“Thank you, Joel,” she said as he opened the gate of the paddock and Starlight followed Ranger out to the track. The ringer took his tin of tobacco and papers out of his pocket and rolled himself a cigarette without looking at it, deftly, with one hand. He licked the paper and lighted the cigarette automatically, his eyes following the horses. Jane was holding her reins correctly and sitting nicely in the saddle, though obviously the long stirrup was bothering her a bit. Style wasn’t what you needed here, he thought, but just horse sense. He thought Jane and Starlight would get along all right. But his eyes were thoughtful as he watched their leisurely progress down the track; Steve, sitting easy as always on his big black stallion, was turning and smiling at the girl by his side.
“Anythin’ in it?” Rory joined him at the rail, watching too. “Steve don’t go for entertainin’ females, much.”
Joel shrugged. As manager of the station he had a certain discretion. “It’s their business.”
Rory grinned. “All right. I haven’t asked the boys to place their bets yet! But I sure would enjoy seeing Miss High-an’-Mighty Alison come a purler. She was always givin’ orders as if she owned the property!”
“That’s all off.” Joel spoke shortly, returning to the harness room. “You won’t be bothered with the Finches again.”
“That’s right by me.” Rory winked at Cal and resumed his polishing though his saddle was already shining like a burnished chestnut. “D’you think he’ll let her ride in the Ladies’ Handicap?” he asked later, meaning Jane.
“Shouldn’t think so. She won’t have time to get to know her mount or the course in four days,” one of the older, grizzled stockmen answered.
“D’you know what’s crook with the little one?” another of the ringers asked lazily. They worked as they gossiped, unhurriedly, but putting a lot of energy and pride into the job. They knew that every station within a hundred miles of Oonga would be sending its best horses, riders, and turnouts to the races. A lot of money would change hands, mostly to the benefit of the tote; a lot of beer would be consumed and as many unmarried girls as turned up would be propositioned one way or another. But behind the bi-annual fun and games of the races, the pleasure for lonely men of being in a crowd for once and the social niceties of the occasion, there was a passionate, dedicated but on the whole good-natured competition between the stations for their own turnout’s showing in the events.
Ron, the young jackaroo, said eagerly, “Moonie says she was injured in a car accident. It killed her old lady and all. There ain’t nothin’ really crook with her legs, it was the shock an’ all.”
“You shouldn’t go talking about homestead affairs with that gin,” Joel said severely. “Pete and his missus are O.K. but Alison put ideas into Moonie’s head. Talkin’ about the city all the time, givin’ her clothes. Wonder she ain’t skipped it to Brisbane or Sydney tryin’ to get herself a job as a model or somethin’.”
There was general laughter and the young jackaroo, red-faced, said stubbornly, “I bet she could. If she was dressed right. Moonie’s pretty—for an Abo.”
The laughter died suddenly.
Joel drawled with finality, “If you want to stay on the Blue River, Ron, keep away from the boongs. Steve don’t go for combo men here.”
He added, after a silent interval, “He don’t go for gossip, neither. We’re supposed to be men, not a pack of gossiping old women.”
The jackaroo slung his saddle on its rack and went out, the back of his neck still red.
After a time one of the older ringers said, “Bit hard on him, weren’t you, Joel? He’s young.”
‘That’s the time to learn, if you’re ever goin’ to learn,” Joel retorted without heat, standing back to look at the final burnishing of his silver with the wallaby-leather. “Ron’s all right. But they don’t have no natives where he comes from. Moonie’s young, too, silly—and there’ll be trouble up at the camp if Ron starts anythin’ with her.”
“Too right. Pete wouldn’t stand for no funny business,” Cal grinned.
“Steve neither,” Rory added, and after that there was talk of nothing but their chances in the forthcoming races.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JANE had ridden horses and loved them all her life—she had had her Dartmoor pony at Jamie’s age, and so had Lisa. She soon got used to Starlight’s long, rocking stride, though he was hands higher than anything she had ridden before and she felt a long way from the ground; she missed, too, the security of the short stirrup giving her bent knees a firm grip, but Starlight responded obediently to the slightest pull on the reins or a touch from her foot. Soon she began to enjoy the slow climb along the hill track above the winding river; she looked about her with interest. To their right the hay-coloured grasslands stretched for miles and miles to the hills on the distant horizon; in the bright early-morning sunlight the whole vast plain was bathed in a golden haze, broken here and there by a hillock or a group of trees, some of them bare and bleached as if they had been struck by lightning.
To their left the tussock grass, greener here, sloped down towards the thick belt of bush and tall trees on the near bank of the river. They were high enough to get an occasional glimpse of the river between the banks, and it was as blue as the sky above their heads.
As blue as Stewart had said it was. Jane winced, remembering how she had sat by her fire, in Stewart’s arms, listening like a romantic schoolgirl to his slow Queensland drawl describing this place.
“Is it as good as he said it was?” Another, deeper drawling voice said at her side. Steve reined in and looked at her quizzically. He had an uncanny knack of reading her thoughts.
“Yes,” she answered angrily. But the anger was for Stewart, and herself—not for the man waiting patiently by her side. She stole a glance at him; dark, craggy-featured man and black horse were silhouetted against the vivid blue sky, so still for a moment that they might have been carved from ebony.
“It’s beautiful,” she added slowly, “at least he didn’t cheat me about that.”
Steve slewed round in the saddle and cast a wide glance over the familiar landscape.
“Some people would call it the end of the world, Jane,” he said drily.
“City people?” she smiled suddenly. “I was born and brought up on Dartmoor, Steve. Of course the distances are nothing like this, and it’s colder and damper—but the Moor can look like the end of the world, too, sometimes. Miles and miles of nothing but heath and bracken and tumbled, savage-looking rocks. And in winter we get the fogs, too—and snow blizzards. Cattle and sheep can die of cold and starvation there—though they’re dropping feed from helicopters in severe weather now, since the freeze-up we had a few years ago.”
He nodded seriously. “I saw it in the newsreels, in the cinema. It was funny, sitting in the open-air cinema with the temperatures up in the eighties—the wet came late that summer—watching those blizzard scenes in the West Country. Sort of unbelievable. The chaps flying those helicopters were pretty brave, I guess.”
She nodded, remembering. “Dad couldn’t get the car out for thirteen weeks. The helicopters dropped food for us, too, and mail. We were lucky to have the telephone and our battery radio set still working, though,” she smiled a little sadly. “I had a week’s Christmas leave from hospital that year, and I couldn’t get back to London for a month! Then a tractor got me down to the Plymouth Road, where they had snow ploughs working, and I got a train from Newton Abbott to Paddington.”
“It certainly was a freak winter for you, that year. My great-uncle John survived it, though.”
“He was lucky. A lot of old people didn’t. My father had to do his rounds on horseback.” Jane stooped and patted Starlight’s smooth neck, her thoughts back in that terrible winter. Her father must have known then that he was a sick man, but he had carried on without a word of complaint under the most appalling conditions. She had never known a blizzard like it before or since, with the drifts of hard-packed snow piling up before they could be
cleared, and when the thaw finally came there were layers of solid ice still between the five-foot-deep layers of packed snow; her mother had described it in an amusing letter ... “I've picked three violets that were in bloom when the first snow began on Boxing Day—they’ve been under four feet of this iced layer-cake and they’re in perfect condition! You’d think the poor things would have been squashed flat by the weight alone—”
“The horse has been man’s best friend, I guess, since the world began.” Steve was smiling at the picture Jane made, sitting easily on the big roan. This morning she’d had the sense to wear a linen hat though she’d come out early, and now in the bright sunlight it shaded her small, piquant features. Nubby was right, he decided; Lisa was the obviously pretty one, with her air of golden blue-eyed fragility—but Jane’s tip-tilted nose and wide, generous mouth and small stubborn chin were attractive in quite a different way.
When she turned her head and met his gaze full on, he grinned in a friendly way. Those big brown eyes, he thought, were like the pansies his mother used to grow in a shady corner of the garden, when the evening sunlight just caught them before sunset. There were dancing golden specks in the brown velvet then, just like Jane’s eyes now.
“He still is, out here,” he said, touching Ranger’s I flank lightly with his soft-soled ringer’s boot and they began climbing again leisurely, “even in this scientific day and age. When the monsoon rains come all the lowlands are flooded, all the creeks and rivers in spate. Sometimes even the Land Rovers can’t get through. But if you know the terrain, the shallow fords, you can always get through on horseback.”
“Do you get cut off then, for months at a time?” Jane asked with interest. Remembering the seventy-mile drive from Oonga yesterday over tracks that were mostly on the fiat, she could imagine it being pretty isolated at the Blue River if that was so.
“Days, weeks sometimes, not months. Sometimes, we get thirty or forty inches of rain between the end of December and April—but it’s not continuous. We’re lucky to have an all-weather landing strip on the plateau too.” Steve walked his horse beside her in leisurely fashion, interested and amused by her reactions to this new world, but all the time his grazier’s eyes were ranging the landscape, alert for anything untoward—for the hovering carrion in the distant plain that would mean dead or dying cattle that had strayed too far from the bores; for a windmill that was not working properly over a well, as it should be working up this fair easterly breeze. “The sun comes through every now and then, and sets us steaming and drying.” He tried to think of a simile for this English girl who had never lived through a tropical monsoon in her life.
“I guess it’s like a Turkish bath,” he said, still smiling a little. “This is healthy, dry heat. In the wet it’s so humid you get mildew on leather—sometimes you feel you’ve got whiskers growing out of your ears and webbed feet!”
She chuckled. “Gumboot and raft weather? Or do you have to stay indoors?” She couldn’t imagine this man cooped up in the homestead for days or weeks at a time, even though there was a radio and shelves and shelves of books in the living-room.
“No.” He shook his head. “We have to keep the stock moving to higher ground as much as we can. The silly beggars drown if they’re left to themselves. Bush-bred cattle don’t have much sense.”
“Poor things!” Jane looked out over the golden plain beginning to shimmer with heat-haze already. “I can’t imagine animals drowning out there—can’t they climb up to these low hills?”
Steve laughed shortly. “Thousands of them! They have one thought in their heads, mostly—to stick near the bores. The water holes. In the dry they die of starvation because they’ve eaten all the grazing round the bores—unless we ride them off in the morning to new pasture and bring them back at night. In the wet they return to the bores—and stand in the water until they drown or starve. Of course, they’re mostly young and inexperienced at this time of the year—we’ve finished mustering the older cattle to the railhead until after the wet.”
“Jamie told me. You had three musters, didn’t you—is that a good year? How many cattle would that be?” He laughed ruefully. “You interested in farming, or just being polite?”
“I’m interested. I come from farming country—and moorland fanning at that. In some ways it presents the same problems, Steve—though not in your astronomical cattle figures and distances and climate, of course. But the moorland cattle are grazing Crown lands, and run pretty wild. They have to be hardier than the hand-fed cattle down in the fertile valleys farms. They’re mostly Belted Galloways and Herefords, on the Moor.” He nodded. “Herefords are tough. They can stand heat or cold, seemingly. I suppose we railed about twenty or thirty thousand head in the three mobs. That’s a pretty good year—considering we had so little winter rain. I dare say we lost a thousand or two in this dry.”
“In spite of moving them around every day?”
“Yeah. You don’t count heads here, like you do on an English farm. I’ve only about twenty hands, black and white, and a good many square miles to cover. It takes some riding. The boys are due for their holiday.”
After a while they turned their horses along a track that led down towards the river, and in the greener paddocks Jane saw a herd of well-fed cattle grazing. Steve explained that these were the dairy cattle for the homestead, “What you’d call the home farm, I guess. Only we never bring them in for shelter. They’re machine-milked in the sheds near the generator and turned out again.”
Jane thought of the thin-looking sheep she had seen grazing the distant plains and asked why they were not brought down to these richer pastures.
“Oh, that would kill them!” Steve grinned at her ignorance. “You a Moorland girl and don’t know there’s nothing worse for sheep than the lush grass that grows by water!”
Jane laughed ruefully. “I’ve lived most of my life surrounded by farms, but there’s an awful lot to learn!” She was glad of the shade as the track entered the belt of trees and thick bush that girded the river, and they were met by the sweet, spicy odour of the gums that had delighted her yesterday. The brightly plumaged small parrakeets flew away squawking at their approach, and now she could see plainly the wide blue river through the tree trunks. Somewhere farther upriver there was the sound of men’s voices, and the louder background noise of machinery. As the path turned again and followed the twists and turns of the winding river she saw a small waterfall; the sound of the water rushing over the weir was refreshing and she wished aloud that she had brought her swimsuit.
Steve laughed. “We’ve a better pool just above the homestead. Are you hot already?”
“Very! This is like a midsummer day at home. But nice. Lisa loves the heat.”
“You may find it trying in the wet. The humidity and the insects get worse at the start. But you soon get used to it, and it gets cooler after a week or two.”
“We shan’t be here then,” Jane answered shortly, and he turned and looked at her curiously. The path along the river was narrower and he was riding a little ahead.
“Don’t be too sure,” he said cryptically. “Suppose Lisa is still liking it—and getting better every day. Wouldn’t you stay and see the cure completed?”
“It won’t happen like that,” she said quietly, “why should it, when she’s had the best possible specialist treatment without success?”
“But she wasn’t happy then. She’s been toting a burden of guilt for your mother’s death, hasn’t she? All the specialist treatment in the world can’t cure that. But happiness can—and new adventures to take her out of herself.” Steve had stopped Ranger for a moment. He spoke gently, without emphasis. “Face facts, Jane. You hadn’t the money to take her right away from it all—I guess it was all you could manage, those clinic bills and things. Now she’s got some new interests. Having you here won’t cost me anything to hurt. I told you, miracles are two a penny at the Blue River.”
She could well believe it, sitting her patient horse in the
dappled shade of the blue gums, watching the swift-flowing river. “I feel such a complete fraud,” she said at last, unhappily. “It’s worse because you’re being so generous about it all, Steve.”
He laughed shortly. “What did you expect me to do—put you on the next flight back to England? When my own cousin was responsible for bringing you here?
It boils down to this, Jane—are you going to let your stubborn pride do Lisa out of her chance of happiness—and perhaps a little miracle?”
She stared at him, full of conflicting thoughts. Lisa ... was she always going to be blackmailed in one way or another because of Lisa’s accident...?
“You really believe in your miracles, don’t you?” she said at last, wonderingly.
“Sure.” He thought of others who had come to Queensland feeling their lives had been broken, and found new hope and strength, Nubby and some of the ringers and Old Quinsy and Dr. Paul among them. “I’ve seen them happen.”
She said in a small voice, “Can one expect a miracle for Lisa when—when the whole thing was founded on a hoax—a cruel and wicked hoax?”
“That wasn’t Lisa’s fault, was it? Or yours?” Steve gave her a sudden, tender smile that held none of his usual dry mockery, and reached back to touch her hand gently. It was a brief caress, over in an instant. “Relax, Jane. Give yourself and Lisa a break. Try and forget that you came to the Blue River through Stewart. Just believe that now I’m over the shock I’m really glad you’ve come—and Nubby is in seventh heaven!” He turned away and began riding slowly ahead, because he had seen the tears sparkling in her eyes. Funny little Jane, he thought. It must have been quite a while since anyone did anything for her ... Lisa was right. Since her father’s death Jane had shouldered ' most of the family responsibilities, and for the past eighteen months all of them—in addition to her own grief for the loss of her parents and her sister’s paralysis.
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