The Ballad of Desmond Kale by Roger McDonald Page B

consumed the eyes — spearing them up from a mess of baked head. Those eyes broke in the mouth quite firm, without spraying their jelly over the teeth.
    Still hungry after that first round they sat by the fire on skins eating foreleg shanks. Except for a heel of bread and cheese, Rankine had eaten nothing for two days. Moreno had a small skin that was almost pretty, with a waved, fine gloss that appeared like the richest watered tabby. ‘It is a fine skin,’ said Kale, ‘but remember what I said, Payolo Moreno, your rams was no good, and the reason was their small size, and their colours with red in them.’ Moreno sulked, warming himself on his prized Santiago’s skin. They were down to the last ram out of five. There would be a lambing soon from the ewes mated before the escape, unwisely mated, as Kale so very needlessly said.
    â€˜Baby lambs poached in ewes’milk will be on our bill of fare soon.’
    Rankine broke out the spirits. They toasted their enterprise in beakers of brandy. ‘Here’s to our honest start,’ said Rankine. The brandy filled him with good cheer.
    â€˜Are they on to us, mate?’ said Kale. He grinned like a raving banshee. His years of official torture had battered him far from his long lost Irish gentleman’s niceness of complexion, white scars puckering an eyebrow, distorting a corner of his mouth; in his speech was a roughened burr from being grabbed around the windpipe and half throttled, in a prison-yard thrashing.
    Rankine told him they were so far safe — how the chase was put aside, from the governor’s lists, though not, it seemed, from the flogging parson’s.
    â€˜Nay, I am glad to hear that,’ said Kale. ‘As long as he fumes, you can follow his smoke like the black fellow who knows everything before it happens.’
    Kale did not think about Stanton constantly, the way Stanton thought about Kale. But he judged their connection precisely, as along the blade of a knife, having no doubt that when the last trump sounded, he would be in Stanton’s sights.
    Before they were too settled round the fire Kale made his next demand of Rankine. He wanted the parson’s big-framed ram, Young Matchless, for his own. ‘Work the animal free and walk him over,’ he said, with a toss of his head. It was like a Sunday stroll was proposed, and Rankine out gathering the finest blooms. An earlier ram, Old Matchless, was originally bred by Kale, with many of the good points wanted in a sire. Kale had bred Old Matchless in happier times, but long since Stanton claimed the breed as his own. ‘It is well past time to claim the breed back,’ said Kale. Young Matchless was Old Matchless’s direct descendant. ‘A grandson of forceful impact, I want him for ourselves. It is the season for taking. We have the ewes for our purpose, and have the country spread before us.’
    â€˜You have something wrong,’ said Rankine, looking at the way Kale sat protecting his back.
    He found Kale had lumps under his armpits the size of duck eggs, from his infected flogging wounds, which Rankine bathed and dressed. Moreno might have done it, and nursed Kale, for he had the stomach to oblige — but not the courtesy to offer.
    Rankine wrapped himself in his blanket and lay on the dustyground. Drifting in and out of sleep, as they yarned, he told of a load of trade goods, of which his saddlebags held particulars, goods that were conceivably to be diverted as far as the duck mole reach on a waggon — specially if they could be brought forward by the trader who owned them, in the name of certain profits, without Parson Stanton getting any hint of where they were bound.
    At the start of the midnight watch Moreno found himself kicked awake. He took his orders from Kale: banked fires against warregal dogs that came in the dark and threatened ewes from under the lowest bars of the hurdles and then skipped over the top. The