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Officer Tarbett asked where you were, could have fitted you in,’ said de Grey later.
    â€˜What was he offering, a joyflight?’ asked Buckler.
    â€˜A flip to Adelaide.’
    â€˜Bullshit.’
    â€˜Dinkum. They’ll take anyone if there’s a spare seat. There was a politician on board, Marcus Friendly, the federal treasurer.’
    â€˜Him,’ said Buckler. ‘I’d a’pushed him out the window.’
    â€˜Warner Tarbett’s his personal pilot for the duration.’
    â€˜Ooh la la.’
    So much for Buckler’s importance. But he began making plans anyway, sounding off a bit, puffing himself up, indiscreet when tipsy on Jack Slim’s hooch.
    Harris watched Buckler from the tin cathedral where so many shorn sheep spilled from the board that clean, white, long-legged lines of South Australian merinos made fan-lines to the horizon. Talk about Buckler planning to shoot through for a week or so’s furlough from the godforsaken continent’s extremest gravel plain reached his ears. Awaiting the moment, Buckler kept seeing the man’s wife taking him by the belt and leading him thunderstruck into a small back room, a broom cupboard would do for what was needed as he yearned for her with the hardness of a rock.
    Dawn found Abe at Buckler’s elbow with a cuppa in a tin mug and a fresh-baked twist of sweet dough on a blue tin plate. The flies got up a crawl on the offside of the flywire.
    When Abe left there was welcoming silence except for their bump and buzz.
    But soon Buckler heard a plane flying low in the rippling hard distance, thrumming and fading. It circled without landing. Buckler swung to the floor, his wide feet holding to the floorboards. The sound of a truck pulled closer, brakes grinding, door slamming, engine idling. Nibble of footsteps and Buckler lifted his nose from Abe’s steaming cup. A shadow fell on the gauze.
    De Grey, with an air of interest, stood at the door with his slouch hat tipped back from his forehead and the leather chinstrap looking chewed, eyes taking in the organisation and personal order of a longtime military mate.
    â€˜Tarbett aerial-dropped a fair bundle.’
    De Grey deposited the mail with a lean of his arm and stood there fiddling with his hat. An envelope of hotel stationery topped the packet.
    â€˜Dunc, I’ve got a question.’
    â€˜Fire away.’
    â€˜What is it between you and the contractor? What’s the poison?’
    Mistrust the wide but trust the narrow , thought Buckler, assessing Adrian de Grey’s honest features on this emotional text, the opposite of which too had often guided him as a man.
    â€˜Why do you ask?’
    â€˜Because of a feelin’,’ said de Grey, diplomacy dropped from his guard. ‘Come on, it’s bloody obvious.’
    â€˜That I know his missus,’ admitted Buckler feebly.
    â€˜Yeah, but is that all?’
    â€˜That’s enough,’ said Buckler, holding de Grey’s eye. ‘If you ever met Rusty. Anyway, what’s it to you when you’re at home, Corp?’
    â€˜I could step in. You could give me a shout. Cover your back for you. Wouldn’t want to see you damaged, say, by an iron bar at your age. There’s those out there wouldn’t agree with me,’ he added with a scowl, ‘them that have heard you say a black man is up for treason by living a life where he was born.’
    Buckler felt shame inassimilable, and brushed a hand in front of his eyes.
    â€˜What’s Harris said to you?’
    â€˜Nothin’. That’s the point. I don’t like camp fever.’
    â€˜Then do nothing. That’s my point. Sweat it out.’
    â€˜Whatever you say, then,’ said de Grey, stepping back out.
    It seemed likely, from the letters Buckler had, that he was never to have a life absolutely and utterly his own.

FOUR
    BEFORE FIRST LIGHT ON BUCKLER’S last day at Eureka, a rooster crowed from the