Chapter One

      The Derelict Aeroplane

      Because the day was still and cool and invigorating, Elizabeth elected to accompany her father on a tour of the fifteen hundred square miles of country called Coolibah. The sample of late October weather in the far west of Queensland had nothing to do with Nettlefold’s decision to make this tour of the great cattle station of which he had been the manager for thirty-two years. With him such a tour came within the ambit of routine work, but on this occasion he wished to inspect a mob of store cattle before they were handed over to the drovers who were to take them to Bourke for the Sydney market; and, further, he wanted to inspect the condition of the feed in a huge paddock, named Emu Lake, which had been resting for two years.

      “I am glad you came, Elizabeth,” he said, while the comfortable car took them ever westward of the great Diamantina River.

      “I am, too,” the girl replied quickly. “The house is always very quiet when you’re away, and heaven knows it’s quiet enough when you are home.” Elizabeth smiled. “And then when you are away something always happens to the radio.”

      Her beautiful face gave the lie direct to those who say that the Queensland climate ruins feminine complexions. Her hair was deep brown, and so, too, were her large eyes. The colouring of her face was fresh, and only her lips were touched with rouge.

      “This is the fourth time you have come with me since we took to cars,” he pointed out after a little silence.

      “The fifth time,” she corrected him.

      Laughter narrowed his eyes and rounded his brick-red face.

      “Well, a car is not so slow and boring as the buckboard used to be. I remember the first occasion you came out with me. You were only five years old, and, although we joined forces against your mother, it was a hard tussle to get her to let you go.”

      “That was the time the river came down while we were outback, and we had to camp for two weeks waiting for it to subside enough to make the crossing back to the house. I remember most distinctly poor mother running out of the house to meet us. I think that my earliest memory is of her anxious face that day.”

      “She had cause to be anxious. There was no telephone from the homestead out to the stockmen’s huts in those days, and no telephone from the stations up north by which we could have ample notice of a coming flood. Before you were born your mother often came with me and used to enjoy the camping out. We were great pals, your mother and I.”

      The girl’s hand for a moment caressed his coated arm. Then she said softly: “And now we are pals aren’t we?”

      “Yes, Elizabeth, we are pals, good pals,” he agreed, and then relapsed into silence.

      They were twenty miles west of the maze of intertwining empty channels of the Diamantina, and thirty-five miles from Coolibah homestead. Ahead of them ranged massive sand-dunes, orange-coloured and bare of herbage save for scanty cotton-bush. Here and there beyond the sand crests of the range reared the vivid foliage of bloodwood trees, while beyond them rose a great brown cloud of dust.

      “That’ll be Ted Sharp with the cattle,” Nettlefold said, with reference to the dust cloud.

      “How many are we sending away this time?” asked the girl.

      “Eight hundred—I am hoping. It will depend.”

      The track led them round a spur of sand running upward for forty odd feet to the summit of a dune. It then led them in and among the sandhills, following hard and wind-swept claypans, on which the wheels of vehicles left imprints barely visible. The Rockies, Elizabeth had called them the first time she had induced her father to stop here for lunch and permit her to scramble up one and then slide down its steep face with shrieks of laughter and boots filled hard with the fine grains.

      Then, as suddenly as they had passed into the seeming barrier, the car shot out on to a wide treeless plain, a grey plain which was fringed along its far side with dark timber. Before them milled a slow-moving mass of cattle, moving like a wheel, and driven by four horsemen. A fifth horseman, leading a spare saddled horse, came cantering to meet them. When they stopped he brought his animals close to the car. Off came his wide-brimmed felt hat to reveal straight brown hair and the line across his forehead below which the sun and the wind had stained his face. Above the line the milk-white skin made a startling contrast.

      “Morning, Mr Nettlefold! Morning, Miss Elizabeth!” he shouted, before dismounting to lead the horses closer. To the girl he added with easy deference: “I thought you would have gone to Golden Dawn and had a flip or two with those flying fellows. All the boys were going to ask for time off to go up and look-see the bush from above if this muster hadn’t been ordered.”