The rainy season is pon us. The skies turn grey, is cold and damp and wet, but is not till the weather start to ease, warm up, that we finally get transported in a big rumbling prison cart from the gaol in Windsor down to Sydney. Get locked up in His Majesty’s gaol. A big stone building on George Street, a place I never think I going end up in when I walked past it, clanging along in the convict work gang. Day after day James and me just left to sit, stand, sleep in bunk beds with a hundred other prisoners in a room smaller than the rooms in the barracks. Backra don’t make us break rocks or jump up and down on the treadmill, all him do is leave us to wait for the trial to begin. The only time our spirits lift is when we get to walk in the yard, glad to feel the sun on our faces. Try hard not to look at the timber gallows just outside the stone wall, looming over us. Is where backra do the public executions. And after each one, our spirits sink even lower, can sense death approaching, especially when we hear that Lazarus Barra got executed, hanged from them very gallows.

On the day of the trial we have to wait till other cases is heard. In the afternoon, we finally brought into court, stand in the dock before the judge and what backra call a military jury. Listen as the legal man tell all kind of things James and me done. Except, I gradually come to understand why it took so long to bring us to trial. No solid proof to hold against us. Is only when Mister Chadwick get called in as a witness that I know fate catch up to us and we is done for good.

A few days later, we get marched back into the courtroom to hear the verdict. It is only a short while, but time seems to stretch thinner and thinner until I going howl if it go on any longer. Finally the judge pronounce the sentence.

‘William Buchanan and James Smith, you have been found guilty of bushranging. You are sentenced to …’

And I think I hear him say: ‘to be taken from this place and hanged by the neck until dead’. But then I see that James winking at me and me ears open and I hear what the judge is saying.

‘You are sentenced to three years to be worked in leg irons.’ And the sound of the hammer hitting the little box go round and round in me head.