The river is Down Read Online Free PDF

away into the dusty redness that was real sundown now.
    The second voice had not been a middle-aged one. It belonged to a younger person. Sophisticated, southern-educated, and aged somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years: perhaps even more. It belonged to someone who called Nick Brent 'darling', and who was entitled to be furious about his absences. So she had a very tangible claim on him. Cindie thought he might need privacy for this talk.
    Why not? she asked herself. He would be at least thirty, himself Single, too, or someone called Erica from Marana would not be calling him 'darling' on the air where everyone for hundreds and hundreds of miles around would hear.
    Cindie kicked the dust with one foot while she stood ten yards away from that private conversation. She stared at the dying sundown world. The wall of the western sky was a great weal of blood-red stain. It hurt the eyes with its splendour.
    She was glad Jim Vernon had cared, and wanted to speak to her. She cared too, and would have given anything to speak to him.
    Over there at Baanya Station someone wanted to hear news of a girl called Cindie—not about water and a river coming down.
    The thought made her happier than she'd been for a long, long time.
    She had indeed crossed a Rubicon.
    Cindie Brown. That was her name for now!
    She watched the purple gold-lined shadows creep across the blaze of sunset. 'I'm not me anymore . I'm someone else. Perhaps this new me might--'
    Nick Brent put his head out of the Land-Rover's window. Cindie he said. Here came a command again. `Coming!' she replied. Hers to obey, but she was sorry
    to end her day-dream just as soon as the sky and land would—
    lose their glorious closing colours.
    `Jim Vernon wanted to speak to you, but I'm sorry, we're out of time,' Nick Brent said as she climbed back into the Land-Rover. 'I've had to close out the radio. Do you mind?'
    Her eyes met his. 'Yes,' she said regretfully. 'But it's too late, isn't it?'
    `I'm afraid so. Baanya's off the air now. It's the Flying Doctor's hour. We don't encroach on that.'
    He started up the engine, went into a jig-saw puzzle with the gears as the Land-Rover surged forward through the spinif ex.
    In those few minutes the sun went down; the rose colour in the spinifex faded to a dying haze of blue.
    Perhaps she had been a little silly—wanting to hear Jim Vernon's voice! Or was it because he, and only he, had wanted to speak to her? Not about the river being down, either !
    But Nick Brent had wanted to speak to someone with a carefully cultivated aristocratic voice, called Erica.
    So there hadn't been time!
    Cindie glanced at Nick's face again. It was a closed book, remote. His thoughts were miles away, and certainly not with his passenger: nor with her need to have talked to Jim Vernon.
    Perhaps this girl called Erica had minded him rescuing a nobody going by the name of Cindie Brown from the river.
    So what! Cindie thought. I minded not talking to Jim Vernon, too. We can't all win!
    CHAPTHER III
    The sun set.
    It was a grey twilight world in which Cindie first saw the construction camp. It was a town of caravans, which stood in grid-iron rows round the four sides of a square.
    At the top end of this square stood the daddy of all caravans. It was king-size. The canteen, surely? Men were sitting on its steps; or on the ground leaning against the wheels or down-drop sides. Some were lounging easily in circles nearby. Cindie didn't have to be told, even if Nick Brent had been communicative, that the men were all showered and washed up ready for dinner. They were burnt as the earth—their faces and arms a dark-brown—but so wonderfully scrubbed and clean.
    Everywhere there were men. Dozens and dozens of them. There weren't any women in sight, and Cindie, unexpectedly, felt like a brown hen caught in a herd of bush turkeys. An oddity because she was female.
    No one sitting about hailed the Land-Rover, or Nick Brent. They seemed to have a veiled interest