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Page 14

| the horse trough, gulping down the champagne. Ignoring them, he walked back inside the pub, his eyes never leaving Sasha. Though barefoot and dressed poorly, she seemed misplaced in this miasma of blue and black smoke. She was a slim, black-haired beauty with a face like a quiet meadow, and she was graceful in all her movements, as though brought up in a house of aristocrats. |

| In truth, she had learned her most genteel, refined ways from another manthe man she was pining for even now, as she continued staring pensively up at the painting over the bar. Exhausted from the never-ending excitement of the pub, Lightning snoozed peacefully at Sasha's feet. |

| Ashton's pub was one of the boozier and bawdier in Melbourne, so he did not have time to concentrate on Sasha's woes. Sam, his assistant, was being run ragged by diggers from the goldfields with their gaudy women hanging on their arms in colored silks and enormous earrings like those the gypsies wore. |

| Making his way through the congestion, Ashton went behind the bar and began slopping out ales, "old toms," whiskey, and a popular, explosive mixture called "Thunder and Lightning." But the common solace was gin. This white grain spirit, flavored with crushed juniper berries, cost next to nothing. They said a man could get drunk for a pennydead drunk for twopence. |

| As more miners flung their nuggets on the bar and ordered their drinks, Ashton balanced a row of tumblers on his arm from his fingertips to his elbow, filled them all at the same time with ale from |

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