Free The river is Down by Lucy Walker Page B

with a tiny leaf floating in it.
    'Don't mind the vegetation,' he said, meaning the leaf. `Takes the smoky taste out of it. Sit down there in the shade. I guess Dicey won't be long blowing dust out of Jorgan's mike. How a feller can drive and service and manage a thing like that and not know when his mike's only plain clogged with dust I'll never guess.'
    'Well, guess who's coming, instead,' another man said. His voice was lazy, yet somehow, in a hidden kind of way, conveyed meaning.
    Everyone. including Cindie, turned and looked towards the dust-ball she had seen earlier and which had now materialised into a Land-Rover.
    She couldn't see the driver because of the reflection of light on the windscreen, but evidently the men knew who and who only, would be driving that particular Land-Rover.
    A minute later it came to a stop and Nick Brent jumped out of it. As his hand swung the drive door to, Cindie nearly put her fingers in her ears. She blinked her eyes in advance of the slam she felt coming. Oh, no she thought crossly Not Nick again—
    `Why does Nick Brent slam car doors?' she asked slowly.
    'He has to. So does everyone else,' someone said, not
    looking at her but at the boss. 'The roads knock the body—
    work of the cars about. After a while, you kinda gotta slam a door to make it shut. Everything's loose.'
    `Not mine?' asked Cindie anxiously. Her imagination flew to the number of times Flan might have slammed her Holden's door while it was on leave yesterday.
    `You stay up here long enough, miss, and maybe you'll have to double-slam. Just to make sure.'
    Nobody seemed perturbed, or on edge, because the boss had arrived. Nobody moved and no one changed the expression on his face, except perhaps to allow it to become a shade more dead-pan.
    They are funny ones, Cindie thought mystified. Nick Brent was so very much the boss. Why didn't they all spring to? She all but felt a horrid compulsion to do so herself.
    A silence fell on the group as they went on sipping boiling tea, or rolling cigarettes leisurely.
    Nick crossed the few yards to the Euclid and stood talking to its driver, who was now on the ground. Dicey was out of sight in the cabin doing something to the radio works.
    Cindie noticed how easily and leisurely the two men, Nick and the driver, stood talking. These men were equals. The men sitting on the ground were equals with those others by the Euclid too. The very concept of the road, let alone its achievement, was so vast that human beings each playing a vital part in its construction had stature.
    Nick Brent held a long desultory conversation with the driver, then he turned and walked across the grass, down the edge of the turned earth of the new part of the road, to where Cindie and the men sat.
    Cindie watched him come with a curious, though still half-angry, interest. She could not forget those ironstone ridges of his personality. She had already stubbed herself against them. He didn't walk quickly, or even as if he had a purpose, yet there was something about the way he did come—something about his long lean wiry frame and the suggestion of tension deliberately tamed, that made her knout everything Nick Brent was doing did have a purpose. She wished she didn't wonder so much about him.
    He pulled up short in front of the group, pushed his jungle hat back on his head, then took out the makings of a cigarette and began to roll one.
    `You chaps put the clock on this morning, or something?' he asked almost too lazily.
    `Half an hour. That's all, boss,' one man replied with equal lack of feeling. 'Foreman said okay, so okay it was.
    We take only a half-hour for lunch-break and no tea-break; an' we can draw lots for the utilities to go across and look at the river later. You know how it is, boss. The river hasn't been down for years and any-come-how we haven't seen water on this stretch of road since we came through the Gibber Ranges.'
    Nick finished rolling his cigarette. He lit it, then blew a spiral of smoke