Dolan of Sugar Hills (6 page)

“Not much damage to the units,” he announced, the rain dripping from his raincoat and forming a pool on Molly’s kitchen floor. “Nothing that can’t be fixed in an afternoon.”

“The barracks?” inquired Molly.

“All right.”

“The plantations?”

“I’ve seen them worse.”

“Then...?”

It was Sheila who asked that, she was still puzzling over his sudden and unmistakable despondency. He had been so different during the height of the cyclone, he had taken everything in his stride. But now, she though...

What was troubling him? The cane, he had just assured them, had not fared so badly, nor the units, the barracks not at all, so why was he acting like this, why,
she asked herself.

She was aware that Cane was looking at Molly, that Molly was looking back at him, that their eyes flicked.

“There’ll be a delay in the cutting,” Cane said presently and with a curious flatness. “The crop will survive, but it will take some straightening out before it can be cut again. That means, of course, a lull in the production activity.”

He paused, then he turned abruptly on Sheila.

“That means there is no need to wait now for an opportunity, that this is the opportunity. I’ll be busy later, even busier than usual because of this enforced delay, so we’ll cross at once.”

“Cross to where?”

“Where? To Silverwake, of course. That was the original intention, remember.” His tone all at once was hard and clipped.

“Yes,” said Sheila. She was conscious now of a curious flatness as well, a despondency in herself. She had dreamed about the island, of crossing to the island. Now it was not a dream, it was an actuality, yet somehow she could not look forward to it, she found.

“The seas,” she heard herself murmuring inadequately, “the weather...” Why was she going on like this?

“Both should be fairly reasonable by the morning.”

“You can’t be sure.”

He wheeled around on her at that. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you want to go?”

The children had wandered away. Molly, who had flashed him that quick look, had busied herself elsewhere.

“I have the impression,” said Sheila in a low voice, “that that’s what you don’t want to do.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“You’re supersensitive,” Cane Dolan said coolly. “I’m a businessman, I can do no good here for a week or two, so naturally I won’t stay around kicking my heels.”

He paused once more, then spoke harshly, unreasonably harshly to her.

“You, too,” he said, “can begin earning your money, Miss Guthrie.”

Before she could answer, he resumed sharply, “We’ll leave first thing in the morning. Kindly confine yourself to two bags.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

After breakfast the next morning, Hans came around with the Land Rover and piled Sheila’s bags in the back.

Sheila climbed in beside Hans, Cane beside Sheila.

The children waved goodbye, but Molly, Sheila noted, did not come out.

They went down a winding track through more cane fields, beaten-down grasses this time, diabolically entwined and tangled.

The plantation went right to the coast. Sheila remembered Cane telling her on the Sunlander that from where he cut some of his crops a coral island would only be a stone’s throw.

A boat that looked rather small to Sheila, with only a confined space under a low canopy to serve as a cabin, awaited them at a tiny jetty. It had no name, just a painted
Sugar Hills.

“It’s not very big,” Sheila stated.

“What’s worrying you?” Cane taunted. “You said once this was a millpond.”

“And you said it could change its face...”

“The craft is completely seaworthy,” he returned flatly. “Get in, please. I’ll stow the bags.”

The engine kicked over promptly; everything Cane possessed would be efficient, Sheila thought. Not quite so dubious now, she sat back as the little boat moved off.

Sheila looked around, then forgot her qualms.

It was beautiful, almost breathtakingly beautiful. Everywhere there were islands, hundreds of islands, islands with fjordlike inlets and pine-clad cliffs rising steeply above the inlets, islands with gently shelving beaches and unbelievably white sands.

“It’s coral sand,” Cane said. He eyed her. “You know about coral, of course, having planned a collection.” His voice baited her.

She flushed. “No, I know nothing,” she admitted.

He told her briefly how living coral was the home of a tiny coral polyp which was responsible for its formation by the deposit of lime; how in time it built reefs; how these white beaches she was now admiring were the result of coral being pounded by the sea for millions of years.

“Our Great Barrier Reef is some twelve hundred miles long; that’s a lot of reef; and a lot of coral.” He narrowed his eyes at the horizon.

Presently he chugged the boat into a little rocky mooring. It disturbed a large turtle that nosed lazily away.

“This is actually still Australia,” Cane told Sheila, “in spite of the fact that we’ve traveled a mile or so, and in spite of Mandalay appearing to be an island. I consider Mandalay—that’s its name—has one of the best of all coral collections, so you must see it before we move farther east.”

He secured the boat, turned around, regarded Sheila a moment, then swung her up in his arms and stepped ashore.

“There was no need to do that,” she told him stiffly.

He glanced back at the rocky anchorage.

“I wouldn’t have done it if you’d been suitably dressed.”

She followed him a little sulkily up the path to the charming bungalow, but once there her sulkiness fled.

Here was something she never had dreamed about ... a coral garden lovelier than any floral garden ... lovelier than anything she had seen ... all shapes, all varieties, of coral, every color in the world.

“This is dead coral, of course,” explained Cane. “Actually it’s the combined skeletons of thousands of coral polyps. Lovely as this is—” he waved an idle arm over the groups of starlike flowers, branches and mushroom formations “—the living stuff is lovelier still.

“This particular collection took some fifteen years to choose and arrange,” he drawled. “Yet you,” he reminded her, “were going to do as much in as many weeks.”

“I didn’t know then,” breathed Sheila, enrapt. She did not try to defend herself, she just stood and gazed.

“Is it like this on the Reef?”

“On the Outer Reef it is, on the Inner Reef the hues are not so vivid. These colors are the original, natural colors, but since they tend to lose some of their brightness away from their seabed, Mandalay freshens them up to keep the tourists’ faith.

“Here—” he handed her a bouquet of pink, mauve and blue coral set beautifully on a piece of white mushroom coral “—I want you to have this.”

She accepted it eagerly.

“Carry it carefully,” instructed the Mandalay collector. “Like a heart, it can break.”

“Moral: Have no heart,” laughed Cane.

“Perhaps, Mr. Dolan, but don’t say that about coral.” The proprietor pocketed the note that Cane had passed across.

Back in the boat, Sheila protested, “You shouldn’t have bought that for me.”

“Didn’t you want it?”

“Yes.”

“Then how would you have bought it yourself?”

“You’re forgetting I’m now a wage earner, quite a generous wage, Mr. Dolan.”

“So it’s Mr. Dolan now,” he commented. “Is that because we’ve left the country of first names behind us at last?”

“Have we this time?” she questioned.

“We’re traveling due east. We relinquished Australia when we left Mandalay.”

She nodded, but did not answer what he had asked, the reason why he was Mr. Dolan now, not Cane. She did not know herself why she said that. Was it because when she had abandoned the mainland she had abandoned, too, all influence of Sugar Hills? Was it ... she shivered involuntarily ... because the island was wielding its influence now?

“How can you possibly find your way?” she asked a little hastily. “Every island is different, yet every island looks the same.”

“You get to know them. Hayman, of course, since it has become glamorously tourist, is very apparent, but apparent, too, are Lindeman, Brampton, Molle.”

“And—Silverwake?”

“And—Silverwake,” he replied.

Now they were in the Whit Sunday Passage ... the same passage through which Captain Cook had sailed, Matthew Flinders. “And now Sheila Guthrie and Cane Dolan,” he added with a smile.

Sheila said unexpectedly, as unexpectedly to herself as to the man, “What is your real name?”

He gave her a long, hard look, but did not answer, and at once she was aware, as she had become aware that afternoon when she had stood and gazed at a picture, that she had made a wrong move.

She looked at him levelly, still determined to question him, to discover what those wrong moves were, and why, but at that moment he stood up and waved both arms. A motor vessel, trim and white, was dipping by them some distance out. Sheila screwed up her eyes and read
The Star.

“That’s the Roylan boat,” said Cane, “on one of its tourist trips from Mackay. That’s Captain McAllister at the wheel.” He sat down again. “I’m glad he knows we’re around,” he observed to himself.

Sheila caught the observation, however. “Why?” she asked directly.

“No reason.” Cane’s answer came promptly, too promptly. Sheila was instantly alerted. She remembered Cane’s glance at the sky this morning.

“There is a reason,” she stated. “You’re not quite sure of everything, are you?”

“I’m quite sure it’s time I crossed to Silverwake, that it’s time you crossed,” he returned bluntly.

“And as sure of your weather?” she insinuated.

There was a pause, quite a considerable pause. Then Cane Dolan met Sheila’s glance both frankly and calmly. For a moment he did not answer. Then he admitted humbly, “No, I’m not quite sure, Sheila, I’m sorry about that, I think perhaps I may have made a mistake.” He wet his finger and held it up.

If he had refuted what she had accused, argued it, Sheila knew she might have been frightened. But her only reaction now was a calm to match his.

“What will you do?”

“Shelter somewhere. You must admit,” he shrugged round at the bevy of islands, “that we’d have a choice.”

“Yes, Robinson Crusoe would have envied us,” she laughed, not alarmed any longer, confident in his judgment. She leaned over and trailed her fingers in the blue water, watching the creamy ripple her hand made ... unconscious of the fact that Cane Dolan was watching her.

He was looking at the silky fan of lashes over the cheeks that were golden, not cream, since this girl had come to Northern Queensland, at the errant little curls that escaped with delicious untidiness at brow and ear from her dark-brown, cap-neat, short-cropped hair.

Suddenly he wanted to lean across and touch that hair, tuck it back into its neat smooth cap, laugh as the wind untidied it again. Impulsively his hand went out ... paused there. His glance went instinctively to the horizon to where the island awaited him, to what awaited him. Slowly his hand went back. His face became grim. When Sheila said, not apprehensive now, although the wind was blowing even harder, the sea freshening, “I’m glad there’s no actual danger, Cane,” he answered her without the previous humbleness and candor but with all the taunting acerbity she had come to know—and dislike—in this odd, enigmatical man.

“There’s no danger of foundering, if that’s what you mean, and once on the island, any of the islands, there is no danger of wild life. Indeed—” he laughed sardonically “—there is no life at all.”‘ He looked at her jeeringly. “What would Miss Whittaker say to that?”

“Miss Whittaker?” Sheila stared at him, confused. And then she understood.

An island, she thought, that was what he was bantering about. An island ... a man ... a girl. It was typical... and hateful of Cane Dolan to taunt her with a thing like that.

She decided to reply to him in his own strain.

“Isn’t it a little late in the day to warn me of social standards? Don’t forget that you yourself reassured me that this was a free-and-easy land, no questions asked.”

“We are now,” he informed her laconically, “some fifteen miles from the coast. I told you we had left Australia behind, we are not on free-and-easy land anymore.”

To her annoyance Sheila found her eyes being drawn irresistibly to his. She tried to turn her own glance away ... it was no good.

“This is all quite unnecessary,” she stormed indignantly at last. “Even if we did have to shelter, go ashore, which of course we won’t—”

“Won’t we?” he interrupted. “Take another look around you. I’m going in at once.”

Sheila wrenched away her glance, and instantly was shocked. In as short a time as it had taken for this man to lose his rather disarming humbleness and become the overdominant master once more, so the Passage had changed from a merely swelling sea to a choppy, restless expanse of tossing water.

The little boat was not riding evenly any more, there was a lot of slatting and banging about it. The wind, though not overstrong as yet, was still strong enough to make it apparent that a further freshening could prove a big task for such a small craft. There was already, Sheila noted, a gurgling rush along the hull, a hiss of spray from the bow wave.

Forgetting the hateful discussion they had just had, only grateful for Cane’s common sense in a matter like this, Sheila watched the man choose a likely island and turn the boat’s course.

They came in very smoothly at First, it was not until they were almost there that there was that thrump, that grating, that unmistakable raw scrape.

Cane was out of the boat in a flash.

“Tarnation,” he called furiously, “and I thought I knew my islands. Of all the stupid oafs!”

“What is it?”

He answered angrily, “She’s reefed.”

Immediately Sheila jumped out of the boat, too. She sensed that this was no time to be helped, carried, that it was a time to lend an extra hand.

He must have expected her aid, for he made no gesture for her to get back. Between them they shoved the craft farther in, then Cane removed Sheila’s bags.

“You carry up whatever else you can find,” he directed. “Sorry you’ve had to get so wet, but you’re better in shoes. Coral can be dangerous on bare feet.”

Sheila grabbed as much as she could, then followed him up to the beach.

“Is it bad?” she asked after he had returned from making a second inspection of the reefing.

“As bad as possible,” he replied glumly. “There’s a hole as big as my hand.”

“What will that mean, Cane?”

“Mean?” He looked at her disbelievingly a moment. “It will mean, of course, that we’ll have to remain here until we get picked up. I certainly haven’t the right material to tackle a hole like that.” Sheila glanced around her.

“Will we be picked up?” she asked a little tremulously. All she could see were islands ... islands with nothing but pines on them ... islands and more islands.

“
The Star
saw us,” he reminded her. “They know about us, they’ll pick us up.”

“Yes, of course,
The Star.
”
Sheila was relieved at once. “They’ll pick us up when they come back.”

He glanced sharply at her at that. It was a long, incisive look. “See here,” he said presently, and his voice was very sober, “I’m sorry for what I just said out there in the boat, very sorry. When I made the remarks I did, when I taunted you with Miss Whittaker, it was only idle banter, fool’s talk. I certainly didn’t anticipate for a moment that such a position would come to pass.”

She stared at him, puzzled at first, then, as she gathered what he was saying, aghast.

“What do you mean,” she said. “What position? You just told me that
The Star
would pick us up when they come back.”

“Not when they come back, when they come again,” he corrected quietly.

“Again?”

“These tourist trips don’t double up, they don’t return the same way as they go, they do a round trip.”

“A round trip?”

“Yes.”

She looked at him wide-eyed, waited dumbly.

Cane finished quietly, “So
The Star
won’t be here for a week.”