In the Roaring Fifties by Edward Dyson (best classic books TXT) 📖

large tent at night, and her guffaw overbore everything; it was one of the wonders of Forest Creek. Many a time its echoes, rebounding from Boulder Hill, had set all Diamond Gully grinning in sympathy. It was not known whether Mrs. Kyley and Ben were married or merely mates, but popular opinion tended to the latter belief, legal unions being incompatible with a nice adjustment of forces at the rushes. The exigencies of life on the diggings made sudden changes of scene necessary to the men, and a woman like Mrs. Kyley couldn't be expected to abandon her business for the sake of a husband, seeing that it was so much easier to set up another husband than another establishment. But the most important branch of the business, that of sly grog-selling, made a man who could handle the riotous and evil-disposed quite essential. Ben Kyley's appearance, broad, thickly-set, solid as a gum-butt, broken-nosed and heavy-handed, and his reputation as the man who was beaten by Bendigo only after an hour's hard fighting, marked him as the fittest man on the field for the position he held. For the rest, Ben was a quiet, mild man, whose voice was seldom heard, and whose subjugation to Mrs. Ben was almost comical. Ben worked on his claim by day, and at night he officiated as 'chucker-out' in Mrs. Kyley's bar--for a bar it was, to all intents and purposes. Ben's duty was not to suppress disorder, but merely to see that the common disorder did not develop into licentiousness, to the danger of Mrs. Kyley's property or the detriment of her trade.

Mrs. Ben Kyley made bread because bread-baking at three shillings a loaf was an exceedingly profitable business. For the same reason she washed shirts at twelve shillings the half-dozen. But selling rum at a shilling a nobbler to 'flash' diggers who despised change was much more profitable still. The industrious woman, who washed and baked all day, was kept busy for the greater part of the night retailing rum to insatiable diggers, and the mystery was that, although nobody could see rum in the bottle or in bulk anywhere about the place, it was rare that the supply ran short.

Jim had visited the tent on one or two occasions, walking from the other side of the gully; he went again on the Saturday afternoon following their removal to buy bread. Mrs. Kyley's big camp-ovens were nestled in the fires outside the tent, three of them in a row; Mrs. Kyley herself, half smothered in suds, was washing with the rapidity and the indefatigability of a machine.

'Aurora will attend to you, my boy,' blared Mrs. Kyley, blowing a storm of suds out of her mop of hair.

Aurora! Jim entered the tent wondering, and found three or four men at the counter, conversing with a young woman, twenty-three perhaps, tall, black-haired, dark-eyed, flushed with colour, happy in temperament, free in manner, a striking representative of a not uncommon type of the time, meeting men on a mutual footing, asking no concessions and making none--Jim's 'Spaniard' of the Melbourne dance saloon. She recognised him immediately.

'Hello!' she cried. 'Look now! if it ain't the boy wid the blushes, an' there's the blush to prove it agin' him.'

Jim was blushing; his rebellious blood gave the lie to his assumption of easy indifference.

'How are you?' he said. 'I knew you at once.'

'To be sure. 'Twould be indacent to forgit, seem' it's my debtor ye are, for the price of a dance.'

'Which you gave me for natural love and affection.'

''Deed, then 'twas because you were poor an' motherless in a strange land, but now the gold's a worry to you, I doubt.'

Jim laughed and shook his head. 'I want a loaf,' he said. 'My mate is hungry and waiting.'

'Heigho!' sighed Aurora; 'devil a scrap of gallantry have these slips of boys, Quigley! You wouldn't leave me for all the mates on earth, would you, now?'

The big bearded digger banged his fist on the counter, and swore a firm, fluent oath that he would not.

'Worse luck,' added Aurora, with a twinkling eye. 'Here's yer bread, Teddy-was-me-darlin', an' ye'd have it fer love if 'twas me own to give.'

Aurora assumed and dropped the musical brogue according to her whim. Ordinarily her English was as pure as Mrs. Kyley's, and Mrs. Kyley had the reputation of being a lady of vast attainments.

'There's the money,' said Jim, 'and will you take this for the dance?' He offered her a nugget he had picked from the week's yield, a flat, heart-shaped slug, curiously embossed.

''Deed, an' it's mighty fine,' said the girl, 'but I'd rather have ye me debtor for life.'

'Take it for natural love and affection, then.'

'Ah, if it's the heart you're givin' me, I'll be uncommon greedy, so I will.' She kissed the nugget, and slipped it into her breast.

Jim went away, glowing with the satisfaction a very young fellow feels in having provoked the admiration of a woman and the jealousy of a man. Aurora's of interest was open and unabashed. Quigley's jealous passion was just as artless and free from disguise. Done had intended to send that nugget as a natural curiosity to Lucy Woodrow. He put the shade of regret the recollection provoked hastily out of his mind. Mike had heard a good deal of talk about the new girl at Mrs. Kyley's, now Jim swelled the chorus of admiration. Both young men spent that evening at the washerwoman's tent.

The Kyley establishment consisted of a tent some fifty feet long, divided into two compartments with a canvas partition. This screen ran just behind the counter, and through it Mrs. Kyley dived to replenish her jug of rum; but that room at the back represented the sanctity of the Kyley home-life, and to it the diggers never penetrated. The public portion was furnished with two long deal tables, at which the men sat on the Bush stools and diced and drank, or played monotonous, if noisy, games of euchre and forty-fives.

That night Aurora--surnamed Australis by a facetious digger--was particularly attentive to Done. Jim was flattered by her open preference, dazzled by her bright eyes and glowing cheeks, and piqued by her bantering manner, for she still implied that he might be allowed indulgences because of his beardless, boyish face and his seeming ingenuousness. As a protest against this attitude, Done was impelled to drink rather more rum than was good for him, and under the influence of the fiery spirit he lost some thing of his habitual reserve, and a fight with Quigley was only averted by the tactful intervention of Burton.

'Didn't like interferin', Jim,' said Mike next morning, 'but Quigley's a hard nut and an ugly fighter. He'd have eaten you if you'd taken him on as you stood.'

'I'm much obliged, old man,' answered Done mournfully. 'I suppose I made an outrageous ass of myself.'

But he went back to Mrs. Kyley's bar again on the Monday evening, and there got good advice from Aurora.

'You don't like this rubbish, Jimmy,' she said, serving him with the drink he had asked for. The remark was made with an air of positive assurance. They were alone.

'Well, no, I don't particularly,' he admitted.

'Then, don't be a fool. Don't gammon you do. You need not drink it. I don't want you to. See here, Jimmy,' she continued gravely, 'Quigley doesn't like you; he is looking for a chance to do you a mischief, and he would have had his chance the other night if I hadn't overlooked you like a mothering hen, and sold you good creek water at a shilling the nip.'

'I did act the fool, I admit.'

'Never a bit; but don't give Quigley his chance by numbing your good sense with Mary Kyley's rum. Sure,' said Aurora, dropping into her honied brogue, 'it's fer the love of me ye're comin', not for the dthrop o' drink. Murther! would ye kill me wid denyin' it?' She was sitting on the counter; she pressed her fingers on his lips, and laughed in his face with happy impudence, her large handsome mouth full of pearls, her eyes flashing a challenge. Jim's arm stole to her waist of its own initiative.

Then Mrs. Ben Kyley came roaring into the tent. 'Inveigling my girl away!' she cried. 'Get out, you kidnapper! Where's your taste, anyhow, philandering with a slip of a girl when there's a fine woman about with a heart as empty as a big sieve?' And the bouncing washerwoman bore down upon him, and bombarded him out of the place with gusts of laughter.

As yet, Done had seen little of the trials and tribulations of the diggers. Diamond Gully was a prosperous rush, and the impositions under which the Victorian miners complained so bitterly had not come home to many on this field; but he had heard a great deal. The political and social wrongs of the diggers were the staples of conversation about the camp-fires. To Jim's great surprise, he found these men, surrounded with the exciting conditions of their peculiar life, allowing their minds to be occupied with aspirations after political freedom. The failure of Chartism in England had driven thousands of hot-blooded champions of popular rights to Australia, and these were the leaven that leavened the whole lump. They talked of people's parliaments, manhood suffrage, and payment of members in a country governed by a pack of British nominees who had no knowledge of the bulk of the people and no sympathy with their aspirations. The ideas stirred the miners; they found a lodgment in every breast, and already men spoke of an Australian Republic south of the Murray, governed on the liberal principles enunciated by Fergus O'Connor.

Jim had supposed the tolerance of man towards man, the absence of petty prejudices, and the large appreciation of individual liberty that belonged to the character of a brave, self population to be manifestations of an absolute freedom; he found the men fired with a passionate aspiration for liberty, just as the masses in England had been five years earlier, and possessed of even more substantial reasons for revolt. The idea of the young republic delighted him; he was already prepared to shed his blood in establishing that glorious ideal. Stories he had heard of the indignities to which the miners were subjected by an insolent bureaucracy, of men being hunted down like dingoes and beaten with the drawn swords of the troopers because of their failure to comply with the outrageous licensing decrees, bred in him a hatred akin to that felt by the diggers who had suffered in person.

But Done's first experience of a license-hunt was largely farcical. Mr. Commissioner McPhee had chosen a sweltering hot day for his hunt. Most of the diggers on Diamond Gully were below, sheltered from the mordant rays of a sun that blazed in the cloudless sky, so close to earth that its heat struck the face like a licking flame. Jim had just brought some picks from the smithy, when he saw the troopers, headed by the magnate on a fine chestnut, descend upon the gully, their glazed cap-peaks and their swords flashing gaily in the sun. The mounted men divided at the head of the gully, and came down on each side of the lead; the foot police followed Commissioner McPhee, head Serang and cock of the walk from Sawpit Gully to Castlemaine. The duty of the foot police was to rouse the diggers out of their drives, and enforce the orders of the high and mighty McPhee. On Diamond Gully the wash was so shallow that the