Bella's Run (16 page)

‘What’s a girl?’

‘This thing
you
want really badly.’

Will looked at Trinity Eggleton and now
he
pondered how much to say. The eyebrow rose once again. Will shrugged. Better told to a stranger than someone who really counted. ‘Yeah, it’s a girl. Not just any girl. It’s
the
girl.’

‘Mmm,’ said Trin. ‘Quite a statement.
The
girl, huh? So I guess it’s a bit tricky if it’s causing a problem?’

‘Yeah,’ sighed Will, ‘you could say that. She’s a flighty young filly. Six years younger than me, my sister’s best mate.’

‘Right. You’d better point her out to me; otherwise I might try and crack onto her myself.’

‘Oh, she’s not here – at least I don’t think so. But if you see her I reckon you’d know her. She’s a hot-looking blonde.’ Will sketched a curvy figure in the air with his hands.

‘There’s a few of them around tonight. I’ve just seen the most gorgeous-looking creature over near the loos. Long, straight, blonde hair. She’s a bit worse for wear but her willowy body certainly did it for me. I wouldn’t mind knowing who she is.’

Will let out the breath he’d been holding – Trin’s description didn’t match Bella. A long-haired blonde with a willowy body in no way described Bella’s tumbling white gold curls and buxom figure. ‘Well, mate, just point her out to me, I’m sure I could tell you. My family have lived around here for a while and we know a few people.’

‘I just might take you up on that one, old fellow. She was pretty hot.’ Trin looked across at his grandfather, who was bringing his poetry recitation to an end. ‘I think the old man over there might need his grandson’s help to get off the chair.’

Trin stuck out his right arm and shook Will’s hand. ‘Great to meet you, mate.’ Coming from Trin, the word ‘mate’ sounded foreign and strangled.

‘Yeah, good to meet you too, Trin. Sounds like we’ll see you around?’

‘For sure, Will. You can count on it.’

As Trin moved off towards his grandfather, Will swigged the last of his can and pondered on the surprise revelation that old Wes had a grandson. And, just how did a city dentist turn himself into a high-country cattleman?

As he observed the striking paradox of long, lanky Trinity Eggleton gently helping little, gnarled Wes Ogilvie from his hard wooden seat, he couldn’t help putting voice to the thought. ‘If anyone can manage such a culture shock, I reckon it could be him.’

‘You reckon who could be what?’ Macca plunked himself down beside Will, rum in hand. Extra rum appeared from his back pocket, and quickly replaced Will’s now-empty can.

‘About bloody time you appeared, mate. Glad a man’s not dying of thirst. Where’ve you been?’

‘Not sure you want to know the answer to that. Then again, if you plan on staying warm in that swag of yours tonight, maybe you do.’ Macca sounded like he was considering another angle.

‘What’s going on? What don’t I want to know?’ Will took a deep suck on his can to ready himself.

‘Well . . .’ Macca sounded pensive. ‘To tell or not to tell, that remains the question, old boy. Just how much do you need to know, is what I’m asking myself right now. Let’s just say a certain curly-haired blonde has appeared on the radar . . .’

‘Bella? Here at the Muster?’ Will felt his spirits lift in an instant.

‘Your sister too.’

‘Well, now there’s a surprise. Where there’s one, there are usually two.’ The twist on Will’s lips was wry. ‘What exactly have they been up to? I overheard a conversation about someone organising a women’s drinking competition. Those girls haven’t been at it, have they?’

Macca hunched over his rum. ‘Mmm . . .’ He relived the events in the marquee in his head, two girls riding each other like a cowboy and his bull.

‘Macca? Oh no. What have they done?’

‘Well . . . they haven’t been complete idiots, but they haven’t exactly been angels either. You know those two, Will. They’re either in or they’re out. No in-between. Let’s just say they’ve been wallowing in Bailey’s and butterscotch schnapps up to their pretty little necks.’

‘Fuck!’ Will half-rose but Macca pulled him back down on the log.

‘It’s okay, mate, they’re okay. They’re a pair of pissheads but they’re still walking. They’re fine. We’ll catch up with them in a bit.’

Will made a mental note to carpet his little sister. He wouldn’t have her making a spectacle of herself, and then being talked about across the mountains. It was a small community and everyone knew everyone else’s business. Patty had a good nursing job to come home to, which required a certain amount of respect from the patients she treated. That’s not what she would get by carrying on like a drunken idiot on the Nunkeri Plains.

‘You were saying someone was going to do something?’ Macca prompted Will.

‘Huh?’

‘Who was going to do something?’

‘Oh. Trin. Trinity Eggleton. Old Wes Ogilvie’s grandson. He’s a dentist in the city and he wants to work up with Wes on Ben Bullen Hills.’

Macca looked morose. ‘I can understand that. I know I’d rather be working on the station at home than driving a bloody truck for me old man.’

Will looked across at his mate, sympathetically. Macca’s father Bryce had both a high-country station outside Burrindal and a successful interstate cattle-trucking business. With the meanness of the drought, Bryce had all but shut down the farm and was concentrating on the trucks. With the dry, cattle were being trucked up north to feedlots and temporary agistment.

Will clapped Macca across the shoulders. ‘The drought’s got to end sometime. At least you got a trip to Mount Isa scouting for business. If the drought hadn’t been so tough, I couldn’t have come with you. Would’ve been too much work at home. So at least we got a bit of a holiday out of it.’

‘Yeah,’ Macca’s eyes glinted. ‘And what a trip that was.’

Will gave Macca a steady look. ‘If you go out with her and sleep with her, then you stay with her, old man. You hurt my sister and I’ll nail that bloody big ugly mug of yours to a gum tree. And I’ll add that black hat just for decoration.’

‘Twenty-six years of friendship wouldn’t come into it?’

‘Not when it comes to my own, mate,’ replied Will. ‘Or Bella,’ Will added under his breath.

‘Speaking of sisters,’ Macca said as he stood up and stretched, ‘how about we jump in my ute and move on down to the band? I reckon that’s where we’ll find those two cowgirls, that’s if they haven’t passed out under a tree somewhere. We need rum anyway, and I should move my ute before I’m over the limit.’

‘You okay to drive a few hundred metres? How about we walk?’

‘Nuh, I want to dump off your swag somewhere cosy, so I can have my ute to myself tonight – and that stand of old gums over there looks a pretty good spot for you.’ Macca pointed to a cluster of eucalypts down the paddock a little way. ‘I reckon you’ll be wanting some privacy yourself, seeing my cousin’s here too,’ he added. He peered at Will from under his black hat.

‘Okay.’ Will’s dimples danced. ‘You’re an ideas man, that’s for sure.’

Together they walked in the direction of Macca’s ute. Trin and Old Wes had disappeared, and Will could see the crowd was slowly moving from the bonfire towards the band playing on the back of the semi-trailer, down the valley.

Looking up into the sky, he could see swirling cumulous clouds overtaking millions of stars lighting up the heavens with their brilliance. On the backs of the ridges, in the mountains above the Nunkeri Plains, lightning flashed and forked, causing the whole sky to come alight. The cool change was on its way.

But it was all nothing compared to the brilliance of his Bella. He already thought of her as his. Her vibrant spirit, keen mind and gorgeous body coupled with a wilful temperament – determined but kind. Nothing could compare with her sheer delight in living or the way she danced through her life. Into his.

A life together? His subconscious tried the thought. To Will’s surprise he didn’t feel the need to bolt in the opposite direction. As lighting flashed around him, he moved with a determined step, his heart and soul on fire.

Anticipation.

Yearning.

Forward towards love.

Chapter 16

Bella came to, lying on the grass. Cold shivers snaked through her body from her damp singlet pressing against her chest, underneath her oilskin vest. Looking around, she saw that Patty and Caro had disappeared, leaving two areas of squashed grass on either side of her. Hauling herself slowly to her feet, Bella realised the spew session had cleared her head but had left a spearing headache in its wake.

Cupping her right temple where it felt like a knife blade was on the prowl, she looked around for Patty but saw only swathes of swaying backs as the crowd moved to the music from the band on the flat-bed tray of the semi-trailer.

She glimpsed an auburn head passing through the gaping doorway of the beer tent. Another shiver ran through her body, and Bella realised she needed to get her wet singlet off or she’d be coming down with something worse than a flaming headache. Looking at her vest, she contemplated what body parts it covered. Enough. The vest alone should do. She headed towards the loos to take off her wet clobber, but when she got there she found someone had hung a sign up on the port-a-loo’s closed door: ‘Loos buggered. Use other toilet block.’

Just great. She shivered once more.

The other loo trailer was halfway up the valley, and she’d be blowed if she was going to stagger all that way in complete darkness, just to take her singlet off. She glanced around.

Beyond the glare of the overhead lights, she spotted the tumbledown walls of the old Nunkeri Plains homestead. Smothered in blackberries, the homestead had been the hard-won creation of the original settlers; a house full of dreams of a summer settling family who hoped their farm would be prosperous on a lush, open plain high up in the mountains. But after a few years of battling with variable seasons, along with snow for up to six months of the year, the original settlers had obviously given in and moved on. Time had wrought its destruction on the house that was not much more than a rough shanty really. The clay in the walls had been mined from the nearby creek bed, the timber cut on site. Amazingly for something which looked so fragile, sections of the house still stood over a hundred years later. For now, though, all Bella wanted was a little privacy, and it would do the job. Trying to ignore the pain in her head, she moved towards the relative shelter of the dark and crumbling wattle-and-daub walls.

Eddie Murray had always been a patient man. He was used to sitting quietly and waiting for his chance. Now he couldn’t believe his luck. He wouldn’t have to go anywhere, or do anything, because she was coming to him.

‘There is a God after all,’ he whispered to himself as the glorious riot of ringlets moved in his direction. Her rounded hips swayed, and her luscious breasts swung with the momentum of the loping gait of her long legs. Her left arm moved up once again to push those curls from her stunning face and at the upward lift of a tanned, smooth arm, her breasts seemed to thrust their way towards him with welcoming glee.

Manna was coming to him and he hadn’t moved a muscle.

Bella reached the blackberry-covered walls of the old hut and made to push her way through the opening that had once been a doorway.