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blossoms of stars and a moon the size of a melon. Occasional movements of small animals, perhaps reptiles, did not disturb her. When a dingo howled a long way off, she chided: ‘Lie down, yellow dog! ’
    She wondered idly and rather pleasantly about that nice man in the car. A writer looking for material? A pastoralist returning home? Obviously he wasn’t a stockman, nor a drover or horse-breaker, he didn’t wear the right clothes. He could be a geologist, she supposed. She wondered where he was going.
    She started eliminating different places, and then, in spite of her previous sleep, she became drowsy doing it.
    A small noise aroused her. It could have been a kangaroo, a yellow dog, and yet it seemed somehow a human noise, like footsteps. Feet made a different sound from paws or hooves.
    There it went again, a stir. A slither. A step.
    Then suddenly there was a scatter of something on the windscreen in front of her ... she did not know what it was, nor wait to find out, she simply leapt from the cycle outfit and fled to the car, calling as she went. Except that Georgina was shaking with fright and not focusing properly, she would have noticed that the man was already out of his car and waiting with the door open for her to get in.
    But she didn’t notice.
    She said breathlessly: 'I thought... I woke up ... there was this sound …'
    He said soothingly: ‘Get in.'
    Georgina did.
    They talked for hours. He had much to tell her about the north-west, and that was what Georgina wanted. Tentatively during the conversation she brought in the Lucy River, Big Lucy, and his descriptions thrilled her. Yes, it was beautiful, he said, in the big river country. There was colour to spare, he related, flowers everywhere now, not coastal flowers but flowers without a name; flood flowers you could call them perhaps, scarlet, magenta, orange, gold, and always, of course, the Salvation Jane.
    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.
     

CHAPTER THREE
    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