1915 by Roger McDonald Page A

ran off with a train driver. Doesn’t everyone know?” Mrs Pepper gave Walter the kind of look she might have reserved for Rip Van Winkle. “Then she came home to Parkes. Her dad was the straightest man in town, Eris Bryant the saddler. Trust Martha to shame him: she was bold, even as a kiddie.”
    Mrs Pepper then seemed to change the subject, but really it was the same story: “You’re the type of boy who doesn’t want to hurt people.”
    Walter nodded sleepily, she had him exactly.
    â€œBut you will, and you do.”
    â€œNo —”
    â€œYou see,” Mrs Pepper insisted, “you have an independent mind.”
    The solid-armed woman had turned florid in the practice of her intelligence. “And it’s not just that you seem to have a certain attitude. You do have it.”
    She let the pronouncement sink in. A nightbird shrieked across the silent paddocks, and suddenly the house seemed not free of the Reids at all: inside and out it reeked of their ownership. Slowly Walter saw what Mrs Pepper was saying, and the injustice of it pricked him.
    â€œYou mean Blacky might have been getting back at me? ” He scraped his chair signalling offence, but she restrained him with a rough hand.
    She held on. “I can see what’s happening between you and your friends. They’re taking something from you after you took something from them.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI don’t know.” She poured herself a fresh cup.
    â€œBlacky and Martha, are they, you know, engaged?”
    â€œWell, they’ll never marry,” observed Mrs Pepper tactfully, plunging her hands into a mountain of dough as she prepared the next day’s bread.
    Walter was asleep when the others arrived home, though behind a tattered dream of crouching against a fence while Blacky rode at him on his motorbike he was dimly aware of low voices, dropped boots, and the distant whine of an engine.
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    The next day they all complained of headaches, and worked sullenly and hard. Walter yarned with the Schulers at morning tea, at dinner and at afternoon tea as well. The Reids and Billy flopped into bed straight after the evening meal. Even between themselves sociability seemed to have evaporated, and the split that Blacky had opened with his jab at Walter mattered less, though it remained. Billy was not unfriendly, but he stopped short of the way things had been before. At the end of each day he rode in to see his mother, but refused to respond with more than a word even to Mrs Pepper’s gentle enquiries.
    Something had diverted them on their outing to Forbes with Eddie, but it was not until Walter and Billy rode home together at the end of the fourth and last day that Walter learned about it.
    The horses, head to tail, held Billy’s voice behind. Walter scanned the lumpy blackness ahead, or just looked up at the stars. A storm was coming. Intermittent sheet-lightning showed high above Canowindra, over thirty miles away.
    â€œWe settled into the pub. Later Eddie got so drunk that Ned had to drive back. But first Blacky startedroasting an old German, one of the Kaiser’s crowd, you know, their king-bloke. Blacky told him all the Germans were sausage-eaters who’d put their mothers into sausages if they got half a chance. When the old German was hopping mad Blacky told him he knew for a fact he’d put his own mother into a sausage and brought her out to Australia in a suitcase. Things ran hot, Blacky nearly got a faceful of beer, but he bought the old geezer a drink — you know Blacky — they got to be good mates.”
    Ginger followed Peapod in a wake of horse smells. Lightning flickered closer now, so that a hump of black cloud was outlined. A curlew called eerily from far off.
    â€œHe said there was going to be a war.”
    â€œWho with?”
    â€œGermany and England. He was all for England. For Australia, anyhow. He would not stick up for his own