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Waterbirds had arrived, he told her. It was common to see ibis, swans and pelicans, but most remarkable of all were the gulls. All those hundreds of miles from the coast, there were gulls.

But when Georgina asked, casually she hoped, about Roper’s, tie man became oddly reticent. Odd, that was, for the outgoing type he obviously was. But Georgina believed she understood. That fellow Roper, she thought, in spite of his confirming and quite friendly telegram, had sounded the pig of pigs.

Around midnight Georgina slept, and carefully the man beside her removed some telltale gravel that had fallen to the floor of the car. He had gathered the gravel and stored it, then waited for the opportunity to throw it at the sidecar s windscreen, and the ruse had worked. He grinned as he placed another rug over Georgina, a pillow under her head.

Then he regarded her for quite a while. It was a very close, very experienced look.

At last he shrugged, smiled philosophically, and then he, too, slept.

Georgina
woke to the sound of music and the smell of coffee.

‘Both canned,’ her companion called from outside the car, ‘I’m no pioneer.’ He nodded to the battery transistor and a small spirit stove. ‘Did you sleep well?’

‘Wonderfully. I didn’t hear you lower the seat.'

‘You were drifting off by that time, so I did it very carefully. Aren’t you glad now you didn’t sleep in the sidecar? You could have had a shockingly stiff neck.’

‘Yes, I’m glad,’ admitted Georgina, ‘I was pleased to go anywhere last night. I was sure I heard steps, then something was thrown across the windscreen. It sounded like gravel or small pebbles. Ah!’ Georgina sat up and looked with deep intrigue at some fine stones on the floor of the car that the man had evidently missed.

‘You
threw it,’ she accused.

‘I plead guilty. I couldn’t have you sitting out there, yet I know how stubborn women are.'

She looked at him in disbelief, yet a disbelief with a smile not far behind. ‘Is that the truth, or did you really have ulterior motives?’ she demanded. He was a very easy person to talk to, Georgina found.

‘I had ulterior motives.' The man pretended to hang his head. ‘Only '

‘Only?’

‘Only you looked like my kid sister if I’d had one,' he grinned.

‘Sure it wasn’t your brother?’ Georgina touched her short-cropped head.

‘Now I didn’t like to say that,' he laughed.

‘I don't mind. Well, I'd better not mind seeing that I--’

I m not stubborn.’ Georgina returned to safe ground. ‘All females are.’

‘You sound rather like Roper of Lucy River when you talk like that.’ Georgina had not intended to bring up Roper again after her companion’s previous reticence, and she bit her lip.

But she needn't have worried. The man looked across at her and asked:

‘So you know him?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Yet you just said --’

'Let’s put it that I’ve gathered an impression of him.’

'Such as?’

‘As if he’s the way you just sounded when you called me stubborn.’

‘And that adds up to?’

‘A disliker of females,’ she asserted, ‘no, not a disliker in your case, for your “stubborn” was only in fun, wasn’t it?’

‘It was.’ He was watching her intently.

But anything from him would come from a born woman-hater, I think.’

‘Not born, achieved. But yes, you’ve got it right.’ Georgina’s companion had made himself a cup of coffee and he got in behind the wheel to drink it beside her.

‘In all our talk last night we never got round to names ’ he told her. ‘I’m Craig Everson.’

‘Georgina Brown,’ she told him.

‘I was born up here, and, apart from school, reared up here. Then when my father died I inherited the station.’

A shrug. ‘Small and badly run down. It wasn’t the old man’s fault, it was the drop in beef prices. He, then I, had the bad luck to coincide with the first cattle slump in years. The failure didn’t worry me, I was never keen, but the lack of funds did. Eventually I had to lease the place out and take on this travelling job. Interested in any farm machinery. Miss Brown?’

‘No,' Georgina smiled. ‘So even though you were born pioneer stock, the real instinct isn’t there?’

‘Not at all. I do this job only because I know it, know the country, know the people. If I knew the city as well, you’d never see me past the coast.’

‘And yet you spoke so graphically about it last night.

‘Of course. I love it, but only to look at and then go away again. I’m not a Larry Roper.’

‘Does he love it?’

‘Blindly,’ Craig grinned.

‘Is that his name, Larry?’

‘I thought you’d know.’

‘No, I don’t know,’ Georgina confessed.

There was silence for a while. Craig Everson had produced breakfast biscuits and adroitly covered them with portions of canned bacon.

‘Lovely,’ Georgina appreciated.

‘Better than you would have served yourself?'

‘Oh yes, but I do have supplies, I’m well tuckered.’

‘You sound as though you’re really going somewhere. Somewhere further, I’d say, than the Westleigh you told me last night.’ His gaze was keen.

‘Yes, I am going further now. Westleigh would have been only an overnight stay.’

‘Will you call in regardless?’

‘I think not,’ she said.

‘Then where?’

‘You do want to know a lot, don’t you?’ Georgina laughed.

‘I do,’ Craig admitted. ‘I like company, particularly female company. To be truthful, in spite of my brotherly feelings for you last night, I have the reputation up here of something of a womaniser.’

‘Deserved?’ she asked mischievously.

He grinned, shrugged and didn’t answer that. ‘Also,’ he went on, ‘although I can wax lyrical about it, I really dislike the bush. I guess I’m just a city slicker at heart. I like to be hemmed in, both with people and chatter.’

‘Then I’ll chatter,’ promised Georgina.

He was easy to talk to and easy to get on with, and when, their coffee and breakfast biscuits finished, Craig suggested that they travelled within hailing distance of each other, Georgina was happy to agree.

It was reassuring to have a man in sight, she thought as she bounced along behind Craig Everson, near enough to see him but sufficiently far away to escape his dust.

She was doubly sure of this when the motorcycle began playing up some time later, then finally stopped. Within minutes Craig was back by her side again, but it took him an hour to spark the reluctant engine.

‘Where did you get it?’ he despaired. ‘In a lucky dip? If so, I can assure you that you weren’t lucky.’

‘We gave very little for it,’ Georgina admitted.

‘We?’

‘My stepfather and I. For the small outlay we’ve had good service.’

‘Well, I can tell you one thing, it won’t be serving you much longer,’ Craig said.

‘But it has to! I have to get there.'

‘Where?’ he demanded.

‘I—I’m not sure. I mean I was, and then Well, I had second thoughts. Oh, dear, I’m not making any sense.’

‘More sense than you think,’ he said shrewdly. ‘It’s to do with the Lucy, isn’t it? You’ve been pumping me hard enough.’

‘Well ’

‘And to do with Larry Roper?’

‘How would you know that?’

‘How would I know, the lady asks, after oh-so-carefully yet oh-so-obviously cross-examining me from the moment we met! ’ Craig laughed aloud.

‘I’m sure I didn’t.’

‘Well, how do you explain now that I’m right about Lucy and Roper?’ He grinned at her.

‘You’re not right. I’m going to the first station that can find a niche for me. Any project that needs a cook or a clerk or a
^:
’

‘But that wasn’t the original intention.’

‘Yes ... no.’

He ignored that. ‘Roper’s was?’

‘Well—yes,’ she admitted.

‘Did I change your mind, saying the things I did about him?’ he inquired solicitously.

‘No, I think I changed my mind myself, and before you spoke.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ Georgina admitted with a grin, for she found Craig Everson extraordinarily easy to talk to, ‘a girl can t be a man.’ She gave him a triumphant look. ‘Now I’ve got you,’ she challenged.

He laughed. ‘You haven’t really! I believe I can see it all. You’ve answered an ad from Roper asking for a man.’

‘Did you read it?’

‘No, but I know you wouldn’t be going out there unless you had something in view, and I also know that Roper would never advertise for a woman, not now. So this time, Craig Everson grinned, ‘I’ve got
you.'

‘Well, yes, I did do just that,’ she admitted, ‘I did answer an advertisement for a man. It seemed all right then, but afterwards I knew I was being crazy.’

‘Very true; very crazy, and it wouldn’t work. Roper s an eagle, nothing escapes him. But then it probably wouldn't work if you were the other sex—not many men can put up with the Mighty Roper.’

‘Mighty Roper?’

‘He’s called that out here.’

‘Because he’s mighty?’

‘Because he thinks he is,’ he amended.

‘You don’t like him,’ guessed Georgina.

‘No.’

‘Any reason?’

‘Plenty. My main one is that he messed up my life.’

Georgina looked at Craig curiously, and decided he didn’t appear to have a messed-up life. She felt he had more to say, and being Craig would certainly say it, so she waited.

‘His own life had been messed around,’ Craig obliged, ‘but that was no reason why mine should be, too.'

‘A girl?’ asked Georgina shrewdly.

‘Yes. She was Roper’s fiancée. Like most hard, tough westerners Larry Roper fell hard and tough for Elva. He put everything into his plans for her.'

‘And?’

‘Well, she got bored with his plans and tore them up. Not literally, of course, but she let Roper know that for her he was only a diversion.’

‘Then where did you come in?’

‘Elva had become interested in me, just as I was interested in her.’

‘Then why didn’t you ... Oh, I’m sorry, it was the money, I suppose, I mean the lack of it,’ she said, confused.

‘No, it was him.’ Craig sounded terse.

‘Him?’

‘Roper, of course. He bought her off. Larry Roper gave Elva the money to clear out. Not just to Sydney but overseas—big money she couldn’t resist.’

‘Go on,’ she urged. He shrugged.

‘Need I? Can’t you understand that it was a case of “if I can’t have her neither can you” as applied to me?’

‘He could have been considering you, thinking you shouldn’t be hurt as well,’ Georgina suggested, though unconvinced herself.

‘Only it wasn’t; it was pure Roper. He’s like that. Look, Georgina, for your own good put any ideas out of your mind as regards going to this man. Not only is he soured by women, he’s a tyrant to his own sex. You couldn’t win either way. If you went as a female he would show you the way out, and if you went as a male ’

‘He’d kick me out?’

‘I think,’ said Craig, ‘you have the general idea.'

‘Yet he did advertise,’ Georgina demurred.

‘Forget it.’

‘And do what instead?’ she asked.

‘I wish I could offer you something, only I’m barely able to keep going myself.’ Craig gave a rueful shrug. I wouldn’t put much reliance on landing a job at any of the stations, either. The boom has been remarkable for its non-appearance this year, and the stations simply aren’t putting on extra hands.’

‘Well, I’m still not going back,’ Georgina said with all the stubbornness of which he had previously accused her, ‘this is my kind of country. Here I belong.’

‘Famous last words! ’ he mocked.

‘I mean them.’

‘Then it’s on your shoulders.’ He looked slyly at Georgina. ‘Incidentally,’ he probed, ‘a girl’s shoulders or a boy’s?’

‘I told you that I’d finished with that idea,’ she told him. ‘Yes, but I think you could change your mind.’

‘Then which do you advise?’

‘Which?’ he echoed blankly.

‘Male or female shoulders?’

‘Neither.’

‘But if you
were
advising,’ she persisted.

‘Determined baggage, aren’t you?’ he grinned at her. ‘Which?’ she insisted.

‘I’d say a male’s shoulders. A woman wouldn’t last two minutes there.’

Georgina was thoughtful. ‘Yet he must have loved her,’ she said at length.

‘Elva?’

‘Yes. I mean, you said it was a lot of money that he gave her.’

‘He has a lot,’ Craig said drily.

By mutual unspoken consent they dropped the subject. Georgina climbed on to the motorcycle again and began following the car as she had before.

Later in the afternoon the old machine gave up altogether. Craig spent another hour on it, then turned and advised Georgina to kiss it goodbye.

‘But what will I do? How will I get there?'

‘Get where?’ he asked once more, and this time Georgina didn’t evade the question.

‘Roper’s,’ she said.

‘So you are going?' His eyes narrowed.

‘Yes.’

‘I suppose I should say find your own way, then, and that anyone who goes to him deserves what she gets.’

‘No,
he
gets,' corrected Georgina.

‘You mean –'

‘Yes, I mean that, Craig. There’s simply nothing else for me to do. You said yourself there would be no jobs being offered, and I can’t, and I won’t, go back. I’m going as George Brown.
He
thinks I’m George Brown, so I’m that far at least, and he, Roper, won’t be back for a few weeks yet, so I could stay on until the eleventh hour, as it were.’

‘But if he did come before ’ Craig began.

‘He won’t. He said so.’

‘But ’

‘Then I’d still be all right. The cabin, my cabin, is secluded, there’s no one close. Finally, if he did discover me’ ... a little rueful grin ... ‘you must agree I’m no
femme fatale
.’

‘It’s a matter of opinion,’ Craig said gallantly.

‘Thank you. But you still must agree that I—well ’

‘I believe that you’re trying to say, among other things, that you have a boyish figure,’ he laughed.