The Ballad of Desmond Kale Read Online Free PDF Page A

They doddered forward into better light. There was a brown and white with lopped horns wearing a large bell, two brindle and white, one with cocked horns, and a strawberry junior with snail horns sounding a bull-frog bell when lowering its glossy head. The brand was an indistinct MT.
    â€˜Those are Mick Tornley’s bullocks,’ thought Stanton, ‘who Joe is in league with and plainly; he is clever as mustard to get on with that man. Everything Joe touches is blessed by a quantity of profit, with a contrived innocence when bartering, which I quite admire.’
    The time of day had an air of contrivance in it of another sort. Nature was a subtle arguer against certainty when shadows fell. Behind an old tree Stanton found the bullocky sitting on a fallen log mending a whip. Mick Tornley greeted him with a brown, toothless smile. Stanton remained on his horse and lifted his hat.
    â€˜Good evening, there.’
    â€˜Mister Stanton, you ave come round to see us rather late.’
    â€˜Never too late for true friends, Mick, though aren’t the days getting short as they can get, in this part of the world just now?’
    â€˜It is gettin too dark to see,’ agreed Mick.
    â€˜Who was that horseman?’
    â€˜A redcoat.’
    â€˜So it was.’
    There was no duplicity in the bullocky; more a sturdy feeling of limits. He made you doubt there was any wrongdoing within a fixed radius of himself — just regular business involved — which included this ground, those trees, and out as far as that departing rider lanky-legged in the saddle and making a clatter with something he carried. Mick was a man all at your service — or not, depending. You had to be one of the chosen with Mick, and Stanton believed he was.
    Stanton strained his credulity to admit that a redcoat — any redcoat — had the right to do business with whomever he chose. It was quite possible to believe that whatever elaborate or nefarious business Joe Josephs was engaged in with officers, touched Mick Tornley only to the extent that it weighed on his waggon axles and decided on his bullocks’ needs in fodder. He was square-necked, bushy black-bearded, with a thickly boned forehead as powerfully deep as a bull’s brain plate. His cheeks were mahogany buffed from the winter sun. When he lifted his hat, his forehead, showing sweaty plastered hairs, was white as milk. Whatever went on in his head, he was quite devoid of curiosity about another person.
    Mick stood with his legs planted wide coiling his whip. ‘If you don’t mind, reverend, with your horse, get away.’ Tornley stepped out then, into the little light remaining, slithered the whip through his fingers, raised his whip arm and shook out the plaited leather like a dusty snake, first merely upon the ground and then lifting it clean into the air where it looped back and forth, and in a final moment, cracked.
    â€˜Good enough,’ he assessed. ‘Tis better.’
    Another crack, and stars appeared in the pale evening sky. Tornley’s five bullocks, ambling closer, reacted to the sound, their heads swayed, they stamped their stocky forefeet. Then it was like Tornley created flashing points in the air — star points — over the head, along the flanks, there at the tail and down to the feet of an imagined sixth bullock. Stanton’s hands sweated to take hold of the whip handle and create from it himself! Then on the other side of the clearing there appeared that sixth bullock, real as could be, pale, enormous, that raised its head and bellowed with tormented strength.
    â€˜Ercules,’ Tornley called it.
    Stanton wanted to ask:
    â€˜When are you leaving for the outlands, Mick?’ ‘Who are Joe’s trade goods for?’ — but these were questions you did not ask a gentleman with bullocks.
    A bullocky’s wheels turned slow in a progress of lurching and leaning, straining and baulking, hardly to be