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Her foot went down to the boards and stayed there. The country raced past her, though she knew that actually she was racing past it. It was indescribably beautiful, as Godfather always insisted, really heart-thudding in its intense vitality, stunning in its Egyptian pottery colours. There was flame, magenta,, purple, ochre, orange, violet. Something, too, had happened since the rains. Green had crept in—a vivid pulsing green, but flaunting through the green was something even more breathless. It was the shouting blue of the Salvation Jane. The Jane spread everywhere, the bluest blue, Gemma thought quite
stunned with the explosion of colour, in all the world.

Her absorption in the landscape had made her forget to check on the road train, but now she did. Good grief, the savage . . . yes, Bruce had been right,
savage
. . . was almost on her bumper bars. And now the fool was blowing a monstrous horn.

She had as much right to the road as he had, but all the same she was not going to act the idiot and be squashed. Angrily, resentfully, but inevitably, she edged off the tar on to the dirt verge. All right, savage, it’s all yours, she cried out.

But the savage only did what he had done before, he brought the cabin equal to her steering wheel and looked down on her. In the few seconds she allowed herself to take her eyes off the road, Gemma saw very white teeth in a very brown face, not Bruce’s pleasant golden tan, but leather brown. She saw blue eyes deep-set as the eyes of men who look long and far into the distance usually are. She had no time for any. more impressions, for now the man was screaming at her. Of all things he was ordering:

“Pull up! Stop!”

Now Gemma’s foot almost went through the floor boards. I’ll show him! she seethed. Boss of the road, is he? Well, boss, you’re in for a shock.

But it was Gemma who was shocked, not the driver. She never would have credited that a thirty-six-wheeler, an articulated monstrosity, could reach such a speed. The thing went past her almost as though she was stationary. She had a vague impression of cattle, then more cattle, then more again. Then when the monster reached an accommodating several hundred yards ahead, it slewed round and cut her
off.

She saw it turn, and she guessed the intention, but even then she refused to credit it. No man would do a thing like that. But... a faint fear creeping in ... a savage would.

She braked.

She should have braked earlier, but she still had not believed that what looked like happening actually would happen. The final halt was only accomplished a bare inch from the great monster.

At once the savage was out of his cabin and coming thundering down at her.

“What in tarnation do you think you’re doing?” he shouted. “Didn’t you hear me tell you to stop?”

“Yes,” she came back, equally thunderous, “but though you’re boss of the road, you’re not boss of me!”

He glared at her, but he did not follow it up, not then. “We’ll see about that later,” he said. “Meanwhile you have a passenger.”

“A passenger?”

“Yes.”

“Not—you!”

“No. I’ll fetch it down. I haven’t room for it in my driving cabin because it’s plumbfull of gear already. But you have an empty car.”

“I have not!”

“Well, you have, room at least for one small fellow. Fellow-ess, to be exact. It’s a girl.”

“It’s a— What on earth are you talking about?”

“A calf has been dropped.” He jerked his head towards the articulated trucks.

“Dropped? Dropped where? Was it hurt?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t you know the birds and the bees bit?”

“Of course.”

“Then a calf has been born. If I leave it there, it’ll be dead in five minutes. It will be trampled on. I haven’t an inch to spare myself.”

“But I can’t take a calf,” she protested.

“Well, you can’t abandon it out here.”

“You—you shouldn’t have accepted a pregnant cow.”

“Look, lady” . . . with heavy patience . . . “the number of beasts in that load would stagger you. It takes us all our time to load them, let alone ask them individually, the females, I mean, if they’re in a certain delicate condition.”

“Well, I still can’t take it. I’m making for Alice Springs for the night.”

“So am I. I’ll meet up with you and Harriet there.”

“Why Harriet?”

“Well, she’s not a Harry, is she?”

“It’s quite impossible. All my trousseau is on the back seat and my cake is on the front.” But Gemma was talking to air; the man had run off.

He was a giant of a man, she saw angrily, as huge among men as his monstrosity would be huge among ordinary trucks. He was also just as Bruce had warned: ruthless, forthright, greedy, overbearing, presumptuous, spiteful. But, gritted Gemma, she’d soon put him in his place.

She thought how satisfactory it would be to say to this low savage: “I am Mrs. Mannering of Mannering Park, and I can tell you now, my man, that you’ll never truck for us.”

But hardly had that very pleasant, very irresistible thought occurred than he occurred again, carrying a bundle this time that looked all legs and head. Before she could stop him, he had opened the passenger door and deposited the calf on the passenger seat, which would have been bad enough had it been empty, for no one wants to drive beside a calf passenger, but holding as it did a large white cake. . . .

“My cake!” yelped Gemma, and looked aghast at lovers’ knots and silver horseshoes and almond icing flying everywhere.

“Sorry,” he said, actually a little discountenanced, and leaning over he promptly lifted Harriet and plopped her in the back.

Then, before Gemma could cry out again, he went.

She watched him in silence. Something had happened to her throat. Also her voice wasn’t working any more. She saw the road train take off and was still silent, then she followed it into the distance until it was not there at all, and was still dumb.

Then slowly, disbelievingly, she came to life again. She turned.

The calf was still where the savage had deposited it, and that was across the back seat.
And on her dress.

When he had put it down, he must have torn the cellophane dust-cover and—well, the calf had done the rest.

There sat Harriet in a drift of white chiffon with lace overlay. The filmy veil Gemma had packed with the gown had somehow come adrift, somehow caught on two sticky calf ears, still wet from birth, and now Harriet actually wore a bridal wreath. It only needed a flower in a hoof and Harriet would be ready to walk down an aisle, Gemma thought hysterically, and as though she read that thought, Harriet reached out at that moment and helped herself to a candied lovers’ knot from the front seat, making the chiffon tear from end to end.

It was then that Gemma’s long silence broke at last.

She wept.

IN between her streaming tears Gemma could see the calf staring solemnly at her. Harriet had big plum eyes with a luxurious fringe of silky lashes. Her nose was moist, black and india-rubbery. Her ears were really something, soft and peaked and covered with downy gold hair, the insides of the ears were pink plush. She wore that irresistible cherubic expression that toymakers toil long to achieve on their cuddly animal offerings, since a child must be won at a first encounter.

Now Gemma was won.

“You're beautiful,” she said, the tears drying saltily on her face, “I’d like to put a bell round your neck for you to wear for a locket.” She had put her hand out to the calf as she spoke, and Harriet licked it with a lolly pink tongue.

The sugar lovers’ knot the calf had taken had proved strange to her taste, and she had discarded it, but not before its powder had landed above her mouth. Harriet now wore a very cute moustache.

“I can’t keep you, of course,’’ Gemma told the little thing, laughing now instead of crying, “not even until we get to The Alice, as
he
arranged, but before I tumble you out into the mulga you can have the milk I brought for my tea.”

She found her picnic hamper and withdrew the bottle of milk she had had filled at Forty Mile.

“You don’t know it yet, Harriet,” she said, “-but you’re what’s called a poddy calf.” She put her finger in the bottle and brought the bottle up close to the calf’s mouth, then proceeded to fill Harriet up.

It took a very long time. A road train went past, then two tourists. What had Bruce said the savages called them? Oh, yes, terrorists.

One of the tourists nearly went off the road staring at her. Anyone would think, said Gemma crossly to Harriet, that they had never seen a calf fed before. In her indignation it did not occur to her to tack on that they might never have seen a calf dressed in a wedding gown and veil being poddy-fed on the back seat of a car before.

“Actually you should be fed like this for a week,” Gemma said next to Harriet, “and after that you should graze. But I’m afraid, my dear, in your case—”

It was a long time before the bottle was finished, and in that time something happened to Gemma. Though, she thought wryly, it would have happened even without the long . . . and thought-permitting . . . time it took to feed the calf. For in the end she knew she would never have discarded Harriet. Who could have tumbled out such a plum-eyed, rubber-nosed, small thing?

She took off the veil, though, and the torn dress, and she wiped off the ridiculous sugar moustache. Then she got behind the wheel and started off again, next stop Alice Springs . . . and what, oh, what were people going to say at a
car
with a calf as a passenger ?

Harriet went to sleep and once more Gemma ate up the miles, the Egyptian pottery colours flashing past like the facets in a kaleidoscope, the new green grass flaunting at her, the explosion of Salvation Jane almost hurting her eyes with its blue.

Then the first signs of closer settlement began, and in the far distance Gemma could see the McDonnell Ranges that parted at Heavitree Gap to cradle the very centre of Australia at Alice Springs.

She glanced back at Harriet, and she was sound asleep now, and slunk so low she was barely noticeable.

"Stay like that,” she implored. “We’re now in civilization, roads and footpaths and even an arcade, I’m told. A really mod hotel.”

She turned into Todd Street.

The fine lawns of the fine houses being kept fresh and green by sprinklers 'though just now after the Wet there was less need for watering) made Gemma a little uneasy. The savage, had called out that he would meet up with them at The Alice, but, glancing again at the suburban-like setting, it appeared barely the kind of place where you could pull up at an imposing sweep of hotel stairs and step out with a newborn calf.

She found and approached the hotel gingerly, and was just about to do a street circuit to find a back entrance when she saw the hateful road train.

It was his—the savage’s. She did not recognize it by its name since the Territorian Transport that was written on it had not registered on her before, but she did remember the man. Even if she hadn't, she would still have had to stop. He came out and stepped right in front of her, just like he had halted his monstrosity in front of her a few hours earlier, and the only way she could have avoided him would have been to run over him. Which, she fumed, might not have been such a bad idea!

He crossed to her window, and when she did not lean out to listen to him, he leaned inwards to her.

“If you hand out the spoil,” he said, “I’ll take over the responsibility of Harriet, leaving you to climb the front stairs as an elegant lady should.”

“No,” Gemma replied.

“No?” His thick brows had risen steeply, making him look quite an austere aristocrat, if a man in a black sweatshirt and oil-stained denims could ever look that.

“I’m keeping her,” Gemma said. She had not thought about it before, but now, all at once, she did, and she was quite resolved.

“Oh, come off it,” he said, “she’s not a pet poodle.”

“I know, but she’s been given to me, so now she’s mine.”

“She’s not!” he retorted.

“Well, she’s not yours.”

“She could be if I kept quiet about the blessed event—after all, I signed for X number of beasts, not X and a half. But Territorian doesn’t do things that way.”

“Territorian?”

He nodded to the road train taking up all the street, and particularly at its sign: Territorian Transport.

“You work for Territorian?” asked Gemma.

“No, Territorian works for me.”

Gemma gave an impatient hunch of her shoulders. “It’s the same thing.”

He did not argue that. But he did lean right in to take tip the calf.

“No,” Gemma said again, “I—I like her.”

“Even after tearing your dress?” He had left the scene before he had witnessed the damage, but he must have noticed the tatters of material now.

“You, not the calf, did that,” she told him coldly.

“I suppose next you’ll be blaming me for the cake as well. Why in Betsy did you bring a cake? Bringing a cake up here would be like taking coals to Newcastle. All the Inside ladies are dab hands at cake. Ever heard of country cooking?”

Gemma did not answer that last, but she did reply to the first question.

“It was a very special cake.”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess. It was a christening cake. You knew
before
about Harriet.”

“Don’t be stupid, how could I know? It” . . . Gemma paused . . . “was a wedding cake. ’ Another pause. “My wedding cake. I’m getting married up here.”

“Go on.” The man leaned even further in. “Do I know him?”

“How would I know that?”

“I know everyone from Adelaide to Marce to The Alice to Darwin, except, of course, the passers-through.”

“Well, Bruce isn’t that.”

“Bruce?”

“Look, it’s no business of yours, but to hurry things up, for I do want a bath before dinner, it’s Mr. Bruce Mannering of Mannering Park.”

The savage looked long at Gemma, and then he said one rude incredulous word. He said: .

“Struth!”

“I beg your pardon?"

“It doesn’t matter,” he dismissed, “except that
now,
more than ever, you can’t take Harriet in there.”