‘Hey, you there, Missy,’ the American called, ‘you want to come here and serve this boy?’

Val was about to intervene, but it proved unnecessary.

‘No, Jilly, don’t bother,’ Betty called, very loudly for all the bar to hear, ‘I’ll serve this good-looking bloke.’ Then to Ben, ‘What’s your name, soldier?’

Jill gave the broadest of smiles and a thumbs-up to Betty, while Val let out a hoot of laughter. She was so proud of her girls, whom she thought of more as daughters than hotel staff.

‘You want to watch yourself, mate,’ Val called to the southern Yankee, ‘or you might just find nobody here wants to serve you.’

The southerner slunk off to join his buddies at the far end of the bar, but not before casting a look of utter loathing at Ben, quickly followed by one of equal loathing to Val.

Val assumed, and quite rightly, that she’d lose this particular group’s patronage, but she didn’t care in the least. Good riddance, she thought as she watched them knock back their drinks and head for the door. I don’t need your shit. People are people, mate, black or white. She felt suddenly proud, not only of her girls, but also of her bar – The Brown’s, a shade somewhere in between – and besides, her browns were true levellers, weren’t they? Everyone was the same when it came to snakes.

Val had always been surprised that people found her snake pen such a novelty. In her past life, she’d bumped into many a similar form of betting – man against snake, always a highly venomous and aggressive snake, a mulga or an eastern brown – snake pens were no novelty in the bars of the outback towns she’d worked. Hell, she’d even bumped into the odd bloke who didn’t need a glass wall between the snake and him, where the bet was whether the bloke could get the snake back into the pen from which it had been released without being bitten. But in such cases, the bloke had always been Aboriginal. Which I suppose goes to prove, she was now reluctantly forced to admit to herself, that all people aren’t the same when it comes to snakes. Aussie blackfellas were born snake wranglers. Of course they have to be, don’t they, she thought – they eat the bloody things.

Snake pens had been only one form of entertainment for the drunken miners in the godforsaken towns Val had worked. Hell, they’d bet on two flies crawling up a wall, she thought; grog and gambling, that’s all they had. Those men stuck in that nowhere land were just begging for distraction. Which is what made my trade such a bloody goldmine!