The Golden Soak by Hammond; Innes Page B

energy and no men around other than her father and the blacks. I recognized her need and it matched my own. ‘You’re very different from Rosalind,’ I said, thinking again of the golden skin, the soft dark hair falling to the shoulders.
    â€˜Yes, I realize that.’ There was a note of resignation in her voice, a touch of sadness.
    It was a cruel thing to have said, but it had the desired effect. After that she talked of other things and in a little while we came to the cattle grid at the end of the paddock. We waited there for almost half an hour, watching the track, but no lights showed and she became increasingly restless. In the end she turned suddenly and started back. ‘I’m going to get the ute and drive down there.’
    That drive in the starlight was beautiful. And with a girl – even a stocky, snub-nosed kid like Janet – it could have been idyllic. But the spark was gone now. She was only concerned about her father and she drove with hard concentration, the tinny vehicle bumping and slithering on the loose surface. In less than half an hour we were under the shadow of Mt Robinson, with The Governor to the west of us, and looming up ahead the twin shapes of Padtherung and Coondewanna. Golden Soak was at the foot of these two, in rough hillocked country with the stony beds of dry watercourses and nothing much growing there but mallee and spinifex. We came to it over a rise, round a big outcrop of red rock, a single tall chimney sprouting from a huddle of tin roofs and a gully that ran back up into the gap between the two mountains.
    That was how I saw it first, at night, with Janet beside me, taut-faced and anxious, both of us staring urgently through the fly-specked windscreen. No sign of lights, the place deserted and the corrugated iron hanging in rusted sheets. She drew up beside the main building and we got out, standing there uncertain what to do. ‘Perhaps he took another route back,’ I suggested.
    But she shook her head. ‘There’s only the one track.’
    I was looking up at the gaunt decayed buildings. The roof had partly fallen in and there were gaps in the tin walls, the iron framework showing through. She had left the headlights full on and it was still possible to read the faded lettering on the board above the gaping doorway – GOLDEN SOAK MINE: OFFICE . A piece of loose corrugated iron was tap-tap-tapping in the breeze. Otherwise, there wasn’t a sound. She had a torch in her hand and she shone it in through the open door – a long bench desk, a high-backed chair lying broken-legged and the walls lined with shelves full of rock specimens, everything covered in a thick layer of red dust. The floor, too, and the dust undisturbed, no footprints.
    She got back into the ute and we drove right round the building and out as far as the old shearing shed. But the Land-Rover wasn’t there. She started searching for tracks then, found where a vehicle had turned and headed east. ‘That must be the Toyota.’ She was peering down at the treadmarks.
    â€˜So they’ve left.’
    â€˜Looks like it.’ She was standing, undecided, with her back against the door of the utility. ‘We can’t have missed him.’
    â€˜What about the mine?’ I said. ‘Where’s the shafthead?’
    â€˜Up there.’ She nodded towards the shadowed flanks of Coondewanna. ‘Halfway up the gully. There’s a tunnel driven into the mountain.’
    We drove back then, past the mine buildings, picking up the rusted traces of old tramlines half-buried by dust drifts, following them up the gully till we came to a series of shallow trenches or costeans. It was here, where the outcropping quartz had first been mined, that we found the Land-Rover standing empty.
    That was when I discovered she had a gun with her. She was scared and she got it out of the back of the ute. It was an old-fashioned repeater with the gleam of silver