Jason's Gold (5 page)

In little more than a week, Skagway had grown dramatically. The buildings along Broadway were virtually completed.

Jason couldn't resist the temptation to eat at a restaurant, even if a meal cost twelve times what it would have in Seattle. At a thrown-together establishment called the Midas Cafe, he ordered a New York steak and handed over three dollars.

As he took his first bite, he detected a slight rancid odor. But then he decided that the odor was coming from him. He and his clothes were full of the scent of dead horses.

As Jason ate he listened to the subdued conversation of two men at the table behind him. There was a secretive tone to their voices that made him strain to hear what they were saying. They'd been in Skagway a week, he understood that much, trying to arrange to have their
outfits packed over White Pass—the Dead Horse Trail. “I believe we've landed in hell,” one of them said.

“A shooting every night!”

“It's not just the gamblers. Anyone you do business with might be a swindler. There's even one posing as a preacher. Some of their victims have barely stepped off the ships.”

“Going bust on the trail is one thing, but being cheated out of your funds before you even set out is another. Seen all the
FOR SALE
signs down by the water—people selling their outfits off cheap?”

“Everything from fur hats to Winchesters. People just trying to raise enough money to get back to Seattle. And the law—they do nothing.”

Suddenly the other voice went down to a bare whisper. “People are saying that the marshal is working for the boss of Skagway. If you report a crime, you might be digging your own grave.”

“So, who
is
the boss of Skagway?”

“That southerner who poses as a philanthropist—Jeff Smith.”

Captain Jefferson Randolph Smith, Jason almost said aloud. He fought the impulse to turn around and tell those two men about his own encounter with Smith and his bunch. Instead, he chewed slowly, listened intently, said nothing.

“They say Smith gives people the fare home, sometimes, out of his own pocket.”

“After his men have cheated or robbed them!”

“There'll be many a dry eye at his funeral.”

“I heard it whispered today, who he really is….”

“What do you mean?”

There was a pause. “I heard tell he's a famous con man from the mining camps in Colorado by the name of
Soapy Smith. Didn't even bother to change his name. Brought some of his accomplices with him and recruits others every day. They're everywhere!”

“All I know is, we better get out of here while we still can. Better try the Chilkoot, don't you think?”

Jason had only a small piece of his steak left. He dangled the meat above the big husky at his feet. The dog sniffed it, took it gingerly, gummed it, then dropped it to the floor uneaten.

“Thought you were hungry,” Jason said. “You'd prefer fish? I'll try to find you some. What do you say we go looking for packsacks for you? Would you carry for me, over the Chilkoot?”

The dog's amber eyes, all the while he spoke, remained locked on his.

“You'll think about it? Good, let's go!”

At the foot of Broadway, Jason paused to take in the raw, bustling drama. There were more ships offshore than before, more arrivals streaming onto the beach, more mountains of gear, more dogs and horses, more confusion. As he stood there, shouts erupted in front of the first building on the street, a telegraph office he didn't remember from before.

“Come out of there!” a man in the middle of the street demanded indignantly. He was waving a telegram in the air as a boy of no more than ten clung to his side, looking fearfully at the people gathering around. “Father,” the boy pleaded.

“Come out and show the good people your telegraph lines!” his father raged. “Where are the lines? Where are the poles? This answer from my wife in Sacramento—it's a phony! I didn't come all this way to be cheated! Pay once to send your telegram, pay a second time to receive
the so-called reply. I may have just got here only a few hours ago, but I wasn't born yesterday. Show me the telegraph wires!”

Someone was coming out of the office, scowling. It was Kid Barker!

Kid Barker, with his puffy childlike face, put his hands on his hips and nodded to several men standing at the edge of the crowd. Jason saw one of them slip a badge out of his pocket and pin it to his vest. Seconds later, the protesting newcomer was hustled away by the elbows. The crowd murmured at the sight of the man being led away, with his son crying and running to catch up.

The boy's father resisted suddenly, shook loose of the two men who had him by the arms. Jason saw the flash of a nightstick, heard the whack on the man's head, saw the blood stream down the side of his face. Jason glanced back for only the briefest moment at Kid Barker, who was watching from a safe distance with a smug grin on his face. Jason longed for the opportunity to turn the tables on him, but he didn't know how it could be done.

Jason turned quickly away. He couldn't afford to be recognized. Everyone on the street melted away. It was over.

At the beach, amid the
FOR SALE
signs, Jason found a pair of dog panniers made of canvas and large enough to match the husky's great size. At bargain prices, he bought five pounds of dried fruit and five pounds of jerky, along with a dozen yeast cakes, and began to load up the dog's packsacks and his own for his sprint over Chilkoot Pass.

Then he set about looking for winter clothes. He
wanted to be prepared for the cold when he joined up with his brothers; there was no telling what might be available in Dawson City. He bought three pairs of wool-lined moose-hide mittens, a beaver hat with fold-down earflaps, a heavy wool sweater, overalls, two thick wool blankets to replace his ruined bedroll, wool socks, a splendid pair of sealskin mukluks for winter boots, and a suit of waterproof oilskin to wear over his father's mackinaw and his wool trousers.

All of a sudden Jason felt a twinge in his gut, sharp like the twist of a knife. He took a deep breath. It passed and was immediately replaced by a dull ache, like he'd swallowed gunpowder.

He willed himself to concentrate on what still needed to be done. He bought a tarp and some rope, so he'd be able to sleep dry. There was the dog to think about too now. The big husky would need dried salmon and plenty of it. Jason had seen a man on the Dead Horse Trail with a whole bale of it, the kind the Indians dried in two long strips connected by the tail. He asked around, found an old woman who told him it was for sale at the trading post in Dyea.

He packed the panniers that he hoped the husky would carry for him, arranging a blanket inside of each so that nothing would jab the dog in the sides. They'd head over to Dyea next.

“I need a name for you.” Jason said aloud. “I had a dog once, a long time ago…not for very long—a puppy, that's all he was.”

He was about to say the name of that long-lost dog out loud. But he had never allowed himself that in all these years. It was a sore spot, a wound that had never healed.

When he finished packing the panniers, they were bulging. He lifted them by the yoke, guessed their combined weight at forty pounds.

Jason talked gently to the dog as he lowered the yoke onto the little saddle blanket he'd placed along the husky's back. To his surprise, the dog stood perfectly still, even gave his hand a quick lick. Jason whispered, “I knew you'd carry for me.”

He walked a little with the dog, who seemed unbothered by the bulky panniers. Jason's new companion stayed close to his side. The husky's face, looking up, was so expressive: black above, white below, just like his entire body. Those amber eyes had a lot of gold in them.

Jason petted the husky across the wide crown of his head. The dog nuzzled him affectionately and wagged his great tail, which he carried curved up over his back.

“You were someone's pet. weren't you? Someone's best friend? We can be that too.”

Jason stooped to fasten the panniers to the dog's harness. His stomach was cramping badly now, and he was breaking out in a sweat. I really am sick, he thought. Something I ate?

The New York steak, he realized. It really
had
gone bad. For a second he even wondered if it could have been rotten horse flesh he'd eaten, and immediately there seemed little doubt. Welcome to Skagway!

No wonder the husky wouldn't touch it.

Got to keep going, he told himself. It was already midafternoon and he still had to find a scow that would take him across to Dyea, but suddenly he collapsed in agony.

In the middle of the human anthill, he lay writhing like a snake with its head cut off. The pain reached a
crescendo, and then his mind switched off like an electric light. He knew nothing more.

 

He didn't know where he was or how much time had passed. He was too sick to know
who
he was. That he hurt, that he was in a fog of pain, was all he knew.

Two faces kept coming and going in the fog, looking down at him. He had no idea who they belonged to.

One was the face of a man with an enormous gray beard.

The other was the face of a girl, a girl with wavy black hair.

Their faces and their voices came and went in the fog, but he couldn't place them.

There was a third face too, the black-and-white face of a sled dog, which would appear and disappear.

The face of the dog floating in his delirium suddenly melted into the face of a puppy, a black-and-white mutt with floppy ears. It was running toward him.

He would struggle to rise, but the man or the girl would hold him back and tell him to stay where he was. He had no idea where he was or what was happening. “Everything's going to be all right,” the girl kept saying, but it wasn't. The little puppy was about to be crushed under the wheels of a wagon. His brothers could see it too, but they were powerless to prevent it. “King!” Jason shouted at the top of his lungs. “King, stop! King, King!”

Then he was standing by an open grave, watching his father's casket sink down into the ground. His oldest brother, Abraham, always so strong, was shaking like a leaf. Ethan, who always had a joke to tell, was bawling like a small child.

Jason looked straight down into the grave. It was a mile deep. It had no bottom at all.

“Here,” Abraham said, shoving the puppy into his hands. “Take this dog and give it a name and take good care of it. Everything will be all right.”

Whenever the fog thinned, Jason was aware of the girl with hair black as a raven's wing or the man with the enormous gray beard putting a moist towel to his forehead. They propped him up. They made him take sips of water from a glass.

When the fog at last was gone and he remembered who he was, he found himself in a strange room. The girl from the dream was sitting by his bed.

She had black hair and hazel eyes, a couple of freckles on her nose, and he had no idea who she was.

“You're going to live after all,” the raven-haired girl told him.

He groaned.

The husky stood up beside the bed, nuzzled Jason's hand, and yawned. Jason stroked the black fur crowning the dog's head, remembered him from the dream, and realized that some of what he'd dreamed had been no dream at all. This was the dog from the Dead Horse Trail. “Am I still in Skagway?” he asked.

“Yes, and it's the most dreadful place on earth. We can't wait to get out of here. Who's King? You kept calling the name King. Is that the name of your dog here?”

Jason remembered the puppy from his dream, the dog he'd never gotten over all this time. His brothers had wanted to replace it with another, but he wouldn't let them. Losing it had hurt too much.

He was about to tell her that King was not the husky's name.

Then he looked again into the clear eyes of this dog who had awaited death with such calm.

“Yes,” he answered. “That's his name. King.”

“How about
your
name?” the girl asked.

“Jason. Jason Hawthorn.”

She thought about his name, but not for long. “I like that,” she announced. “The thorny part isn't necessarily a bad thing. It could be a good thing. Jason is perfect.”

What was she talking about? “Who are you?” he asked.

“I'm Jamie Dunavant.”

“Jamie?”

“That's right. I'm fourteen years old. My father is Homer Dunavant, and we're on our way to Dawson City.”

He sat up straighter. The girl reached for a cushion and propped it behind his back. He was struggling to remember how he had gotten here to this room, but he couldn't.

Jamie seemed to read his mind, and explained. “My father carried you here. We weren't planning to stay overnight in Skagway, but then we came across you. You were
real
sick. My father wanted to stay with you till you got better, but then he got restless and went out and started playing the shell game.

“Father's a poet, and a good one, too. But he has one weakness—he loves to gamble. And guess what? He lost some of our money. There's so many crooks around here, an honest man is like a grasshopper in a yard full of chickens. My father insists that the eye is faster than the hand, and he does win sometimes, but whenever the stakes are high, he loses. There's got
to be a trick to it. He's already lost a hundred dollars. Imagine, a hundred dollars! I'm afraid he's out there right now trying to win it back. I'll be happy to get over the Chilkoot and into the jurisdiction of the Yellow Legs.”

Jason was trying hard to make sense of all this.

The girl went to the window and looked anxiously up and down the street. “It sure wasn't like this where I'm from.”

“Where
are
you from?”

“Swift Water…,” she replied absently as she kept her eye out for her father, “…west of Moose Jaw and east of Medicine Hat.”

“Oh,” Jason said uncertainly.

“South of Saskatoon,” she explained.

“Montana? North Dakota?”

She wheeled around when she realized how confused he was. “Saskatchewan,” she declared. “Saskatchewan, Canada. My father and I are Canadians. We caught the Klondicitis bad, sold the farm, took the Canadian Pacific west to Vancouver and sailed from there. We were headed for Dyea and the Chilkoot Pass, but everyone from our ship got dumped here in Skagway.”

“Lucky for me,” Jason said. “Who are those Yellow Legs you were talking about, the ones on the other side of the Chilkoot?”

“Oh, them. The Northwest Mounted Police. The Mounties. They have yellow stripes down the sides of their trousers.”

 

In the morning Jason was recovered enough to board a scow for Dyea along with Jamie and her father. On the ride across the tip of the bay, Homer Dunavant was
scribbling lines in a notebook. The poet's beard was big enough for birds to nest in.

“Does he sell his poems?” Jason asked the girl.

“Oh, no, but they're good enough. He won't even recite them to people. Too modest.”

Jason peeked over the poet's shoulder. The title of the poem was “Lift Up Your Eyes.” As the poet wrote each new line, he would look up to the snow-clad peaks. For inspiration, Jason guessed.

“I'll tell you the beginning of one he wrote yesterday,” Jamie whispered. “I know it by heart. Listen:

“How do you like it, Jason?”

“It makes me want to get up there and start digging.”

He didn't know what to make of this girl, except that he knew he liked her. Unguarded as a baby colt, she always looked him straight in the eye, and burst out with her enthusiasms. She was different from any girl he'd met, a bright new star in the sky.

When it came to practical matters, Jason couldn't help wondering about these two Canadians. Their things, which he'd helped to load on the scow, consisted of a sleek eighteen-foot canoe and no more than a five-hundred-pound outfit from food to gold pan. It seemed like the poet and his daughter stood only a slightly better chance of reaching the Klondike than the people he'd read about in the Minnesota newspaper who'd announced they were going to go by balloon. But he wasn't going to say it.

He did say, “You sure are going light.”

“Fast and light,” Jamie replied. “That's Father's strategy. We still have enough funds to pay the Indians to pack our canoe and outfit over to the other side. It's all we have left from selling the farm, less what Father donated to the criminals in Skagway.”

She added in a whisper, “We only got a thousand dollars for the farm. We have six hundred left.”

“But how will you eat this winter?”

“Father's Winchester will take care of that. He never really was a farmer, you see—we just came out of the North a few years ago, when he got the daft notion that I needed ‘civilizing,' as he called it. Before that he worked for Hudson's Bay Company his whole life, trapping and trading. I grew up at Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabaska, in the bush.”

“In a bush, did you say? Excuse me—”

“
The
bush, silly. In the
wilderness
. There's moose, caribou, and mountain sheep in the Yukon country where we're headed—we'll be fine. We can make dry meat, pick berries and make pemmican, gather rose hips for tea. You should do that too, you know—a cup of rose hip tea once a week through the winter and you won't get scurvy.”

“What about the Yukon River? Can a canoe handle it?”

“This Peterborough we have is the best canoe in the world! Father says there's no more than five miles of rapids in the whole journey. A beginner could paddle the rest of it in a canoe just fine—and we're not beginners!”

“That Mountie post, wherever it is—aren't you worried about it?”

“It's past Lake Bennett, at the foot of Tagish Lake.
But we won't have to pay a customs duty like you will, because we bought everything in Canada.”

“What I was trying to get at is the food requirement…. Isn't it seven hundred pounds per person? Will the Mounties let you through with no more than you can carry in the canoe?”

“They'd better…. We're Canadian citizens! With my father's experience in the North, he has no doubt he can convince them we'll do fine. All the Yellow Legs care about is that you're not going to go up there and die. It's only a three-week paddle to Dawson City. We'll be there well before freeze-up.”

Jason couldn't help but grin. It made him feel good just listening to Jamie, so filled with confidence, so proud of her father and what they were attempting together.

When they reached Dyea, the beach was swarming with the arrival of eight hundred Klondikers from the
Islander
offshore, the converted coal carrier Kid Barker had told him about. The horses, he remembered, were quartered above the first-class berths. He thought better of telling Jamie about those yellow rivers.

He helped his Canadian friends load their canoe. Then Jamie paddled it a short way up the Dyea River, past the melee of horse-drawn freight wagons and Klondikers on foot shuttling their goods to safety above the high-tide line. She would wait there while her father arranged for packers at the Indian huts just beyond the trading post. Jason called his thank-yous and good-byes to both of them, hesitant to turn away. It didn't seem right that he'd never see them again. She was pretty, darn it, in addition to being friendly and brimful of spunk.

With King at his side, Jason finally turned and waded off through the crowd. At the trading post he stood in line to buy a bale of dried salmon for the husky. As he paid, the clerk handed him, without explanation, a map of the trail over Chilkoot Pass, and a second one of the Yukon River to Dawson City. “How long would it take two men to build a boat from timber?” Jason inquired.

“Been done in two weeks,” the clerk said impatiently. “That was in the days before all this, though, by men who knew what they were doing. For most of these cheechakos coming through here now, two
months
would be a miracle.”

“What'd you call them?”

“Cheechakos. Means greenhorns. Means you. If you survive your first winter, you'll be a sourdough.”

Jason stepped outside, inspected the map. It was twenty-seven miles from the trading post, up and over the Chilkoot Pass and down to the first big lake on the other side, Lake Lindeman. Four miles long, Lindeman was connected to a much longer lake—Lake Bennett—by a mile of river. At the head of both lakes, an
X
was marked, with the inscription
BUILD BOATS
. His brothers would be building theirs at the head of Lake Bennett, where the trail over White Pass came in. People coming over the Chilkoot would build boats at the head of Lake Lindeman, then float to Bennett and beyond.

He'd lost twelve days, he realized. Twelve days ago he'd waved good-bye to Jack London only a few hundred yards from this very spot where he now stood.

He'd chosen wrong. If he'd gone over the Chilkoot, he would have arrived at Lake Bennett about the time his brothers got there over White Pass. But how could he have known?

Still, he should be okay. It was August 13, and his brothers had gotten to Lake Bennett on the fifth. He had a twenty-seven mile hike to Lake Lindeman, another six miles to reach his brothers. Without doubt he could reach them before they'd been at their boatbuilding for two weeks. He could still make it before they left. He had to.