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‘It is,’ he said, mimicking her and holding out his own.

She grinned as they shook on their agreement. ‘You have to take me now. But until that day, you’ll have to describe it to me. Can you do that?’

‘Yes, I can.’ He got a faraway look in his eye as though he was conjuring a picture in his mind. ‘Where I live, I think the sun is always trying to kill us, while the howling wind sounds like a soul in constant despair . . . that’s what my mother used to say, anyway.’

Fleur caught a slight hint of a smile on his face at her memory and then it left as he continued.

‘We get huge dust storms and many times I’ve had to crawl out of the single window in our cottage to clear the sand that blows against the door and locks us in.’

‘That sounds scary.’

‘It can be. My father once said that if you survived sun and dust, drought was never that far behind, determined to kill everything.’

‘Why live there?’ she asked, appalled.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s where we live. The mountains are ancient. I’ve learned about them. They’re called the Flinders Ranges and they were formed by the earth’s surface folding.’

She grinned. ‘Are you fibbing? How can it fold?’

‘It can, I swear. It’s called plate tectonics.’ He rubbed his forefingers together, hands held flat, to demonstrate. ‘One great mass of land collides against another, and it’s felt tens of thousands of miles away. That land, all that distance away, is bent, pushed up to form wrinkles in the earth and that process can form mountains.’

She gave a low whistling sound of awe. ‘So your Flinders Ranges were pushed up against each other,’ she said, moving her hands together to form a gesture of prayer.

‘Exactly!’ Tom said, sounding delighted that she’d caught on so fast. ‘And I learned from one of my father’s friends who knew about stuff like this that these mountains were once covered by an ancient sea so many millions of years ago that I’m not sure I know how to write that number down.’

She giggled and he smiled back at the sound of her amusement. ‘I like you, Tom. You’re interesting.’

‘I can tell you more. Flies are the greatest pests in our life but there are snakes, spiders, scorpions, lizards, mosqui—’

She shuddered. ‘Ugh.’

He gave a shrug. ‘They’re fine if you leave them alone. Thanks for the biscuits. I would never have asked.’

‘You look like you need a good feed.’

He grinned. ‘No, I always look like this.’

‘Serious, you mean?’

‘I don’t have a lot to laugh about right now.’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘What will you do?’

‘I suppose I’ll go back on the train and wait for my father. The news may have reached him by now.’ Tom nibbled on another biscuit.

‘And when he comes home, then what will you do?’

‘Grow up. Become a wool classer, I suppose.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You’ve heard of a shearer?’

‘Of course.’ She began to sing. ‘“Click go the shears, boys, click, click, click.”’

Tom grinned. ‘Well, the classers – they sometimes call them “guessers” – are the men who look at the wool and they make decisions about it.’

‘What sort of decisions?’ Fleur frowned, thrilled to be learning more new knowledge from Tom.