Free Dolan of Sugar Hills by Kate Starr Page B

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