Then Molly drops the red rock and grips the paring knife she holds in her hands behind it and she lunges forward and she screams as she brings her hands down hard, driving the short blade into Aubrey’s right thigh. And Yukio drops blindly through the hole, the near-dead weight of his body landing heavily on Aubrey’s shoulders. His sword spills from his hand on impact but he keeps a grip on Aubrey’s neck, his left arm around the older man’s throat and his right arm already reaching for the pistol that Aubrey instinctively tries to bring to the head of his impossible assailant.
Aubrey still has Molly’s paring knife stuck in his thigh when he rushes blindly backwards and slams Yukio’s back into the cave wall. There’s a bullet still resting in Yukio’s back and the cave wall meets its point of entry and the pilot screams in agony but he will not release his grip.
Aubrey is a wild dog now. He roars. Saliva and sweat and blood and bruising across his face. He charges sideways, driving Yukio towards the arched opening. Molly scrambles along the floor, her hands searching blindly in the darkness for the shortsword. Aubrey roars again as he builds to a run and he carries the pilot like a wheat sack and he drives himself and his assailant hard against another wall and the men bounce off this wall and stumble into a roll that spins them out of the cave, where they land hard on the rough rock of the sandstone clearing, just beside Aubrey’s bag of gold.
The sound of the full river running alongside them, its whitewater spray. The pilot has fate on his side and he has Nara, and he ends the tumble with his weight on top of Aubrey Hook and he can grip the gravedigger’s pistol hand well enough now to smash it three times against the bag of gold and then he watches the weapon bounce across the ground. Then Aubrey twists hard and fast and the men roll twice again across the sandstone and in the chaos of their movements they do not see that the gun has landed only a yard from two black bare feet poking out of a pair of brown slacks. Aubrey slips a hand free and reaches for the paring knife still stuck in his thigh. He pulls it from his flesh and shoves the blade into the side of Yukio Miki’s stomach.
What little strength the pilot has left in his arms now abandons him. Aubrey turns him over easily and reaches again for the blade sticking out of Yukio’s belly. He pulls the blade out and he breathes deep and hard and he raises the blade over Yukio’s heart and the only thing that stops him from driving the short knife down into the pilot’s chest are the words of a sixteen-year-old Aboriginal buffalo hunter named Sam Greenway. ‘Hold up there, feller.’
Aubrey turns to his left to find a pistol pointing at his head. The young man’s face is covered in faded strips of white paint. He’s shirtless and barefoot and in his left hand he carries a long, carved wooden spear almost twice his height. Across his chest are more white lines that rise and bend like fountain water over his shoulders and arms.
‘Sam,’ says Molly, standing now at the entrance to the cave, the shortsword in her hands, momentarily dazed by the sight of him. Tyrone Power by way of Mataranka. Her cowboy carrying a spear and a gun. She wanted to say his name louder but it came out so soft. So beaten.
‘You all right, Mol’?’ Sam asks.
Molly has no answer to that. She can only turn silently to Aubrey sitting atop her friend who fell from the sky.
‘This feller hurt you, Mol’?’ Sam asks.
Molly has no answer to that one either. Too dazed. Too spent. She sees movement to her left. Four more Aboriginal men, a similar age to Sam Greenway, emerging from the path between the two rock walls on the left side of the clearing. Same faded paint across their faces and across their chests. Same spears in their hands. The young men say things to Sam in their own language. Sam says things back to them and the young men hiss. One young man taps his spear twice on the ground.
‘You want me to plug this feller for you, Mol’?’ Sam asks.
Molly is silent. She doesn’t take her eyes off Aubrey. ‘Get away from Yukio,’ she says to him.
The gravedigger drops his head and smiles. He takes his time to adjust his skewed black hat then he stands confidently, shaking his head. He steps back from Yukio and Molly rushes to the bleeding pilot. His head is limply turned to the side. Blood across his belly. A line of blood running from his mouth. Molly kneels down beside him and she places her hand over the leaking knife wound.
‘I’m sorry, Yukio,’ she says. ‘I should never have led you here.’
Sam keeps the pistol trained on Aubrey, who holds his arms out with the paring knife still in his right hand, staring down the young man with the gun.
‘You even know how to work one of those, blackfeller?’ Aubrey asks. ‘You ever held a white man’s weapon, eh blackfeller? You ever come across one of those on walkabout?’ Aubrey chuckles to himself. ‘You better not miss, boy.’ And he firms his grip on the knife in his fist.
Then Sam points the gun at a spot on the ground about three feet to the left of Aubrey and six
