by Walker, Lucy
The children sighed as they looked at one another. Then shrugged.
`I’ll be pretty mad,’ Jinx remarked ominously as he carried his precious tins to the door, ‘mad as hops in fact, if we walk three miles out in the spinifex tomorrow, and three miles back—and I don’t get a drawing of Swell.’
Cindie had no answer to that. She debated as she began to grill the chops as to whether she would tell Mary of the children’s methods or not. A little reluctantly she decided against. It would look too much like telling tales, and she wanted Jinx and Myrtle to trust her as she trusted them.
Perhaps they would tell Mary themselves.
The next day, Thursday, would be half-day for Cindie as well as the children.
On Saturdays and Sundays, when the camp was full for the week-end, the personal demands for help or advice would be multiplied by at least a hundred. The men would all be in camp at once. Mary had said she would like Cindie’s help on the week-end days.
‘I don’t know what I did before you came.’ She seemed surprised herself at this mystery. ‘I’m flat-out now, yet you, Cindie, seem to have work to do to keep you busy all day too. Nick thought this would be a part-time job for you. Seems more like full-time with two capital letters.’
‘I’m only too glad,’ Cindie said readily. ‘I like the men. I like helping them. And they seem so grateful—’
The next day Cindie finished her work at midday. Mary carried on. She explained to Cindie that like the professional men on the job, as different from the skilled men and workers,
Tr
she herself was on a salary. Like the boss, and several others, the geologist, for instance, there were no set times for salaried people. They were paid so much per month—regardless.
`All hours of the night you’ll see Nick at his drawing-boards, if you happen up that way,’ Mary remarked. ‘Saturday and Sunday he’s back up the road, checking and seeing things for himself, when the men are out of the way and the dust-cloud has settled. He does his thinking up there too. It’s why he likes to be alone. He’s responsible for all the thinking on the job.’
Cindie wondered if Nick would go up the road alone this week-end. Or would he take Erica too? Well, of course he would!
Meanwhile, to-day was her half-day.
Except for the whirr in the engine block behind the canteen there was a midday silence all round the camp. Specially so in Mary’s house. There was no sign of the children, though there was evidence of a hurried lunch. The washing up had been forgotten.
Cindie cut herself a sandwich from the new-made bread and a slice of cold meat. She made the tea, then sat down to rest a few minutes and to let the tea draw.
Where, she wondered, are Jinx and Myrtle? A sudden thought assailed her. She jumped up and went outside to an enormous packing crate which was the children’s shed for storing their play things and treasures gathered from the outback. The tins of insects and sand-snakes were gone.
Cindie walked back to the house slowly. It didn’t matter, of course, that Jinx and Myrtle had gone off to keep tryst with their beloved frilled lizard, but it mattered that they had said nothing about it. Mary had warned Cindie that if she wanted to spend her half-day having a sleep-off she might find the children too noisy.
So Mary had expected the children to be around!
Cindie’s steps were even slower as she moved across the room to the mantelpiece. She hated looking behind the clock because she hated the idea of distrusting the children. She would apologise to all the gods in heaven if she found that packet of cigarettes safely there. But look she must. She slid her hand edgeways down the space between the clock and the wall. The cigarettes were gone.
Well, she told herself, determined to be sensible about this, a good long walk would do her good anyway! Besides, she hadn’t seen a frilled lizard. They were big creatures, she knew. They puffed themselves up when they were angry,
or disturbed, and their neck frill, inches wide, stood out like the first Queen Elizabeth’s collar. Hence Jinx’s name for his pet. Swell.
Cindie gave herself all the reasons she could think of for going out in search of the children. Alt but the true one. If Jinx and Myrtle were puffing cigarette smoke into the lizard’s rockery then Mary would have to be told. It would become Mary’s responsibility as to whether the children learned smoking habits by accident, or not. Mary could deal with Flan, and his irresponsible gifts.
Cindie knew the direction the children generally took when they went out. They had told her it was due west towards the sunset sky. Jinx had shown her how he could find due north on his big ‘railway’ watch; from that reckoning, due any-other-direction was easy.
Cindie put her sun-hat on, then walked around behind the two rows of caravan houses on the west side of the camp. Within a few minutes she found where the tyre tracks of her own car led out to the west. This was the way Flan had driven the children out with the tadpole harvest for Swell’s dinner yesterday. Cindie’s car-tracks were the easiest picked up in and around the camp because all the company vehicles had huge thick double-service tyres with deep square-cut grooves against skidding. Her car alone had come north with standard tyres meant for sealed roads. There was a slight veer in the alignment of the front wheels and this had led to extra wear marks on the outside rim of her right-hand front tyre. Cindie recognised these marks too.
A child could pick up the tracks and follow them over that red sandy waste which was all but overgrown with the round hump-shaped spinifex bushes.
Cindie had barely set out along this track, still hidden from Nick’s office by the angle of the second row of caravans, when she heard a Land-Rover starting up from the camp. She stopped and looked out from under the brim of her hat to see where the Land-Rover was going, and if Nick was driving it. Everyone had this casual curiosity for something moving in or out of the stillness of the camp under the blistering sun.
It was Nick.
He was driving off in a southerly direction, the way he had brought her, Cindie, from the river. She thought there might be someone sitting in the front seat with him, but he drove so fast, and the dust-cloud behind him rose so smotheringly quick, Cindie could not be sure of that.
If anybody, it could be Erica. Was he taking her to see the geologist’s latest test holes? Or maybe to the river? Cindie remembered how nice and green and cool that bank
of river gums had been. Here around the camp-site, there was endless nothingness. Forever and ever, it seemed. There was nothing except the clump of white gums at the back of Mary’s house, and an odd bush or two of wattle breaking the flatness of the plain.
She felt a touch of envy because Erica would now be seeing the lovely river gums. Erica would be not so very far away from the crossing, then the road back to Baanyaand Jim Vernon! Funny how just being that much nearer a person: or in a place with which that person was associated, could make one feel as if one were somehow sharing his actual company!
The silly ticking heart that was in Cindie was very unpredictable, she told herself. She was actually jealous of Erica.
Oh, surely not! Erica had Nick, and would never think
of Jim Vernon—matrimonial-wise.
Perhaps they had taken a Thermos. And would have tea!
Funny, how it made her kind of sad. Yet she was glad she was not just a visitor to be shown the sights as a social gimmick. She was glad she was being useful: and gladder still she was earning some money.
One thing for sure, her Holden car would need a set of new tyres after this trip. Someone had mentioned that the
!track to the upper tableland, where Bindaroo stood, was rougher than any to the river or the coast. It was covered with iron flint stone. Yes, she needed every penny of the money she could earn.
As these thoughts flitted through her head, Cindie had
I been walking on, her eyes dropping to the ground every so often to be sure she followed the tracks.
Now and again she looked up towards the west to see if she might be n
earing her destination. Sometime soon, she thought, the flat plain must change its character, if only a little. Swell, the frilled lizard, lived in amongst rocks. There had to be something other than red earth and spinifex.
Once she saw a williwilli of dust start up from nothing to become a tall spiral moving across the spinifex like a spectre out of space. Then subtly this changed to a fizz, dwindling into a dust-ball hanging low over the grass. Finally there was nothing but a faint red haze to show where this beautiful whirling dancing sprite had come to a last nothingness.
Then she saw dark broken lines in the near distance. This must be a shallow piece of breakaway country. Here would be the rocks. Here, with luck, she would find the children.
As Cindie approached these dark rocky outlines she thought she saw, for a moment, a very strange kind of williwilli. It was smoky-white—not brown or red—and though it spiralled up high into the colourless sky, there seemed to be a loose cloud-like formation spreading at its base.
The oddest thing about this particular was that
it did not move. It didn’t whizz or dance away. It stayed still. And the cloud around its base was growing bigger in area. The whisper of spiral had altered shape to become pillow clouds.
Cindie stood still and stared at it.
It was smoke!
Could the children be giving themselves a picnic? A black-coated billy standing between two rocks over a small campfire? But it was too big!
Suddenly she knew panic!
This was a fire. A real spreading fire: not one made to boil a billy. If a wind rose .. .
Cindie started to run.
The rock formation was clear now, more menacing in its stark red-blackness against the backdrop of yellow spinifex plain. The smoke, as the fire spread, billowed in cumulous clouds over a wide area.
Was this where Swell lived? Were the children here? If not
Dear heaven! Her breath, as she ran, came hard and hurt her chest.
A minute later she saw two small shadows dodging in and out of the smoke. They were beating at the ground with sticks.
Myrtle and Jinx! Thank God! The children were all right.
Now Cindie was forced to stop to catch her breath. The perspiration poured from her. The temperature was way more than a hundred.
How did one put out a spinifex fire without shovels, hoses and tree branches with which to beat? Those miserable sticks—and the fire was creeping, creeping! What could have caused it?
The cigarettes!
Cindie started to run again, out of desperation now. Instinctively she picked up an old tree branch, fallen in a
time long past from some wattle long dead. She dragged it with her as she ran.
Minutes later she came to the licking fire that was stealing through the brittle, dried-out spinifex. No roaring blaze here. Just a curving inroad of low orange flames spreading, spreading.
The children were all right. They were beating savagely at the edges of the fire farther round. Cindie started on her side, working her way as she beat, sometimes treading out hot embers with her shoes, breathing deeply, trying to recover her breath.
When she was near enough she called.
`Did you start the fire, Jinx? Oh, never mind what started it! Jinx? How does a spinifex fire stop? Shouldn’t we try to get help?’ She stood now heaving for deep intakes of air before she could go on.
Jinx, like Myrtle, puffing and banging and thrashing the ground, was too busy to answer Cindie except to call back:
`Keep on the east side, Cindie. That’s where it’s going. You stop it there. Myrtle and I’ll stamp the burnt grass on the far side—’
`Swell has disappeared, Cindie. He’ll run in front of the fire. Don’t put your foot on him ‘ Myrtle cried.
Dear heaven! Cindie thought, energy renewed, and furiously beating her stick down on creeping flame. Is a spinifex fire dangerous, or is it just one of those things? If there’s no wind perhaps it will die of its own accord in the night.
She turned away from the smoke to wipe her eyes. The heat had brought tears to them. Then as she lifted her face from her sleeve she saw something. A Land-Rover, followed by a second one, was hurtling over the plain from her left.
Her relief was almost an anticlimax of deflation.
Others had seen the fire-smoke and were coming to the rescue! The troubles weren’t hers any more.
If it was those cigarettes! Cindie thought furiously. I’ll tell Flan he can’t have my car again, ever. And—well—
She nearly promised herself she would slap Jinx and Myrtle. She didn’t believe in slapping, specially other people’s children.
Cindie’s ancient tree stem broke one second before the first Land-Rover came to a dusty halt. Even as the vehicle came to a standstill the door flew open and the driver, a little monkey man, ran round the south side of the fire towards the children. It was Flan. From the other side, his unidentified passenger spilled out at similar speed and attacked a red rivulet of flame with his boots.
Cindie’s own fighting weapon useless, herself breathless and exhausted, she stood still. Her smoke-grimed face meant nothing to her, neither did the streams of perspiration running down her temples and the sides of her cheeks.
Here were men. They would know how to put out a spinifex fire in a treeless plain!
They would even know, she thought wearily, if it matters that several acres of this beastly stuff is burned, anyhow! There’s millions more acres of it to spare.
The second Land-Rover seemed to have come from a slightly different direction from the first. Its tyres now skidded to a stop in their own cloud of red dust, and the drive door swung open. A man, tall, lean and in a blazing hurry, ran through the haze, boots crashing through grass and black cinders towards Cindie.
She stood quite still, suddenly feeling desolate.
He came through the pall of smoke. Nick!
There was incredulity in his face as he stared at her.
Bedraggled, smoke-powdered, exhausted and all, Cindie thought, seeing herself through his eyes. Oh, well. Does it matter?
`What in the name of fortune are you and those children doing out here?’ he demanded. Did you have the bright idea of a picnic out by the rocks? A campfire and all?’
His voice, she decided, was full of sound and fury.
`No one in their right senses,’ he went on, ‘would light a fire on a day with these temperatures. Don’t you know the very air is combustible on the plain when it’s over a hundred degrees?’
Cindie stood quite still, looking at him, and saying nothing. She couldn’t tell tales on the children, of course. But something like anger was creeping over her, as word by word he went about questioning.
So that is what he thinks of me? Not just a waif out of the
river, but a stupid little fool who lights fires in the spinifex? The sheer injustice of Nick’s wrath kept her silent.
She did not answer him.
The man who had come with Flan, having trodden out his own yard or two of flame, moved towards them through the veil of smoke.
Cindie forgot Nick. She blinked her eyes.
Was she having hallucinations? Could it be-?
`Jim!’ Her voice had a fog of smoke and fine cinder in it. `Jim Vernon!’
The heat and cinders smarting in her eyes filled them with
moisture. Or could they be real tears? She wiped them away with the sleeve of her blouse, streaking her face more than ever with fire grime.
Jim saw the silent figure of a young girl taking a cracking lecture from the boss—right on the chin. Those violet eyes, he guessed, were also taking a beating from the fire debris.
`Why—Cindie girl!’ he said gently, as he came up. ‘Cindie Smoke-all-over this time, eh?’
He was bigger than she remembered. Handsomer. He held out his arms.
Without a thought, she went straight into them and buried her grimy forehead against his shoulder.
`Jim! Oh, Jim!’
She closed her eye
s.
He had come! Oh, the relief of it! It wasn’t only the fire—she would have to explain some other time. It was Bindaroo—and this injustice from Nick—
She would never explain to Nick. Never.
I wish he’d go away and get lost, she thought of Nick, burying her face farther in Jim’s shoulder and allowing herself the luxury of one spurt of real firebrand anger at the boss’s expense.
Jim was here, so Nick and his anger didn’t have to matter—well, not for now, anyway!
Cindie had been unaware of a third passenger in Flan’s car. This newcomer was now quietly dislodging herself from the passenger seat. This done, she crossed the intervening space to Nick’s car. It was Erica Alexander.
Cindie had been mistaken in her guess when, earlier in the afternoon, she had seen Nick driving away from the camp with someone seated beside him. That someone had obviously been left elsewhere, for Nick had driven up alone. Erica had come with Jim in Flan’s Rover.
Cindie, a little embarrassed, lifted her head from Jim’s shoulder.
`I’m terribly sorry,’ she apologised to him. `How silly can I be?’ She was conscious of a very smutty face, and cinder-tears still on her lashes. Jim’s eyes were clearer and brighter than she had pictured in her memory.
`Don’t be sorry, Blue Eyes,’ Jim smiled down at her, turn-
CHAPTER IX
ing her heart a little by the kindness in his tone. ‘I can’t imagine a nicer welcome for me. The best ever.’
Nick moved away deliberately. He began checking on the burnt-out edges of the grass. Cindie was relieved at that. She had Jim to herself. His eyes smiled into hers, giving her reassurance. For the moment she didn’t care about anything else in the world.
`Fighting a fire, even a low spinifex one, is no joke for a girl fresh out of a city, Cindie,’ Jim went on in his slow-speaking way. ‘You did darn well even to try. Most newcomers in these parts would have shot through fast.’
`Jim … it’s funny, but we’ve only known one another a short time. I hope you didn’t mind my running to you like that. It was, sort-of, seeing an old friend.’ She had nearly said dear friend, but saved herself in time.