The Ranger in the Hills: A Heartwarming Australian Outback Romance

by Lucy Walker

  ‘When are you two coming in?’ Mrs. Ryde called, coming back to the veranda. ‘Katie dear, we’re delighted that you’re off for a break to Pandanning with the girls.’

  ‘But Tom’s coming too, isn’t he?’ Katie asked coming towards the veranda. The absence of Tom, the author of Katie’s jauntings, was more than noticeable now.

  ‘My dear child, don’t be disappointed. Tom’s gone on ahead. He’ll be there to meet you. He had some urgent business that simply could not wait. He took the Land-Rover a week ago and bustled off.’

  ‘A week ago?’ Katie wondered why her voice sounded dismayed. She felt dismayed too, though for the moment she could not understand why. Something about Tom’s departure bothered her. It was something her bones were trying to tell her.

  Mrs. Ryde gave them a splendid lunch ‒ the potato pie was perfect ‒ then after they had unpacked the jeep Mr. Ryde directed them all to his big Chevrolet in the shed. This, Katie thought, was the car of all cars. It was enormous and glamorous: too good surely for a long over-landing trip through red dust and yellow sand-plain. When she was last here it had been covered with canvas.

  Taciturn, who could change at the flick of a hand from a stableman-groom to a caretaker of mammoth motor cars, was flicking this one lovingly with a cloth.

  ‘Mr. Ryde wouldn’t lend this car to anybody but Bern Malin,’ he told Katie in his slow drawl. ‘He don’t even let Tom put a hand on it.’

  Poor Tom, Katie thought. How wild he’ll be to see Bern driving his father’s treasure into Pandanning, while he himself had taken the Land-Rover.

  There was no question about who sat in the front seat with the driver. Stella opened the door and stepped in: and was established.

  ‘There’s room for three in the front,’ Jill said pointedly.

  ‘Not with me in it,’ Stella replied distantly. ‘When I sleep I sleep the full length of the seat ‒ allowing for Bern’s shoulder for somewhere to put my head. You three can room it in the back. If you don’t like Andrew you can always put him in the boot.’

  Andrew had been so silent the whole time he had been at Ryde’s everyone but Katie almost forgot he was there.

  ‘I never saw such a child,’ Mrs. Ryde remarked to her husband as Bern turned the car and made off up the track, west into the wheat and sheep lands. ‘He’s almost too good to be true. Not a word out of him; and sitting so still in his chair he might be a dummy.’

  ‘He’s watching and listening,’ Mr. Ryde said with a quiet grin. ‘He misses nothing. Could do with a good game of cricket or football to find out how the other half lives, all the same. But he misses nothing ‒’

  Mr. Ryde was the quiet kind who missed nothing, too, so Mrs. Ryde understood what her husband meant.

  The motel was brand new and modern, sitting by itself in the middle of One Gum Hill, where the only neighbours to the motel were paddock fences and one long grey streak of a bitumen road into which their track led.

  ‘Why ever did they build it here?’ Katie asked, surprised.

  ‘For through-travellers,’ Jill replied. ‘That bitumen is the main highway to the south coast. Tom says at night-time the motel fills up. That’s why he booked ahead for us.’

  Yes, of course Tom would know that. He had gone through a week ago. But how did he get the message to Ryde’s Place? That bush telegraph again? No. This time it would have been those prospectors whose jeeps had left Ryde’s Place as they themselves had arrived.

  So that party hadn’t been unexpected, or unwelcome!

  Katie wished she didn’t think this way. It’s something to do better than looking at the back of Stella’s head propped against Bern’s shoulder for a hundred miles, she thought. Either way she wasn’t exactly happy.

  Bern drove the car into the courtyard at the rear of the motel’s administrative block. He eased himself out of the door.

  ‘Back soon,’ he said and retraced his way towards the main office to sign-up with the management.

  Katie ran after him.

  ‘I have some traveller’s cheques I brought with me from home. Please, Bern, I’d like to register for Andrew and me.’

  Bern came to a halt and looked straight at her for the first time since they had left Malin’s Outpost. He was silent a minute, as if looking at her made him think of something other than the business in hand. He saw the wide young eyes and the mobile mouth: the troubled expression in those eyes, and the small chin that was lifted high and firm because here, in this matter of who paid for whom, there was much of Katie’s pride.

  He smiled unexpectedly.

  ‘There’ll be a reckoning one day, Katie. Don’t worry about it. If I may play high-jinks with a biblical saying ‒ It is sometimes more blessed to receive than to give. This is my party, and you are my guest. Could you be a little gracious about that?’

  Katie flushed. It was the smile that undid her. It turned all the collection of little stones that were somewhere inside her to jelly. Her pride would have done battle with him otherwise.

  ‘Thank you very much, Bern,’ was all she could say, hoping desperately she sounded poised about accepting this kindness.

  In some magic way, standing there looking at her with that smile ‒ after the long day’s silence ‒ she forgot everything except what he meant to that stupid over-ticking heart of hers.

  ‘Thank you’ she said again, then turned and walked quickly back to the car. Immediately she felt she had been exactly the opposite to what Bern had asked ‒ ungracious.

  ‘I’m always on the wrong foot when he’s around‒’ she wailed to herself.

  Stella, who had been peering in curiosity through a window of one of the vacant rooms, turned round at that moment. She saw Bern standing still, looking back at Katie’s retreating figure.

  What have they been up to? she asked herself crossly.

  She ran across the newly-sown lawn in the centre of the courtyard and caught Bern’s arm in an extra friendly way.

  ‘Where are you off to, Boss, darling? I’m coming too ‒’

  She was gay, and very, very natural with her eager laugh.

  Together, Stella’s hand in the crook of Bern’s arm, they turned and went towards the main office. Katie could see the other girl’s face lifted, talking happily as they went. Bern, his head bent a little, was listening. They looked so companionable.

  Katie’s own sense of having been abrupt and ungracious mounted. Bern’s back, walking away, gave her again the strange feeling of deprivation she had had that first night when she was travelling with him from Malley’s Find. That night he had walked away from the camp fire into the bush, and she had had an irrational sense of loss.

  It was a feeling of being left; forsaken.

  She wasn’t noticing any more that Stella was with him now. She wasn’t thinking of Stella ‒ only that she herself had said a mere, brief ‘Thank you,’ then come hastily back to the car as if taking his gesture of hospitality for granted.

  Well, was she happy about it? If she had lots of money it wouldn’t matter ‒ as it probably didn’t matter to Jill and Stella. They probably took everything for granted.

  It was beastly to be anxious about money, and more beastly to have pride about it.

  Beastlier still to feel herself turn to putty because after a long day of silence he had smiled at her.

  Truly, she did hang on the skirts of chance for favours! How had she, Katie James, come to this pass?

  ‘I hate myself,’ she said furiously. ‘And I hate him too.’

  Then she realised what she had said.

  ‘No, I don’t hate him. I don’t hate him at all,’ she amended quickly.

  She had a dreadful feeling she might have put a curse on him like pin-sticking in witchety times. Something might happen to him because she had said that. A tree might fall on him, or a snake bite him, or a shaft cave-in under his feet.

  She was filled with remorse for that silly thought uttered to herself ‒ ‘I hate him’ ‒ even though for the moment that w
as just what she had done.

  It was an awful feeling.

  There she stood by a dusty over-landing car ‒ at the end of the day ‒ in a no-place called One Gum Hill with Andrew and Jill inspecting the brick and tile flatlets around the courtyard ‒ yet she felt alone in a wasteland.

  ‘Don’t fool yourself, Katie. You don’t hate him. You love him. There, I’ve said it. You dream of Gideon Dent, but you spring or wilt according to whether Bern Malin smiles at you, or walks away from you. You might need Gideon Dent badly; but this man you ought to run from. And run hard. Otherwise you’ll be one dreadfully unhappy girl.

  ‘Run, Katie, run!’

  ‘Katie, Katie!’ It was Andrew, bothered because Katie, standing there with that strange look on her face, seemed to be somewhere else.

  The boy’s voice called her back to the motel in One Gum Hill.

  ‘I was thinking ‒’ she said vaguely.

  ‘Are you all right, Katie?’ Andrew persisted. ‘You’re not sick, or anything?’

  She shook her head as if to brush mists away.

  ‘Not sick,’ she said. ‘Just somewhere else for a few moments. You do that, Andrew, don’t you? You sit sometimes in a chair, or on the veranda step, or under a gum tree and you are not there. Your thoughts have gone somewhere else. Where do they go?’

  Andrew stared at his sister thoughtfully.

  ‘Well, I can’t rightly say,’ he said, not committing himself. ‘It’s different places different times. Most times I’m remembering and wishing I could put it down. I can’t, though Secretary said if I learned to paint properly I could put down the things I remember.’

  Perhaps he was an artist, after all!

  How strange, Katie thought. There wasn’t any paint or any form of music that could put down that world her spirit had flown to a minute ago. She was sure of that.

  Jill came towards them, her hands in her pockets and her lips pursed in a whistle.

  ‘Phew!’ she said. ‘No wonder Tom does himself grand when he takes a trip. They’re all glamour, those rooms. Wait till Bern comes with the keys, Katie. This is really something.’

  Bern and the motel manager came across the courtyard together, Stella by Bern’s side, the manager jangling a bunch of keys.

  ‘Numbers eighteen, twenty and twenty-one,’ he said. ‘Twenty-one is the single on the other side of the courtyard: all the odd numbers over there.’

  He unlocked number eighteen and Jill and Stella almost collided in their eagerness to be first in to look over their accommodation.

  ‘That settles any discussion about who’ll have the single room,’ Bern was saying to the manager. ‘Miss James will have that. The boy and I’ll go in twenty.’

  The man unlocked twenty as Bern spoke.

  ‘If you’ll run your car up here in front of your own door you’ll be right, sir,’ he said handing the key to Bern. ‘Now if the young lady will come with me ‒’

  Stella emerged from her door.

  ‘It’s gorgeous, Bern. Wait till you see it. Where’s Katie going?’

  ‘Over in twenty-one. It’s a single.’

  ‘Such grandeur!’ said Stella derisively. ‘Why can’t we all have singles? If there has to be one single why not me? I’m the eldest, aren’t I?’

  ‘You and Jill happen to be sisters. It makes it easier. The manager wouldn’t oblige with any more singles on the grounds that we’re first in but by sundown the place will be full and he’ll have to be sending travellers on. Everyone who is single, asks for a single, it seems.’

  ‘Don’t explain, darling,’ Stella said with a laugh. ‘I suppose Katie will be happy all by herself over there. Jill and I are booking you for after-dinner coffee in our flat. It’s gorgeous; television and all. We must be within viewing distance of the new station at Darling Range.’

  Katie, separated from the others by the circular lawn and the circular road around it, was let into her flat. The manager gave her the key.

  ‘If you want anything let me know,’ he said. ‘Dinner menu is on the table. Likewise breakfast and house regulations.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Katie said politely and walked into her room. She stood inside the doorway and looked around.

  It was lovely, and so very clever.

  It was one large room with a corner of it bricked off ‒ in gorgeous cinnamon coloured bricks ‒ to make a shower-room and toilet. At the end of the room, against the far wall, was a tiny refrigerator and beside it a bench with an electric hot-water jug standing near a plug in the wall.

  In the foreground was an angel of a bed, made up to look like a settee, cushions and all. It had an overhead reading light and a small built-in table beside it. The television set hung on the wall above the mirror. The carpet was mustard, the bricks were cinnamon, the woodwork was honey and the curtains were a golden apricot. It was so new and so modern! A dream place to Katie who had never been anywhere but in a weatherboard cottage and small old-fashioned hostels in Sydney and Melbourne on her way through to the West.

  Her spirits lifted. She had opened the door of number twenty-one to enter the London, Rome, Paris world of the magazines.

  Jill came sauntering across the courtyard.

  ‘You like it, Katie?’ she asked as Katie opened a drawer here and there, then peered into a low cupboard that mysteriously opened outwards into the courtyard.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ she said.

  ‘An overdone word,’ Jill remarked. ‘We’ve all been saying it repetitively for the last ten minutes ‒ except Bern. Seems he hasn’t been to this one before ‒ it’s new ‒ but he’s been in these motel things around the outskirts of Perth when he’s been up there on business. Tell you the truth, Katie, I didn’t even know Bern ever went to Perth. I thought he stayed permanently in the Never. He’s a dark horse, that one! You ought to have seen Stella’s face when he mentioned it. I bet she’s hoping he hasn’t heard a thing or two about her shindigs in Pandanning when he’s been on his way through there. Pretty well known is our Stella in Pandanning.’

  Katie sat on the edge of her bed.

  ‘What do you mean ‒ shindigs? I thought Stella was in love with Bern and expected him to love her. Didn’t you tell me that the first day I came to Malin’s Outpost?’

  Jill rocked herself backwards and forwards on her heels. Her hands were in their favourite resting-place, the pockets of her trews.

  ‘Oh, Bern is Stella’s property, or so she thinks. Don’t waste any worry about that, Katie, my girl. She’d tear anyone’s hair who put a holt on Bern. Well, so to speak, anyway. But that doesn’t stop her whooping it up when he’s not around. That’s what Pandanning is for, you know. The farmers come in at week-ends. There are so many of them, the girls can take their pick. Personally I prefer someone out of a bank; or something like that. More polished, though not so rich.’

  ‘You sound as if we’re in for a bright time, Jill.’

  ‘You will be, Katie, if you want. Have your hair tossed up on the top of your head. It’s gorgeous hair, you know. There’s red in it when you’re in the right light ‒ and natural too. Buy yourself a new dress and a slazzy pair of shoes. The bank manager will introduce us to lots of people. The right kind of people, mind you. Bank clients, and all that. We always call on his wife first ‒’

  Katie listened thoughtfully. She had a feeling she was only here in this room temporarily. Presently when she had overcome her surprise and pleasure at being here ‒ and when Jill had gone away ‒ she would go back to that country of imagination she had seen for so brief a moment when she stood by the car and for no reason whatsoever ‒ without sound of trumpets, or even a cautious warning, her mind had said ‒ ‘I hate him’, then her heart had said ‒ ‘I love him! Run, Katie, run!’

  Perhaps this was why Andrew day-dreamed. He wasn’t odd, or peculiar. He escaped from one world to another.

  Chapter Fifteen

  They had dinner that night in the restaurant in the main block of the motel. It was a gay, partyish affair with
Bern being the Elder Statesman at the top of the table.

  It was a little world of its own. There was nothing around them outside the motel but miles and miles of paddock and plain, cut by a long bitumen road that went north and south for hundreds of miles. There was a moon, however, alone in a pale pin-starry sky.

  The night was warm, and smelt of the earth and gum leaves long fallen before the land had been cleared for wheat.

  When the waitress came to take the order for coffee both Jill and Stella protested in one breath.

  ‘We’re having it in our room. What’s the good of an electric jug, a fridge and free packets of coffee if we can’t go and make it ourselves?’ Stella insisted.

  ‘I want to see the television,’ Jill put in eagerly. ‘I haven’t seen television since last I went to Pandanning. Come on, Bern. You promised. Coffee in our digs in quarter of an hour.’

  Bern glanced towards Katie.

  ‘You too?’ he asked.

  ‘Katie has to put Andrew to bed,’ Stella mustered an artificial air of complaint. ‘She can come later.’

  ‘I haven’t put Andrew to bed for five years,’ Katie declared. ‘But I’ll go with him and see he doesn’t make a mess of Bern’s room. Of that, he is quite capable.’

  ‘Bern’s room?’ Jill asked with raised eyebrows. ‘Is that what you do over at Malin’s Outpost, Katie? Fuss round Bern’s room?’

  ‘No. Andrew didn’t share it then; only the sleep-out.’ Katie pushed back her chair and stood up. ‘Do you mind, Bern?’ she asked looking at him.

  He had risen with her.

  ‘Of course not. I’ll come with you. I have the key on the ring with my car keys.’

  He stood aside to let her pass.

  ‘Don’t be long, Bern,’ Stella cautioned. There was a hint of annoyance in her voice now.

  ‘I might have remembered his beautiful good manners,’ she said to Jill after they had gone. ‘If only he weren’t so infernally polite: opening and shutting doors for everybody.’

  ‘You won’t hold him by holding him, Stella,’ Jill advised. ‘Leave the cage open and the bird will come home to roost of its own accord.’