He put up at the Stockman’s Arms and soon the whole town had heard: he was from the coast, had a set of bagpipes, meant to win that reward. I won’t pretend I wasn’t one of the gossips—Terrence wasn’t interested, so I had to tell someone.

Some people said he brought an animal with him, but they couldn’t agree what type. Peg Hale, who held the licence, said she never saw it. She’d have turned it out—him, too. But I cleaned his room, and all the times I was there I never noticed anything.

Pinnicke—Billy Pinnicke, Old Pinnicke’s father—who had an enormous white beard and played the accordion at dances, shook his head. “Never trust a piper,” he told me. But when he saw the pipes, he changed his tune. “No bagpipes I’ve ever seen,” he grumbled, as he sat in the bar day after day. “Too many legs.”

Old Pinnicke muttered too, but he always did. Our visitor was the only man I ever knew take notice of the Pinnickes’ stories. And he laughed, asked for a map, and spread it on the bar.

Men went up, looked over Darryl’s shoulder and started to point out landmarks: this gully is where the bushranger had his last stand, that’s the sinkhole where at midday you hear a horse but don’t see one, there’s the stock route along the edge of the old Spicer station—not haunted, of course, but no one likes to go there at night—and that’s as far as Woodwild will admit an interest; if you live beyond there, you belong to Runagate. There’s the old sawmill and the new. They marked the worst stands of lantern-bush, always on their own properties.

Not that they liked the man or believed he’d work a miracle. But if there was something in it, they didn’t want to lose out.

Then, sitting in the bar of the Stockman’s Arms, Darryl put those pipes together. The men—in Woodwild, never ahead of the times, most women didn’t care to be seen in the main bar, though it had been legal for years—watched as he twisted wooden tubes into leather bags, tightened joints with waxed cord and plumber’s tape, and tuned them with rounds of sticky paper over the holes. Careful, as if he knew what he was doing (or wanted us to think so) but hadn’t done it a lot. You know what I mean.

Terrence, of course, thought himself above being interested.

Once Darryl pumped up those pipes and let them go, they made an unholy noise (Billy Pinnicke said). There did seem to be more sticks and valves and bellows than strictly necessary. But they were bagpipes, after all. Since the Pinnickes played accordions, it was the pot calling the kettle.