by Henry, Sue
“Sounds just peachy. I can hardly wait.”
“I’m not fooling, Jessie. Be ready for it.”
“I know. I will be. But right now I’m more concerned with getting these guys and myself fed. Then I’ll crash until about six. There’s still the rest of the run to Forty Mile and up that river before I have to start climbing.”
Jessie did not sleep well; she woke up several times at small sounds in the dark that made her take long looks around their camp, finding nothing untoward. She was glad to be resting with someone else, but wondered if she should have found a solitary spot. What if the kidnappers had intended to approach her when she stopped, not, as she had been expecting, while she was traveling? Well, she decided, too late now. If that’s their plan, they’ll just have to wait. They can’t expect me to begin to think the way they do. Though maybe I already have, she thought, and hated the idea that her racing strategy was being influenced.
When Jessie woke to the sound of her alarm, Gail Murray, the sleeping musher, had already departed with her team and Ryan was harnessing his dogs.
“Coffee’s over there by the fire,” he told her, as she rose from the sleeping bag she had placed atop her sled, stretched, and stomped around to help get her circulation going. “There’s hot water in my cooker, if you want some before I mix it with kibble to take along for the dogs.”
Jessie used some of it to wash her face, then poured coffee over powdered hot chocolate in her insulated mug, to which she added two heaping, calorie-loaded spoonfuls of sugar. As Ryan packed the rest of his gear, she moved a skillet from her sled bag onto the fire, tossed in a dozen frozen sausages and a handful of snow. They would steam themselves thawed and hot, then brown when the water evaporated. While she drank the hot chocolate and waited for her breakfast and the water for dog food to heat, she watched Ryan finish his preparations.
“Those sure smell good. Sure you don’t want me to wait a bit?” he questioned, turning to her when he was ready to go.
She laughed. “Yes, if you mean you want more breakfast. There’s enough, with some powdered eggs. Otherwise, no. I’ll be okay by myself, Jim. You go on and make good time. Maybe I’ll see you at Forty Mile for another break.”
“If not, I’ll be watching in Eagle to be sure you come in.”
She gave him part of an hour before putting her own team back on the Yukon River ice, taking even more seriously the instruction that she must run alone. After this, she would make sure she camped alone, too, unless the unofficial checkpoints came at a time when the team needed to rest.
Damned if I let these guys destroy my whole race for me, she thought, heading down the steep bank to the ice again.
The cabins at the tiny site of Forty Mile are the farthest west buildings in Canada, built even before the Klondike gold rush at a place where the Forty Mile River meets the Yukon that was believed to be forty miles from a trading post, Fort Reliance, near where Dawson City would later be established. In reality, it was closer to fifty miles between the two.
Jessie was perhaps five miles from the Forty Mile River when she was passed by a racer she had not encountered before in the front-runners. Slowly, he pulled up behind her with a team of eleven dogs, called for the trail, and went by as she pulled her dogs to one side of the track.
“Thanks,” he called out, bringing a mitten to the band of a bright orange stocking cap in a jaunty salute as he passed.
She encouraged the team back into its normal seven-to eight-mile-an-hour trot, then slowed them slightly, ignoring Tank’s tendency to race after anyone who got in front of him, talking him into a trot of about seven miles an hour. The ice was quite smooth and slick, easy running, so they cruised along, watching the distance slowly grow between them and the orange-capped musher, who seemed in a hurry to reach the next stop. He was still in sight, however, when he reached the place where the Forty Mile River ran into the Yukon.
The churning water at the meeting of the two rivers had resulted in rougher ice, with thick and thin spots that must be carefully negotiated, a dangerous situation for those traveling the frozen highway with heavy sleds. Jessie was just close enough to be able to see a large hole in the ice by the left-hand bank, where someone had broken through sometime earlier, when she heard a shout, accompanied by an ominous cracking, and the other driver was suddenly waist deep in icy water, his sled rapidly sinking, the wheel dogs and two more on the line were being yanked in with it.
Calling her team to a lope, Jessie quickly drove a wide circle to the right to be sure she was on solid ice, stopped the dogs, threw down the hook, which refused to dig into the hard surface, and ran across to grab at the team leaders of the sinking sled, trusting Tank to keep the dogs where she had left them.
The driver was now completely wet and struggling with the sled, which was partially afloat with air trapped in its bag. Still on firm ice, the dogs at the front of the stricken team were scrabbling, toenails scraping frantically to find a purchase on the slick surface, but being inexorably drawn back toward the hole by the weight of the team and sled. Jessie threw herself down and added her body weight to the front of the line, which helped stop their slow, steady backward slide toward the freezing water.
Someone on the bank was shouting in the dark and she had the impression of a light, but couldn’t turn to see if help was coming without loosening her tenuous hold on the line. In the water the racer, headlamp still burning and in jerking motion, was gasping with the shock of the sudden cold, but kicking hard, trying to shove the sled onto the shelf of solid ice, which continued to break off in chunks. Finally, after long moments that resulted in burning pain to her arms and shoulders as Jessie pulled with all her strength yet felt that she was getting nowhere, the tension on the line eased a little and two of the drenched dogs managed to clamber out onto unbroken ice. Immediately she helped the rest of the team take up any slack and prayed the ice wouldn’t break again. It held long enough for the wheel dogs to climb out as well, but she was distrustful, almost certain it would crack under the weight of the fully loaded sled, its weight increased with water and becoming more saturated by the second.
“Hup, boys. Pull, Silver,” the half-drowned and frozen musher was calling through clenched teeth to his leader, the dog pulling beside Jessie’s right shoulder.
With almost superhuman strength, the man managed a strong kick and gave the sled a giant shove that, along with the efforts of the whole team of dogs and Jessie, tipped it up and far enough onto the solid ice to keep it from sliding back. Remarkably, the ice held. Scrambling to her feet, still holding tightly to the line, Jessie carefully moved the dogs forward, giving thanks that most mushers have strong upper bodies from sled wrestling and weight training.
“Come, Silver…keep them coming,” she encouraged the dog, talking her forward.
As the obedient leader threw her shoulders against the harness with all her weight and will, slowly the soaked figure of the musher was dragged out of the hole behind the sled, clinging desperately to a rear stanchion, dripping water that immediately began to freeze his clothing to the ice on which he collapsed, gasping. As he let go, rolled, and struggled to regain his footing, Jessie kept his team in motion until she had moved it away from any thin ice, closer to her own and in no danger. Leaving it, she went quickly back to do what she could for the musher, knowing the man was now in more danger than the dogs, though they would need help, too, or they could freeze, their undercoats clearly sodden.
Three men from the tiny settlement, watching for approaching mushers on the river, had seen the accident, climbed down the bank, and were hurrying across the ice, flashlight beams joggling as they ran. They carried a rope, which was now unnecessary, and a blanket, which was.
“Th-th-a-anks,” the dripping racer, so cold he could hardly speak, managed to sputter at Jessie, as he was cocooned in the blanket and forcefully propelled toward the bank by one of his three would-be rescuers. “My t-t-team.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he was told. �
��We’ll take care of them. He’s a vet.” A hand was waved in the direction of the other two, one of whom was already getting set to drive the team toward some buildings Jessie could just make out on the edge of the dark river. “Let’s get you inside, where it’s warm, and out of those wet clothes.”
“You okay?” one of them asked Jessie.
“Yes, fine.”
“That was a good job you did. We’ll see you up there, then.”
And they were off, hastening to find life-giving warmth for the man and his dogs.
He was lucky to have gone through the ice in a place with assistance and a fire handy. Soaked and shivering mushers who had fallen through the ice far from any shelter were forced to build their own quick fires and hope for dry clothes to change into, stripping off their wet ones as fast as possible, sometimes hopping from one bare foot to the other in the snow. Most carried a complete set of extra clothing and outerwear carefully sealed in plastic for just such an emergency. Boots, even with felt liners, could be emptied of water and put back on, for their cold-repelling insulation usually kept feet warm even when they were damp. The dogs had to be rubbed as dry as possible, then kept near the fire like their driver.
Glad the accident had not resulted in serious problems, Jessie went back to her own team, which had remained standing where she’d left them.
“Good dogs. Oh, you are the very best dogs in the whole world,” she told them, giving each one a pat or two.
When she looked back at the frightening hole in the ice, her headlamp caught the bright orange of the musher’s hat, floating gently in water that had already developed a thin skin of ice. Leaving it to its fate, she drove on into the historic site of Forty Mile.
“I couldn’t have got out without you,” the musher, warm and dry, though still suffering a periodic shiver, told her later. “Thanks.”
“You’d have done the same if I’d gone through,” Jessie told him honestly. “Hey, do you have a name?”
He grinned. “You want to know who you’re responsible for, now that you saved my life?”
“Nope, just want to be able to tell about it,” she teased. “Can’t tell credible tales without names. Besides, you saved your own skin. I was just an anchor.”
“I’m John,” he told her, holding out a hand. “John Noble.”
His grip conveyed the temperature of the mug of hot soup he had been using as a hand-warmer between swallows.
“Oh, you’re the guy your handlers were bragging about in Dawson, on their way to Gertie’s. You’re a very good musher, from what I was told.”
“Terry, right? And Hank? Had to be the night they went out to party.”
“Might have been just a bit sloshed, as I remember it.” She grinned.
“And who are you?”
“Jessie Arnold.”
“Yeah? Hey, wait a minute. I’ve got something for you.”
He turned to the gear that was spread out to dry around the small trapper’s cabin that a hundred years earlier had been a gold rush store, and dug into the wet pocket of the parka he had been wearing when he took his unexpected bath.
“Here,” he said, handing her a soggy, folded envelope. “Sorry about the baptism, but it’s probably still readable.”
Stomach tightening as she recognized the squarely penciled letters that formed her name on the outside, Jessie sincerely hoped so.
16
“It’s a cold night, boys,—a bitter cold night…. You’ve all traveled trail, and know what that stands for.”
—Jack London, “To the Man on the Trail”
AS SOON AS JESSIE WAS WELL AWAY FROM DAWSON CITY ON her way down the river to Forty Mile, Delafosse went directly to work on the case. Before her support crew could leave town on their long drive back to Alaska and Fairbanks, he found Ben Caswell and Don Graham in the dog yard across the river and enlisted their help.
Cas was angry and incredulous that he had not known what was going on almost in front of him.
“You knew and didn’t tell me? Why not?” he demanded of Graham.
“Jessie made me promise not to tell anyone,” the big man rumbled, embarrassed at Cas’s pointed irritation. “Would you have told me?”
“Yeah, well…probably not, I guess. But still…”
“We’ve got too much to do to argue about it now,” Delafosse told them both. “Done is done. Jessie did the best she could, considering. At least she came to me—though, from what I understand, Leland is very unhappy about it. Can’t blame him. He’s understandably concerned for his stepdaughter.”
“Okay. What are we going to do?” Cas asked, shifting into professional trooper gear and needing to get his thoughts together.
“First we need to talk to Jake Leland, and Ned Bishop, the race manager, and be sure we coordinate anything we decide to do. We need to review everything that anyone knows about the situation, including that murder back down the trail. I sent two of our men out this morning to take another look in a couple of places, and they’ll be back soon. Then maybe we can come up with something that will help catch these guys without endangering either Debbie Todd or Jessie in the process. It could be extremely touchy, especially spread out all over the map, as this race is.”
“Aren’t you afraid there’ll still be someone watching Leland?”
“He is. But I think that they were checking, knew exactly when the ransom went out with Jessie, and now will concentrate on following her progress until they get it. There’s a slim chance that they’ll leave someone here to spy on Jake, but the odds are in our favor that they won’t, and taking them is better than doing nothing. Right?”
Cas nodded his agreement.
“Okay, let’s go find Leland.”
“Wait a minute.” Cas frowned. “We should tell Alex what’s happening up here that concerns Jessie. He’d want to know—I would, if it were Linda.”
“He already does,” Delafosse assured him. “I told him all about it last night on the phone and we discussed what should be done.”
“Does Jessie know that?”
“No, but she knows that he called me and I told him what was going on. She’s really focused on getting that money delivered, as she should be, and probably hasn’t thought about anything else much.”
Again, Cas nodded, satisfied. “Leland?”
“I think we’d better have someone bring him to us, rather than hunting him up. Just to be safe, in case there is someone tracking him.”
Claire Delafosse was called into service as a messenger and shortly brought Jake Leland and Ned Bishop—making certain they were not followed—to the cabin on Dawson’s south side where Cas, Don Graham, and her husband were waiting.
Leland glared at Delafosse, as they met in the living room of the cabin. “I don’t like this. It’s one hell of a risk to my stepdaughter’s life, and Jessie Arnold promised to keep this to herself. Now half the race is involved, and who knows who else? The RCMP—obviously.”
“Jessie was very careful about filling me in,” Delafosse told the stressed and indignant stepfather. “No one knew she had talked with me. We made sure of that. Now that she’s gone with the ransom, all we want to do is help. Your daughter’s safety comes first, without question—and Jessie’s, of course. But we can’t just sit on our hands and do nothing to catch these people.”
He paused, then, partly to shock Leland from his stubborn dismissal of assistance, said, “Do you really think that they are likely to just let Debbie go as easily as that? A hundred things could go wrong and we don’t even know where she is or how they’ve treated her. If she could recognize any of them…”
What he didn’t say hung in the minds of everyone in the room. Jake Leland abruptly sat down in a chair by the fireplace and stared at him without speaking for a long minute before dropping his face into his hands with a groan.
“Jesus. Her mother will never understand or forgive me if…Jill’s practically hysterical now. I sure don’t want to be the one to tell her that.”
&n
bsp; “Do you have to tell her? Where is she?”
Leland raised his head. “At the hotel. The doc gave her a shot—she’s out, for the moment. Best thing to do.”
“Jake, listen to me carefully.”
Delafosse sat on the hearth beside him and laid a hand on his arm.
“You’ve been trying for days to hold this together by yourself—get the money, keep everything quiet—just the strain of waiting for these bastards to contact you has been enough to fell a weaker man. For God’s sake, let us shoulder some of the weight. We’ve got some pretty experienced and smart people in this room—on your side. Let’s use them. Right?”
Leland thought about it, then nodded reluctantly. “Okay. I’ll have to admit I’ve just about come to the end of my gang line. Let’s hear what you’ve got in mind. But I want your promise that nothing gets done that I don’t know about.”
“You’ve got it. We can’t be working against each other, or something surely will go wrong.”
An hour later some workable decisions had been made and they had arrived at a basic outline for a plan of action. Bishop had a race to continue managing and would be leaving shortly for Eagle, to watch the front-runners of the race pass through. Leland would continue to wait in Dawson, doing what he had been doing, hoping for word from the kidnappers and keeping in close telephone touch with Inspector Delafosse. Cas would stay in Dawson to assist Delafosse with the investigation and contact the state troopers for help on the Alaskan side of the border. Don Graham would start the long trip to Fairbanks with Billy Steward and Linda Caswell, for, after dropping the ransom money, Jessie would finish the run to Eagle, then continue the race down the Yukon to Circle, where she would expect and need to be met by her support crew.
Claire had just refilled everyone’s coffee mugs and put out a plate of sandwiches, and Delafosse was having another look at the notes that had been left for Jake Leland and Jessie, when there was a knock at the door. Outside were the two constables who had gone to investigate the murder scene and the lake where Leland thought Debbie might have run into the snowmachine along the trail when she disappeared. They came through the door carrying a black plastic trash bag of what they had collected, both clearly enthused about the success of their discoveries.
