The Ranger in the Hills: A Heartwarming Australian Outback Romance Page 6

  ‘I guess we’d better be gettin’ on, Jill,’ Taciturn said. ‘Two miles mightn’t be much to you and me but you don’t know about the young feller here. It might be a bit of a stretch for short legs.’

  ‘I can walk miles, thank you,’ Andrew said politely. ‘I’m used to it at home.’

  ‘How about you, Miss Katie?’ Taciturn asked.

  ‘Like Andrew, I’m used to it.’

  ‘Okay, well, you’d best follow me. Jill can come up behind with Nipper. The way’s clear all right for a half a mile, then when it gets good and final dark we’ll pick up the Cross. No trouble then.’

  ‘Should be well up by then,’ Jill said. ‘Go on, Tass. The farther we go before dark the better.’

  Katie had had some odd experiences on the edge of the Dust Bowl on the other side of Australia, but this was a new one.

  They went as quickly as the horse on a lead would let them go and they had no further time for conversation. It was a silent cavalcade that passed over the hump of the spur, declined down on to a sloping foothill and finally to another, more treeless, plain. Thence they turned south-east to follow the flank of You-self. There beside them to the west was only the shadow of the mountain.

  Darkness fell quickly, in a matter of minutes. For a short while it was a case of following hard on Taciturn’s steps. Katie had taken Andrew’s hand by this time. The path was not so narrow and she was anxious that he should not get himself lost in the dark. He might stop at any minute and investigate what went on in the darkling world around them: nothing but some hand-holding could stop him from doing this.

  First the pale stars came. The planets, here and there, twinkled. Then the sky passed from a pale night blue to a dark purple, and suddenly the stars were like pepper sprinkled everywhere.

  ‘There’s the Cross,’ Jill called from behind. They did not have to stop to see it.

  No one, Katie thought, in all Australia was unaware of the Southern Cross in the night skies above this enormous empty land. She knew that people travelling across the outback at night took direction from it too, but had never quite been sure of the method.

  ‘Andrew,’ she said in a low voice, ‘how do you tell north and south by the Cross?’

  ‘Bisect the pointers, and through the axis, and where the two lines meet is true south,’ he said as if quoting a text-book.

  For the first time in her life Katie realised Andrew did sound like a text-book. She wondered if perhaps he was a very clever boy instead of being a rather unreal day-dreamer as she had always supposed. She wished now, sadly, that in the long hours of caring for her father, cleaning, scrubbing and polishing that weatherboard house, sewing, mending and cooking for them all, not to mention caring for the goat and two horses, she had had more time and more thought for what was going on in her young brother’s head.

  Somewhere, somehow, she had missed out.

  ‘Another person might have done better,’ she thought. ‘But I did my best ‒’

  It was better than best if she had only known for, like every girl once past seventeen, she had wanted a life of her own. The chance had not been given her.

  ‘The important thing now is ‒’ she thought, clutching Andrew’s hand tighter to steady herself because she stumbled against a small rock, ‘is not to be a sad-sap, or self-pityish either.’

  Was that what Bern Malin had seen in her? An Andrew-smothering prig?

  Dear Heaven! she thought.

  When she arrived around this mountain and came to stay wherever it was she was going to stay ‒ Malin’s, Ryde’s or with Gideon Dent ‒ she would have to become all that she had wanted to be ‒ someone carefree and gay, with lots and lots to do in life.

  ‘Guess we’ll put up and take a rest,’ Taciturn said. ‘On account of the young feller, of course. Nothing to do with you kicking your shoes out on boulders and stumbling now’n agen, Miss Katie. Maybe I could give you a hand, except I know ahead of it you’re the kinda young lady can manage best on her own. Eh?’

  So she had been day-dreaming herself, and not watching where Tass trod to tread accurately in his steps and avoid those pitfalls.

  Pride was a pitfall too so now, perhaps for the first time in her life, she’d be like other girls. Like Jill. She’d be honest.

  ‘I’m so tired I could cry, Taciturn,’ she said. ‘But I must go on, mustn’t I? Perhaps I could take your arm after all. Maybe Andrew will walk beside Jill.’

  ‘He can go up on top of Nipper,’ Jill said unexpectedly. ‘Nipper’s like a bronco to ride but he can carry the mountain if he wants.’

  Suddenly all sense of strangeness was gone.

  Taciturn was the rock man as Katie had first thought of him, for that is how he was when Katie took his arm. Andrew was hoist up with the baggage on top of Nipper and they went on, round the mountain, then up a short narrow valley ‒ a niche in its north-eastern flank ‒ so on to a grassed plateau where Bern Malin’s timber-built house stood in a fenced paddock under the encircling shadow of tall trees.

  ‘The only tall trees south of twenty-six and east of the rabbit-proof fence. These and the ones at Ryde’s Place,’ Taciturn said. ‘That’s why Gideon Dent first made camp here.’

  ‘Gideon Dent?’ Katie asked quickly. ‘You know him, Taciturn?’

  ‘Me? I know him and there’s few do. Don’t you worry, Miss Katie. He’ll come when he’s good and ready; and not till then. Meantime you shift your swag on Bern Malin’s shoulders. He can carry a mountain ‒ if he so wants.’

  He paused, then added very slowly each word dropping in its own clear pool of meaning. ‘What Gideon Dent’d do, he’ll do too. Like they were twins. There’s no difference to ’em, and that’s a fact.’

  Chapter Five

  It wasn’t till next morning that Katie really took stock of what both Jill Ryde and Taciturn called ‒ Malin’s Outpost.

  It was an old house, yet somehow a good one. It had been built of axe-hewn timber planks and uprights. There was a lean-to veranda back and front, a main living-room into which one entered straight from the centre front door. This large square comfortable room was flanked on either side by smaller rooms. On the lean-to veranda which had been screen-wired stood the bed which was obviously Bern Malin’s bed. It was the only one made up in a way that suggested it had been slept in. Another bed, at the other end of the veranda, had been newly made up with fresh-smelling unbleached calico sheets. This one was intended for Andrew.

  Katie, seeing those two beds, knew that Bern Malin had expected to bring Andrew home here himself.

  Why had he changed his mind and gone elsewhere when he found that Katie had come too?

  He had made that change of mind when he had pulled the two-way radio out of his car; he had coded a message through to someone called Secretary ‒ so that she would not know what he was doing.

  Looking at the bed Bern Malin had slept in ‒ the slightly rumpled pillow, the tucked-in sheets and single cover ‒ gave her an odd feeling of intimacy and loss.

  The empty bed made her feel as she had felt when she saw her father’s empty chair at the table after he had gone!

  Taciturn had led Nipper away to be unloaded and unsaddled while Jill Ryde quickly made up a wood fire in the stove in the kitchen.

  ‘Put that boy to bed, Katie,’ she had said, nodding her head in Andrew’s direction. ‘Bathroom’s through the door and he’d better have the bed Bern made up at the end of the veranda. Then you take a shower and get ready for bed yourself. You look dead-beat. I’ll get something for supper.’

  ‘I’ll be quick with Andrew, then give you a hand.’

  ‘I manage best on my own,’ Jill said bluntly. ‘Anyhow, whether you admit it or not ‒ like I said, you’re dead-beat. How many days have you been coming across Australia?’

  ‘If you count to-day ‒ seven.’

  ‘Okay. If I’d travelled seven days non-stop I’d be in bed right now. I’d have been carried there unconscious. Now, please, will you go and do what I ask?’
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br />   Jill did not have to command a second time. Katie felt tired indeed. She was past argument. She was, in fact, past words. Even her voice wouldn’t work properly.

  The next day she looked at Bern Malin’s homestead properly.

  ‘The front part is so old,’ she said to Jill. ‘It must have been built here all alone, when no one else had ever come this way.’

  ‘That’s about it. There was no one here till Gideon Dent came this way. Bern Malin put on the back part, the shower and the sleep-out.’

  ‘Then Gideon Dent built it. This was his house?’

  ‘Certainly. The whole place was Gideon Dent’s. About three hundred acres of it, with two nice paddocks. Bern Malin took it over from him. So they say. Anyhow he lives here as if he owns it! That is why it is called Malin’s Outpost and not Dent’s Place, as it used to be.’

  Katie was silent.

  What could it mean? Had her cousin sold out? Was that the answer to the mystery of his absence? He had gone somewhere else, perhaps farther inland. Bern Malin had perhaps to go and prepare the way for her coming. Andrew was all right in the rough bush. But a young woman?

  None of these things could she say to Jill Ryde. She was afraid of appearing not to know enough about her cousin. She had to pretend, of course.

  How fantastic it would seem to them all that she and Andrew had crossed Australia to meet a cousin of whom she knew only what her father had told her.

  They were tidying up, after having made the beds and washed up everything they had used in the kitchen. Andrew was outside, watching Taciturn load up a jeep with their bags. The jeep had been housed in a shed some distance away.

  Katie was remaking Bern Malin’s bed. Taciturn had slept in it and now his sheets had been taken off and new sheets put out for the rightful owner.

  ‘We’ll take the laundry back home with us,’ Jill said. ‘It can come back with the jeep when Secretary brings it back.’

  ‘Who is Secretary?’ Katie asked, patting Bern’s pillow into shape. She had liked making up Bern’s bed, though she hadn’t the faintest idea why. Just a way of showing gratitude for having been given a night’s hospitality, I suppose.

  ‘Secretary? He’s Bern Malin’s rouseabout. He’s an aborigine and he happens to be Bern’s left and right hand, go-between and general do-all and know-all. You’ll like Secretary. Incidentally there isn’t anything he can’t do.’

  They had finished the bed-making and now straightened up together. Suddenly they were facing one another down the short length of the sleep-out. Jill had been much kinder to the newcomers than Katie had expected.

  They were silent, for the first time each really taking stock of the other. Jill was dressed as she had been the day before. Katie had put on a white blouse and slacks herself. The morning light slanting sideways in through the veranda shutter caught the lights in her hair. Her eyes looked a lighter blue, her figure slimmer. Her whole self suddenly seemed defenceless to Jill Ryde.

  ‘Must be pretty ghastly coming all this way to find no one but a pack of strangers,’ she said. ‘Sorry I made that snipperty remark when we first met. You know, the one about you falling for Bern. In case you think I was jealous or something ‒ I’m not. I’m about his kid sister and he’s about the bully brother. That’s all there is to it. But I ought to tell you I have a sister who’s not so kid-size. She wouldn’t let anyone ‒ but anyone ‒ look twice at Bern while she’s around.’

  ‘Please don’t think you have to warn me, Jill. I’ve only known him less than two days. I’m grateful for his meeting us, but ‒’

  ‘Don’t but me any buts,’ Jill said, shaking her head sagely. ‘There aren’t too many females who ever meet Bern Malin, leastways not out here in the never-never, nor up-country at Pandanning where he goes to do his business-end of things, who don’t fall at his feet inside one hour’s notice.’ She paused. ‘Makes me wild, if you want to know. Gives him a kind of God-complex.’

  ‘He knows how they feel then?’

  Jill shrugged.

  ‘How do I know what he knows? I just know what I know. Oh, Bern’s a good enough guy, but keeps himself and his doings too much to himself. I think he likes to be intriguing. He likes to feel he doesn’t have to tell anyone when he’s going away, and where. Or when he’s coming back, and for how long. Guess that’s why I don’t go crackers about him myself.’

  ‘He’s like my cousin?’

  Jill looked puzzled.

  ‘Your cousin?’

  ‘Yes, Gideon Dent. Keeps himself to himself.’

  Jill sat down on the newly-made bed, stretched out her slim legs before her and folded her arms. She frowned as she examined the toe of one riding boot.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘If and where this Gideon Dent is, Bern will find him. Else he wouldn’t have brought you and young Andrew out here. This was his house, before Bern had it, and there’s books in the bookcase in that side room that belong to him. Some of those guns, too, and other things. They’ve got G.D. carved on them; or written in them if they’re books. You go and look while I see if Tass is ready. Then we’ll shut up and go.’

  She stood up and stretched.

  ‘After all, he’s your cousin, this Gideon Dent. You’ve as much right to look at his things as anyone else. That’s for sure.’

  The fifteen-mile drive to Ryde’s Place across an undulating plain, the last level of the foothills behind the three mountains, was as nothing to the long train, bus and car travelling Katie and Andrew had done in the preceding days.

  Nipper had been turned out to grass at Malin’s.

  Jill had insisted that Katie sit up front with Taciturn while she and Andrew rode in the seat behind.

  The lovely pink-stemmed salmon gums on the other side of the mountain had given way hereabouts to open bush with clumps of mulga giving the only sparse shade.

  Katie, sitting silent by Taciturn, had the guilt feeling all over again. This time it was not because of the wrong-headed way she had brought up Andrew but because of a crackling document ‒ not much more than a foolscap-sized sheet of paper ‒ she had folded and put in her slacks pocket.

  Every now and again, when she moved she felt its flat surface against her thigh, or heard its faint rustle. She told herself she felt like a thief in the night; then corrected herself by saying:

  ‘I’m one in the broad light of day. But I’ll put it back, or give it to Bern Malin when I see him. I just have to have a loan of it.’

  ‘It’ was a hand-drawn map, done in fine penmanship, of a tract of land. In the extreme south-west corner of the map were marked the three mountains. About two miles, by scale, to the north-west was a spot marked G.D.’sH. A track led away from that marked out in ten-mile points, to a place called Gideon’s Rock. The track was called Dent’s Track. From Gideon’s Rock a number of tracks splayed out like the stems of a fan, and they terminated at places called camps or outposts. Every camp had a number and before each number were the letters G.D.

  The map was a hand-drawn survey map and was old. She had found it in one of the leather-bound books in the bookcase that had borne Gideon Dent’s name in the fly-cover, all written in a good firm pointed handwriting. The thing she had known instantly about the handwriting was that it was not the same as the writing in the letter she had received from Gideon Dent giving instructions as to how Andrew was to be sent to Malley’s Find.

  In that room ‒ the office or gun-room, whatever it was ‒ had been many things belonging to Gideon Dent. Apart from the guns with his initials notched in their butts there had been maps, obviously in use, on Bern Malin’s desk, several of them one on top of the other. They had the G.D. initials in the corner.

  Anxious, and bewildered, she had opened the one drawer in the desk. There had been a number of large-sized, official looking letters that had been opened. They were addressed to Gideon Dent Ltd., Post Office, Pandanning. The post-mark was recent, and they had been opened.

  Katie had not looked at their contents. At that point she had sto
pped looking at and touching her cousin’s things.

  So he was here somewhere! Somewhere near Malin’s Outpost. He might even have used that room for work himself.

  Then why had he gone away and where to, just as she and Andrew were due to arrive? Andrew at any rate!

  Sitting beside Taciturn as the jeep bumped and ground its determined way across bush track, Katie made up her mind what she would do. She would find Gideon Dent herself ‒ somehow. She would not and could not throw herself and Andrew on the hospitality, even charity, of the Rydes and Bern Malin.

  Mrs. Ryde, when Katie met her on the veranda of the homestead, was so kind in her welcome it almost undermined Katie’s good intentions.

  They had driven up a short straight track from the boundary gate of Ryde’s Place, between wired fences of paddocks on either side, to the square open-faced bungalow sheltering under great old trees that were unlike any gum trees Katie had seen anywhere else. They had white trunks and wandering arms for branches, as if everything in them had started reaching for the sun and the wind and the air, then become suddenly cast in stillness.

  ‘They be wandoo-gums,’ Taciturn said. ‘A bit out of place hereabouts but then everything thisaways is a contradiction. It’s all but desert all around, then all of a sudden there’s water coming up from underground and flowing plenty down there. An’ the soil’s right. Somehow, some time past those trees found their ways here. God Almighty put ’em here, I can tell you that. Not the Rydes ‒ nor anyone else that might have come this way. They were growing right there a coupla hundred years ago when there wasn’t a white man in the whole land. And not another wandoo for two hundred miles.’

  ‘How long have the Rydes been here?’ Katie asked as they rounded up to the homestead veranda.

  ‘’Bout twelve years, that’s all. Old Man Ryde was prospecting about for some good land and he found this. Accident, I guess, because there’s nothing for five hundred miles to lead him to suppose there be any good land between here and Ayer’s Rock. And you know where that is. Bang in the Centre.’