The river is Down Read Online Free Page A

girl's car, Flan? Is it dry?' `It'll go, boss. I wiped around a bit and tried the engine. She purrs!'
    Cindie made a movement to open the door. 'I'll take it over . . .' she began.
    Nick Brent leaned his arms on the steering wheel. 'Leave it to Flan, Cindie,' he said, still in that steady voice. 'He'll bring it up. Besides, he has a call to make at the gang on the number-four grader. He can go in your car. It'll be useful.'
    Well really!
    Cindie leaned back in exasperation. Everything, even her car, was taken out of her hands. They had rescued her. That was wonderfully good of them. Now they carried on as if the rest of her life and belongings were theirs.
    The rest of her life!
    Cindie was startled at herself.
    What a strange expression to have thought up! It had come into her head, like that. Not meaning that at all, either. Yet the effect of it made her feel she had crossed not any river, but the Rubicon.
    She had crossed a river! The very act had made her into
    a different person. She was someone else. She wasn't even angry any more. The weight on her heart, the muffling in her ears? They were gone: all because she had crossed water, and there was no way back.
    Looking around her she knew she was in a new world. A wide, wild, untamed, hot spinifex plain of a world. And
    there was no road back because the river was down!
    She was Cindie Brown. Not Cynthia Davenport any more. She was born again!
    Nick Brent had been speaking with Flan from the window. He turned to Cindie. She looked back at him, meeting his eyes straight as the level plain that stretched away between them to a line that was the only definition between the earth and the sky. Funny, but it didn't matter so much that he didn't like her. A miracle had happened. Like the snap of a tow-rope.
    `Have you a job for a cook, or an unprofessional nurse? A typist? Something? Anything?' she asked.
    Her eyes did not waver under his immensely sceptical stare.
    `Are you as versatile as all that? Have you three qualifications for providing for the comfort of man?' He was only one decimal point away from being sarcastic now.
    `No,' she said gravely. 'I can cook for two; also for a party. I can nurse about as well as a nurserymaid. That is—I know how to bandage and put on a poultice. Also to mix a throat gargle. I can read well enough to understand a standard pharmacopoeia. Typing is my best. That's how I earn my living. I'm a typist.'
    Their eyes held. Cindie's were violet—true. His were a cold grey, but not altogether empty this time.
    `What are you running away from? Or to?' he asked at length—a sort of deadly question.
    She did not reply.
    `No answer?' His eyebrows went up. Cindie realised how good-looking he was under his overlay of sunburn, and beneath the watchful manner that said there was a whole book of personality hidden behind his unappeasable attitude towards herself.
    He'd thrown out a tow-rope to rescue her car. She had really needed a tow-rope for herself—as a person. This was her own moment of truth. She had thought she was going to Bindaroo for her mother's sake. It had really been for
    her own sake too. She'd been looking for an escape route. Or was it a tow-rope?
    'I can work hard,' she said. 'I'm a good worker.'
    He turned back to the steering wheel, and started up.
    He narrowed his eyes to see through the unsettled dust of his own earlier arrival. As he drove he watched for his car's tracks on the red-brown earth, and between the spinifex humps.
    'I'll take you up to the camp temporarily,' he said after a long silence. 'You could give a hand up there, in preference to sitting around waiting, if you wish. Unfortunately they don't have helicopters up here to take you off. We're rather stuck with one another, till we see what the river is likely to do in the next few weeks. No one but the river knows. It flows underground, and the mud can stay feet deep when the surface has dried out.'
    Cindie shook her head without knowing she did it. This was her