She set the pen back in its stand and closed the ledger. The arrival of the coach meant that Amos Burrell would be in with the Melbourne mailbags and the man had the annoying habit of just slamming them down on the counter, sending anything in their vicinity flying in a cloud of dust.

A woman’s scream and the raised voices of men penetrated the post office. Adelaide hurried to the door, fully expecting to see brawling miners spilling from the Miner’s Arms.

A large crowd had gathered around the coach. Amos Burrell’s attention was directed at his horses. He held Mac’s bridle and ran a hand down the big horse’s nose. Mac’s ears flicked and his feet shuffled in the dust. But the centre of the crowd’s attention appeared to be Netty, her bonnet hanging from her neck by its strings as she bent over a man lying in the dirt.

Adelaide cast around the crowd for Danny and saw him sitting on the edge of the boardwalk. He looked her way and her breath caught at the sight of his dusty face, muddy tracks marking the course of tears. He stood up and came running towards her, throwing his arms around her waist and burying his filthy face in her apron.

‘It wasn’t my fault.’ His words were muffled by her skirts.

But before she could ask what wasn’t his fault, Netty crossed the road, followed by a party of men carrying the injured man on a stretcher.

‘I’ll have no drunken miner in here,’ Adelaide said as the group approached.

The Maiden’s Creek Mine superintendent, Will Penrose, stepped onto the boardwalk in front of the post office, hat in his hands. ‘Apologies, Mrs Greaves, but you are closest and this man just saved your Danny.’

Adelaide looked at Netty.

‘One of the coach horses, Adelaide,’ Netty said. ‘Spooked by the explosion. He pushed Danny away just in time.’

Adelaide glanced down at the dirty face of her son’s saviour. His eyes were closed and his colour did not look good.

‘Is he badly hurt?’

‘His leg,’ Netty said. ‘Could be broken. Carry him in, gents.’

As the stretcher party passed, Adelaide’s gaze travelled along the length of the man’s body. Someone had tied a dirty neckcloth around his left thigh. Whatever colour it had been originally, it now glistened with blood. As she watched, a drip of blood splattered on the spotless floorboards of the post office. A perverse thought about the difficulty of scrubbing away blood stains crossed Adelaide’s mind.

‘Carry him through to the kitchen,’ she said and hurried ahead to throw open the door to the residence.

William Penrose remained in the doorway, watching as the rescue party tramped through Adelaide’s neat parlour.

‘Mr Penrose, what can you tell me about this man?’ she asked.