Chapter 4

  The head stockman's house stood on piles some thirty feet above a narrow gulch fringed with tall, straggling gum trees and many weeping willows. After the splendor of Drogheda homestead it was rather bare and utilitarian, but in its appurtenances it was not unlike the house they had left behind in New Zealand. Solid Victorian furniture filled the rooms to overflowing, smothered in fine red dust.

  "You're lucky here, you have a bathroom," Father Ralph said as he brought them up the plank steps to the front veranda; it was quite a climb, for the piles upon which the house was poised were fifteen feet high. "In case the creek runs a banker," Father Ralph explained. "You're right on it here and I've heard it can rise sixty feet in a night."

  They did indeed have a bathroom; an old tin bath and a chipped water heater stood in a walled-off alcove at the end of the back veranda. But, as the women found to their disgust, the lavatory was nothing more than a hole in the ground some two hundred yards away from the house, and it stank. After New Zealand, primitive.

  "Whoever lived here wasn't very clean," Fee said as she ran her finger through the dust on the sideboard.

  Father Ralph laughed. "You'll fight a losing battle trying to get rid of that," he said. "This is the Outback, and there are three things you'll never defeat-the heat, the dust and the flies. No matter what you do, they'll always be with you."

  Fee looked at the priest. "You're very good to us, Father."

  "And why not? You're the only relatives of my very good friend, Mary Carson."

  She shrugged, unimpressed. "I'm not used to being on friendly terms with a priest. In New Zealand they kept themselves very much to themselves." "You're not a Catholic, are you?"