Hills End Read Online Free PDF

himself. He had been given his marching orders. No question about it. He made a nervous grimace—a mannerism of his when he was embarrassed—tapped out his still unlit pipe on his heel, and wandered back down the hill, feeling uncommonly like a little boy rebuffed for telling tales out of turn. Schoolteachers! He snorted. They were a funny race of people!
    Miss Elaine Godwin sat on a stump and took from her haversack the book she had removed from the library shelf. It was called The Art of the Aboriginal .
    She knew it from cover to cover and probably that was why she couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t get out of her mind a suspicion that Frank Tobias had made up the whole story. Perhaps it was pity all the time. Perhaps the children, perhaps all the people, were sorry for her. That would be perfectly dreadful. It worried her so much that she started trembling again, all over.

3
The Ascent Begins
    Adrian was first back to the hall. He wasn’t going to let anyone think that he was frightened to face it, so he was back before the quickest of them. There was only one escape for him. He’d have to bluff it through. There were so many caves, anyway, that he could pretend to lose his bearings. Who could know that he hadn’t really lost his bearings? There were hundreds of caves. The more he thought about it, the better he began to feel.
    Frances came down the road, thinking ruefully of the truck convoy drawing nearer and nearer to the big bridge at Fiddler’s Crossing, thinking of all the shops in Stanley, full of such wonderful things, pretty dresses and long lengths of beautiful material, things she wouldn’t have bought, but things she would have looked at, up and down the long main street, all through the hot afternoon, window-shopping with her mother, dreaming.
    â€˜Hi,’ said Adrian.
    â€˜Hi,’ said Frances.
    Harvey came down the track, small, squeaky, pugnacious little Harvey, nine years old, as sharp as a tack, full of fight and courage, the terror of every girl who wore pigtails or hair at all, a very dangerous young fellow when roused. He fought like a wasp, darting in and out. He lived for a rough and tumble. More often than not his poor father was black and blue.
    â€˜Hi,’ said Adrian.
    â€˜Hi yourself,’ said Harvey.
    Maisie came along, wondering how on earth she had come to be mixed up in it, because no one was more harmless than Maisie. She was clever at school, well behaved at home, and only eleven years old. Quiet as she usually was, Maisie had a twinkle in her eye, and perhaps that was why she had jumped from the truck, following the leader, eager for the prank. But it wasn’t so marvellous now. No, it wasn’t so marvellous now.
    â€˜Hi,’ said Adrian.
    â€˜Hullo,’ said Maisie.
    Butch—his mother called him Christopher—waddled into view with an enormous lunch bulging from his schoolbag. He hadn’t emptied the refrigerator because there was always tomorrow, but he had made a big hole in it. Butch needed food and a lot of it because Butch was almost as big as a man. He had tumbled from the truck because Adrian was in trouble and Adrian was a frequent provider of malted milks and chocolate bars. But Butch liked Adrian, too, apart from that, because most of the time Adrian was a very nice fellow.
    â€˜Hi,’ said Adrian.
    â€˜Hi.’ Butch smiled.
    Paul and Gussie came along the road, guiltily, sure they had ruined the day for everyone. Gussie felt it very badly, because Gussie was all gold. She was the light in her parents’ eyes; she was everybody’s darling, nearly twelve, with not a shred of conceit in her. Everybody’s darling, that is, except Paul’s. As far as he was concerned, she was Trouble with a capital T.
    â€˜Hi, you two,’ said Adrian.
    Paul looked him up and down and again began to wonder whether he should blame himself entirely. Adrian’s lie was the real cause. Adrian