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Drew frowned down at the map again. A thought, very clear and definite like a notice in block capitals seemed to hang itself up before his consciousness, as if defying him to ignore it.

No wonder, really, if she missed all this—

He seemed to see, rather horrified, a circle draw itself on the map enclosing the life she'd lived with him since their marriage – from one suburb of Sydney to another – school-holiday trips with Colin to the mountains, summer cottages at Bowral, summer cottages at Cronulla, at Terrigal, at Wollongong – and it was, on that vast and adventurous expanse, a very little circle indeed!

But he hadn't known – hadn't realised—

When a man's busy earning a living—

Funny how school lessons took the glamour out of a thing! Why hadn't it ever shown to him somehow that every miserably bethumbed page of his atlas was the picture of a story – a thousand stories—? He could see now that page upon which the long
coastline of his native state wavered down the right-hand side, and the countries, bewilderingly indicated in colours whose ugliness he even now remembered and resented, stretched away to its western boundary. And all it had ever meant to him had been a few parrot phrases, a few lists of names learnt rebelliously by heart. Even now he could say the rivers – “Tweed, Richmond, Clarence, Hastings, Manning, Hunter, Hawkesbury, Shoalhaven” – and much good it did him!

Why hadn't any one ever told him about this road, for instance? Oh, yes, of course he'd scrawled laboriously in examination papers that, “In the year such-and-such a party of explorers led by so-and-so set out to discover this-and-that—” But why hadn't they told him, somehow, things about it that only to-day, at fifty-eight, he'd begun to realise – that it was
a road of inconceivable glamour and romance and that it went on – and on—

He said to Bret:

“Who made the Western Road?”

Bret answered between puffs:

“Chap called Cox. In six months from Penrith to Bathurst.”

“Six months!”

“Six months with a gang of thirty. Mostly convicts, I think they were.”

Drew stared down at the map. Perhaps because he'd had a long day and was beginning to feel tired, the black line of the road faded by some optical illusion into the moving winding strip that his eyes had been watching since early morning. The darkly shaded valleys, stretching out like talons towards it, became blue and luminous, incredibly deep, dreadfully remote, so that he had a brief sensation of vertigo, and a ridiculous momentary feeling that he, Tom Drew, in clothes with arrows on them, and chains about his ankles, was toiling perilously on a moving road that stretched like a tightrope with blue death on either side—

His finger moved slowly westward. Names shone up at him out of the golden lamplight, tantalising mysteries hidden from him behind the soft syllables of an alien tongue; Gulgong, Dunedoo, Merrygoen, Tooraweenah—

No, they weren't bad, those names. There was a sort of music in them, difficult, elusive, like the difficult and elusive beauty he'd discovered that morning in the bush; and still the road went on.

Jove, what a fleabite was the distance they'd come compared with what separated them still from the
western boundary of this eastern state! Amazing to think you could still go on, right out of this map into another and right out of that other into a third before you reached the sea!

Not that one would, of course. Desert. Waterless. Hundreds and hundreds of miles— The sort of mad journey you tackled when you were young—

Fifty-eight—

His eyes came up rather forlornly from the beguiling map. Fifty-eight – and feeling it! He climbed heavily to his feet and the map, released, rolled itself up with a little rattle to the cigarette-case which Bret took and handed up to him.

He said:

“Well, I'm off to bed, Milly. We've had a long day. Don't suppose I'll sleep for a while, so if Colin comes in—”

Margery cut in a little too quickly.

“I don't think he'll be back till to-morrow morning now—”

And Millicent, who from the dark had been watching her husband and feeling a faint ache that was half excitement and half apprehension, stood up as he passed and put a hand on his arm.

“I'll come too, Tom. It's ridiculously early, but I am tired. You don't mind, Margery?”

Margery said, “No, of course not!” Squeezing the hand that her mother-in-law put out to her. She wished very much that they'd all go to bed. And as if answering that wish Susan stood up. Bret, re-rolling the map on the floor, saw her skirts pass him faintly golden, diaphanous. She was saying something softly to Margery and then she was gone through the open door into the house following her parents.

Bret, snapping an elastic hand over the map came slowly over to Margery. He sat down in the chair Millicent had just left, and
took his pipe out of his mouth.

He said deliberately:

“Marge, where
is
Colin – really?”

S
HE
turned to him in the darkness, and with the startled movement came a small startled sound as if not till that moment had she allowed herself to know how afraid she was.

He prompted her:

“Drinking again?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“This morning—”

For a moment as she said it she wondered. Only this morning? It seemed a hundred years ago that she'd lain, her face downward, on a half-made bed and heard the sound of the car fade in the distance, and let her anger overwhelm her fear. Bret asked:

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No. He just went. I didn't ask him. I didn't care.”

Bret went over to the veranda rail and
knocked his pipe out on it. He reflected as he did so that it was strange how some sounds were, of their very nature, sinister; how that mild and innocent knocking of his pipe should break the quietness so forebodingly – “Didn't care,” eh? He thought, with a sudden wave of surprising bitterness, “Love!” and asked her, without turning:

“Was he in a fit state to drive?”

She came and stood beside him, put her elbows on the
rail and her face with a sudden distraught movement in her hands.

“I think so. He's often driven home much worse. I – I've been nearly mad – I didn't know what to do – well, there
wasn't
anything to do. Some one in Mudgee will find him—”

Bret asked:

“You – think he's in Mudgee?”

She lifted her face from her hands to look at him. He saw uneasily that though she had made no sound of weeping her cheeks in the dim light glistened with tears, and instead of waiting for her reply he found himself asking another question:

“Why did you say you didn't care?”

“I didn't – then. Sometimes you go – past caring about anything at all. I suppose,” she added half to herself on a breath like a sigh, “it's to give you a rest. Before you give way altogether – so that you can go on afterwards caring harder than ever—”

And then she said sharply:

“Where else would he go?”

Bret didn't answer. He was wondering whether it was not perhaps rather a mad thing to do, to alarm her because of a suspicion, a feeling, a wisp of blue smoke—? Whether it wasn't, after all, far more likely that Colin was somewhere in Mudgee, poor kid, sleeping off another failure, another capitulation—?

Margery's voice startled him – a whisper with an edge to it.

“You don't think – he's up there?”

He found that he'd been staring at Jungaburra, and hearing the terror in her voice his first instinct was to deny and comfort. He realised, too, that he needed reassurance himself; absent-mindedly as he'd been
staring at the mountain, something in its vast black mass, its spire-point soaring into the sky, must have chilled him— He said hastily:

“No, no. Why should he be? He – he didn't go in that direction, did he?”

She shook her head miserably.

“I don't know. The turn-off is down the hill – you've stopped hearing a car by the time it gets there, anyhow.”

“Did he ever – say—?”

“No!”

Bret looked at the mountain again. He found himself remembering in rather terrifying detail his one ascent of it with Colin. There'd been one damn place— He realised that he was in a state of acute and agonising funk, and instantly he said:

“When we drove down this evening there was smoke up there – in his cave.”

As he followed her down to the garage ten minutes later he was feeling faintly amused. It was all, he told himself, rather ludicrous. Colin, probably, was safely asleep somewhere in Mudgee, and he himself was off on a ridiculous wild-goose chase. He followed Margery into the darkness of the shed where her electric torch made for a moment a moving pool of light across the mud-splashed glories of the Madison. It passed on then, found a wall, travelled up it and paused, and with its pausing Bret was aware of a little shock, a tension, a hair-thin crack in his self-possession – the same
sensation which he had felt when he heard the knocking of his pipe on the veranda rail.

What was there, in heaven's name, about a coil of rope hanging on a nail? He wondered, staring at it, if its quality of drama – or one might almost say, of melodrama, came from the suddenness with which it had leapt out of the surrounding darkness and now hung there in a circle of light which invested it somehow with a wholly disproportionate significance.

Queer. He reached over Margery's shoulder and took it down from its hook. He asked:

“How long is it?”

“Fifty feet. But you won't climb alone, Bret?”

“I probably won't need to climb at all. If the car isn't there I suppose we can take it Colin isn't either.”

“But if it is—”

“Well, I'll just find out where he is and do what seems best.”

“You won't take this car?”

He grinned, thinking of the crazy and precipitous track which led up the foothills of the mountain. He said, slinging the rope across his shoulder:

“She's had enough adventures for her maiden journey. Besides if Colin – I might have to drive the other car back.”

She said in a low voice:

“Yes.” And then, with an effort, “You won't take me, Bret? I'm all right. I could do it.”

“And supposing he turned up from Mudgee in the meantime?”

She nodded.

“Yes. What about Susan?”

But he said very finally and
abruptly, “Not Susan,” and she sighed, switching off her torch and following him out into the night, already faintly silvered by the rising moon. She said wearily:

“If you want help you can signal with the torch from that flat rock at the top of the first hill. It's pretty powerful. I'll see it all right. I'll watch for it.”

“Right. You go in now and rest. It'll be at least an hour before I could do any signalling even if I want to.”

But she went after him quickly as he turned away.

“Bret?”

“Well?”

“You – you – I'm not quite blind because I – happen to love Colin. You mustn't do anything – risky. I know your life's worth more than his to every one but me.”

He said, “Nonsense!” rather uneasily, and then felt an unspoken answer to that remark of hers flood him with a wave, a torrent of black and bitter depression. “Worth more than Colin's!” Something in him cried out at her savagely, silently, that he was worth nothing at all to any one, not even to a wife who inexplicably and uselessly happened to be in love with him. Least of all her! Dead, he thought, adjusting the rope so that its knot came comfortably clear of his shoulder, he would at least mean a name; an income; and, perhaps, a well-meaning memory—

He said rather shortly:

“I haven't the slightest intention of breaking my neck. I'll watch the house when I can and you'll signal with flashes from the window if he comes home. Right?”

“Yes.”

She watched him go off across the paddocks, his
white shirt glimmering more and more dimly, till it faded altogether out of sight. Then her eyes went to the peak of Jungaburra and stayed there.

Bret walked fast in the moonlight. When he came down the hill to the flat grassy bank of the creek he stopped for a moment, looking up and down for the crossing. That pause, brief as it was, had been enough to impress upon his mind a gurgle of running water, a croaking of frogs and a dry faint rustling of leaves. Sounds which, by way of memory and association, took him back to another creek, not unlike this one, where on a grassy flat behind just such another fringe of she-oaks he'd camped once, three years ago with Jim. A good camp, that one had been – a holiday camp, a week's poking about, and exploring among the Warrumbungles, coming back each evening, tired and scratched and dirty, and bathing at dusk in a pool paved with smoothly rounded pebbles.

Like these—

Stepping from one boulder to another, he paused midway across the stream looking down into the limpid moonlit shallows. So strongly that he did not even try for a few seconds to resist it, came a feeling that all the time between then and now was an illusion; that he would see, if he looked up from these familiar seeming pebbles, a long familiar figure on the opposite bank, a tent pitched on the grass between a she-oak and a gum, its white sides flickeringly painted with the rosy light of the camp fire—

Then, sharply, his head did come up. No long figure, no tent, but—

But certainly, somewhere, a fire.

He sniffed. The breath of wind, which
was stirring the leaves of the taller gums, barely touched him here; a vagrant breath of it had, all the same, carried from somewhere a scent which, always unmistakable, seemed too, coming in the wake of his thoughts, disturbing. Not a bush fire after this morning's rain. Possibly a log still smouldering up there in the paddock where they were ring-barking. Possibly—