Somers dropped his head. He liked the man. But what about the cause? What about the mistrust and reluctancy he felt? And at the same time, the thrill of desire. What was offered? He wanted so much. To be mates with Jack in this cause. Life and death mates. And yet he felt he couldn’t. Not quite. Something stopped him.
He looked up at Callcott. The other man’s face was alert and waiting: curiously naked a face too. Somers wished it had had even a moustache, anything rather than this clean, all-clean bare flesh. If Jack had only had a beard too—like a man—and not one of these clean-shaven, too-much exposed faces. Alert, waiting face—almost lurking, waiting for an answer.
“Could we ever be quite mates?” Somers asked gently.
Jack’s dark eyes watched the other man fixedly. Jack himself wasn’t unlike a kangaroo, thought Somers: a long-faced, smooth-faced, strangely watchful kangaroo with powerful hindquarters.
“Perhaps not as me and Fred Wilmot was. In a way you’re higher up than I am. But that’s what I like, you know—a mate that’s better than I am, a mate who I feel is better than I am. That’s what I feel about you: and that’s what makes me feel, if we was mates, I’d stick to you through hell fire and back, and we’d clear some land between us. I know if you and me was mates, we could put any blooming thing through. There’d be nothing to stop us.”
“Not even Kangaroo?”
“Oh, he’d be our way, and we’d be his. He’s a sensible chap.”
Somers was tempted to give Jack his hand there and then, and pledge himself to a friendship, or a comradeship, that nothing should ever alter. He wanted to do it. Yet something withheld him as if an invisible hand were upon him, preventing him.
“I’m not sure that I’m a mating man, either,” he said slowly.
“You?” Jack eyed him. “You are and you aren’t. If you’d once come over—why man, do you think I wouldn’t lay my life down for you!”