David Spicer came back from wherever he’d been all those years while Sylvie Spicer ate her heart out. She took strange fancies. Believe me, I know! I was librarian, and a few books she wanted … well, I took care she didn’t get them. Some fires don’t need fuel. But Davy reappeared, old, and met Darryl Scott. I suppose they recognised their own kind.

They set off to catch the bone horse. Botched it, of course: only caught a part—the ghost, the power of it. Something like a soul. Where the horse scavenged that, I don’t know—from a deathbed or graveyard; half Inglewell is built on blood. The bone horse wore it loosely. Once, if you saw it, it used to trail a bit of a shine.

The horse vanished for a while. Down the deep dark places of the earth where things go to die, or nurse their wounds, or wait. Time was, if you stretched yourself out and listened to the ground, you’d hear a rustle like heavy canvas, like a body wrapped in a tarp, turning in its sleep.

Of course, Scott and Spicer quarrelled. Scott kept the stuff. Stored it in an old bottle. Maybe he didn’t know what to do with it. Maybe he forgot—he kept himself busy enough. And one day Davy Spicer comes to Runagate, talking up the fortunes you could get for junk in farm sheds. Darryl Scott had moved into Runagate by then, bold as you like, and little Tina Scott says to her mother, “What happened to those things Dad used to collect?”

Probably Scott kept more than one secret in the old sawmill after he moved to town. It wasn’t rightly his—to be frank, I don’t know what you could have called rightly his. But he’d have liked that it stood on treacherous ground. That’s why Spicer sent a boy in: lighter, easier to excuse, and if you’d failed—well, boys get hurt every day. Didn’t serve in the end. I’d have rested easier if they’d found Spicer’s body, after he crashed that ute.

I thought Scott finished him off. But people like that don’t have straightforward minds. Always thinking around at you from the side: pestering a place with lantern-bush just to scope out the land; making a wife instead of running off with Gwenda Alleman, like a reasonable man.