Oddly, Lars struck up a friendship with Denby, who was still recovering from his bout with typhoid. Roxanne wondered if Lars had bestowed his friendship on Denby because he was her husband, then decided it was unworthy of her to think that. Normally, Denby had a pleasant personality, but he seldom exhibited it anymore, sitting instead dark and dejected in a corner of the bar as he watched Roxanne work. In any event, Lars had no other friends, and Denby’s friends had drifted away, finding him gloomy company.
Having given up the search for gold himself, Denby now loudly championed the cause of the Scandinavians. He harangued Roxanne about it. Afraid Denby would get into trouble with the law again, she questioned him closely about Lars.
Lars, it seemed, had arrived early in Nome. He had an Eskimo mistress he called Gin-Gin, who, Denby said, was young and pretty. Lars also had a team of precious malamutes—those magnificent sled dogs of the Eskimos whose feet and legs were different from those of ordinary dogs; their leg temperatures ran fifty degrees lower than their bodies, allowing them to sleep in the snow without freezing in the terrible arctic temperatures. Lars insisted that he'd been run off his claim because he was a foreigner, and Denby thought that was a crying shame.
Roxanne agreed with Denby, but she was afraid for him. He had never really regained his strength after his bout with typhoid. So she tried to soothe Denby, to cheer him and make him think of other things.
As the winter wore on, big Lars with his expressionless face, and Denby, gaunt now and with his eyes sunk deeply into their sockets, continued to mutter together in a corner of Big Mike’s, while Roxanne in her orange satin dress—the only one she had been able to save from the storm—served whiskey to a bar crowded with standing, shuffling men. Above the bar hung the usual picture of a reclining nude. Sometimes, when a lock of Roxanne’s blond hair came loose and fell temptingly down to a white shoulder, the men at the bar looked up at the picture and back at Roxanne’s softly glowing white bosom and sighed. She realized they were stripping her with their eyes, seeing her in that sensuous picture, lying naked and inviting. But she did not care. She had to earn a living the only way she could, and tending bar and dancing with the big shaggy miners was less back-breaking than working at Marge’s laundry had been. She remembered Marge’s happy bellow of “It’s clean work!” and smiled wistfully. Big Marge was one of her happier memories of this bleak north country; she hoped the winter was being kind to Marge.
And Leighton—she thought of him occasionally, and hoped he was faring well on the bleak northern reaches of the Koyukuk River. Kind Leighton, who had carried so many heavy washtubs for her, who had fashioned her a pair of snowshoes and gladdened her heart with his warm admiration, and who had saved their lives half a dozen times on the terrible journey over the Chilkoot Pass and down the Yukon to Dawson.
And Case, sinister and deadly and complex . . . she had never met a man who made love so well. She remembered the lean length of him lying beside her and shivered. Why couldn’t she have loved him?
But no, she had had to love Rhodes. . . . She could keep her face steady now, but the knife still twisted painfully in her heart whenever she thought of him. Rhodes, the only man she had ever truly loved. If only he had said, I came to see you, Roxanne. I came to Dawson because I love you. But Rhodes had his share of stiff-necked pride, too, and so he had not said the words that were in his heart. Nor had she.
While Roxanne dredged up old memories, on the other side of the bar, the New York reporter who was busy trying to glean human-interest stories from Nome’s frozen heart for his paper saw the sad look in her eyes and wondered what the Dawson blond was thinking about. He doubted any of these dance hall trollops had a heart—certainly not this one. He’d made careful note of what Ratface had told him about her killing a woman in the States. When he got enough material, he’d write a story about her, and it would be a humdinger!
Roxanne, with worries enough of her own, was unaware of his interest.
In midwinter Josie Mawkins, muffled to the eyes in furs, came over to Big Mike’s to see her. Josie, like so many other Dawson madams, had transferred her establishment to Nome, setting up Nome’s snootiest sporting house. Roxanne looked up from polishing glasses at the bar to see her stamping snow off her boots on the sawdust floor.
Josie threw open her fur coat to reveal a pink boa over an ample bosom, brushed snow off wisps of brightly hennaed hair, and came right to the point. “Rox,” she said, “you could make more money in my place in twenty minutes than you can here in two hours.” She looked around her disparagingly. “You know dancin’ only whets their appetites for the real thing. These fellows come over here and get all stirred up dancing with you for maybe ten dollars—and then they rush over to my place and spend two hundred. I could use you. Two of my girls got in a fight and knifed each other something awful. You want to consider coming over?”
Roxanne grinned at earnest Josie, resplendent in her furs and pink boa. “I’ve still got that jealous husband, Josie.”
Josie shrugged. “Just stopped by to tell you if you ever change your mind, the offer’s still open. You’d like it over at my place,” she declared. “High-class clientele, real overstaffed chairs, lace doilies, servants to fetch and carry, red hot stoves—not freezin’ like this place.” She shivered. “I don’t see how you can wear a dress cut so low with that draft comin’ through the door! ’Course my girls wear even less. Mostly they romp around in their underwear—or nothin’ at all—so’s they need it a little warmer. But then my girls are hothouse flowers—and you are too, if you’d only realize it.”
Roxanne gave Josie a warm look. For all their obvious differences, there was something about Josie that reminded her of Marge. Something forthright and honest.
“It’s a nice offer, Josie,” she said. “I’m sorry I have to say no. It would be nice to be actually warm without dancing!”
They both laughed, and Josie refused a drink, saying she had better liquor back at the house. The New York reporter, craning his neck to see them through the crowd at the bar, scowled. Here was another thing to chalk up against the Dawson blond: she kept bad company. He rather hoped to see them leave together, but he was disappointed, for at that moment, Josie and her pink boa and her hennaed hair and her furs floated out into the snowy street. And Roxanne went back to earning her living as a barmaid.
As that winter of howling winds and blizzards and disasters wore on, Roxanne grew more and more worried about Denby. He and Lars seemed to have retreated into a kind of private world as they skulked about together. Nome itself was an eerie place that winter. Bored with huddling like captives indoors, eating monotonous food, doing nothing, the miners traded stories at the bar, and Roxanne listened. Frightening stories of things that had wafted out of the fog, stories of a subhuman monster that lay in wait on the glaciers, grinding its teeth, or came roaring out of the subarctic darkness to crush a man. Men listened and nodded their heads soberly. Many believed in the hairy monster of the glaciers.
As bitter winter slipped into frozen spring, Denby took up a new tune. Now he muttered about a great discovery Lars had made, a claim Lars was afraid to stake lest—as a foreigner—it be taken away from him. Lars called it the Gold of the North. Denby’s eyes glittered as he told Roxanne about it. Somewhere beyond the low hills behind Nome it lay; Lars hadn’t told him exactly where. That Lars was willing to share this vast mother lode with Denby made him proud. Roxanne listened with a sense of frustration. She was thoroughly tired of being waltzed about by strangers, having her feet tramped on, listening to tinny music and tired jokes, serving cheap whiskey for high prices. She was tired of Alaska. All she could think of now was summer, when the ice would break in the Bering Sea and the steamers would thread their way north—steamers that would take her home.
Preoccupied with thoughts of leaving, she didn’t pay much attention to Denby, but she was glad his health had improved, even though his eyes were more sunken than ever and had a fanatical gleam in them that bothered h
er. Sometimes she heard him talking to himself as she went to sleep beside him on the hard bed. Roxanne covered her ears; her work was hard and demanding. She needed her sleep.
It all happened so quickly, she was never sure later in which sequence the events occurred. Vaguely, she remembered dressing for work while Denby babbled about Lars’s need to stake his claim—their claim—to the Gold of the North before others found their way there. Roxanne, smoothing down the orange satin dress around her hips, ignored him. She looked up when he muttered that he’d have to go too—suppose Lars forgot to stake a claim for him? She sighed and began combing her hair. Later, she remembered how Denby had watched her, a curiously sly gleam in his eyes.
To her surprise, Denby, as if to make amends for past treatment, brought out two brimming glasses and insisted Roxanne have a drink with him—something he had never done before, for he disapproved of women drinking. As Roxanne sipped her drink, Denby raised his glass and said with a flourish, “Here’s to the States. Drink up!” That was one toast Roxanne could drink to heartily; she swallowed the rest of the hot liquid at a gulp, smiled at Denby and went back to fixing her hair.
Shortly after that she passed out.
She awoke feeling smothered, with fur tickling her nose. She was being jolted too, and there was a loud yelping somewhere ahead of her. When she struggled to sit up, she found to her horror that her hands were tied. Something—she thought at first it was a fur rug—had been thrown over her face. Her body felt strange too; there was fur against her skin. She moved her legs in disbelief; her feet too were encased in fur, and beneath the soles of her feet she could feel something stiff and rasping.
She cried out. Abruptly the jolting ceased.
“She’s awake,” said a voice, Denby’s voice.
The fur covering—it was called a parka—was thrown back from her face, and she was almost blinded by the white glare of an icy world. When her vision could focus, she saw that she was wrapped in furs and riding on a dogsled. Nearby she saw another sled, and behind it, his hands on the handlebars, stood Lars.
Denby’s face loomed up beside her. “I had to tie you, Roxanne.” His voice was apologetic. “I didn’t want you to jump off and try to get back to Nome. You’d get lost and you might die.”
“Denby,” she wailed, “where are we?”
“Remember I told you we had to stake our claim?” he told her importantly. “Lars is leading us to the Gold of the North.”
Bewildered, Roxanne looked around her. As far as the eye could see stretched a white wilderness: snow, ice, undulating hills. “Why did you bring me along?” she gasped. And then, in horror, “Denby, you drugged me! You put something in my drink!”
“I had to, Roxanne,” he mumbled. “I couldn’t leave you there in that place. Besides, I needed your money to buy these dogs and this outfit.” His voice grew defensive. “And you wouldn’t have given me the money. You know you wouldn’t.”
Grimly, she stared at Denby. Indeed she wouldn’t have, not for this mad venture!
“Your clothes,” he said cheerfully, “they belong to Lars’s Eskimo girl friend, Gin-Gin. They’ll keep you warm.”
Gradually it all sank in.
“Denby,” whispered Roxanne, “untie my hands. Isn’t it enough you took the money for this wild-goose chase? Take me back to Nome. We could all die out here!”
“No,” said Denby, sticking out his lower lip childishly.
“Denby.” She was very near to tears. “What have I ever done to you that you would do this to me? How could you drag me out into these wastes of ice?”
“We’re going to be rich, Roxanne.” Denby turned his face away from her and said it as if it were a litany, repeated many times and memorized. “You aren’t going to have to work anymore. We’ll be as rich as those millionaires in Bonanza.”
“Come along,” called Lars impatiently. “Suppose they come looking for her from Nome?”
“He’s right,” said Denby. “They mustn’t follow us. They might kill us for the gold.”
“Gold!” wailed Roxanne. “Denby, there is no gold—there’s only snow and ice. Oh, Denby, untie me!”
For answer, he tossed the fur over her head again. She heard his muffled voice, “So your face won’t freeze in the wind, Roxanne.”
Immobilized in darkness, she lay back, tears swimming in her eyes. Dear God, how could Denby do this to her?
That first night on the trail Denby untied her so she could eat and drink. She sat on the sled, sheltered by an overhanging boulder of ice and looked around glumly.
Lars and Denby were dressed like Eskimos in fur parkas and tunics and mukluks. Roxanne studied the clothes that Lars had borrowed from Gin-Gin for her. Sewn with thread made of sinew, her undergarments consisted of a tunic and parka with the fur turned inward, fur pants made of caribou tucked into socklike boots with the fur side inward. The boots fitted loosely and were packed with dry grass, which had to be changed frequently, Denby told her, to keep her feet from freezing. Over those fitted first another low boot, like a slipper, and then a pair of big fur boots. As an overgarment she wore a tunic, fur-side out. The tunic was loose-sleeved so she could pull her arms inside and get warm.
“That fur around both hoods is made of—well, one’s wolf and one’s wolverine,” Denby told her importantly. “Lars told me that’s because those furs won’t collect ice from your breathing.”
Roxanne looked down at her hands, stuck into fur mittens that extended to the sleeves. “I look as if I’ve gained a hundred pounds,” she muttered, indicating her warm but ungainly costume, and Denby laughed as if she had said something hilarious.
She gave him a resentful look. “You aren’t up to this trip, Denby,” she said coldly. “We may be dressed as Eskimos, but we are not Eskimos. If there’s a bad blizzard, we won’t survive out here.”
His lips thrust outward and his eyes glittered. She knew that look—it was his “gold look.”
“We’ve come a long way, Roxanne. We aren’t going back to the States empty-handed.”
Roxanne sighed. They wouldn’t have gone back empty-handed. She had made enough, saved up in their mattress, to get them started. But Denby, with his misguided pride, wanted to be the one to make the money. She fell silent, sitting there by the tiny campfire and trying to eat the food Lars handed her silently. Still lashed to the sleds, the malamutes growled and barked and scrapped over their meal of frozen fish. Overhead, a brilliant green aurora borealis cascaded down like a giant waterfall against the inky sky. Over the campfire’s thin yellow flame, Lars’s pale, expressionless blue eyes watched her. Roxanne thought she read a kind of triumph in his look, and she shrank back. When they had finished eating and rested awhile, Denby said apologetically, “I’ve got to tie you up again, Roxanne. I know you’d take one of the teams and start out alone. Don’t try to say you wouldn’t—I know you.”
Neither pleas nor common sense restrained Denby, and he tied her up again. She spent the night thinking bitterly about how Denby had thrown away their chance of going back to the States with enough money to make a good start, and wondering about big silent Lars, and why he had taken part in this—this kidnapping!
The next morning Denby untied her hands, saying they were now too far from Nome for her to have any chance of making it back alone. Lars called out to Roxanne that she should learn to handle the dogs, and should practice riding on the sled runners and running behind the sled as the men did. Roxanne gave him a black look, but flexed her fingers and moved on stiff legs up to make friends with Denby’s lead dog. He was a big malamute sled dog of a type found along the Bering Sea. Stocky and short, he weighed a good seventy-five pounds. His shoulders were powerful, his arched tail was a bushy plume, and there was resolution in the way he stood, in the way he forged ahead, leading the other dogs. The other dogs were grays, but this handsome dog was snowy white. He was named Snowman and he had cost a packet, Denby told her cheerfully. Snowman was reputed to be smarter than a man at finding his way. Roxanne f
ound the dog friendly and surprisingly tame. He snuffled her hand with his pointed nose and waved his bushy tail when she patted his head. She was warned not to feed the dogs, since it would make them fight and perhaps injure one another; one had to be careful about feeding them. On the trail they were given just a little bit of frozen fish at a time, because if they were allowed to eat all they wanted, they’d simply lie down and sleep. As she petted the big handsome dog, Roxanne wondered if she could seize the sled when Denby wasn’t looking and make her escape. But the bleak white countryside with its absence of recognizable landmarks daunted her. How would she find her way to Nome? Would she not just wander deeper into this glacial wilderness?
Lars seemed to have read her thoughts, for he suddenly pulled out a long rifle and inspected it. She shuddered, wondering if he would really bring her down with that if she tried to leave. She turned to study Denby’s pack. Sure enough, Denby had a Winchester. Her eyes traced their fresh sled tracks in the soft snow. Could she follow those tracks to Nome? Perhaps ... if the wind did not come up and blow them away, or if new snow did not fall and cover them up.
They kept traveling and the weather held. Roxanne believed they were headed north and that frightened her too. North lay the Arctic Circle. Around them the white countryside was rougher now. Chunks of ice like crags jutted up out of the snow and caused them to make sudden detours. For two days they followed a frightening crevasse and, at one heartstopping point, Denby’s sled veered and nearly slid into it. The crevasse had sheer sides and was incredibly deep. Around them the ice made noises, like a great creature stirring, and Roxanne thought of the monster of the glaciers that the miners had muttered about in Nome.
Once when Lars’s sled was too far away for him to hear, she confided to Denby, “I don’t think that man knows where he’s going. He keeps looking around him for landmarks and doesn’t seem to find them. I think he’s lost.”
These Golden Pleasures Page 35
