The river is Down by Lucy Walker Page A

But if they stay long enough it gets into them like a vice. They come back because it's caught them.'
    He had forgotten the barrier of antagonism between them
    perhaps? The land haunted, yet healed, where it touched the heart. Cindie felt this instinctively. Endless miles of spinifex: lonely, white-trunked, motionless—sometimes grotesque—trees. Blood-coloured red rock mountains in the distance. And so
    empty.
    `You speak almost as if you know that feeling,' she said.
    'I do. I was born and reared a nor'-wester. My company
    won this contract for this part of the road because, being
    the engineer, I know the country and its conditions.' `You came back gladly?'
    'I was coming back anyway.'
    Cindie was silent. The magic was gone.
    Coming back?. She heard that signature tune again—Bindaroo, Erica and Nick.
    She glanced sideways at his face. It was a closed book now. He wasn't thinking about the wonders of the ironstone ranges, the alternate bands of red rock and green spinifex, nor even about the road. He was thinking about something far, far away from her. With the utterance of those words, he had forgotten she existed.
    The speedometer read eight miles from where they had left Dicey at work on the Euclid. Cindie guessed there would be roughly another two miles to go before they reached their destination.
    Nick broke the silence. He too had come back to the present—a bumpy ride in a dusty Land-Rover.
    'I forgot to tell you this morning that the wives up in D'D row had heard about your arrival in the camp last night. They've decided to give you an afternoon tea-party by way of welcome. Mary Deacon told me about it before I came out. That's why I said I'd take you back to the camp. They can't be disappointed, you know. Havoc in D'D row won't do at all.' He said this last in a voice tinged with amusement.
    Cindie found it an effort not to turn her head and look at him. He was so different.
    Had he really forgotten the message? Or just not wanted to tell her at the radio unit, or in front of the men on the site?
    'Why is it called D-apostrophe-D row?' she asked.
    The apostrophe stands for T. From politeness, we usually write it with the apostrophe.'
    Was he amused? Or was he not? It was hard to tell. 'D—T—D,' she spelled it out slowly, puzzled.
    'Detergent, Teacups, and Dynamite,' Nick said.
    Cindie turned her head this time. He smiled: a wonderful flashing smile, then it was gone. Unexpectedly Cindie was
    drawn to him. Had she dreamed it, or had she glimpsed magic for a moment?
    `The men labelled the row,' Nick said. 'Sometimes you have to let them have their kind of humour. I thought it might be more diplomatic to cut the name down to initials only.' He glanced at her, one eyebrow raised. 'For the sake of peace; and good relationships.'
    Cindie suddenly laughed. Jim Vernon would have called this her rainbow smile, illuminating her face like fire flame that made colour and light but did not burn. It only beguiled with its warmth and promise.
    A second later she realised Nick had wanted her to laugh. He had made her do it. He had forgiven her her misdemeanours.
    From then on to where the men were grading the track, the atmosphere between herself and Nick was easier in a subtle kind of way. So surprised was Cindie at this new relationship, and the certainty that Nick had manipulated it, that she forgot the worry about his possible connection with Bindaroo. She had been won over by him. Well, temporarily, anyway!
    What an enigmatic, yet bafflingly human, person he was turning out to be!
    Nick, when he had finished talking with the foreman, said he'd drive her to one of the uplands leading by a series of dips and climbs to the broken foothills of the ranges.
    `I'm not taking up valuable time?' she asked.
    `Not my time. Yours. There's that tea-party remember.' Again that glimpse of a smile, a little alarming now because Cindie felt herself succumbing to something she did not understand, but feared it was the pressure of