A Town like Alice

each other than they would learn under the restraints of Cairns.
    "I'd like to do that, Joe," she said. "How would we get there?"
    He beamed with pleasure, and she was glad for him. "I'll slip out after tea and find Ernie," he said. "He's probably in the bar at Hides. He's got a boat, and he'll run us out there tomorrow; it'll take about three hours. We'd better start about eight o'clock, before the sun gets hot. Then I'd ask him to come out and fetch us on Monday, say."
    "All right," she agreed. "But look, Joe-this is to be Dutch treat." He did not understand that term. "I mean, you pay the boat one way and I'll pay it the other, and we both pay our own bills." He objected strenuously. "If we don't do that, Joe, I won't come," she said. "I'll think you're plotting to do me a bit of no good."
    He grinned. "Too right." And then he said, "All right, Mrs Boong, we'll each pay our own whack."
    He went out after tea and came back to her on the veranda half an hour later; he had found Ernie and arranged the boat, and he had bought a large basket of fruit to take with them. In the quick dusk and the darkness they sat together for some hours, talking of everything but Willstown. She learned a lot about his early life on the various stations, and about his relations in and around Cloncurry, about his war service, and about Midhurst. "It's got a bonza rainfall, Midhurst has," he said. "We got thirty-four inches in the last wet; down at Alice it's a good year if you get ten inches. I've been asking Mrs Spears if we couldn't build a couple of dams at the head of the creeks to hold back some of the water-one across the head of Kangaroo Creek and one on the Dry Gum."
    "Did she agree?"
    "She'll pay for them," he said. "Trouble is, of course, to get the labour. You can't get chaps to come and work in the outback. It's a fair cow."
    "Why is that?" she asked. She had a very good idea, herself, but she wanted to hear his views.
    "I don't know," he said. "They all want to go and work in the towns."
    She did not pursue the subject; there was time enough for that. They talked of pleasant, unimportant things; she found that he was very anxious to get back to Midhurst to see his horses and his dogs. "I got a bitch called Lily," he said. "Her mother was a blue cattle dog and she got mated by a dingo, so Lily's half a dingo. She's a bonza dog. Well, I mated her with another blue cattle dog before I come away and she'll have had the litter now, so they'll be quarter dingo. A cross between dingo and cattle dog makes a grand dog, but you've got to get the dingo strain weak or they aren't reliable. I had a quarter dingo dog before the war at Wollara, and he was grand."
    He told her that he had about sixty saddle and pack horses on the station, but they did not seem to be as close to his heart as his dogs. "A dog comes into the homestead and sits around with you in the evenings," he said, and she could picture the long, lonely nights that were his normal life. "You couldn't get along in the outback without dogs."
    At ten o'clock they went to bed, prepared for an early start in the morning. They stood together in the darkness by the entrance to her room for a moment. "Have I changed much, Joe?" she asked.
    He grinned. "I wouldn't have known you again."
    "I didn't think you would. Six years is a long time."
    "You haven't changed at all, really," he said. "You're the same person underneath."
    "I think I am," she said slowly. "After the war I felt like an old woman, Joe. After Kuantan, I didn't think I'd ever enjoy anything again." She smiled. "Like a weekend at Green Island."
    "There's nothing to do there, you know," he said. "You bathe and go out in a glass-bottomed boat to see the coral and the fishes."
    "I know. It's going to be such fun."
    They left next morning in Ernie's fishing boat, a motor launch with a canopy. For two hours they chugged out over a smooth sea, trolling a line behind and catching two large, brilliantly coloured horse-mackerel. Green Island appeared after an hour as the tops of coconut palms visible above the horizon; as they drew near the little circular island appeared, fringed round completely with a white coral beach. There was a long landing-stage built out over the shallow water of the reef; they landed and walked down this together, pausing to look at the scarlet and blue fishes playing round the coral heads below.
    There were no other visitors staying on the island and they got two of the little bedroom huts in among