The Ranger in the Hills: A Heartwarming Australian Outback Romance Read online

  The Ranger in the Hills

  Lucy Walker

  Copyright © The Estate of Lucy Walker 2020

  This edition first published 2020 by Wyndham Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1966

  www.wyndhambooks.com/lucy-walker

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover artwork images © Jeremy Red / Adamov_d (Shutterstock)

  Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd

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  Books by Lucy Walker

  from Wyndham Books

  The Call of the Pines

  Reaching for the Stars

  The River is Down

  Girl Alone

  The One Who Kisses

  The Ranger in the Hills

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Books by Lucy Walker

  Chapter One

  ‘I am looking for Mr. Gideon Dent,’ Katie said. ‘Could you tell me where I might find him, please?’

  She stood with her young brother Andrew at the side of the gravel road outside the one lonely store of Malley’s Find. The store-keeper had come down the step to pick up the mail bag and the corded bundle of papers. They had been left by the Overlander as it had paused on its long thousand mile journey to drop off two passengers, and the bags, for Malley’s Find.

  The Overlander was going, going, gone now, wrapped in a garment of dust as it moved along the yellow gravel road out into the wild country towards the plains and Border lands.

  Katie noticed its going, and thought about it with a sudden pang of anxiety as of one who had lost the last tie with home: and the place from whence one had come.

  Andrew sat down on a log at the side of the road and watched the massed ants busily crossing the gravel space.

  ‘Please …’ said Katie, holding her head high with a sort of necessary dignity because the store-keeper was looking at her with an air that said it was a peculiar and unheard-of thing for a strange girl to step off the Overlander bus and not be met; not even quite know where she was going, or where to find the person she sought.

  ‘Gideon Dent?’ He wiped his hand over his face, finishing up with a quick washing movement of his chin as if removing the last of the shaving soap.

  ‘Gideon Dent.’ The store-keeper said the name; not asked it, this time.

  ‘You know him, of course,’ Katie put in quickly. ‘I wrote to him here ‒ care of the store. My father said the letter would reach him. He answered it ‒ I mean, Gideon Dent answered it. He is a kinsman ‒’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. I misremembered hearing that name in years. Then a letter came. A man fetched it away. He wasn’t Gideon Dent, I’ll wager that. A tall chap he was. Looked as if he owned the earth by the way he walked. Grey eyes. I remember them particularly. Like they’d bore through you cold, if they so wanted. He was a stranger ‒’

  The store-keeper, a man in his middle fifties and dressed in cotton drill trousers and open-necked shirt, moved his hand with that thoughtful wiping movement over his face again.

  ‘Maybe they could tell you over at the hotel ‒’

  He looked at the girl standing there.

  She wasn’t much more than a girl anyway. Nineteen? Maybe twenty at the most. She was pretty in a tired dusty way because she had come a long long way on that bus. Maybe as far as from Perth on the Swan River. That was where the fortnightly Overlander started from. Bang outside the railway station. Five-thirty a.m. every second Tuesday morning.

  She was pretty all right, with a roundish face though her chin pointed nicely. It pointed upwards right now because she was proud and was showing it. One thing for certain, he’d better not show pity because she was stranded right here in Malley’s Find where there was one store, one pub, a stockyard and galvanised-iron shed and that was the lot, bar the gum trees. It was a stopping-off place, that was all.

  What’s more Gideon Dent hadn’t been anything but a name ever: a sort of someone out there through the Gap in the never-never land. People out on the farms talked about him but the store-keeper had never seen him. Not right here in Malley’s Find, anyway.

  That stranger who had come in here and picked up the letter hadn’t been heard of round these parts much, either. Some said he had land right inland. Some said he worked a syndicate round the old gold diggings ‒ through that Gap and on for five hundred miles into the real outback.

  ‘It’s farming country round here,’ the store-keeper said to Katie, continuing his thoughts aloud rather than being explicit about her inquiries. ‘Anyone who owns or works farms round here I know ‒’

  ‘But he answered my letter,’ Katie persisted. ‘He said he would meet us. That is ‒ he said he would meet Andrew. I decided at the last minute to come too ‒’

  She stopped and bit her lip.

  She didn’t have to tell the store-keeper her life history, let alone explain why she was here. All she needed to ask of him was where she might find Gideon Dent, her father’s cousin.

  She watched him with troubled patient eyes as he stooped to lift the bundle of papers. She had come a long, long way indeed. Right across Australia by bus and train, and train again, then the Overlander to bring Andrew to their cousin. Second cousin as Andrew always pointed out. Gideon Dent was their father’s cousin. Not theirs. Andrew, who was silent most of the time, day-dreaming and not always with us about the daily chores of living, was very particular about some things. The things that interested him.

  He was a mystery to Katie, this small brother of hers, though she had virtually brought him up herself, alone. Her mother had died when he was nearly two. Her father had been an invalid after being thrown from a horse, and had died scarcely three months ago.

  She stood, watching the store-k
eeper, recognising him for the slow speaking, slow moving outback man that he was. She had known his kind back there in the Dust Bowl country of the east from whence she had come. Before that she had come from England as a child. She remembered England too ‒ its green fields and leaf-burdened trees; the flowers in summer, and snow on the rooftops in winter. She remembered England as if it was a picture postcard that she would keep for ever sacred in an album.

  Katie took off her hat and shook her head to loosen her hair. It was unbearably hot and remembering her picture postcard England made her head feel hotter still under its cap of red-brown hair.

  ‘He must be somewhere hereabouts,’ she said with exasperation.

  ‘That is the point, but whereabouts?’ The store-keeper straightened up with a slow rhythmical movement as if lifting heavy weights was something to do with spared energy, and defensively ‒ against the heat.

  She was pretty, standing there in her cotton dress and the sun shooting red lights through that hair. Pretty and small and gallant. The store-keeper read a lot at nights so he understood what it meant for a woman to be gallant. And the farmers’ wives out there on the lonely plains! They were gallant too in their hard-bitten, hard-working ways.

  This girl’s eyes were a bright blue and she was tired but determined and not afraid.

  ‘Like I said ‒ there was a stranger came in here ‒’ he said slowly.

  He broke off and tilted his head as if listening.

  Katie knew what the gesture meant so she too turned her head a little, and bent it slightly, trying to catch the sound the store-keeper’s ears, attuned to this infinity of silence hanging over the bush and the paddocks and the cattle standing inert under the shade trees, had caught.

  For quite a minute she heard nothing but she knew that the store-keeper was hearing something.

  He nodded.

  ‘Car coming,’ he said. ‘Up from thataway. From the track through the Gap.’

  He grinned at Katie, relief like a respite from a heat wave easing the muscles of his face.

  ‘This’ll be it. This’ll be him, maybe.’

  They stood in a silence as fixed as that of the white gums by the hotel veranda, and listened. Andrew, leaning forward with his chin cupped in his hands, did not listen. He was watching the ants, noticing everything about them: totally absorbed in their strange activities.

  Katie would find out where to go. Katie would know what to do. Everything was all right, so long as Katie had things in hand.

  He didn’t even have to think about it. Ants in battalion formation marching army-wise across the gravel road were infinitely more interesting to young, ten-year-old red headed Andrew.

  Presently Katie heard the first faint thrum of the car engine. Her eyes lit up as if victory had suddenly come her way too.

  ‘You see?’ she said, tilting her chin even more. Her blue eyes shone. ‘He is coming. Gideon Dent is coming, I mean.’

  As soon as she had spoken she realised how much she had been apprehensive. Pride made her cover up quickly.

  ‘He is our cousin,’ she repeated again, throwing back her head, shaking her hair a little. She was happy, relieved, as if suddenly God had been very good to her and now Heaven was near at last.

  The store-keeper scratched his chin. Already he recognised the thrum of that car engine. It was the same big overlanding Bel-Air that the stranger had driven, that time he had come to Malley’s Find. The stranger who had picked up that letter. The one with the grey gimlet eyes.

  Maybe, he thought, he should warn the little lady. But he didn’t have the heart.

  ‘Guess I’ll take the mail bag in,’ he said lamely. ‘It’ll need sorting before the farmers get to coming in to-night. They always come in Tuesday nights. Mail day once a fortnight. Other Tuesdays they come out of habit. Darts at the pub for one thing. An’ seeing one another ‒’

  Katie sat on the log beside Andrew.

  ‘Gideon Dent is coming,’ she said quietly, softly as if saying the name was savouring music. ‘We are being called for, Andrew.’

  The boy did not reply. He saw now why the ants marched across the road in battalion formation. Ants on the other side were emerging from the verge of dried-out summer grasses. There was to be a battle ‒ one army against the other.

  Andrew wished he knew why. He wondered how he could find out why. It was no use asking Katie. She only knew about girls’ things, and house things. And cooking. And that ‒ Maybe the store-keeper, or Gideon Dent could tell him. The ants were a different kind from the ants out by the Dust Bowl. These were red ones. He would have to find out about ants, and a lot of other things like why the white gums over there had big brown splotches on their trunks. It was a new place. A new world. There was an awful lot to find out about Malley’s Find.

  He didn’t even hear what Katie was saying. She was really saying it to herself anyway.

  ‘Father said ‒ “Write to Gideon Dent. He’ll know what to do about Andrew. He’ll understand. He was like Andrew himself when he was a boy. You can’t manage on your own, Katie girl”.’

  Katie closed her eyes as the car raced down the side track into the gravel road.

  Maybe it was just a car going through!

  But it wasn’t.

  The brakes skidded the big dust-covered car to a standstill. It was the car that made the first impression. It was the biggest Katie had ever seen and it was brown all over with layers and layers of dust. It must have come a long long way because it didn’t exactly look unwashed. It looked covered. There was a luggage rack on top of it, kangaroo bars barricading the engine from animal onslaught, and spotlights above the ordinary lights. It was an over-landing car all right, and one that travelled at night, sometimes heavily laden. Water bags hung from the bumper bars back and front.

  Then the man eased himself out of the front seat and slammed the door behind him.

  He was tall and powerful, though not so very heavy in build. It was something about the way he carried himself: the way he walked.

  He strode across the road, under that slouch hat of his. He wasn’t smiling either.

  Katie had an awful minute when she thought he might perhaps be no more than a farmer going into the store. He might walk right past the log: right past them.

  But he didn’t. He stopped bang in front of the log and looked down at the young boy. Katie might not have been born.

  Andrew barely conceded him any attention at all. The two ant armies were about to lock in battle.

  ‘Andrew James?’

  The man said it more than he asked it.

  Katie stared at him, strangely fascinated. If this was Gideon Dent then he was full of purpose and immediate decisions. He was enormously impressive.

  Yet Father had said he had once been like Andrew. He was years older than Katie; maybe quite ten years older at least, but he wasn’t as old as her father. In a way she had expected Gideon Dent to be a young edition of her father who behaved absent-mindedly like Andrew. And here was an outback man of considerable force saying abruptly ‒ ‘Andrew James?’ For the second time.

  Six feet high, she thought. Aloud she said in a voice that had the faintest tremolo of trepidation in it. ‘Yes, he’s Andrew James, and I’m Katie, his sister. I brought him ‒’

  The grey eyes swung to hers and held them for what seemed a glacial age.

  He didn’t believe it. His face said nothing as impossible as this could happen to him ‒ because he personally had not arranged it.

  ‘Did you say ‒ his sister?’

  His voice was quite good but sounded as if it might always be the one that gave the orders. Not that it was loud or even quick. In fact it nearly drawled and was softish, the way a tiger’s tread is softish.

  ‘Well ‒ I am his sister, you know.’ Katie decided dignity and a touch of hauteur was the only way to deal with a personal question asked that way. ‘You see, I had to bring Andrew. I couldn’t let him travel all that way alone. He would have become lost He is like that. He day-
dreams, and wanders away ‒’

  Her voice, which had begun strongly, coolly, faltered to a stop under the steady inquiring gaze of those cold grey eyes. They didn’t exactly bore into her, but they looked at her as if they saw instantly everything she was both inside and outside. And they didn’t welcome her. Not one little bit.

  ‘You are Gideon Dent?’ she asked at length, worried.

  ‘I am not. My name’s Bern Malin. I’ve come to collect Andrew James. Did you say this was the young man?’

  He swung those grey eyes to the boy again.

  Nothing on earth, at that moment, would have deflected Andrew’s attention from the ants. Both armies stood face to face, rank upon rank, regiment upon regiment and battalion upon battalion. There were thousands of them. Andrew had to see when and how the battle began. What awful death might be done there on the road in any minute!

  The tall man with the grey eyes and the commanding manner meant nothing to Andrew when he was busy with something else. Katie would talk to the man. Katie would explain. Katie would take care of everything. She always did.

  Very slowly the grey eyes came back to Katie.

  ‘You have come to take Andrew to our cousin Gideon Dent?’ she asked quickly. ‘I do hope you won’t mind taking me too. You see, I could not possibly let Andrew go by himself ‒ that is ‒ with a stranger ‒’ Her voice faltered to a stop again. She did not want to be impolite to this man. It was possible she was utterly dependent on him now. That is, if he was the only way of getting to Gideon Dent.

  The silence was so long while he read all about her by merely looking at her, and holding her blue eyes hypnotised by his grey ones. She began to think it would never end.

  They were like a trio, she, Andrew and Bern Malin: a triptych silhouetted by time against a backdrop of heat-hazed sky and old, old gum trees.

  Katie let her eyelids droop over her eyes.

  They were so old, those gum trees. So old and so enduring. Heat and frost and bush fires and drought! Even the onslaught of white men’s axes had left them to survive.

  Her eyes flew open and stared back into Bern Malin’s face.