got nowhere. Oakeshott denied it with scorn, but Randolph had only to listen: ‘You’re for the knife,’ or ‘Into the bucket of guts with you, my friend,’ as down culls went, driven in a sad little mob into the dark hole of an old mine shaft one hundred feet deep.
    Too hard by a long chalk was Captain Oakeshott; Randolph thought the pit a foul solution, indecent, lazy. But there was knowledge the man had around sheep and their breeding, the calculation involved in keeping them in good wool in dry country on the margin of the world’s greatest deserts, and as much of that as could be imbibed Randolph Knox took in and made his own.
    In the spare time, he was allowed reading or did leatherwork, making tooled belts and wallets with ram’s horns embossed on them, the edges tightly sewn. He wasn’t lonely. He liked his own company. Just sometimes he looked at his own shadow and wished it wasn’t there.
    It