Free The Night They Stormed Eureka by Jackie French Page B

A structure like a carport was hung with a dead sheep. Flies crowded around the customers as a butcher in a leather apron dark with blood hacked off hunks of meat from the dangling carcass.
    Mrs Puddleham looked down her nose, though it was a stubby one, not made for looking down. ‘Look at that. Ten times the price we pay at the farm,
and
it’s fly-blown into the bargain. Not that anyone can see maggots in a stew,’ she added. ‘Not among the spuds. But it ain’t wholesome.’
    ‘No.’ Sam shuddered. No fridges here, she thought. No fly screens or even proper windows.
    The tiny hut next to the butcher’s was more substantial than any she’d seen so far, made of neatly trimmed logs of wood and looking a bit like a child’s cubby. A man sat, almost filling the little doorway, below a sign that said ‘The Lemonade Man'. He was in his forties, with dark hair neatly parted in the middle and a moustache that turned up at the ends. He wore a suit like Mr Puddleham’s, with a dusty round hat. He raised it politely to Mrs Puddleham.
‘Guten Morgen, Frau
Puddleham. You care for lemonade perhaps?’
    ‘Not this morning,’ began Mrs Puddleham, then stopped. ‘Well why not? It’s a treat like. You’d like a nice mug of lemonade, wouldn’t you, lovey?’
    Sam nodded, thinking of the dirty creek. At least a bottle of lemonade would be clean. But instead of the soft drink she expected, the man reached behind him and drew out a jug like the Professor’s and two tin mugs, which he filled with a flourish right up to the brim. The lemonade man stood and bowed to them, clicking his heels together, then handed them each a mug.
    Sam sipped cautiously. It wasn’t lemonade. It wasn’t even lemon cordial. But there was a faint bitter taste of lemon, and the drink was sweet and curiously good.
    Mrs Puddleham sipped slowly too, obviously making the treat last. She wiped her lips as she drained the last drop. ‘Ah, that was good.’ She reached into the small cloth bag that hung from her waist, and drew out a coin. The lemonade man coughed politely. ‘It is a penny each,
Frau
Puddleham.’
    ‘Not a halfpenny?’ Mrs Puddleham looked innocent. ‘Oh, my mistake.’
    The man smiled. ‘For so beautiful a
Frau
on such an afternoon, it is a halfpenny. This is your son?’
    ‘Our Sam, just up from Melbourne.’
    ‘A good-looking boy. He looks just like you.’
    Mrs Puddleham beamed. ‘Don’t he just? A good day to you.’
    ‘And to you,
Frau
Puddleham.’
    Sam waited till they were out of earshot. ‘Is he German?’ Oops, she thought, Germany doesn’t exist yet, does it? It’s still just lots of states. But Mrs Puddleham didn’t notice her mistake. ‘Some foreign place. Half the diggers don’t speak the Queen’s English right. Gotta long name that sounds like a sneeze. Folks just calls him the lemonade man.’
    The road was lined with huts now. A milking goat
baaed
at them from the end of a short line, while its kid nosed about for weeds. A kookaburra tethered by one leg to a post gazed at the world that had once been his. A woman in a battered man’s hat pushed a thing like a broom with a plug on the end into a wooden tub. A long line of wet trousers stretched above her. She waved to Mrs Puddleham.
    ‘Mrs Hopgood,’ said Mrs Puddleham, waving back. ‘Her laundry’s a nice earner. But clean trousers can’t compare to my stew.’
    The road had been rising so slightly Sam had hardly realised it. Now they had reached the top of small hill.
    Sam gazed down over the crest, and gasped.
    Mrs Puddleham grinned. ‘Takes yer breath away, don’t it? Thems the gravel pits. More gold’s been taken out of there than ye’d find in the crown jewels.’
    Sam nodded, still stunned. She had thought the diggings behind them were crowded. But this …
    Once there had been a river here. Now the water was divided into hundreds of channels bubbling brown and filthy into tiny pools, each guarded by a ragged team of miners.
    Men huddled