When Colts Ran Read Online Free PDF Page B

explode from the emotion he put into watching.
    â€˜Wait till I tell him!’
    Veronica danced around the burning caravan waving her hat. ‘Tell him, if you can find him,’ she said.
    The caravan speared through with sparks, flame spiralling at first and then going straight up and making a chimney roar.
    Colts walked down the track away from the blaze, looking back to check on the caravan as he’d done when they last left, making sure the roof was still there, a sentimental tactic stamping images to recall when he was stuck back at school. The difference now was a smoking curve held by spindly uprights getting charred black and wrapped in sheets of flame. The corrugations rose like an aeroplane wing, wafting but never taking off. Through stacks of heat he saw Veronica going to the bike, and so he kept walking, turning his shoulder on her until she caught up.
    He climbed into the sidecar and wedged himself steady with cushions. It was soon dark as she drove. The headlight flounced ahead like a dying torchbeam but always finding a tree or a bush.
    â€˜Can’t you go faster?’ Colts urged, but only because he didn’t want her to know he hated being taken away like this, dependent, stunned. She kept stealing glances at him, easing her shoulders around and angling her neck as they drove, and wondered about a feeling, if it was true motherliness, which she had never strongly had. The boy had not screamed and threatened her so much as treated her, not coldly, but reservedly, saving passionate attachment for the real mother he barely knew and who awaited him six feet under, and giving his male ardour to that heroic goat, Dunc Buckler.
    The ingratitude of children she was feeling anyway. That, at least, was an authentic touch of the parental fate.
    In Colts’s mind the triangular paddock by the river wasn’t how they had left it, destroyed. The caravan was replaced by a shining turnout on four pneumatic tyres inflated hard, with new wood and bright copper nails, and those horses, Old George and Mrs Dinah, displayed freckled lips and foaming spittle as they had when hauling loads, great with leaning life and hoofs biting forward.
    Just by Veronica lighting the fire and destroying the lot, the horses returned with their immortality intact. Colts wondered if Veronica knew the mare of the couple still wore a perky straw hat. And she did. And she did.
    Later that night a town slept, tin roofs shining under a zinc moon, silent except for dogs jerking on chains and drunks under a tree on the track to the blacks’ camp there, the riverbank plunging down a clay slide to cracked mud and smoky camp fires.
    They went over the rattling-board bridge and slept by the roadside a mile out, returning next morning for Veronica to wash and groom herself on the riverbank, to bargain for rationed petrol at the town garage and speak to the police.
    When details were given, the circumstances of the swagman explained, the long-faced sergeant said: ‘I knew this was on the cards with that gent. I’ll have to mention the fire you lit, Mrs Buckler. There might of been things of his in it.’
    â€˜There weren’t things though.’
    The Sarge lowered his voice.
    â€˜You must have had a reason for it.’
    â€˜Does the name Molyneaux mean anything to you?’
    The Sarge angled his head. ‘Yes. But he’s deceased.’
    â€˜Mine’s out this way working – a friend, an associate of my husband, a pale sort of young fellow, book-keeping on stations.’
    â€˜The Molyneaux I knew was Joe Mole, as we called him – the little skipper.’
    â€˜That was Des Molyneaux’s father,’ Veronica nodded.
    â€˜A brave man. There must be good in the younger version, then?’
    â€˜He keeps in touch by mail,’ said Veronica emphatically, ‘and doesn’t always sign what he writes, leaving no return address.’
    â€˜That swaggie, the returned man, Major