A Town like Alice

fields."
    Joe said quickly, "Where was that in Malaya? I met that party."
    The pilot said, "It was somewhere between Kuantan and Kota Bahru. When we got back they were taken in trucks to Kota Bahru, and I flew them down to Singapore. All English, they were, but they looked just like Malays. All the women were in native clothes, and brown as anything."
    Joe said, "Was there a Mrs Paget with them then?" It was vastly important to him to hear if Jean had survived the war.
    The pilot said, "There was a Miss Paget. She was the hell of a fine girl; she was their leader."
    Joe said, "Mrs. A dark-haired girl, with a baby."
    The pilot said, "That's right-a dark-haired girl. She had a little boy about four years old that she was looking after, but it wasn't hers. It belonged to one of the other women, one who died. I know that, because she was the only unmarried girl among the lot of them, and she was their leader. Just a typist in Kuala Lumpur before the war. Miss Jean Paget."
    Joe stared at him. "I thought she was a married woman."
    "She wasn't married. I know she wasn't, because the Japs had taken all their wedding rings so they had to be sorted out and that was quite easy, because they were all Mrs So-and-So except this one girl, and she was Miss Jean Paget."
    "That's right," the ringer said slowly. "Jean was her name."
    He left the bar presently, and went out to the veranda and stood looking up at the stars. Presently he left the pub and strolled towards the stockyards; he found a gate to lean upon and stood there for a long time in the night, thinking things over. He told me a little about what he had been thinking, that morning in my London flat.
    "She was a bonza girl," he said simply. "If ever I got married it would have to be with somebody like her."
    I smiled. "I see," I said. "That's why you came to England?"
    "That's right," he said simply. He had ridden back with Jim Lennon and the Abo stockmen to Midhurst, a journey that took them about ten days, leading their string of fifteen packhorses; since they had started mustering on the station in February he had been in the saddle almost continuously for three months. "Then there was the bore to see to," he said. "I'd made such a point of that with Mrs Spears that I couldn't hardly leave before that was finished, but then I got away and I went into Cairns one Wednesday with John Duffy on the Milk Run"-I found out later that he meant the weekly Dakota air mail service-"and so down to Brisbane. And from Brisbane I came here."
    "What about the Golden Casket?" I inquired.
    He said a little awkwardly, "I didn't tell you right about that. I did win the Casket, but not this year. I won it in 1946, the year after I got back to Queensland. I won a thousand pounds then, like I said."
    "I see," I observed. "You hadn't spent it?"
    He shook his head. "I was saving it, in case some day I got to have a station of my own, or do a deal with cattle, or something."
    "How much do you think you've got left now?"
    He said, "There's five hundred pounds of our money on the letter of credit, and I suppose that's all I've got. Four hundred pounds of yours. There's my pay as manager goes into the bank at Willstown each month, of course."
    I sat smoking for a time in silence, and I couldn't help being sorry for this.man. Since he had met Jean Paget six years previously he had held the image of her in his mind hoping to find somebody a little like her. When he had heard that she was not a married woman he had drawn the whole of his small savings and hurried expensively half across the world to England, hoping to find her and to find that she was still unmarried. It was a gambler's action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback. Clearly he thought little of his money if it could buy a chance for him of marrying Jean Paget.
    It was ironical to think that she was at that moment busy looking for him in his own country. I did not feel that I was quite prepared to tell him that.
    "I still don't quite understand why you've given up the idea of writing to Miss Paget," I said at last. "You said something about Willstown."
    "Yes." There was a pause, and then he said in his slow way, "I thought a lot about things after I left you, Mr Strachan. Maybe I'd have done better to have done some thinking before ever I left Midhurst. I told you, I got none of them high-falutin ideas about not marrying a girl with money. So long as she was the right girl,