Corroboree by Graham Masterton

been as brown and wrinkled as a pickled walnut.
    Eyre had nodded. The cart had bounced and rattled out of the port; and south-eastwards towards the settlement of Adelaide itself. The rough muddy road was lined with scrubby bushes; and off to the right Eyre could see rows of sand-dunes, and hear the waters of the Gulf of St Vincent slurring against the beach.
    â€˜Got a place to kip, squire?’ the old man had asked.
    â€˜No,’ Eyre had told him. It had begun to drizzle; a thin, fine, rain from the mountains.
    â€˜Well then,’ the old man had decided. ‘It’s Mrs Dedham’s for you. Every boy’s mother, Mrs Dedham. Solid cooking, clean sheets, and Bible-reading afore bedtime.’
    They had driven through the low-lying outskirts of Adelaide, the donkey slipping from time to time on the boggy road, and the rain growing steadier and heavier; until the old man took a sugar-sack, which he had ingeniously rolled up into a kind of huge beret, and tugged it on to his head. Eyre had watched the rain drip from the brim of his hat, and shivered.
    They had rolled slowly past sheds, mud-huts with calico roofs and calico-covered windows and even an upturned jolly-boat, with windows cut into its sides, and a tin chimney. But then at last they had reached the wide, muddy streets of the city centre, where there were rows of plain, flat-fronted houses, and shops, and courtyards; all interspersed with groves of gum-trees and acacias; and quite handsomely laid out. Although it was a wet afternoon,Eyre had been impressed by the number of people in the streets, and the scores of bullock-carts and carriages. He had expected the people to be roughly-dressed, but apart from a group of bearded men in tied-up trousers who were probably prospectors, most of the passers-by were smartly turned-out in tail-coats and top-hats. The women looked a little old-fashioned in their bonnets and shawls, but what they lacked in modishness they made up for in the self-assured way they promenaded along the wooden sidewalks, mistresses of a new and confident country.
    Eyre had seen more Aborigines, most of them dressed in
bukas
, or native capes, but a few of them in European clothes, although one girl had been wearing an English skirt with her head and one arm through the waist, and the other arm protruding from the open placket.
    Mrs Dedham had owned a fine large house at the east end of Rundle Street, built like its neighbours out of limestone, brick, and pisé. She had come bustling out to greet Eyre as if he were her prodigal son; even hugged him against her huge starched bosom; and offered him steak-and-kidney pudding at once. In the kitchen, as he had eaten with determined unhungriness, she had told him how she had come to Australia from Yorkshire with her dear husband Stanley, and how Stanley had started a sheep-farm at Teatree Gully, only to be taken at the peak of his success by ‘shrinking of the mesenteric glands’, an ailment that would later be diagnosed as peritonitis. Mrs Dedham had sold off the farm and bought herself what she like to call ‘a gentleman’s hotel’; three good meals a day, no visiting women, no whistling, and a communal Sunday lunch after church.
    That night, in his unfamiliar bed, with an unfamiliar light shining across the ceiling, Eyre had lain awake and thought of his father. Outside in the street he had heard laughter, and a woman calling, ‘Fancy yourself, then, do you?’ Then more laughter.
    The following day, he had paid Mrs Dedham’shandyman four shillings to drive him out to Hope Valley, to find John Hardesty. It had still been raining as they had followed the narrow rutted track between dripping gums and wet sparkling spinifex grass; until at last they had arrived at the sheep farm, and the rain had begun to ease off.
    The farm’s owner had been a stocky man in a wide leather hat, his face mottled by drink and weather. He had said very little, but taken Eyre