Two men lay on the floor, bound and gagged. One eyed us fearfully, his sweat picking up the filth from the earthen floor. The other writhed in pain, alone with it: a large iron hook was embedded in the muscle at the back of his arm and tied with a rope to the leg of the table.

I followed the eyes of the uninjured man, looking into the darkest corner.

There stood a woman. A native woman, dressed traditionally in strings and kangaroo hide, tall and fierce and beautiful. Her hair was cropped tight against her head, and beneath the hard domes of her shoulders, diagonal scars ran into the centre of her chest. A circlet of maireener shells glowed at her throat. Long high cheekbones made flat planes down to her jaw, and those planes caught a glimmer of light. Her mouth was proud, her brows cast shadows over hard eyes.

She stood with one leg forward, and a soldier’s Brown Bess pointed directly at the two men on the floor. The barrel was so long that its muzzle nearly reached them. The detonation in here would be thunderous.

A cask of broken coal fragments lay between her foot and the hearth: it was she who had signalled us in, into her ambush. She held the weapon expertly, as I had seen the Corps do: one hand under the barrel keeping it level, the other wrapped around the stock with her index finger snake-alert over the trigger. Her eyes never left the two men.

‘No further,’ she said.

Argyle had come in with the gun raised: now he lowered the barrel, held it out wide. No one spoke or moved. The room awaited her.

‘Put your gun on the table,’ she said calmly, and Argyle complied.

She walked towards it, keeping the barrel of her own weapon trained on the men. With one hand, she opened the breech and flipped the gun over, then banged it loudly on the surface of the table so the cartridge fell out. She hefted it back to Argyle.

The man with the baling hook in him groaned, and she looked at him quizzically. She took the rope that connected the hook to the table and pulled it tighter: he screamed. What had this man done to her that she would be so casually cruel? Satisfied that the rope was tight, she stepped over him and swung a graceful kick at the other man’s backside.

He grunted, and she sank the foot in again. ‘Waste of a good kickin, your arse.’

Then she came forward, stood within inches of me and looked over me from head to foot, her eyes exactly level with mine. She tipped her head to one side. Some sort of doubt appeared in the burning eyes, some lack of faith. We had not exchanged a word, but I disappointed her.

‘Righto, stick insect,’ she said to me. ‘Off we go.’

~