“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 themrose 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 thesandhills, following hard and wind-sweptclaypans, 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.