Free Home Before Sundown by Barbara Hannay

it?’ Bella had whispered.
    â€˜An albino echidna,’ Gabe told her, wide-eyed.
    â€˜Wow!’ When Bella looked again, she could recognise its quills and its pointy little face, but the colours were all wrong. Pink and white, instead of brown and black.
    â€˜I’m feeding him termites,’ Gabe told her. ‘Dad said we could keep him here for a bit and I can take him for Show and Tell at school.’
    â€˜That’s so cool.’
    Bella hadn’t yet started school, but Gabe was a weekly boarder at the tiny primary school in Gidgee Springs. In another year he would head off for fulltime boarding school in Townsville.
    Back then Bella used to think he was practically a grown-up. But when he’d shared the echidna with her, he’d simply been a happy kid.
    Now he was looking almost as happy as he had that day.
    It felt good.
    Too good surely? Their more recent past was still an ugly, ugly mess.
    â€˜Roy was about to take me over to our dogs,’ she said, wondering if Gabe would offer to come instead.
    Gabe didn’t offer. Already his face had morphed back into the serious mask as if his happy smile had been a regrettable mistake. He simply nodded to her and took two steps back, clearly in a hurry to head off, to go about his business.
    â€˜Thanks for looking after the dogs,’ Bella said.
    â€˜Roy did the honours. They’ve been well behaved.’
    With that Gabe more or less dismissed them, and it was Roy who walked with her to the barn-like room attached to the stables where the four Mullinjim dogs, all blue heelers, were housed.
    Of course, when Roy opened the door, the cattle dogs barked madly, but it was Gus, the house dog and her father’s old mate, who trotted straight up to Bella. In many ways, the dog was an extension of her dad. The two of them were always together.
    Gus sniffed at Bella’s boots then lifted his face, his hazel eyes searching the doorway for a sign of his master. Then he looked at her with pleading eyes as he gave a soft whine.
    â€˜I’m sorry, Gus.’ Her throat was tight as she gently stroked the soft fur between his ears. ‘Dad’s not here, mate. It might be a while before you see him.’
    She glanced back to Roy, caught the soft sympathy in his eyes, and looked away again quickly, before she started to blub.

9.
    Gabe pulled on leather gloves and hefted a roll of barbed wire from the back of the ute, then collected star pickets and a post driver, pulled his hat low against the already hot sun and set to work.
    Most times he used fencing contractors, but this job was a small repair job of a few hundred metres. Even so, it would take him all day on his own.
    He should have asked Roy to help him, instead of making that awkward hasty exit and leaving the old ringer with Bella.
    Then again, if Roy had been here, he’d probably be jawing on about Bella’s return and that was one conversation Gabe was happy to miss. Not that his own thoughts were much better.
    His head was filled with images of Bella striding across the paddock last evening and playing with that damn pup this morning. Everything about her looks, her movements, her smile was as familiar and as much a part of Gabe as his own two hands. Yet now . . . she was a stranger.
    There was a distance and wariness in her eyes that the impetuous young Bella had never shown.
    An unbridgeable gap?
    Or a challenge?
    Liz stood in the middle of Mullinjim’s lounge room eyeing the baby grand that had held pride of place in the homestead for as long as she could remember.
    It was amazing that after all this time the room still looked much the same. Virginia had introduced only the smallest of decorating changes via cushions and pot plants and paintings. The old-fashioned, Victorian-era furniture still graced the room, along with faded oriental carpets and uncurtained, deep, breeze-catching casement windows.
    It was here that Liz’s mother, having first