Gold Dust (36 page)

Though the Yukon swelled with the waters of tributaries as it approached its confluence with the Klondike, it became tamer
as it grew deeper and wider. Once past the Hootalinqua River, only two stretches of white water stood between the Klondikers
and their goal: Rink Rapids and Five Fingers. With Katy and Andy helping out with oars, Stewpot guided his boat through the
rough water without so much as a single tense moment. Finally, twenty-two days after setting sail on the headwaters of the
Yukon at Lake Bennett, on a gloomy, wet day with winter blowing down their necks from the valley behind, Katy sighted Moosehide,
the huge scar of an ancient landslide that marred the mountainside above Dawson. A short time later, the town itself came
into view. Dawson, gateway to the new El Dorado: the goal of thousands who had set out from Seattle and Portland to sail up
the lower Yukon, from Skaguay and Dyea to endure Chilkoot and White Pass, from Edmonton on the long overland trails. Dawson:
the end
of the rainbow vouchsafed for only a few to attain. She had made it. Katy O’Connell. One of the few. Katy thought that her
father would be proud of her for making it to the gold-fields.

“Damn that girl for an imp of the devil!” Gabe muttered as he stood shivering in the cold wind on the docks alongside the
Yukon River not far from where it joined the cold arctic sea, just west of St. Michael and just south of Nome. Some fathers
might need to stand guard at their front door to keep overeager suitors at bay. Others might wear their parlor carpets thin,
pacing and worrying about what the little dears were doing or thinking. But Gabe was willing to bet he was the only father
forced to chase his daughter through the wilds of Alaska and Canada.

He could only hope that Katy was having an easier trip than he was. The weather had been miserable—cold, damp, and windy.
Every man and his brother were trying to reach Dawson before winter, or so it seemed, for when Gabe had arrived in Seattle,
there wasn’t a northbound ship not full to the scuppers. He had been reduced to winning a berth in a poker game, a task which
had taken him longer than it would have some years ago. The settled, quiet life was taking its toll on his seedier talents.
It also seemed to have reduced his patience with sleeping in the rain, food that tasted like pig slop, and companions whose
body odor was more powerful than their intellect.

Now, at the mouth of the Yukon River, all the river steamers that were due to leave the docks in the next two weeks were fully
booked, and after two weeks were up, the chance of anything steaming up the miles between here and Dawson without getting
frozen in was slim at best.

“Damned little idiot.” Gabe stamped his feet against the cold and stuck his gloved hands into his armpits to keep them warm.
“I should have stayed home and let her deal with the Klondike—and Mr. Jonah Armstrong—alone.”

“You are talking to yourself, Gabriel O’Connell?” The inquiry came from Mrs. Delilah Von Stratton. Mrs. Von Stratton, young
widow of a German industrialist, had made Gabe’s acquaintance on the steamer from Seattle. Adventurous as well as rich, she
had decided to include in her tour of America a visit to the fabulous Klondike that had everyone’s ears pricked and mouths
buzzing. With her traveled two maids, a genteel companion, a bodyguard, and a huge mastiff named Guntar which made the bodyguard
superfluous.

As Mrs. Von Stratton slid her arm through Gabe’s, Guntar the mastiff circled behind and came at him from the other flank,
sniffing up and down his leg. Gabe hoped the beast hadn’t mistaken him for a tree.

“Come now, Gabriel. Why do you scowl so? I do not approve of such a scowl. I insist that everyone around me enjoy himself.
Such a ferocious face does put a damper on our grand adventure.”

“Well now, ma’am, I didn’t mean to put a damper on your adventure.”

“There now. That is much better. You must join me in my cabin once we board and we will warm ourselves with a glass of fine
schnapps.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have a berth on your boat, Mrs. Von Stratton.”

“Oh.” She sounded truly disappointed.

Gabriel didn’t have any illusions about the rich widow having designs on him. They’d whiled away several evenings on the steamer
from Seattle—playing cards and talking. She had put out a few feelers—Gabe guessed that she was a woman who did that with
any man who still possessed all his limbs and teeth—and he had filled her ears with stories of Olivia and his children. From
then on they’d become friends of a sort. Mrs. Von Stratton found American ways, especially the ways of the West, to be as
entertaining as a comic opera, or so she’d told him. She listened raptly to stories about Olivia, Katy, and Ellen, or about
the Blackfoot relatives of his first
wife, and Gabe enjoyed telling them to her. He missed Montana. He missed Olivia, little David, and the ranch. Somehow adventuring
didn’t have the appeal it once had.

“You are staying at this miserable place to wait for the boat that will leave in three days?”

“Well, to tell the truth, I don’t have a berth on that one either.”

She looked at him askance. “You are perhaps going to walk these long, cold miles to the land of gold?”

Gabe laughed. “I’ll find a berth one way or another. These feet of mine don’t take kindly to walking.”

“Ah, Gabriel.” She tugged him along as she strolled along the dock, her arm tucked securely within his. Guntar ambled behind,
herding him like a sheepdog herded a sheep. “I do so admire you American men. You are so spontaneous. So impulsive. You spring
to action and leave the thinking for later. Very refreshing.”

Olivia wouldn’t call it refreshing, Gabe reflected. Olivia would call it idiotic. Feeling the arctic winter breathe down his
collar and lacking a way to get the rest of the way to Dawson, Gabe would have to agree with her.

“And like cats who jump off of heights without looking, you always land on your feet, you Americans.”

Guntar gave Gabe a look that made him suspect the cat analogy might not be wise.

“This time I will be your benefactor, eh?”

“I beg your pardon?” Gabe said.

“You will come on the boat with me. As my guest.”

“I… uh… appreciate the thought, ma’am, but the captain’s already told me the boat’s full up.”

“Nonsense. He wouldn’t dare say no to me. I booked passage weeks ago for my entire traveling party. I’ll simply tell him you’re
my second bodyguard. We have become friends, and it is the least I can do.”

Olivia would likely take a scalpel to him if she found out. She was a sensible woman, his little doctoress, but when she
got riled, she could make a she-puma look like somebody’s tame house cat.

“Come now, Gabriel. I would miss your stories. And think of your poor daughter, who is probably in Dawson by now. You cannot
abandon her.” Her eyes twinkled merrily. “I promise I will not attempt to take advantage of you, my friend.”

“You’re a generous lady, Mrs. Von Stratton. Only a fool would say no.”

“Excellent! I look forward to meeting this remarkable daughter of yours.”

“So do I,” Gabe said as he scowled upriver. Katy could get him into trouble when she was miles away, the little imp—her and
that newspaper man, on whom he aimed to beat until the scoundrel’s stuffings busted their seams. He wondered apprehensively
how Katy had survived the hazardous trip to Dawson, and with a certain amount of wry realism, he wondered if Jonah Armstrong
had survived the hazards of being with Katy. Could be that the man wouldn’t have any stuffings left for Gabe to beat out of
him.

“This town is a piss-poor excuse for the end of the rainbow, let me tell you!” Otar Johnson spit a gob of brown tobacco juice
into the spittoon in the corner of the cabin, and Jonah wondered for the umpteenth time how the lumberjack could be so dead-eye
accurate.

“Give it time,” Jonah told him. “The town’s only a year old.”

Otar spit again. “I’ll be glad to get the hell outta here and up to where the gold is. Shit. Ain’t nothin’ in Dawson but bog
and dog dirt. The whiskey in the saloon tastes like horse piss, and the whores don’t wanna go with no cheechakos, no newcomers.
They all wanna tickle the dicks of them what’s already proved a claim.”

“Well, they are businesswomen, after all.”

“Shee-it! They are that. By the by, lad, little Maudie said to tell ya hey. She gave me a free tumble jest ‘cause I was a
friend of yours.”

“Decent of her,” Jonah said blandly. Maude and her companions had arrived in Dawson a week ago, about the same time Jonah
and his lumberjack benefactors had beached their boat on the narrow ledge of summer bog upon which perched the town of Dawson.
Here where the Klondike River emptied into the Yukon, saloons and dance halls prospered along with all of the other businesses
hastily erected to serve the gold-seekers. Maudie and her friends were doing a roaring business mining the miners for their
gold.

Jonah set aside the piece he’d been writing and added a stick of wood to the sheet iron cabin stove. The stove had cost him
a pretty penny at the Alaska Commercial Company store, but it did a good job of keeping the cabin warm, even with a cold wind
sneaking in beneath the door and around the windows.

“Two more days,” Otar sighed. “Me and Buck and Sven will be digging real gold up on Hunker Creek. We got noses for gold, my
brothers’n’ me, and a good thing, too, for I’ve been hearin’ that the Brits are gonna start takin’ a cut pretty soon.”

“A royalty.” Jonah closed the stove door and went to look out the window at the dreary, rainy town. “I heard that, too. People
up here aren’t too happy about it. They’re also going to cut down the allowed size of the claims and reserve every other parcel
along the creeks for the government.”

“Yah. My brothers an’ me, we’re lucky to file our claim so fast. We work hard and get rich before the government gets their
greedy fingers into the pot. You should do the same, my friend.”

Jonah smiled and tapped the papers on the table where he’d been working. “This is why I’m here. Not gold, but tales of the
gold diggers.”

Otar snorted his contempt for that notion. He lumbered to the door and shrugged on an oilskin. “I hear whiskey calling. This
rain, it has me cold to my bones. I need more than a stove
to warm them.” He hitched a blond brow at Jonah. “Will you come?”

“Thanks, but I have work to do.”

Jonah watched Otar walk through the mud toward town, his shoulders hunched as the rain beat down upon him. The lumberjack
was right. Dawson was a piss-poor excuse for the end of the rainbow. The first two days he was here, he’d walked the town
from end to boggy end, stuck his head in every one of the thirty saloons, got a haircut in one of the town’s two barbershops
and a shave in the other. He’d absorbed the town’s atmosphere, breathed in its stink, let its numerous roaming dogs sniff
at his heels, listened to the town drunks, and watched the newly rich throw gold dust around like it was sawdust.

All so he could write an account of what an end-of-the-trail gold rush town is really like. Not the El Dorado of people’s
dreams, but a bog-ridden hellhole that catered to men’s lust and greed, a town that most men came to and got out of as fast
as they could—to go to the diggings, or to give up and go home.

Above and beyond the journalistic curiosity in his explorings, however, was Jonah’s search for Katy. When he hadn’t found
her the first day, he’d worried. The second day he’d been nearly frantic. The third day in town he’d spotted her with Andy
in tow, looking around the town like Dawson was her own personal Pearly Gates into Heaven. He’d wanted to run to her, pick
her up, and crush her in his arms, but he hadn’t. Even since he realized he loved Katy, he’d been pushing her, and she’d raised
her stubborn little hackles and pushed right back. Now was the time to give her some line. He recalled his father’s advice
on a fishing trip they’d taken when he was a kid. Jonah had hooked a trout that had fought so hard the line had almost snapped.
Let the fish run, his father had advised. Let it wear itself out. If the hook was properly set, he could reel it in easily
when it tired.

In the trout’s case, the hook had been barbed steel. For Katy, the hook was love. Only time would tell if it was properly
set.

Jonah stood up straighter and squinted through the rain. There she was, the little bedraggled imp, headed toward Dawson’s
meat market with a brace of rabbits in her hand and Hunter trotting at her heels. Every day since she’d come, Katy had brought
in game to sell or trade. In a town where everyone wanted to spend their time getting rich, where gold dust was more common
than greenbacks, where people were getting nervous over a threatening food shortage and soon-to-be-impassable river, fresh
meat was a precious commodity.

Jonah waited for Katy to come out of the meat market and make her daily tour of town—looking for a job, Jonah figured, and
unlikely to find one. Katy didn’t have the skills necessary to support a lone woman in Dawson. Quite a few seamstresses took
in a good bit of business. Camilla was already doing very nicely in that trade. Several laundry businesses run by women were
booming, and the Great Northern Hotel employed several female cooks and a couple of girls to serve tables. Katy didn’t have
these domestic skills, however, and the only other positions open to a woman was flat on her back in one of the whorehouses
or dancing in a dance hall.

An ornery part of Jonah almost enjoyed Katy’s predicament. He’d done enough investigation to assure himself that she was all
right, for the time being at least. But little Miss Independent was not doing all that well on her own, living in a tent at
the edge of town with Andy and Hunter, bartering game for flour and bacon, cruising the town for a job and finding only closed
doors and invitations to take herself elsewhere. He did feel a bit sorry for her, and perhaps a bit proud of her persistence,
but damned if it didn’t feel good to see that she might actually need his shoulder to lean upon for a change.

She came out of the meat market, pulled her hat farther down on her head to keep off the rain, and looked down the muddy street.
The stubborn little scrapper never gave up, Jonah mused, expecting her to march off on her usual tour of
the town. To his surprise, though, she struck out in a different direction—straight toward his cabin.