Free Band of Gold by Deborah Challinor Page B

gaze, and Kitty noted that between Leena’sfull brows was a vertical line that had not been there a year ago. And, as always, she reminded herself of how lucky she was never having to live apart from Rian.
    ‘You look well,’ she said, and it was true. Leena’s tall figure was as willowy as ever, and her dark eyes sparkled in the firelight. ‘Will you stay long?’
    ‘We will stay until we go again,’ Leena replied in her relaxed, philosophical manner.
    ‘And how are you?’ Kitty asked, stooping to address the younger of Ropata and Leena’s children, four-year-old Molly.
    Her curls bouncing with a life of their own, Molly shouted, ‘Good! I am good! We’ve come to see Papa!’ and clapped her pudgy hands with excitement.
    ‘And what about you, Master Will?’ Kitty asked.
    Six-year-old Will, his own curls rivalling his sister’s, opened his mouth but his intended reply became a shriek of laughter as Ropata snatched him up and dangled him by the ankles.
    ‘Me, too, Papa! Me, too!’ Molly demanded.
    Then someone else climbed down from the cart, stretched stiffly, and ambled over.
    Kitty grinned, delighted. ‘Mundawuy! What a lovely surprise! How are you?’
    Leena’s uncle, Mundawuy Lightfoot, a full-blooded Aborigine of the Cadigal band, held a special place in Kitty’s heart. It was he who had offered to inter the body of Kitty’s closest friend, Wai, in his people’s burial cave in Sydney after she died in childbirth, and it was he who had taken Kitty back to the cave five years later to collect Wai’s bones so Kitty could take them back to New Zealand for burial.
    Mundawuy clasped Kitty’s outstretched hands. ‘Good to see you, too, eh?’
    ‘It was nice of you to bring Leena and the children down, Mundawuy,’ Kitty said.
    ‘Maybe, eh? But safer, too.’ He hoicked up a gob of phlegm and fired it irately at the ground. ‘Bloody police troopers and their bloody pet blackfellah trackers.’
    Kitty nodded, aware of how unsafe it was for an Aborigine to travel alone, especially a woman. ‘Will you be staying?’
    Mundawuy shook his head. ‘Got things to do. Gotta go back in a couple of days.’ He looked past Kitty, his face lighting up as Gideon approached.
    Mundawuy thrust out his hand. ‘G’day, black man!’
    Gideon, grinning from ear to ear, shook it energetically. ‘Good evening, friend Mundawuy.’
    It was a ritual they’d shared since they had first met years ago, when Gideon had gone to the aid of some of Mundawuy’s people in Sydney.
    Rian appeared, full of bonhomie , followed by Pierre, who urged the travellers to come and sit by the fire and allow him to feed them.
    As the last morsels of extremely tasty stew were being mopped up with thick slices of fresh bread, Rian asked Mundawuy if he’d seen any of the New South Wales goldfields.
    Mundawuy nodded and said through a mouthful of bread, ‘Been out to Hargraves and Ophir. And Turon.’
    ‘Did you try your hand?’
    Mundawuy swallowed and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘Yeah, had a go, but us blackfellahs not popular on the goldfields, eh?’
    Rian grunted.
    ‘What about you? You rich yet?’ Mundawuy asked.
    ‘Not quite,’ Rian said, ‘but the claim’s showing promising signs. We’re down forty feet now, to the basalt, but we’ve to get through the main drift next, and it’s absolutely saturated with water. Christ knows how deep that’ll go before we get down to the lead.’
    ‘You got it all slabbed up and rendered? Don’t want a cave-in, eh?’
    Rian nodded, his aching back and shoulders testimony to the number of eucalypt slabs they had cut and carted to the claim, then laboriously lowered and secured into place.
    ‘No, we certainly do not,’ Kitty said. She quickly changed the subject. ‘Leena,’ she asked, ‘how are you at baking bread?’
    Rian, Mundawuy, Patrick and the rest of the crew sat in the Eureka Hotel. At half past twelve in the morning liquor had been crossing the bar for quite some