A Town like Alice

any letter."
    "That's seems rather a pity," I said quietly.
    "Maybe. I had a good long think about it, and I won't be writing any letter. I decided that. That's why I didn't come back at the time you said."
    "As you like," I said. "Perhaps you'd like to tell me a bit more about it when you've had some breakfast."
    I left him to his breakfast and went on with my letters. My woman took it to the dining-room and he went in there to eat it; a quarter of an hour later he came back to me in the sitting-room.
    "I'd better be getting along now," he said awkwardly. "Will it be all right if I come round later in the day and leave these shoes with the woman?"
    I got up and offered him a cigarette. "Will you tell me a bit more about yourself before you go?" I asked. "You see, I shall be writing to Miss Paget in a day or two, and she's sure to want to know all about you."
    He stared at me, cigarette in hand. "You're going to write and tell her I've been here?"
    "Of course."
    He stood silent for a moment, and then said in his slow Queensland way, "It would be better to forget about it, Mr Strachan. Just don't say nothing at all."
    I struck a match and lit his cigarette for him. "Is this because I told you about her inheritance?"
    "You mean, the money?"
    "Yes."
    He grinned. "I wouldn't mind about her having money, same as any man. No, it's Willstown."
    That was rather less intelligible than Greek to me, of course. I said, "Look, Joe, it won't hurt you to sit down for a few minutes and tell me one or two things." I called him Joe because I thought that it might make him loosen up.
    "I dunno as there's much to tell," he said sheepishly.
    "Sit down, anyway." I thought for a moment, and then I said. "I'm right in thinking that you met Miss Paget first in the war?"
    "That's right," he said.
    "That was in Malaya, when you were both prisoners?"
    "That's right.".
    "Some time in 1942?"
    "That's right."
    "And you've never met her since, nor written to her?"
    "That's right."
    "Well, what I don't understand is this," I said. "Why do you want to meet her now so very badly? After all, it's six years since you met her. Why the sudden urge to get in touch with her now?" It was still vaguely in my mind that he had somehow heard about her money.
    He looked up at me, grinning. "I thought she was a married woman."
    I stared at him. "I see… When did you find out that she wasn't married?"
    "I only found out that this May. I met the pilot that had flown her out from a place in Malaya called Kota Bahru. At Julia Creek, that was."
    He had driven his fourteen hundred cattle down from Midhurst station to Julia Creek with Jim Lennon and two Abo stockriders to help. From Midhurst to Julia Creek is about three hundred miles by way of the Norman River, the Saxby River and the Flinders River. They left Midhurst at the end of March and got the herd to railhead at Julia Creek on the third of May, moving them at the rate of about ten miles a day. The beasts were corralled in the stockyards of the railway, and they set to work to load them into trains; this took about three days.
    During this time Jim and Joe lived in the Post Office Hotel at Julia Creek. It was very hot and they were working fourteen hours a day to load the cattle into trucks; whenever they were not working they were standing in the bar of the hotel drinking hugely at the cold Australian light beer that does no harm to people sweating freely at hard manual work. One evening while they were standing so two dapper men in uniform came into the bar and shouted a couple of rounds; these were the pilots of a Trans-Australia Airline Dakota which had stopped there for the night with an oil leak in the starboard engine.
    Harman found himself next to the chief pilot. Joe was wearing an old green linen sun hat that had once belonged to the American Army, a cotton singlet, a pair of dirty khaki shorts, and boots' without socks; his appearance contrasted strangely with the neatness of the airman, but the pilot was accustomed to the outback. They fell into conversation about the war and soon discovered they had both served in Malaya. Joe showed the scars upon his hands and the pilots examined them with interest; he told them how he had been nailed up to be beaten, and they shouted another grog for him.
    "The funniest do I ever struck," said the chief pilot presently, "was a party of women and children that never got into a prison camp at all. They spent most of the war in a Malay village working in the paddy