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. . . And that, in Mr. Fortescue’s small office, was what Gemma was told a few minutes after.

“He never came in for dinner last night... well, we never worried, you know how these brainy men are . . . then no meal again this morning. So I went down. And there he was. A bit of rock in his hand and his head bowed over it, spectacles still on as though he was examining the piece, but not with us
any more. You could say he died with his boots on, my dear.”

For a long time Gemma just sat there, and old Forty sat with her. Then he went out and came back with tea.

“It’s the way he would have wanted to go,” he said gently to Gemma, “and the place, too. He only said to me a week ago that of all his journeys into science, this journey had been the best. He loved the centre most of all, and that’s
why...”
Old Forty looked significantly at Gemma.

“Yes, Mr. Fortescue?”

“That’s why he told me to keep him here. Are you following me, Gemma? Do you know what I’m trying to say?”

“Yes, Mr. Fortescue,” said Gemma.

“He said: "I can’t think of any better journey’s end than right here. If anything happens, Forty, will you tell my goddaughter?’ ”

“So you’re telling me,” she whispered.

“Yes, my dear. He didn’t want to be taken back to Sydney, he wanted to stay in the red country that he had come to love so much.”

“When—when did he die?” She had been told, but somehow she could not think straight.

“Yesterday.”

“Yesterday I was on the road. If I’d been a day before . . .”

“Yes, dear, there are many ifs in life,” soothed Mr. Fortescue.

“Where is he?” she asked.

Mr. Fortescue nodded to a little outbuilding, and Gemma bit her lip and nodded back.

“Can I see him? Say goodbye?”

“Yes, dear.”

“And then what?” she asked.

“Then we have our outback minister who calls here at times and who has now been contacted. The Reverend Bill. . . he’s the Reverend William Flett really . . . always says it’s a travesty talking to scientific blokes, that they have all the answers. But the Reverend Bill also says they have good hearts.”

“Godfather had a good heart,” she said wistfully.

“We all know that. We all loved him. Then shall we say tomorrow? There’s a little cleft in the rocks down the incline where he often used to go to rest and think.” Mr. Fortescue looked anxiously at Gemma.

“Yes,” Gemma said.

He gave her a key and she went sadly across to the building. But all her sadness dropped away as she looked at Godfather. He seemed to be smiling.

“I think,” Gemma said lovingly to him, “you found your best rock occurrence yet, Godfather.”

She came out again and Mr. Fortescue was wailing for her.

“We can fix you a room up here if you would sooner, my dear. You may feel lonely and deserted down there ”

“No, I’d sooner have Godfather’s chalet. Besides, I’ll have his things to go through.”

“You’re a wonderful girl, but then he always said that. Please stay on with us as long as you can The boys, even though they’re blind as bats, unaware scientists, like a pretty face about the place. You’d be doing us a service.”

“I’d like to stop for ever. I love out here. But I
would only have been here briefly, anyway, only until I married.”

“Married? You’re marrying up here?”

“To a Mannering. Bruce Mannering,” she told him.

“Yes, I know Mannering Park. They’ve made several complaints.”

“Complaints?” Gemma queried.

“It’s inevitable with geologists. Our g’s try to avoid it, and we do pay compensation, but it sometimes happens like that.”

“What happens like that?”

“When geos and mica and wolfram men go out scouting, holes sometimes are left.”

“Which turn into water supplies and should please the Mannerings ... I mean the pastoralists.”

“Sometimes,” said Mr. Fortescue sadly, “a hole breaks a beast’s leg. But we do our best not to let that happen, of course, and we do pay compensation.” A contemplative pause. “So you’re marrying into the Mannerings.”

“Yes.”

“Then would you like to contact them, my dear?”

“Oh, no, they don’t expect me. I told Bruce I would be married from the barracks and would not be ready for a little while yet.”

“I didn’t mean quite that. I meant would you like their comfort in your sorrow? Their presence? Mr. Bruce’s presence?”

“No,” Gemma answered, and she surprised herself. She did not want Bruce, not now! Why didn’t she want him? In love you wanted comfort as well as joy. In death you wanted the touch of a hand even more than in life. Yet she didn’t want Bruce.

“Then someone else? I feel you should have someone,” persisted Mr. Fortescue. “Have you met anyone up here, my dear?”

“No ... only a road train man. A Mr. Torrance.” Now why had she answered that?

“The Territorian? We all know Tim.” Mr. Fortescue smiled warmly. “I think he would come, anyway,” he said, “he was very friendly with Bernard.”

It was only when she had gone down to the chalet that Gemma realized what she had done when she had mentioned Tim Torrance to Mr. Fortescue. She had established the Territorian and displaced Bruce, and it was Bruce she really wanted. Wasn’t it? However, Mr. Fortescue had said that the Territorian would have come, anyway, that is if he was here. But he wouldn’t be here. He would be swinging down The Bitumen, boss of the road, stopping every fifty miles to get the fallen beasts on their feet again. At night he would be sleeping in the compartment behind the wheel, and looking through the window at star shadows.

Gemma settled in Harriet, went up to the mess for a meal with the men and was fussed over and petted, then came back and went to bed.

But before she put out the light she stood a moment at the open door. The air was incredibly soft and warm; centre nights were usually like that. The stars seemed as big as gourds, which made it only natural that they cast shadows on the red earth outside the chalet door.

Was the Territorian looking at shadows, too, she thought ? Then ... and a little guiltily :

Was Bruce?

The Reverend Bill Flett arrived the next morning and he sat with Gemma and talked about the centre. As a centre man himself he was glad that Godfather was stopping in the red country. He deserved that, the Reverend Bill told Gemma, he was the finest of all rock himself.

“Yet you’re known to say that the scientific men have all the answers,” smiled Gemma wanly.

“I do say that, but do you know what? They’re the right answers, only put in different terms. They’re my answers, His answers, only in scientific language.”

Gemma spoke of her forthcoming marriage. She felt she would have liked the Reverend Bill to have solemnized it.

“The Mannerings,” he said doubtfully.

“Yes.”

“I rather think they might fly up some social dog-collar from Sydney.”

“But I would like you.”

The Reverend Bill seemed about to say something, then evidently changed his mind.

At noon all the block went down to the resting place that had been prepared, the little cleft where Godfather had often sat and contemplated.

The Reverend Bill chose Psalm Eighteen. The Lord is my rock, my strength and my deliverer. . . my buckler, and the horn of my salvation ... my high tower.

My high tower.

The words touched, then gently enclosed Gemma. Tears stopped blurring her eyes and she found she could look up.

She saw the Territorian standing at the back of the others, and as well as comfort from the words that had been spoken she was aware of another comfort. My high tower, she thought. Tim Torrance towered above the others and as he looked across at her she felt a calm and an acceptance that had been denied her before, so he in his way was a high tower as well.

Mr. Fortescue came across and put his arm around her and they all went back to the barracks. There was a big pot of tea and a big slab of project cake, yellow, sawdusty and containing one raisin.

All the Brains came and kissed Gemma, and urged her to stay on. To stay on, anyway, they added, until she left to be married. There was no reason, they pointed out, why she shouldn’t keep to the plans she had told them about, and be married from the barracks.

Gemma said she would think it over, then turned to find the Territorian by her side.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, “for myself as well as for you. Bernard Drews, I mean. I knew him very well and I’ll miss him. I have a deep feeling for all these fellows, they’re doing work I wish I could have done, but I didn’t have those kind of brains, but rock I admired most of all. I’ve always loved rock. Yes, he’ll be a loss. I never dreamed he belonged to you.”

“We belonged to each other,” Gemma said.

“I can see that now. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“That you were coming here.”

“Why should I? I mean, we were only passing by.”

“But we weren’t, were we? We met up again. But I’m sorry it had to be like this. What are your plans now?”

“The men want me to stay;.. well, until I leave to be married. I’ll think about it, as I said.” She paused. “I’m still kind of hollow and unsure.”

“Of course you are. That’s where your man comes in.”

“My man?” She looked at him a little stupidly.

“Your fiancé.” He was staring very hard at her, very alertly, not at all stupidly. “That’s what fiancés are for. For comfort. For a hand in yours. Don’t tell me” ... his eyes boring now ... “he doesn’t know yet.”

“Everyone knows everything up here. You told me that yourself.” Her voice had risen a note.

‘They hear eventually, yes, but good grief, girl, in a thing like this you don’t let them hear, you tell them. Haven’t you told Mannering?”

“No. You see, he wasn’t expecting me, I mean not yet. I mean, the arrangements were ... Oh, dear!” Gemma looked distressed, she clenched and unclenched her hands. “Should I have done so?” she implored.

He was silent for quite a long time. Then:

“Not unless you felt you should,” the Territorian answered, and he spoke quietly.

“All the same,” he went on, “as you’re the Future Mrs. Mannering I’d give it a second thought.” Another pause, shorter this time, and after it another theme.

“You got my note?”

“Yes.”

“In it I told the gem if she ever left her velvet box to call me up, but now I’ll say it with more dignity.”

“Yes?” "

“It’s this: If you should need me I’ll be waiting, Gemma.”

“Why should I need you ?” she asked curiously.

“I said if,” he reminded her.

“I won’t need you.”

“Then good for you, but not so good for me. However, what I’ve said still stands. And remember the high tower.”

My rock, my strength, my deliverer, my buckler, my horn of salvation. My high tower.

Gemma was thinking this as she carried down a bottle of milk later to poddy-feed Harriet. Well, the fellow was tall enough, but he was . . . and would be ... no tower. Bruce was her tower, and tomorrow she would go on to Mannering Park and begin her new life. She had decided on that.

“You, too,” she promised Harriet, “but” . . . crumpling for a moment ... “I do wish, darling, you’d been able to meet Godfather.”

Harriet just sucked on oblivious, and laughing a little Gemma continued dunking her fingers in milk then inserting them in the calf’s sweet pink velvet mouth.

The next day Gemma put Harriet in the back seat again, kissed all the men goodbye, promised the geologists a better deal once she belonged to the House of Mannering and they left holes behind them, then drove out of the block and once more headed north.

IT was only some hundred kilometres to the next turn-off, which was Mannering Park. The first turnoff from Come Again had been Rudhill, and because there were no branching roads prior to it, none in the distance as far as Gemma could see, she wheeled with confidence into the much smaller but still sealed way when it occurred an hour later. Twenty minutes later again the road lost its tar, grew narrower and branched a second time, but at that precise moment Harriet set up a moo of protest from the back seat, either for sustenance or exercise ... Gemma decided to give her both .. . and by the time Gemma had halted the car she was past the branch and the sign with the
two
arrows, one to Mannering Park and one to a place called Boothagullagulla.

When she set off again, Harriet having been duly finger-dunked and duly skipped, Gemma was unknowingly on the way to Boothagullagulla.

It was a charming track, and she found her spirits rising. There were a few gurgling streams, legacies from the Wet, and a few large puddles of leftover water with pelicans sailing on them. There was also a sense of sea, somehow. Gemma even stopped the car to sniff and to listen. It was ridiculous, she knew that, but there was still that sensation of blue water.

She drove on.

Half an hour later... how very large were these properties . . . Gemma knew she was coming to something. She went through a first gate, taking care not to commit that cardinal sin and not shut it carefully behind her, a second gate, a third gate, and was wondering whether one could ever train a calf to perform these little tasks when the homestead surprised her. Delightfully surprised her. It was a typical Australian one-level sprawling building with a colonial encircling verandah like the wide brim round a college hat.

Gemma loved it at once.

She loved it even more as she. pulled up. The shallow stairs to the front brim of the hat were wide and inviting and on each rise was a tub of scarlet geranium. There were deep comfortable chairs waiting, and from one of them rose a barely middle-aged man, a man with greying hair and matching, very friendly grey eyes. He threw down the paper he had been reading and at once came down the steps to greet her Before Gemma could do so, he opened the car door, then extended his hand to help her out. He raised his brows at Harriet, but he did not seem at all put out.

“Hullo, girl,” he said to the calf, then he turned and included Gemma. “Hullo, both girls. Welcome to Boothagullagulla.”