by Amanda Doyle
Harry’s liquid black eyes sharpened, his grin fading. ‘You-ai, Boss.’ He hesitated. ‘Might that-one gammon me, Boss?’ he asked uncertainly.
Chad’s brow rose ironically as his eyes met Rennie’s. ‘Sure-thing she gammon you, Harry. Garnmon alla-bout. That means “everyone”,’ he told Rennie in a silky aside. ‘ ’Nother-one time, you not listen to youngfella missus. Behind I tell you now, you only listen to this fella, eh, Harry?’ He tapped his own broad chest. ‘ ’Nother-one time might her killem, see.’
‘You-ai, Chad,’ agreed the stockman readily, and then the irresistible grin broke once more. ‘Allasame, youngfella missus she gammon that crankyfella black horse, too, eh, Boss? She prop’ly goodfella rider, that-one, mine t’inkit!’
Harry shook his head reflectively, slid a fleeting look of unmistakable admiration in Rennie’s direction, and jogged away in pursuit of his quarry.
‘Mine t’inkit, too, Renata!’ Murtie chuckled. ‘You most certainly taught that black brute a lesson I reckon he never thought to get. He had it coming to him. And I really believe you had him in hand all the time.’
‘Of course I did, Murtie. I was just letting him get the steam off, that was all. If you two hadn’t come up like a pair of mad things, I’d have slackened him off when he tired. As it was, I still don’t quite know what happened,’ she admitted, giving the old man an answering smile, albeit a somewhat pallid one.
Chad’s mouth twisted grudgingly.
‘He only did what he’s been taught to do. He swung on a sixpence, Renata. That is another way of saying that he turned right around almost in his own length, like every good stock-horse should be able to do, by the time Harry and I have finished with him! You must unwittingly have given him the signal.’
She looked mystified.
‘I don’t think I did. I — I don’t think I did anything.’
‘Then he did it himself,’ Chad told her, and for the first time amusement chased the sternness from his expression. ‘He’s highly intelligent, that horse, but inclined to be wilful and disobedient—like someone else I could name right now,’ he added, his mouth suddenly tightening again.
‘You’ve gotter admit that Harry’s right, though, eh, Chad?’ insisted Murtie. ‘You’re some rider, Renata, you most certainly are! Dead sweet! It was just that turn that got you, that’s all, and yer can’t be blamed fer that, bein’ a city rider.’ The old man smiled at her kindly. ‘It’s like the poet said—Lawson, it was, you’ll recall, Chad?—
“You may talk about your ridin’ in the city, bold an’ free,
Talk o’ ridin’ in the city, Texas Jack, but where’d you be
When the stock-horse snorts an’ bundles all ’is quarters in a hump,
An’ the saddle climbs a sapling, an’ the horseshoes split a stump?” ’
Chad’s features relented at last.
‘O.K., Murtie, you win,’ he told the older man pleasantly—but there was a tiredness in his voice that Rennie had never detected before, a tiredness that was more than just his usual deep drawl. ‘Now, let’s get back to work. See that Harry gets that horse yarded again, will you, Murt? Come, Renata, I’m taking you home.’
‘Home?’ Barrindilloo, home? Well, she supposed it was that to Chad Sandasen, even if not to herself.
‘Go on, up you go.’ Chad held his stallion and placed a hand beneath her elbow.
Rennie opened her mouth to protest, caught the steely glint in his eye, the flicker of that tiny muscle as his jaw firmed, and decided not to argue. She fumbled her way into the saddle, stiff now, as her muscles protested at her recent fall, and Chad Sandasen swung up behind her and put his aim about her. As he urged his horse forward, he drew her back against him, clasping her body to him so that she could feel the steady beating of his heart through the cloth of the khaki bush-shirt that he wore. Or was it her own heart’s beating, after all? It could be, for it was thudding uncomfortably quickly. Her own puke-beat drummed in her ears, because she couldn’t help her awareness of Chad Sandasen’s arm about her, holding her to him. His bare forearm was right there whenever she dropped her eyes—sunburnt, muscular, fuzzed over thickly with bleached hairs that glinted against the brownness in the sun. His other hand held the reins loosely.
Rennie raised her eyes again, but somehow that brought the back of her head too near to his. She was conscious of his chin just behind her crown, could feel the warmth of his breathing close to her ear, could smell the mingled aroma of shaving lotion and dust and leather and tobacco that she had come to associate with Chad.
She dropped her head once more, and there was that arm again, steady and firm about her. It held her in a careful, impersonal sort of way. Rennie gazed at the rippling muscle, the strong wrist, the brown competent fingers—wondered what it would be like to be held by that arm in a way that wasn’t careful, wasn’t impersonal. Chad’s hand was broad-backed, masculine, an ‘outdoor’ sort of hand. Yet it was also sensitive, incapable of clumsiness. Rennie had observed those same square-tipped fingers performing many tasks over the past weeks, and it occurred to her now that whatever they did, they possessed a sureness, an artistry, all their own, whether they were splicing a rope or plaiting a stockwhip or fixing a brand or a stencil, or simply rumpling Magda’s hair or stroking his tanned, clean-shaven chin in that reflective manner in which he sometimes did when he was looking at Rennie herself in that uncomfortably penetrating way.
One good thing, sitting as she was now Rennie did not have to meet Chad’s eyes. There was something for which to be thankful, because if he had been able to look into her face, he would surely have seen the delicate flush of colour creeping up amongst the dust and pallor at the trend her thoughts had taken.
The burnt plain stretched before them, mulga-dotted, shimmering in its own private lake of heat-reflections. High in the sky, a sparrow-hawk wheeled and floated, a drifting speck up there in the blue. Save for that distant, winging bird there were only herself and Chad and this horse in the whole wide world just now.
Only herself and Chad.
She cast a quick glance behind her, to his sternly set face.
Chad, at his most unreadable and enigmatic. His hat was pulled right down. Its brim was almost level with his jutting, sun-bleached brows, and his glittery eyes were narrowed as they so often were, looking right over the top of her head into the distance. They were green, unfathomable, slitted against the glare in that crinkled, wrinkled way which she had also come to associate with Chad. His mouth was set in a grim, straight line that made him seem at once remote, yet forbidding. Only the deep groove near its left-hand corner reminded her that that mouth could curve, with a sort of fascinating tenderness, into one of those rare curly smiles.
It wasn’t smiling now, though. It was as grave, as remote, as the rest of him.
The little sparrow-hawk had gone. It had banked into the sun and glided right out of sight. A couple of crows had replaced it up there, flying lower on a ragged, indeterminate course, without the eagle grace of their predecessor, sky-high in the blueness. They emitted harsh, raucous cries that were like sad, slow laughs, as if they were deriding Rennie for her thoughts.
Har! Har! Har!
‘I hate those horrid black birds,’ she decided under her breath, ‘and they’re everywhere out here. Always waiting, watching. Probably just biding their time for some less fortunate creature to weaken and die. They’re like this whole landscape—remorseless in a horrible, patient sort of way. Their cries are like warnings, doom-calls to the faltering.’
Rennie had seen the way those crows could descend to pick and pull at some unlucky carcass almost before oblivion had come to it. She knew that all forms of life must eat to survive, but there was something indecent about the haste with which they dropped down to their carrion meal, guided from miles of distance by an instinctive knowledge of death—or, worse, mere helplessness.
She shuddered, felt the immediate, reassuring tightening of Chad’s arm pulling her closer, although he did not
speak. The pine and tobacco aroma mingled with the dust thrown up by the stallion’s cantering hooves.
The crows were circling above a wilga tree, and now they settled in its topmost branches and jeered. They looked like ragged pieces of torn black cloth fluttering amongst the boughs. She was glad that they followed no further, even though it meant that there were now just herself and Chad and the horse again. Rennie could do without those crows!
It seemed unbelievable that that black rogue-horse had brought her so far in his maddened gallop. Rennie had been expecting to see the homestead buildings materializing on the horizon for the last mile or so. When they did, she could scarcely conceal a sigh of pure relief.
She stiffened away from Chad, leaning forward over the stallion’s withers, and made a pretence of patting the sweat-foamed neck. It was wet beneath her fingers.
The animal did not stop at the saddling-yard, but was urged on by its rider until it came to a halt at the gate in the white paling fence that surrounded the house.
There, Chad swung down, passed the reins through the stirrup, looked up at Rennie, and held out his arms to take her as she dismounted.
As he stood there, booted and spurred, with his wide felt hat tipped back on his head as he looked up, she noted with some surprise that he was paler than usual. Those strange, eucalyptus-green eyes were inscrutable, but there was a sober, purposeful, waiting quality in him that caused a sudden flutter of pure panic in Rennie just then.
When one allows oneself to be overwhelmed by panic, one is apt to do something stupid, and afterwards she was forced to admit that her next, confused action was both ill-considered and foolish, and with a result far more disastrous and unexpected than she could ever have anticipated.
Rennie had scarcely scrambled awkwardly down upon the other side of the horse—the wrong side—than she felt a vice-like grip on her elbow, and she was turned violently and precipitately, without volition, right into Chad Sandasen’s arms.
If she had thought herself close to him up there in the saddle, it was nothing to what she was now. His arms were like steel bands about her, forcing her against him, so that she could feel the hardness of his thigh muscles against her own through the thin denim-cloth of her once-smart, dusty jeans. The buckle of his low-slung kangaroo-hide belt dug sharply into her soft flesh through her shirt, and her face was muffled into his khaki-clad chest in a way that made breathing difficult.
Rennie managed to turn her head sideways, took a grateful gulp of air, her mind lurching so crazily that it was impossible to think.
Chad’s fingers forced her chin up so that she had to look at him.
‘You’ve been avoiding me, Renata,’ he accused, and even his voice seemed strange and thick and unfamiliar to her reeling senses. ‘Why?’
He shook her almost savagely, and Rennie could only blink.
What was this? A dream? A nightmare? Was it really happening?
It war!
And it went right on happening, too!
Rennie knew, instinctively, a split second before he did it, just what Chad meant to do. She could read his purpose, right there in his eyes. They were like cold silver streams, drowning her in their icy depths, narrowed and calculating. When his lips came down on hers, they, too, were cool. Cool and firm and forceful. Brutal. Ruthless.
Rennie struggled, knew the futility of it. There was no escape from those cool, firm, seeking lips.
There was no passion in Chad Sandasen’s kiss—only anger, a deadly self-assurance and a certain experienced thoroughness. When he finally put her away from him, Rennie stood quivering, her vision blurred, instinctively covering her bruised lips with the back of a hand that shook visibly.
The man whose eyes sought hers so boldly was well aware of that shaking hand, Rennie knew, and despised herself for the trembling that she was unable to control. Speechlessly she watched him raise his hat and re-settle it at a lower angle over his brow with a gesture that almost mocked.
‘If there has to be a reason for keeping out of my way, Renata, you’ve got one now,’ Chad told her smoothly.
And then he turned away, flung the reins over his horse’s head, swung up into the saddle again and rode off without a backward glance, leaving Rennie standing there near the small white gate in the paling fence with her hand still pressed to her lips, gazing dully after him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ash Ryarton was in a teasing mood next morning.
‘You’ve made headlines on the galah today, Rennie,’ he joked.
‘I?’ She was startled.
‘Weren’t you listening in? You should have been,’ Ash rebuked her somewhat whimsically. ‘The whole world knows we’ve a crack rider here on Barrindilloo now, according to Elspeth.’
‘Oh!’ Rennie was embarrassed—actually relieved, too, that it was only her riding that was the apparent subject of that gossipy interchange on the open transceiver session this morning. Her cheeks were scarlet with the memory that obsessed her own thoughts today—that of Chad Sandasen’s punishing kiss!
‘H-how could they possibly know?’ she collected herself sufficiently to ask Ash, bringing her mind to what he was saying with an effort.
He leaned on the corner of his desk and shrugged.
‘That’s the biggest unsolved mystery that ever was, Rennie, I guess—how these little titbits get abroad without even the aid of the mulga wire! They’ve got it, anyway, the whole dam story. Elspeth says the listeners were delighted at the sheer improbability of it all—the young English model girl at Barrindilloo who put on a rodeo all on her own.’ He chuckled. ‘They’re all delighted, except, probably, for one person, and that’s Leith. She likes to be the best girl rider we’ve got in these parts. She won’t care to have her position threatened by an outsider—and a Pommy one at that! Maybe that’s why Chad’s gone off this morning—to simmer her down a bit. He’s an artful cove when it comes to soothing sheilas’ ruffled feathers!’
‘Gone off?’ Rennie blinked, scarlet again. ‘Has he gone away?’
Ash nodded.
‘In his plane, this morning. With his best city duds on, too. Looked as if he could be planning a week-end on the tiles in one of the capitals, if you ask me. Probably he’ll call for Leith and take her with him.’
Rennie thought that over.
A vision of Leith’s pretty red head beside Chad’s own swarthy one in that lovely silver aeroplane had no particular appeal this morning. She supposed she was feeling sour with the whole world, that was why! She had slept only fitfully, and when the kookaburras started laughing in the dawn of a new day, down at the creek, they had seemed to be deriding her, just as those nasty black crows had done yesterday.
Hoo-hoo—haha! Hoo-hoo—haha! they had mocked, and Rennie had turned her head into her pillow, trying to shut out the sound.
‘Don’t you ever go, too, Ash—when he goes off like that?’ She determinedly controlled her thoughts again. ‘Don’t you ever want to go, just for the ride?’
The book-keeper grimaced.
‘I’ve told you how it is with me, Rennie. I’d go actually, sometimes—just for the ride, as you say. But permanently, never. I reckon this is my home. I feel sort of odd down there in the Big Smoke now. I’m not as young as I used to be, you know. My days of doing the town all night, like Chad does, are past! I suppose I’ll end my days here, now that I’m back.’
Murtie unwittingly echoed Ash’s pronouncement later that very morning.
‘So Chad’s off on the skite, is ’e?’ he asked interestedly. ‘I thought somethin’ was bitin’ him earlier this mornin’, when he came clatterin’ down ter the camp around piccaninny daylight. ’E must’ve got the itch overnight!’ He sighed. ‘I wouldn’t of minded stowin’ away fer a jaunt meself, on’y three’s a crowd, and it’s a fair bet he’ll be takin’ Leith Mindon with ’im, if you arst me.’
Rennie hadn’t asked him. She certainly hadn’t! Why on earth did everyone have to talk about Leith Mindon this morning—Leith and Chad? Fir
st Ash, and now Murtie.
‘What would you do if you went with Chad, Murtie? If you stowed away?’
Murtie bared his tobacco-stained teeth in a sheepish grin.
‘Make a beeline fer the nearest pub, prob’ly, an’ have a bit of a bender,’ he confessed amiably, ‘just like a drover’s bullock’ll make fer that water-hole after a dry stage. I like it fer a while, see, Renata. But the city life fer keeps’d be enough ter give me white ants in the billy, s’truth, it would!’ Murtie tapped his grey head comically.
‘Don’t you ever feel you’ve missed anything, Murtie, living away out here?’ she asked curiously, looking away to those far, endless, monotonous horizons. ‘I mean, all this space and just a handful of people, and knowing there are other exciting places, crammed with sights and sounds and all the wonderful man-made advances that you can’t possibly experience out here?’
‘Huh!’ Murtie unstuck his cigarette from between his lips and waved it in front of his face disparagingly. ‘Sometimes, when man advances, God retreats,’ he told her cuttingly. ‘You earmark that, young Renata, an’ think it over.’
‘Then you don’t have any regrets?’
‘Regrets? Fer what?’ the old man shook his head firmly. ‘Reckon I’m too old ter start regrettin’, Renata. I wouldn’t know where ter begin, an’ where ter leave off. No, I reckon I’m like the poet said—
“For good undone and gifts misspent and resolutions vain,
’Tis somewhat late ter trouble. This I know—
I should live the same life over, if I had ter live again,
And the chances are I go where most men go.”
‘That’s my philosophy, as well, I reckon, Renata. She’s a beaut philosophy, that—an’ I’ll probably go somewhere a good bit hotter than what it is here at, Barrindilloo, too!’