Shadow of the Osprey by Peter Watt Read Free Book Online

over one hundred and sixty miles of ground left by God for the Devil to create.
    By night they had taken turns standing guard against the possibility of an attack from prowling tribesmen. Kate would stand armed with a hardhitting Martini Henry rifle and her little pepper box pistol, while Ben always carried the big Colt revolver in a holster strapped at his hip. It was the same pistol Kate had presented him with years earlier on his first trip west with the taciturn and burly Irish teamster Joe Hanrahan.
    The long haul from Cooktown to the Palmer River goldfields had taken its toll on both Kate and Ben. Fording rivers still swollen by the monsoonal rains by day, and double-banking the wagons on the steep sections of the track, with the never-ending work of off-loading, then reloading stores, had sapped their reserves of strength. Often they would stumble beside the wagons like sleepwalkers while the big, stolid bullocks strained at the yokes hauling the wagons just that one mile more and then, just one more mile after that.
    When those times came, and Kate’s body screamed out for rest, she had talked to the big Irishman who walked beside her. He told her of other tracks in other places, of the devils that tempted with the promise of despair. He would urge her to keep going despite her despair.
    Ben would see Kate talking to herself as she stumbled along. At first he thought she had been driven mad by the rigours of the trek, but he soon came to learn that she was talking to her long dead father who, sometimes gently and at other times harshly, encouraged his daughter not to give in.
    Sometimes Ben suspected that the spirit of Patrick Duffy was speaking through his daughter when Kate refused to allow them to rest for even one day on the tortuous trail down to the goldfields. Day in and gruelling day out, they pushed forward with only the sounds of the wagons and the lonely bush as their companions.
    ‘You hear that?’ Ben cried as he stumbled forward. ‘That sound coming from the south?’
    Kate could hear the sound. It was a distant murmur of massed voices and clinking of metal against rock as picks chipped at stone. It was the welcome sound that told them they had finally reached the Palmer.
    ~
    The bedraggled teamsters struggled into the town of white canvas tents and bark shanties. They hugged and Ben danced a little jig. They had brought with them supplies worth literally their weight in gold while stranded behind them were the supply wagons of their competitors, pulled by the big cart horses. Unlike the stalwart bullocks, the horses were unable to cross the flooded creeks. The bullocks had again proven their versatility.
    Being first to arrive on the fields meant asking your own price. The two wagons were rushed as the word spread up and down the banks of the Palmer and its eroded gullies that the precious goods had arrived.
    The miners came, gaunt and hollow-eyed, to jostle for flour, sugar, tea, tinned fish and meat. But mostly the miners came to purchase the most precious of all goods – tobacco. And when they came to the wagons they brought their gold with them.
    Within a few hours sixteen tons of goods had been sold to eager customers prepared to pay the inflated prices Kate demanded.
    Had Patrick Duffy lived to see his daughter trading with the miners, he would have smiled. His daughter handled the impatient, enthusiastic miners with firmness and fairness.
    This was not the first trip Kate had made with Ben to the Palmer. Before the Big Wet they had come in late ’73 when they had used two smaller bullock drays to haul supplies up the track from Townsville. A trek through hell as they had crossed the drought-parched plains and passed the long lines of hopeful miners walking with bed-rolls, pushing wheelbarrows loaded with their possessions, or riding on horseback.
    For a fee Kate would carry the personal possessions of the miners on the drays. Together they would trudge past red-eyed men and women stumbling