Wanted Dead by Kenneth Cook

notice how much he actually drank and besides, there was no way of telling that he hadn’t been drinking heavily long before he came here.
    Soon the dancing inside reached a crescendo, then stopped abruptly, and couples began to spill out of the shanty.
    Two young men, hand in hand with a couple of girls, claimed the barrel at which Riley was sitting. He abandoned it gracefully, and drifted into the shanty. He wanted to see whether Janey Cabel was there anyway.
    The floor of the shanty had been cleared apart from a platform made of beer barrels and planks at one end. That would be for the fiddlers, Riley thought. The fiddlers themselves, instruments in their hands, were at the bar, and, Good God, there was the old man, still in the same place, still motionless. Not
still
Riley corrected himself,
again
surely. He couldn’t have been there since Riley saw him last. But the effect was eerie, particularly when he heard the old man’s voice replying to some remark by one of the musicians. As before there was no visible movement among the hair that hung round his mouth.
    Riley walked over to the bar and set his pot down. The musicians glanced at him and one nodded, but the old man never stirred.
    Riley wondered how he was supposed to go about introducing himself into this circle. No-one seemed remotely interested in him. Probably the best would be to ask somebody to dance, but then there seemedto be such a dire shortage of women that he’d probably get killed in the rush.
    The two fiddlers downed their beer and tramped back to their improvised stands. Riley wondered what they did when they weren’t fiddling. Probably station hands. Most of the men here looked as though they could be station hands.
    The fiddlers looked at each other, nodded and then broke into a frenzy of sawing at their instruments. The sharp vivid sounds seemed to physically draw the dancers into the shanty and in moments the whole place was again full of couples, jigging and twirling. Riley eased himself into a corner made by the bar and one wall of the shanty.
    He saw Jane Cabel dancing with a tall, clean shaven young man. She looked rather ill, he thought. He wondered whether the young man was one of her bushranger friends. Quite possibly there were a number of bushrangers in this gathering, amateurs or professionals-. The shanty had become hot and stuffy with the influx of the crowd and Riley began to wish he’d stayed outside.
    There seemed to be some sort of disturbance near the doorway. The people there had stopped dancing. Probably someone had fallen over. Or perhaps it was a fight. Riley couldn’t see very clearly.
    Then the dancers in the middle of the shanty stopped and some of the men cursed someone who was trying to struggle through the crowd. One of the fiddlers stopped playing, then started again, but out of time now with his companion.
    There was a fight. A thin young fellow was struggling with another older man. The young one broke away, and pushed through the crowd. One of thedancers shoved violently at him and he reeled, then scrambled on. The man he’d been fighting was thrusting through the crowd after him.
    The young man reached the bar and scrambled over it, near the old shanty-owner, who still didn’t move.
    Then astonishingly, the young man grabbed the shanty-owner’s arm and hung on to it. His face was distorted and wet with tears.
    Riley recognised him then. It was the youth who’d tried to hold him up when he was riding out along the road from Goulburn.
    The shanty was in an uproar now. A few determined couples were still trying to dance in the far corner, but most were staring at the tableau in front of the bar. The old man, motionless, leaning on his elbows; the youth cringing behind the bar, clinging to his father and weeping . . . the man who’d been chasing him standing with the palms of his hands on the bar as though to vault over.
    One of the fiddlers cut out again; the