Ernie’s answer to the guilt he felt had been to turn to the land and work like a demon, hardly leaving the farm for more than a year after his father’s death.   He might never have left the station again, if not for his mother, Victoria, deciding to move to a small cabin which the Singletons owned a few kilometres outside LePage — the next town on the way to Glen Hartwell.   The move was made because Vikkie decided she had to get away from the scene of her husband’s death.   She had grown to hate the sheep station for having killed him.   But a positive effect was that it shocked Ernie out of his ennui.   After finding there was nothing he could do to change his mother’s mind, he had agreed to help her move, help fix up the long-neglected cabin, and stop in every few days to see that she was all right.

Gradually Ernie had started to come out of his shell again and almost two years after his father’s death started dating again.   He soon met Rowena Frankland whom he was now on the point of proposing to.   Although he had never fully got over the hurt and guilt from his father’s death he had got over the worst of it and for the last six months his life had gradually been getting better and better.   Until ten days ago when he had started to suffer from crippling aches in his stomach and in his bone joints.

Ernie had been poked, prodded and subjected to every kind of torture known to modern medicine, without his doctor getting any nearer to localising what was causing the pangs that wracked his body despite the strongest painkillers that she could legally give him.   “It could be a delayed reaction to the death of your father,” she guessed, having no real clue what the cause was.   So reluctantly she allowed Ernie to be taken home.

For the last three days Ernie had been lying around the farmhouse (while Brian Horne called around every day to take care of the most urgent tasks around the sheep station) sitting, standing, lying down in a vain effort to find a best position to alleviate his aches and pains.   Until the previous night, when he had stumbled from the farmhouse, in a desperate hope that the night air might work some kind of “miracle fresh-air cure”.   And to his amazement, as soon as he stepped out onto the back porch, he had felt a loosening of the tight knot in his stomach and a slight easing of the aching in his joints.