The Great Alone (86 page)

“It was a waste buying those new clothes,” Justin murmured, his low voice vibrating against her body. “I don’t think I had them on more than twenty minutes.”

“Maybe. But I’m glad you had the bath and a shave. That’s my biggest complaint about Nome.”

“That men don’t take baths?”

“No. That getting a bath is such an ordeal—hauling the water, heating it. It’s the Russian in me, I guess,” she mused. “I miss bathing regularly.”

“Baths, huh.” He rolled away from her onto his back, resting his head on the adjoining pillow and raising his arms up over his head, exposing the dark hairy armpits. “Do you know I haven’t slept in a bed since I left Skagway?” He gazed at the water-stained canvas roof of the tent. “Hell, I’d be satisfied if me and my partners had a tent to sleep in.”

“You don’t have one?”

“No. Our boat capsized coming down the Yukon. We lost the tent, most of our gear and equipment as well as our supplies. We were hoping to get a grubstake once we got here, but so far we haven’t had any luck. Course we’re taking gold out of our claim on the beach, so eventually we’ll have our own money to buy what we need. Problem is I’m not sure how long we’re going to be able to work it. Some of the owners of the tundra claims are saying that their claims go all the way to the ocean and that we’ve jumped their claims. Others are saying that the beach is public property and no one can stake a claim on it. Until a court says who’s right, we’re just gonna stay there and keep working it.”

“In the meantime, you’re just going to camp out there in the open?” One night of sleeping on that damp sand with that chilling wind blowing in off the sea had been enough for her. She couldn’t imagine anything more miserable.

“Got any better ideas?” he asked.

“Sure.” She rolled onto her side, propping herself up with an elbow. “You can sleep here.”

“I don’t know how well that would go over with my partners—me sleeping on a nice soft bed and them out there in the cold. Not that I don’t like the idea, but it wouldn’t be fair to them.”

Now that he had turned down her impulsive offer, she realized it was best. The bed wasn’t always going to be available when he wanted to sleep, and it might be awkward when she had customers to entertain. Still, she wanted to help him, and there was another alternative.

Glory rolled out of bed, dragging the top blanket with her and wrapping it around her. Barefoot, she padded over to a large steamer trunk and knelt down on the ground to open it. She flipped open the hidden compartment located in an inner wall, and removed the flat leather pouch.

“What are you doing?” Justin sat up, the remaining cover falling down around his waist.

She took out five of the bills in the pouch, then returned it to its secret compartment and rearranged the gowns inside to conceal its location again. With the money in hand, she stood up and walked back to the bed.

“You said you needed a tent, some equipment and supplies. Will five hundred dollars do the job?”

He stared at the bills in her outstretched hand, then looked at her, slowly shaking his head. “I can’t take that from you.”

“Why not? You wanted a grubstake. Well, here it is. It’s the perfect solution, because it gives both of us what we want. I’ve always wanted to own a gold claim, and this buys me part interest in one.”

After hesitating a moment longer, he took the money and counted the bills as if not quite believing they were real. “With this, I bet I could buy everything we need yet tonight. Hell, they were gonna throw out lines and catch fish for supper. Maybe I could get my hands on some meat.”

Throwing back the covers, he swung out of bed and reached down to pick up his faded red flannel long underwear. Quickly he stepped into it. He was still buttoning with one hand while he was pulling his trousers on with the other. Glory had never seen a man dress so fast in her life.

“I can just see the looks on their faces when I come walking up with all the stuff.” He grinned. “Damn, are they gonna be surprised!” He didn’t bother to button his shirt as he hurriedly tucked the tails inside his trousers. His coat was in his hand and his hat was jammed on the back of his head when he came around the bed and gave Glory a quick, hard kiss. “I gotta go. Thanks … Glory.”

His barely contained excitement brought a smile to her face—a smile that became wistful as he charged out of the tent. It was easy to imagine how excited he would have been if he’d been there that night when she’d come back to their room with the ten dollars needed for their Klondike grubstake. A lot had changed since then, and five hundred was considerably more than ten. She sighed, wishing he’d stayed a little longer, wishing that he hadn’t been so quick to take the money and run. He’d just been excited; that’s all.

But it was just as well he’d left now. She was needed somewhere else, too. There was a lot of work still to be done to get the Palace ready for business. But, unlike Justin, Glory took her time getting dressed.

Although the Palace was unfinished, Deacon and Glory opened the doors the next day, admitting anyone and everyone with gold dust in their pouches. The place was almost immediately jammed with prospectors ready to celebrate their find. With only the minimum of hired help to run their establishment, they quickly pressed Matty into service, placing her in charge of the gold scales, responsible for weighing a miner’s gold and giving him the dollar equivalent in tokens he could spend at the Palace. They were fully aware that a miner was apt to overlook any “accidental” spillage of his dust by a clumsy Eskimo breed. A blanket lined the shelf below the enclosed counter on which the gold scales sat. Its nap caught the spilled flour gold. On a good night, they could glean as much as a hundred dollars from the blanket.

With the discovery of the gold-bearing beach sands, the economy of Nome boomed. No expensive machinery was required to extract the gold from the sand. This was a poor man’s diggings. Every man in town had gold dust in his pockets. People rushed to take advantage of it. Suddenly men who had deserted their trade to mine the sands discovered there was as much money to be made at their old jobs and went back to their former work.

The next weeks were chaotic for Glory and Deacon. The carpenters and paperhangers put the finishing touches on the Palace, working around the steady crowd of customers. The piano arrived from Seattle. A musician formerly with the Philadelphia Symphony agreed to play it for them as long as they kept him supplied with morphine.

Two more prostitutes were hired, bringing the number of Glory’s girls to four. Following Miss Rosie’s lead, Glory had carefully screened them, requiring that they be free of disease, reasonably clean and neat, and at least capable of good manners. Once those criteria were met, she selected on the basis of personality and looks, wanting to give customers a variety from which to choose. Joining the sultry, copper-skinned French-Indian woman from Saskatchewan with the ubiquitous name of Frenchie, and the plump, hennaed Mad Alice, so called because of her volatile temper, were the baby-faced Gladys, who was quickly renamed Happy Bottom by the miners, and “Good” Betsy, a former school-teacher who always praised her customers when they were “good.”

Glory’s arrangement with her girls was the same as Miss Rosie’s had been, splitting the fee fifty-fifty, letting them keep the tips, charging them a flat rate for the condoms, allowing them to sell them for whatever they could get, and giving them a commission on the drinks they sold. However, she did charge a higher rent for their rooms. Meals and laundry, with the exception of linens, were extra. In addition, Glory arranged with her dressmaker in San Francisco to allow her girls to charge clothes to her account, and she received a small kickback from the dressmaker for the additional business. Despite the costs for bouncers, domestic help, a kitchen staff, the piano player, and the monthly “fine” of ten dollars for each prostitute recently imposed by the town’s newly formed consent government, the profits were ample.

The Palace was not without competition. By the middle of September 1899, twenty different saloons were in operation, including the Dexter Saloon run by C. E. Hoxsie and the once-famed gunslinger and marshal of Tombstone, a paunchy, middle-aged Wyatt Earp. Behind some of the saloons on the north side of Front Street, rough and hardened prostitutes plied their trade from one-room tents and wooden shanties, some of them as quick to steal a customer’s poke as to bed him. It was popularly known as the Stockade for the high fence that was built around it to shield the town’s more righteous citizens from its sordid activity.

With Nome’s population exploding to five thousand people, business was lively for everyone. But that wasn’t what prevented Glory from seeing Justin more than two or three times a week. The ownership of mining claims—both the rich placer deposits in the gulches and creeks of the inland mountains and the gold-riddled sands of the beach—remained in dispute. As far as the beachfront was concerned, the general consensus was that, according to U.S. law, beaches were public property, and therefore open to everyone. As long as a man had a shovel in his hand, he had a right to that section of the beach, an area that was, more or less, agreed to be roughly twenty square feet as measured by a miner’s standard long-handled shovel. The tides played havoc with that system.

In an effort to continually occupy the section they claimed, Justin and his partners took turns coming into town, with two of them always remaining at their beach site. Glory didn’t really mind the separation. It just seemed to make the time they did spend together that much more special. She had something to look forward to now. Deacon appeared to have taken the change in their personal relationship in stride, although sometimes he seemed more aloof and withdrawn. Yet he’d always been that way, so it was difficult for her to tell if the change was real or imagined. Either way, she could hardly complain.

The September sun was shining brightly, but Glory’s gum boots were weighted down with mud as she picked her way through the mire. Nome’s streets were figments drawn on a long-disregarded town plat that bore no resemblance to the winding paths that recent rains had turned into rivers of mud, in some places two feet deep. It was a standing joke that a man never knew when the next step would take him to China.

Buildings went up wherever there was space; sometimes they were built in the middle of where the street was supposed to be. That created narrow trails no more than eight feet wide in places.

An expanse of murky brown water confronted Glory. She stopped to hoist her skirts higher and to try to gauge its depth before stepping into it. Matty bumped into her from behind, nearly knocking her into it, but Glory recovered her balance.

“Why do you stop here?” Matty looped both arms through the curved handle of the market basket mounded with foodstuffs.

“I’m debating whether I have to wade or swim through that puddle,” Glory replied.

Although Matty usually did the daily marketing, Glory went with her whenever there were major purchases to be made. She was often able to persuade the merchants, especially the ones who occasionally visited the Palace, to shave their prices a little. With rumors of a possible food shortage in Nome this winter, Glory was attempting to accumulate a stockpile of non-perishable goods.

She shifted her grip on the heavily loaded market basket she carried, trying to ease the strain on her arm. Normally she loaded her purchases in a wheeled cart pulled by a team of sled dogs that Deacon had bought for her, but this thick mire made the use of such a conveyance impractical. But Glory knew their load wasn’t going to get much heavier, since their last stop was the bakery.

“It can’t be much farther.” She glanced up the long row of false-fronted buildings, scanning the lettered signs. All around her, men slogged through the river of mud, seemingly indifferent to the slop sucking at their boots. The yammer of sled dogs was an incessant din that competed with the pounding and sawing of wood as carpenters worked busily to slap together another building. “Wasn’t the bakery shop next to the watchmaker?”

There was an empty space where she thought the bakery shop should have been. The spot wasn’t completely empty. The framework for a new building now occupied the site.

“It’s gone now,” Matty observed. “This place is crazy. The people are crazy.”

“I agree.” She sighed heavily and retraced her steps to the fruit and cigar store they had just passed. The proprietor was sorting through a crate of apples, turning them so the bruised side wouldn’t show. “Excuse me.”

The man started guiltily, then quickly began rubbing the apple in his hand on the sleeve of his coat. “Just polishin’ these here apples, Miss St. Clair.” There were few people in town who didn’t know her on sight. “Got a new shipment in. Real beauties they are, too. Would ya like some? You know what they say—an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

“I don’t believe so. But maybe you can tell me what happened to the bakery that used to be next to the watchmaker?”

“Somebody hauled it off in the night with poor Mr. Parker still in it. Guess they hitched on to it with a team a’ horses an’ jest drug it off. It jolted Mr. Parker right out a’ bed. Heerd he got quite a knot on his head when he fell. The new place is gonna be a gen’ral store.”

Glory wasn’t surprised by the story. Lot jumping was as prevalent as claim jumping in Nome. “What about the bakery?”

“Can’t say as I know where it’s located now.” He shook his head regretfully.

“Thanks.”