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.