Gypsy

by Lesley Pearse

  They were close to Dawson City now, and the river Yukon was a seething mass of boats. Joining all those who like them had come down from the mountain lakes were many Sourdoughs. Beth understood the name came from the habit of old-timers up here keeping a small piece of bread dough in a bag inside their shirt so that it stayed warm and could be used like yeast to make the next batch of bread they cooked. These men were grizzled old prospectors who’d been holed up all winter at their claims on small creeks. Some of them had been in the region for years searching for gold.

  The excitement that they were nearing their destination was palpable. People shouted out greetings; they wanted to share their stories about their journey and hopes for what lay ahead. But Beth and the boys couldn’t bring themselves to enter into conversation, for one mention of Sam might make them break down.

  Beth hoped that everyone assumed their silence and grim faces were symptomatic of the fearsome heat and the tormenting mosquitoes, for that appeared to be making some people act irrationally. She and the boys had witnessed many vicious fights and slanging matches, usually between men who had soldiered amicably through so much already. Whatever it was that was causing it, it was terrible to see, for they seemed to hate one another like poison now, wanting to separate to go it alone. They watched two men on the bank, actually sawing their boat and provisions in half as they screamed abuse at each. Another couple were fighting for ownership of a frying pan, until someone else came along and solved the problem by throwing it into the river, so neither could have it.

  It was a madness that Beth and the boys found impossible to understand. Sam’s death had made them realize how much they valued one another, and how little mere goods and chattels meant.

  ∗

  Darkness never came now, just a slight dimming of the light around midnight, but by two in the morning daylight had returned. They would make camp on the shore just long enough to light a fire and cook a hurried meal, then set sail on the raft again, Theo and Jack taking it in turns to sleep. It wasn’t that they wanted to beat others to Dawson, for their hearts had gone out of that, but because they needed to be occupied. They realized now, too late, that it was Sam’s enthusiasm, cheeriness and constant optimism that had kept conversations flowing in the past, and without him there seemed nothing to say.

  On the morning of 12 June, Beth was half dozing at the stern when she heard Jack shout, ‘It’s Dawson City! At last we’re there.’

  They hadn’t known exactly where it was, and they’d been hugging the river bank for the last two days for fear of coming upon it suddenly and being swept past by the strong current. But as they rounded a rocky bluff, there it was in front of them. The fabled city of gold.

  Beth didn’t know what she had expected it to look like, but the reality, a sprawl of tents, log cabins, false-fronted emporiums and teetering piles of lumber, wasn’t that different to Skagway. There was even the same black oozing mud.

  Yet this mud stretched from the shoreline right into the little town, and she could see no planks put down to walk on, no boardwalks or even stones as there had been in Skagway. Horses and carts were floundering in it, and people were trying in vain to pull heavily laden sledges through it.

  Later, they were to discover that the town had been flooded when the ice melted a couple of weeks earlier, and the people who had built cabins right down on the shoreline saw them swept away. But it seemed such things were just a minor setback in Dawson City, for as soon as boats began arriving with provisions, especially longed-for luxuries like eggs, whisky and newspapers, the muddy streets were a mere inconvenience.

  They managed to find a spot along the boat-crowded shoreline to moor the raft, and hauled their kit right up to the back of the town, the only place they could find free to pitch their tent. They heard that to rent one room cost a hundred dollars a month, and every commodity changed hands for extortionate prices.

  ‘Good job I brought those nails,’ Jack said, spotting a sign advertising them for eight dollars a pound. ‘Not that I want to sell them — we’ll need them to build a place of our own.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll get a good price for that silk and satin I brought along,’ Beth said thoughtfully. The boys had argued with her back in Skagway and said she should take something more useful, but she had stuck to her guns, insisting that she knew there would be women desperate for dress material once they got to Dawson. Judging by the stained and dreary clothes most of the women here were wearing, she was right.

  After they’d pitched their tent, they went back down to Front Street to take a look around. This street overlooking the river was clearly where everything happened and where everyone gathered. It was lined with saloons, hotels, restaurants and dance halls, though all of them had clearly been thrown up in a hurry. Every minute or so another boat moored and the owners hauled their belongings on to the shore, adding to the utter chaos. Thousands of new arrivals were wandering around aimlessly, while the veterans, who had by all accounts suffered all winter from a scarcity of almost everything, harassed the newcomers for everything from brooms to books.

  As at Lake Bennett, there were huge piles of lumber everywhere, and the buzz of saws and the hammering of nails made it difficult to hear what anyone was saying. Building work was going on everywhere — shops, saloons, banks and even a church — yet disconcertingly there appeared to be no overall plan.

  Down by the shoreline people had set up stalls selling everything from boots to boxes of tomatoes, all at sky-high prices. Many of these goods had been brought in by a steamer just a few days earlier, but they saw an elderly woman they’d met in Lake Bennett, who’d managed to get her chickens up the Chilkoot Trail, selling them for twenty-five dollars each.

  There were countless signs proclaiming ‘Gold Dust Bought and Sold’. Outside some of these cabins, grizzled-looking men with shaggy beards, and small leather bags hanging from their belts, stood in line smoking their pipes. A man in a loud checked suit and a black stetson hat informed Beth and the boys that these were Sourdoughs, who’d struck it rich on their claims at Forty Mile and Eldorado Creek. He said he thought the gold they were selling today was worth a king’s ransom, yet they looked like tramps, without a cent to their names.

  However strange everything was, it was colourful and vibrant. Men in smart suits and homburg hats mingled with others in ragged, mud-splattered trail clothes. They saw a pretty blonde in a pink satin dress being carried over the mud by a bare-chested man who looked like a prize fighter. There were dogs everywhere, mostly malamutes and other sledge dogs, but there were also women carrying toy dogs under their arms, and greyhounds and spaniels picked their way daintily through the mud.

  ‘It don’t feel right seeing this without Sam,’ Jack sighed.

  It was a pivotal moment, for Beth had thought the same and she guessed Theo had too. She felt grateful to Jack for being brave enough to come out with it.

  ‘If he was here we’d all be arguing what to do next,’ she said, half smiling as she imagined how excited he would have been.

  ‘Then we must do what we aimed for, for him,’ Theo said unexpectedly. ‘He wanted to get here more than all of us. So we can’t let him down now.’

  Tears prickled in Beth’s eyes and she buried her face against Theo’s chest to hold them back. He was right — the best kind of memorial they could give to Sam would be to succeed here. That way, maybe they’d be able to cope with their loss.

  Beth lifted her head away from Theo and wiped her moist eyes. ‘Then I must find somewhere to play tonight,’ she said. ‘And you two must start looking for opportunities.’

  Beth went into the Monte Carlo Saloon on Front Street while Theo and Jack went to check out a few other places.

  From the outside the Monte Carlo looked the smartest and busiest of all the saloons, with fresh paint and a large picture of Queen Victoria over the door, and it had signs claiming to have gaming rooms and a theatre. But the timber facade which promised sophistication was false. Inside it was unpreposses
sing, only one step up from a rough and ready shed, the gaming rooms dark and dreary, the theatre small and spartan with hard benches.

  Undeterred, Beth approached a man with a swirling moustache and a fancy waistcoat behind the bar and asked him if she could play her fiddle there.

  He looked her up and down and shrugged. ‘You wanna take the risk, then that’s your funeral,’ he said. It was clear he didn’t believe the young woman before him, in her shabby dress and gumboots, could possibly entertain his customers.

  ‘So if I just come in and start playing, and pass a hat round at the end, it will be all right with you?’

  ‘Sure, honey,’ he said, already turning away to reach for a glass and bottle. ‘But don’t expect too much, or fer me to look out fer you. It gets rough in here at nights.’

  The man’s obvious conviction she would only make a fool of herself made Beth anxious to prove him wrong. She went back to the tent, washed her hair in a bucket, dug out her scarlet dress and polished up her best boots. It was only a couple of hours later that she learned from the people in the next tent that the man behind the bar was Jack Smith, one of the men who’d struck it rich out on Bonanza Creek and built the Monte Carlo.

  But it transpired he wasn’t such a good judge of character, for he’d sent his partner, Swiftwater Bill Gates, off to Seattle with ten thousand dollars in gold to buy mirrors, velvet carpets and chandeliers for the saloon. News had already filtered back here that Gates had actually gone to San Francisco and was being called the King of the Klondike because he was distributing the gold to one and all while he lived the high life in the city’s best hotel.

  Beth was amused by the story and it made her even more purposeful. At seven that evening she was back outside the Monte Carlo, which was almost shaking with the thunderous noise coming from within. But with shining hair trimmed with a feathered comb, her red dress and determination in her heart, she was ready for anything. She slipped off her muddy gumboots, leaving them by the door with her fiddle case, put on her clean, shiny boots and, with Theo and Jack looking anxiously on, tucked her fiddle under her chin, striking up a spirited jig, she walked in.

  It took a few minutes for the music to percolate around the saloon. Beth was nervous, her fingers sticky with sweat from the heat, and she was intimidated by quite so many rough-looking men in one small space, but she let her mind conjure up Sam, imagined him standing before her as he’d so often done in the past when she played. And she played only for him.

  She could see his smile, the way his wide mouth turned up at the corners and a dimple appeared in his right cheek. She could see his blue eyes sparkle and the way he pushed his blond hair impatiently out of his eyes.

  Mentally, she left the sweaty saloon and went back to the immigrant ship, watching him charm the girls and laughing with him on deck. She saw him lounging on the bed in their room in New York, or pouring drinks in Heaney’s, with a host of Bowery whores batting their eyelashes at him.

  It was some time before she realized that the noise in the saloon had stopped, and she opened her eyes to see a hundred or more men looking at her. Most were probably about Sam’s age, but they had that weatherbeaten look that made them look far older. Some were in fancy suits, boiled shirts, ties and homburgs, others in grubby shirtsleeves, with braces holding up trousers that had seen better days and broad-brimmed hats that could tell a few stories. There were pale-faced Europeans, brown faces from South America, black faces and Indians too. Some had untrimmed beards and moustaches, others were clean-shaven. In amongst them were a few women as well: a prettily plump one with a straw hat trimmed with feathers, another with roses on hers; women in silk and lace, others in plain cotton from the trail. But regardless of who they were, whether they’d already found gold or were helping someone who had, to spend it, they were all listening to her play.

  ‘Bravo!’ a big man in a checked jacket called out as she finished the first number. ‘Don’t stop now, give us more!’

  It was after one when Beth picked her way through the mud to get back to the tent. She was exhausted but satisfied that she’d made her mark on Dawson, for Jack Smith had claimed she was the finest fiddle player he’d ever heard.

  She had no idea where Theo and Jack were. They’d been in the Monte Carlo for the first hour she was playing, but then left and hadn’t returned. She hadn’t minded, for while she wasn’t playing, there were plenty of people only too happy to buy her a drink and keep her company.

  The sky was as bright as day, and no one else appeared even to be thinking of sleeping, for the muddy tracks between tents and cabins were full of jostling people. Above the sounds of thousands enjoying themselves down on Front Street, laughter, chatter and clinking glasses, she could hear thumping feet on a dance floor, the wheeze of a mechanical organ, and a saxophone playing a plaintive ballad.

  She’d been told Dawson City buzzed until eight in the morning, and she supposed that was understandable in a place where they were cut off from the Outside by snow and ice from September till the end of May.

  Tied around her waist was a leather bag which someone had thrown at her, with a quantity of gold dust in it. She’d added to it the small fortune in notes and coins that had been collected for her. As she walked, it clonked against her hip bone, making her smile with satisfaction. Money and success would never compensate for her brother’s death, or make her miss him any less, but tonight those black clouds of grief had rolled back sufficiently to make her want to live again.

  ∗

  A week later, at four in the morning, Beth was being walked back to her tent along Front Street by Wilbur, one of the bartenders at the Monte Carlo.

  ‘Looks like there’s a big game on at the Golden Horse Shoe,’ he said, indicating a crowd of people outside a saloon up ahead. ‘You can bet it’s Mack Dundridge playing poker in there. Folks always want to watch him play; when he’s winning everyone gets free drinks.’

  Beth smiled up at Wilbur, for this tall, lanky young bartender from Seattle was not only her regular escort home, he always had tales to tell her about the larger than life characters of Dawson City.

  He’d told her about Mack Dundridge just the day before, for Mack was one of the celebrated Eldorado Kings. He had been drifting around Alaska and the Yukon for years searching for gold, and he was close by when George Carmack and Skookum Jim discovered it in Rabbit Creek. Mack rushed there when he heard the news and staked a claim that was soon to bring him a fortune. And Rabbit Creek became known as Eldorado.

  But like many of the old-timers who’d struck it rich, Mack was feckless with his fortune. He would come into town and sling his poke, a leather bag of gold nuggets, down on the bar and treat everyone. It was said that one evening he gave a dance-hall girl a gold nugget worth over five hundred dollars so she’d only dance with him.

  ‘Can we go in and watch?’ Beth asked. While barely an hour passed without her thinking about Sam, her popularity at the Monte Carlo and the constant excitement and gaiety in the town had lifted her spirits. She liked Wilbur and felt safe in his company, and as Theo and Jack never got back to the tent until at least seven in the morning, she saw no reason why she shouldn’t have a bit of fun too.

  ‘As it’s a big game they’ll have someone on the door stopping common folks getting in. But you ain’t common folks, so I guess I can use my powers of persuasion.’ Wilbur grinned.

  He took her arm firmly and pushed his way through the people around the door of the saloon who were trying to peer through the door and windows to see the action inside.

  ‘You’ll let the Klondike Gypsy in, won’t you?’ he said to the burly man barring the way. ‘She’s got a mind to see the high-rollers, and maybe she’ll return the favour by playing for you one night.’

  The way the big man beamed down at her made Beth realize that she’d already established a name for herself in town and it made her feel good.

  ‘You’re welcome in the Golden Horse Shoe, Miss Gypsy,’ he said. ‘But don’t you go distrac
ting the game with your pretty face, or your fiddle.’

  Despite the bright light on the street, inside the saloon it was gloomy and impossible to see anything, for men stood packed shoulder to shoulder, intently watching something at the back of the place. But Wilbur took Beth’s arm and led her over to the side of the room where the crowd was thinner.

  He left her there to go and buy them both a drink. Beth couldn’t see the players beyond the thick wall of male shoulders, but she could sense by the tension in the room that something out of the ordinary was going on.

  ‘Is Mack winning?’ she whispered to a tall man she’d found herself beside.

  ‘He was, but he’s lost the last couple of games,’ he whispered back. ‘I reckon it might be one of the nights he throws his claim in fer a stake.’

  Wilbur had told her that Mack had built his reputation as a high-roller by going right to the edge, prepared to gamble everything he had. It was said he lost half a million dollars one night, but turned up again the following evening and won it all back.

  ‘Who’s he playing with?’ she whispered.

  ‘The Swede, Dangle and a guy I ain’t seen before,’ the whisper came back.

  People gave everyone nicknames in Dawson; it appeared to be a way of showing their acceptance of them. But as Beth hadn’t met either the Swede or Dangle, she felt she must take a look at them, so she moved along to where there was a pillar holding up the roof, wriggled round it and elbowed the men there out of the way.

  She gasped when she finally saw the players, for one of them was Theo.

  Above the table was an ornate oil lamp which created a circle of golden light in the otherwise dark room. Just beyond this circle and behind Theo she could make out Jack standing against the wall watching the game, and she could see from his stance that he was very nervous.

  The three men Theo was playing with were typical Sourdoughs, bearded, with untidy hair, rough clothes and weatherbeaten faces. Clean-shaven Theo in his smart clothes and polished boots looked incongruous, even though he wasn’t much younger than the others. He’d had some good wins since they got to Dawson, but she was fairly certain he hadn’t won anything like enough to be playing for such high stakes as this.