Dolan of Sugar Hills

DOLAN OF SUGAR HILLS

Kate Starr

All her dreams were shattered now

Sheila was traveling to North Queensland to claim the coral isle she’d inherited, when she met Cane Dolan.

Overbearing, infuriating, but undeniably attractive, Cane bluntly informed her of the truth: the coral isle was leased—and to Cane himself!

Sheila had no choice but to accept his offer of help, at least until she could make other plans. Falling in love with the enigmatic Cane definitely wasn’t among them...

CHAPTER ONE

Sheila Guthrie read the notice idly the first time.

Take Notice: If the man who stole my cane knife from no. 7 cutting calls back he can take something else that is coming to him. Dolan of Sugar Hills.

She read it with incredulity the second time, then dropped the local newspaper that her fellow traveler had casually tossed her to the train floor and observed aloud: “It’s a primitive land.”

The man, the tall, broad, heavy-shouldered, bronzed man beside whom she had journeyed all the daytime hours of the long miles north from Brisbane, the man who had handed her the little local paper to while away some of those hours, glanced incuriously up from his own
Queensland Courier.

He had thick, black brows that scowled readily, deep lines around his firm, large mouth and big, square, strong, capable hands.

“How?” he demanded quietly.

Sheila waved distastefully to the newspaper and particularly to the pungent paragraph; no subtlety, she was thinking with disgust, no reservation, no hesitation in treading down uncouthly on deserving or undeserving toes. Imagine a
civilized
publication permitting such an ad!

“Things like that,” she replied, curling her lip, “would only be paid for by barbarians.”

The man took out the makings of a cigarette and took his time in rolling and lighting it. Every gesture was unhurried and deliberate.

“
I
can afford it,” he said at length.

“You?” But she was not surprised really, and her lip, curling upward again, said as much.

The man exhaled slowly, leisurely, and either the smoke or inner sardonic amusement narrowed his charcoal-dark eyes.

“Up here, miss,” he informed her lazily, even with boredom, “we don’t stand around considering our sugar crop—we go right out and cut it, the same as we don’t pick and choose our words but say them instead, then act.”

“That is crude,” Sheila said stiffly. She
felt
stiff, physically stiff from thirty-six hours’ inaction.

“Your previous words, I believe, were ‘primitive’ and ‘barbarian’...” the man challenged.

For a deliberate moment his bold charcoal eyes held Sheila’s own clear violet ones in cool demand.

The moment lengthened quite uncomfortably for Sheila and angrily she resolved that if this objectionable man believed she would withdraw the words, step down, he was to be disappointed.

“You are Mr. Dolan,” she stated in a clear, cool voice.

“
Cane
Dolan,” he came back just as clearly and coolly. “There is another name, miss, but you wouldn’t be interested, not in anyone so crude. Simply put me down on your list as one of the ‘barbarians’ of this ‘primitive’ land.”

Sheila had first encountered the man last night at Roma Street Station in Brisbane.

She had been waiting for the northbound Sunlander, intrigued by several groups of men apparently northbound, as well.

Queensland was certainly a masculine state, she had concluded, remembering that males outnumbered females by nearly two hundred thousand. There seemed to be men everywhere.

They were mostly big men, she noted, if not in height then in build, and they all carried kits and blankets as well as something else that they hugged to their bodies in narrow boxes. She wondered curiously what the boxes contained. Here and there, in the mixed nationality groups, a dark eyed Neapolitan strummed a guitar to dulcet words.

She had looked on, fascinated, entertained, not unaware that the men returned her gaze and she decided that their warm glances were just another instance of the friendliness that she had found so much more readily up here in Queensland than in Australia’s cooler southern states.

Responding to their friendliness, she had smiled in return. As quietly as he was to address her afterward, the man who sat beside her in the train now had addressed her then.

He had approached silently—either that or she had been too absorbed to hear him—and with the merest touch on her shoulder had wheeled her around.

“If I were you, miss,” he drawled without preamble or apology, “I wouldn’t wave a flag.”

“A flag?” She had stared at him in amazement, in question, in rising indignation.

“It could amount to that,” he had drawled again in lazy explanation, “when a cane cutter is heading north. There’s five months’ season in front of him, and if you think there’s not a profusion of women here in Brisbane, up there it’s female famine. Understand?”

“No,” Sheila had snapped.

“Then I’ll put it more directly,” he proposed.

“It doesn’t matter,” she had replied, her eyes flashing, “I think after all I do understand.”

She had flushed at his words, at the idea behind the words. It did not occur to her to be grateful for the timely advice. She had turned away, smarting, humiliated, embarrassed, hoping the train would arrive soon and that she would lose him. Lose him for all time, she had thought.

As though in answer to her wish the Sunlander had purred out of the darkness into the brightly lit station.

“Bundaberg, Rockhampton, Townsville, all points north to Cairns,” Sheila had heard, and she had joined the groups boarding the white, streamlined, air-conditioned train.

Once inside, Sheila had found that the Sunlander was a pleasant world of its own; cool, self-contained, well-appointed, meeting the difficult challenge of attending the wants of many travelers for as long as two days.

The neat berths had not been made up yet, but stewardesses were busy on them now, and until the beds were ready there was a comfortable lounge.

Sheila had entered the lounge ... then paused. There was only one seat vacant. A seat beside
him.

The train had started. It was a quiet train, the movement almost imperceptible, but for all that one could not stand in the corridor in absolute comfort. Furthermore, a guard was approaching. He had a fatherly look, he would be sure to fuss and find her that one seat that remained. It would be better, Sheila decided, to go to it herself rather than be guided there.

Unwillingly she had gone.

The man had glanced up and raised his hateful dark eyebrows in acknowledgment. To her annoyance she had had to thank him for adjusting her chair,

At last a stewardess had told her that her berth was ready and without a word Sheila had fled.

But in the morning she had found that her day traveling seat was the same as the seat the night before. So was his. She had found that she was even placed beside him in the diner for meals.

Then also she had discovered, as all far-bound passengers eventually do discover, that you cannot journey for hour upon hour, mile upon mile, without something loosening up between you and your traveling companion.

Reluctantly but inevitably she had accepted the man’s offer of morning coffee, later afternoon tea, later again a cocktail before dinner.

They had spoken desultorily about the country they traversed, sugar country, and he had given her a brief outline from planting to cropping to mill. Apparently he was a sugar man himself.

There had been hours of mutual silence when he had read and smoked, when Sheila had closed her eyes and tried to think about the future but she had given it up because it all just didn’t bear thinking about and because as Miss Whittaker had said acidly, it was all quite, quite mad.

“Australia?” her ex-employer had expostulated. “You must be crazy, girl.”

“But there’s an island, you see,” Sheila recalled babbling anxiously, “a coral isle. Father said so. It was his, so now it must be mine. It’s in the Whit Sunday Passage of the Great Barrier Reef. It—” her voice had faltered a little, Sheila remembered “—is the only thing father left me when he died.”

Miss Whittaker had sniffed, expressing her opinion of improvident people who in the course of a lifetime only manage to achieve one very distant and very dubious-sounding coral isle.

Not that Miss Whittaker had cared that Daryl Guthrie died a pauper. To her it meant that Sheila would depend on this position more than ever, and Sheila was valuable to Miss Whittaker. She was quiet, pliable, docile, a clear reader, a good listener, and she knew that the special China tea that Miss Whittaker imbibed must be a
pale
brew and served with
one
sugar cube and
thin
bread and butter cut in
delicate
squares.

Miss Whittaker did not want to lose Sheila ... she had thought she would not lose her ... but now there was this foolish talk about a coral isle.

“The Barrier Reef is still Australia,” she had warned, “and Australia is a barbaric, primitive land. I recall that when I traveled there it didn’t matter how often I asked for one lightly boiled egg, I still received two ... bacon ... fried potatoes. It’s a dreadful place. Plenty of mosquitoes and horribly hot.”

Sheila had not heeded her. Miss Whittaker had said the same things often of Africa, of Ceylon; she had complained acidly on the previous day of Surrey ... but now, now on this comfortable but overlong trip, beside this big over-dominant man, with the uncertainty of what lay before her and what she intended to do with hours and miles and fields and horizons of nothing but cane, cane, cane, she found herself hearing Miss Whittaker’s voice again.

It had echoed warningly as she had read that straight-to-the-point advertisement in the small local newspaper... The next moment she had found herself murmuring aloud, “It’s a primitive land.”

The man had put his paper down now, and he was regarding Sheila closely.

“May a ‘barbarian’ ask why you are here, then?” he asked shortly. “It must have been your own choice.”

“It wasn’t,” she defended rather tearfully—she was very tired, a little afraid—”I had no other choice.” That was not true, she had had the choice of staying with Miss Whittaker, and that surely would have been a far more sensible thing than what she was doing now. What
was
she doing now? Sheila tried once more to think, but once more it made no sense.

The man’s dark brows were arched as his eyes rested on her.

“I’d put you down as a tourist,” he patronized loftily. “We get a lot of tourists up north during the winter to escape the southern cold, but now you infer you’re business-bent.”

“I inferred no such thing.”

“Pardon me, you stated you had no other choice, and that presumably means monetary compulsion. Am I right?”

“You presume too much.”

He ignored her retort. “Am I right?” he persisted.

To her dismay and disgust Sheila heard herself mumble, “Yes.”

“What sort of business? Are you opening a store? Beginning a library? Joining the staff of a school?”

“I see no reason why I should tell you.”

The arched brows drew haughtily together. “There is every reason. You’re obviously English. You’re also—” he paused deliberately “—obviously a fool.

“No—” with an imperious gesture “—don’t get on your high horse, please. You haven’t been exactly complimentary to
me,
have you, if you can tag me a barbarian I consider I can tag you a fool. And you are a fool. Only a blind idiot would have stood on Roma Street Station and—”

Sheila finished coolly, “And waved a flag.”

“Exactly,” the man said.

There was a long silence.

Along the corridor a stewardess called, “Last sitting for lunch.” Outside the sealed windows the cane fields grew and grew until it seemed to Sheila that Australia was a place of nothing but sugar, waving sugar under a blue bowl of sky.

“I’m waiting,” the man reminded her significantly, “and I think you want to tell me, tell someone, anyone at all. I’ve been watching you for a long time, and you’re worried.” He lit another cigarette. “I’m big enough for a wailing wall.” All at once, quite unexpectedly, he smiled.

It was the smile that did it.

Anything else could not have opened the floodgates, not argument, dominance, even pleading. The smile did.

Sheila began to talk. She told him everything. How her father simply had not possessed the knack of making money, how when he died all he had left her was a coral isle.

The man had glanced at her sharply at that and she had known a certain elevation. Not many people possessed a coral isle, she thought.

She had related how all at once she had not wanted to continue reading and listening and brewing delicate tea and plying thin bread and butter, even though, as Miss Whittaker had said it was all she could do, not being trained for anything else at all.

“I understood for the first time why father had roved and ventured, lost and started again,” she related a little shyly. “I, too, felt the urge. Only of course, I mustn’t fail like he did. A woman doesn’t get as many chances as a man. I must make my island pay at once.”

“And how—” he was on another cigarette now “—do you propose to do that, pray?”

“I’m not certain,” she admitted. “I thought of exploring the tourist possibilities ... doing something with the coral around the island. Coral’s pretty, isn’t it?”

He did not reply for quite a while. In fact he did not reply for so long that Sheila believed he must have lost interest.

Then he emitted a long, deep, disgusted breath. “Holy smoke!” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said holy smoke, a fit answer, I think, to your inane remark that coral was pretty.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Then understand this. It takes an expert to get coral, to group coral, to collect a coral garden. It also takes up to some fifteen or more years. As for the tourist potential, that takes money—something, I believe, you don’t have.”

“There’s no need for you to believe or disbelieve,” Sheila reminded him coolly. “I know what I’m about, it’s no business of yours.”

“Because you don’t know what you’re about makes it my business. North Queensland may not be the primitive, barbaric country you’ve named it, miss, but it’s certainly a very alive land, a virile land, and it’s definitely not a land for a stranded girl.”

“I’m not stranded.”

“You will be.”

“I ... I’m a property holder, I’m not destitute.”

“Let’s get this straight. What do you own?”

“I’ve just told you, an island.”

“Our islands are not owned, they’re leased.”

“Leased...?”

She stared at him dumbly for a long moment, feeling deep down inside of her the first awful stirrings of doubt.

“Perhaps ... perhaps sometimes an island is owned,” she stammered.

“No,” he said again.

“Then—?”

“A lease is granted. Quite a generous lease. Up to a hundred years.”

“Oh.” The sigh was in pure relief. A hundred years was more than her lifetime, Sheila thought.

The man was looking at her closely.

“Of course,” he resumed deliberately, “that’s only after certain conditions have been fulfilled. Residence there ... yearly rental paid up ... improvements...”

He kept holding her eyes relentlessly with his own.

“Upon occasion,” he continued smoothly, “residence and improvement are waived, as long as the fees are to date.” He paused. “Are your fees to date?” he asked.

She would have liked to toss airily: “Certainly they are. Why otherwise would I have come all the way from England? Do I look the kind who wouldn’t assure herself first of that?” but her voice turned traitor and croaked instead, “F-fees...?”

“Perhaps your father attended to them.” He was very smooth now.

She did not answer at once. She sat picturing father, pleasant, easygoing, lovable but totally unreliable father, falling in love during one of his many lotus-eating voyages with an island, a coral island, slamming down a first rental, receiving notices afterward but ignoring them ... never paying a penny more.

“No,” she said slowly and hollowly, “father wouldn’t have attended to any fees.”

“Then—” the eyes were narrowed over the cigarette “—you can say goodbye to your island, I’m afraid.”

There was another silence. Angrily he broke it. “You’re not accepting my word even now, are you?”

“My father told me—”

“Look here, give me the name of your island, where it is, and I’ll see if I can pinpoint it for you, and then you might accept my word.”

“I can’t see how you can do that. Obviously you’re a sugar man, not an islander,” she retorted.

“Yes, I’m a sugar man and live on the mainland, but I still know the islands. Good lord, woman, the nearer ones are only a stone’s throw from where I cut my cane every year.”

“This island,” she said, tilting her chin, “is further east than a stone’s throw, I’m afraid, it’s in the Whit Sunday Passage.” Her voice was bland.

He ignored her show of pride. “The name,” he repeated.

“Silverwake Island. Father said it was called that because—”

She did not finish.

Something despairing inside her knew in that moment that
she
was finished, finished, anyway, as far as her island was concerned.

“Do ... do you know it?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Is ... is someone else on it?”

“Yes.”

When she did not ask anything else, when she just sat waiting, violet eyes wide and cloudy, lips trembling, everything about her strung-up and taut, he finished laconically:

“Two women, a maid or so to attend them, a handyman to tend the grounds and, when not cutting at the plantation,
I
miss, am there myself.”