by Lucy Walker
Cindie expelled a long sigh of relief. She hadn’t been scared ‒ well not very much. She had made herself believe in that day-dream of Jim Vernon and the radio air-world of the nor’-west. Now it had come true.
The two doors of the Land-Rover opened, and two men seemed to spill out: one on either side of it.
From the distance they were alike in their dress. They both wore the light-brown clothes, uniform of the outback. On their heads, pulled down on their brows, were their dusty brown cotton hats, like the ones the jungle soldier wore. One was tall and the other short. They stood, their feet slightly apart, hands dug in their belts. They looked across the river at Cindie, who had slipped out of her car now and was staring back at them.
She waved her hand. Unexpectedly, the silent unnerving stance of the two men took the spirit out of her wave: and they did not return it.
Exasperated at having to rescue a traveller?
The tall one pushed his hat on the back of his head, came round the front of the Land-Rover, and began giving the short man instructions. He pointed across the river, then back to their own car. The short man pushed his hat on the back of his head too, then nodded. The first man lent in the window, and when his head and shoulders came out of it he was holding a megaphone.
‘Hullo, over there!’ he called through it. ‘Have you a tow-bar to your car? Raise both arms for “Yes”. Drop both arms by your side for “No”.’
Cindie raised her arms. A tow-bar on her car was pure luck. She had bought the car cheap from a second-hand dealer. It probably had been a country car before it was traded in.
‘Good. Next question. Is your name Cindie Something ‒ maybe Brown?’
Cindie’s chin firmed, just that much. She wished she too had a megaphone. She would have called back ‒ ‘It’s Cindie, but not Something. Just Brown-all-over.’ She was about to be rescued ‒ but she wished they had been as nice about it as she was relieved.
All she could do was raise her arms to signify ‘Yes’.
‘Right! Now listen carefully. Turn your car round rear-end to the river. Move any luggage and gear on to the back seat. That’s two instructions. If you understand both, lift your hands over your head.’
Cindie did as she was told.
‘Right!’ the answer came back. ‘We’re coming across.’
Both men climbed back into the Land-Rover, started up and drove down the sloping bank into the water. Having a four-wheel drive, the Land-Rover could do more than any ordinary car. Cross a river, for one thing. The churning of mud was a wonder to behold, but the Rover kept on moving through the river, water almost up to chassis level. It had a relentless, powerful engine.
Cindie felt her eyes rounding while this was going on. Supposing they bogged! The thought appalled her. She was so concerned about their safe transit she was bound by anxiety to the spot. She also realised that they perhaps considered she could have driven over too ‒ if she had had the nerve. They were annoyed with her. That was it. They hadn’t wanted to come to rescue her. How different from Jim Vernon!
They knew her name was Cindie. That was Jim Vernon’s air-call. The thoughts rattled, unrelated, through her anxious mind.
The Land-Rover churned upgrade now, which meant it had safely made the deep part in the middle of the river. The mud was a chocolate-brown pudding again.
She felt herself tense all over as she watched the front wheels, enormous rippled rubber tyres, roll forward on to dry land, on her side of the river. Only then did she come out of her trance.
The shorter man put his head out of the window.
‘Say, miss, didn’t we tell you to get in your car and turn it round? You forgotten, or something?’
Yes, she had forgotten because she had been fearful that the Rover would bog.
She turned guiltily, and slipped back in her car. She moved the key and pulled the ignition switch. Nothing happened.
‘Oh, no!’ she thought. ‘Not now! Not a flat battery. It isn’t possible.’ She used the choke and pulled the starter button again. The engine clanged, then petered. She tried again, this time using the throttle. The engine barely fired, clanged again, then died. She looked in the rear-vision mirror in despair. The Land-Rover had come to a halt a few yards away and had about-turned. The tall man was out of the car bringing with him a tow-line.
The short man came towards her.
‘You got engine trouble?’ he asked, almost too casually. ‘That why you stopped up here? Or too scared to come across t’other side?’
Cindie decided he was like a brown wizened monkey with his small round lined face, and his quick jerky movements.
‘There was nothing wrong with the engine earlier,’ she said lamely. ‘It was all right when I stopped here. I was warned back along the track not to go over the river if it was down because of clay-bog. I didn’t know what to do ‒’
A shadow was thrown across her window from the other side.
He had to bend quite a lot to look at her through the far window, because this was the tall one. He was different. He was very brown, but not lined. His body was still, yet wary, as if he only moved when ready. Then he’d go into action like the flash of a stockwhip, maybe. His eyes were penetrating, very direct. He was a man of command. Even the quiet, forbidding antagonism she sensed in his bearing did not lessen her own first response to respect him.
‘Are you from Marana Station?’ she asked, hiding an unexpected shyness. He was impressive and she was a little scared of him.
‘I am not,’ he said briefly. ‘We’re down from the construction camp. The thousand-miler. What is the trouble with your starter?’
‘I didn’t think there was any.’ She was flustered and apologetic, though in her heart she wanted to stand up to this man, and keep her dignity.
‘Move out, then, will you?’ he asked briefly. He held the door open for her but looked across to the monkey man who was leaning in the window on the drive side of the car as if time was nothing and they now could take all day. Cindie sensed him telling himself: if women are stupid enough to travel alone in the outback, they ought to learn how to look after themselves first. She scrambled across the passenger seat and slipped out of the car. The taller man had to bend low to ease through the door to the steering wheel.
‘Smell any petrol, Flan?’ he asked his companion. The monkey man sniffed the air.
‘Maybe she’s flooded the carburettor some, boss, but can’t smell anything much enough to worry about.’
The man at the steering wheel moved the gear stick, then pulled the starter. The engine sprang into life and purred as sweetly as if it had been a brand new car straight from the show-floor.
Cindie’s face flushed scarlet, as he glanced at her. His unrelenting expression spoke volumes.
He eased his foot on the throttle and the engine rolled beautifully. He glanced up through the window again.
Her chin went up. ‘I was nervous. I must have stalled it. That’s why ‒’
‘You were still in gear ‒’ he said casually, yet with the hidden superiority of an elder statesman.
‘Jumping ’roos!’ the little monkey man said. ‘She comes across from the coast, maybe all the way up north first ‒ she’s got a city number plate ‒ and she says she’s nervous. She starts a car in gear ‒’
‘Now’s not the time for cracks, Flan,’ the boss said without emphasis, unexpectedly. ‘Nothing will get back over that river in another hour. I’ll back up and turn this car. Get the tow-rope hitched on the bar while I set the luggage up high and back in this lot.’
So he had spared her his spoken annoyance! Cindie was grateful.
She felt lost and just a little forlorn, standing there while her car was backed away and the driver turned it round.
Neither of the men spoke to her again while they went about their business of attaching the tow-rope, then using a kind of winch on the back of the Land-Rover to raise a miniature crane from under the canvas hood. The tow was then attached through a pulley.
‘Poor darling car!’ she said sadly to herself, shaking her head.
She stood by, wanting to offer to help, but afraid of a snub if she said anything. The quiet efficient authority of the two men had an intimidating effect on her.
That dreadful blush about muffing the starter had thrust her straight back into the class of helpless womanhood that should not have become emancipated. She could almost hear what they were thinking. Ought never have left her mother’s apron strings.
Her mother’s apron strings?
Mother without a penny, and not the nerve to find out from those Bindaroo relatives why they had none of her dead father’s investment left!
Chapter Two
They were ready to move now.
The monkey man clambered back into the Land-Rover and eased it forward to tauten the tow-line.
‘Right!’ he called, leaning his brown head and brown-clad shoulders out of the window. ‘Who drives, boss? You or me?’ The boss, out of Cindie’s car now, had been standing with his legs slightly apart again; his hands tucked in his belt.
‘I do, Flan. You get up on the back bumper of the girl’s car and keep it balanced against a cross-drift in the channel.’
There were no pleases or thank-yous in this dialogue. The monkey man jumped out of the Land-Rover again. The boss turned to her.
‘Now, if you’ll get up in the passenger seat, I’ll take you ‒ and your car ‒ across the river. Time is beginning to matter. That water’s risen another inch while we’ve been hitching-up here.’
‘Thank you.’
Cindie wished she didn’t sound diffident. She was letting herself down. Stalling the car, and that dreadful blush, had done it. The sort of thing David had always held against her. She couldn’t understand advanced physics, or why the speed of light had to be so much faster than the speed of sound. Or why someone should land on the moon before 1970. To David she was kissable ‒ when he had time ‒ but scientifically speaking, ignorant. She was tired of that category. The boss glanced at her curiously as he opened the door for her.
‘Want a hand up? The step is a bit high.’
‘No thank you.’ She gathered her remnants of pride together. ‘I don’t understand about universal constants or the speed of sound, but I can run and jump and play tennis. Besides I’m five feet six inches high. Not really a little person ‒’
They stood by the step and he looked straight into her eyes.
‘My name’s Nick Brent,’ he said. ‘I’m in charge of the construction camp on the thousand-miler. That’s a road in the making ‒’
Cindie nodded. ‘Yes, I thought so. I heard about the road back at the coast. I also heard about the river coming down.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh? You heard about the river coming down? Yet you came on? Alone?’
‘Yes. But I didn’t know it would be down before I crossed it,’ she said gravely. ‘That, you see, is the difference. Information, but inadequate information.’
‘Do you always talk like this, Miss ‒ er, Miss Cindie?’
‘Miss Cindie Something. It’s an interesting name, isn’t it? Cindie is short for Cynthia and the Something was bestowed on me, over the air probably. It makes me into a person travelling, incognito. Brown, because I’m brown-all-over, would be nearer the mark.’
‘Very common in the outback,’ he said dryly. ‘Now, Miss Brown, if you don’t mind getting in this Rover, we’ll take off before the river takes the lot of us.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Cindie put her foot on the step. ‘Are we going to Marana Station? It’s not far off, is it?’ she asked.
‘We are not. Marana, and every other station from here to the coast, and from here to the desert on the east, will now be cut off by the river. It curves a lot ‒ if you happened to look at your map at all; and has a dozen creek tributaries ‒’
‘Oh!’ Cindie felt deservedly deflated.
Then where were they going?
She slipped into the passenger seat and Nick Brent clambered in on the far side. He slammed the door after him. He started up; did strange things with the gears, then leaned out of the window and called to Flan, who was now balancing on the elevated bumpers of Cindie’s car.
‘Right, Flan? Then hang on while I give the first pull.’
The Land-Rover began to ease its way cautiously down the river bank. Suddenly it speeded up to make a dash into the water. Nick Brent kept his eyes on the rear-vision mirror.
‘Sorry for the splash,’ he said to Cindie. ‘You may not understand universal constants but you will know that the short sprint was from necessity. I had to keep the pace of this Land-Rover faster than the estimated pace of your car when it began to roll down hill. Otherwise we would have had a rear-end to rear-end collision, Flan nicely minced between.’
‘Yes … I see,’ Cindie said, surprised at her nervousness of this man.
There was silence as the Land-Rover churned its way, both front and rear drives of the car in action, over the sucking mud and through the red-brown water which washed and splashed to the floor level.
‘Your car is nose-deep in water, Miss Brown, because your tow-bar was at the back,’ Nick Brent said looking in the mirror again as he began to climb the far bank. ‘The electrical system will be wet, and until dried out, may not function. Flan will know.’
‘I see. Well, as long as I’m safely over the river, it won’t matter. I can camp. I have gear and stores. I was prepared for an occasional night in the bush if I didn’t make a town or motel on my way up the North-West Highway.’
‘If the river doesn’t go down, you think you can keep right on camping on this side?’
There was a catch somewhere hidden in this question. Something in his voice suggested it. He was still watching the muddy bank as they came up through the buffel grass towards dry land.
‘Well certainly,’ she began. ‘Camping here would be no different from camping on the other side, or anywhere on the track up north …’ She broke off, glancing at his profile uneasily.
‘Exactly,’ he said dryly. He waited for a few minutes, then added quietly, ‘Then why try to cross the river at all? A camp’s a camp, so long as there’s food and water.’
Cindie’s heart seemed to drop with a clang. Here was another person in her life equipped with deadly logic. David in a different guise?
If she was going to camp here, she might as well have camped on the high ground between the billabong and the main bed of the river.
‘I didn’t know how long the billabong would be a bog,’ she protested.
His voice became almost gentle, but not quite.
‘But you should have known, Miss … er … Brown did you say?’
‘Brown-all-over, but you could use just Brown for short.’
He was silent some minutes, then said, ‘Cindie appears to be the name you are known by over Baanya’s radio, so I suggest we settle for that. Right?’
She nodded. ‘You don’t care for Brown?’
‘I don’t mind either way, but everyone north of Twenty-Six goes by his or her Christian name. Settled?’
They had come up the bank, and were rolling along the flat land at the top. Cindie, without looking back through her window, knew by the feel of the engine that her own car had been towed clear of the water.
Nick Brent ran the Land-Rover a good fifty yards across the flat land before he braked to a stop.
‘Cindie it is,’ she agreed. ‘It’s spelled with an “ie”, not a “y”.’
His grey expressionless eyes looked at her.
‘Right,’ was all he said.
‘So where do I go from here?’ she asked quietly, meeting his glance.
‘I have no choice but to take
you up to the construction camp.’
‘The uninvited guest?’
She regretted that, but could not take it back. It was ungracious of her, but then he made his own feelings so clear.
He nodded.
‘I’m afraid so. It’s not the Palace Hotel, nor even an outback motel. It’s the headquarters of a large gang of road-building men. In such a camp women are limited to the necessary few.’
‘Then I could camp here. I would prefer ‒’
‘That would be even more responsibility for us, I’m afraid. If you were snake-bitten, or caught in a willi-willi ‒ and we have enough of them here ‒ you would be more of a liability than if you were up at the construction camp.’
He had spoken very quietly; a man of hour-to-hour problems all day, every day. This was just one more. Suddenly Cindie felt dreadful. Unwanted. Also angry. No one likes to be called a liability.
The little monkey man was off the bumper of her car and at the rear of the Land-Rover. He was releasing the tow-rope. Then, by winding the winch, he swung the crane into place under the canvas cover of the Land-Rover.
Nick Brent leaned out of the drive window.
‘How’s the wiring under the girl’s car, Flan? Is it dry?’
‘It’ll go, boss. I wiped around a bit and tried the engine. She purrs!’
Cindie made a movement to open the door. ‘I’ll take it over …’ she began.
Nick Brent leaned his arms on the steering wheel. ‘Leave it to Flan, Cindie,’ he said, still in that steady voice. ‘He’ll bring it up. Besides, he has a call to make at the gang on the number-four grader. He can go in your car. It’ll be useful.’
Well really!
Cindie leaned back in exasperation. Everything, even her car, was taken out of her hands. They had rescued her. That was wonderfully good of them. Now they carried on as if the rest of her life and belongings were theirs.
The rest of her life!
Cindie was startled at herself.
What a strange expression to have thought up! It had come into her head, like that. Not meaning that at all, either. Yet the effect of it made her feel she had crossed not any river, but the Rubicon.