by Janet Dailey
“Didn’t I tell you?” Curly said. “She’s already got herself a man friend.”
The third man held out his cup. As she reached across the table with the coffeepot, the bearded man hooked an arm around her waist and hauled her against him, nearly causing her to miss the man’s cup and pour the coffee onto the table.
“He cain’t be much of a man if ya gotta work in this place,” he declared.
Somehow Marisha managed to keep her balance. “You’d better be careful. This coffee is hot.” She reached back to pry his hand from her waist, but he tightened his hold.
“If’n you was to move in with us, you could quit this dump.” He smiled suggestively. “Do you know you’re even purtier up close?”
“I’m glad you think so. Now will you let me go?” She continued to tug at his hand, firm yet patient, having learned from experience that it was the best way of dealing with this kind of harmless advance. Anger invariably provoked a man into persisting.
“Miss?” the preacher called to her. “I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to order some breakfast.”
“I’ll be right there,” she promised, then glanced pointedly at the man holding her. “Do you mind? I have a customer waiting.”
“Ya see, now if you was livin’ with us, you wouldn’t be jumpin’ to every man’s biddin’. Why, lookin’ after the needs of three of us wouldn’t be near as hard as workin’ in this place—an’ a hell of a lot more fun. We’d see to that, wouldn’t we, boys?”
“Yeah, we’d keep ya entertained.” The third man snickered.
“I’ll bet you would,” Marisha retorted, guessing exactly what kind of entertainment they had in mind. “But I’d rather keep my job. Now, will you remove your hand or do I have to scald you with this hot coffee?”
“Now that ain’t very friendly,” he scolded.
Across the room, a chair came down on all four legs with a resounding slam. Deacon Cole rose to his feet in a smooth, fluid motion and walked slowly toward them. He halted short of the table.
“Mister, I’ll ask you just once to let her go,” he stated.
“I don’t recall anybody invitin’ you over here.” The bearded man tightened his grip on Marisha. “Why don’t you just go back t’ your chair in the corner an’ mind your own business.”
“This is my business,” the preacher replied. “I’m hungry. I want something to eat. And I won’t get it until this lady takes my order. You’ve got your coffee. Now why don’t you drink it and let her get back to work.”
“It so happens that I’m gettin’ kinda attached to her.” He gave Marisha a little squeeze as if reasserting his claim on her.
Marisha felt this had dragged on long enough. “Curly, tell your friend to let me go. I have work to do.”
“I suggest you do as the lady says.” The preacher smiled pleasantly. At least, it seemed pleasant until Marisha noticed the small derringer that had appeared almost magically in his hand. “I tend to become irritable when I’m hungry.”
“There’s no need of gettin’ testy about it,” the man grumbled uncomfortably and immediately turned her loose.
Marisha quickly moved away from his chair while staring at the snub-nosed gun, shocked to see such a thing in a minister’s hand. As he turned from the table, she saw him tuck the deadly little weapon up inside his sleeve. She couldn’t help thinking that it was a strange place to keep a gun as she followed him to his corner chair.
Seated again, he smiled faintly. “After that, I expect I’d better order something. I wouldn’t want to be called a liar. I’ll take a stack of hotcakes.” Marisha frowned at his inference that it had all been a pretext. Noting her expression, he cocked his head to the side. “Did I make a mistake just now?” He spoke in a low voice that didn’t carry beyond her hearing. “I had the impression that you didn’t welcome his attentions.”
“I didn’t, but he didn’t mean any harm. Most of the fellas here will only go as far as a girl will let them.”
He studied her with quiet speculation. “Could be you aren’t as innocent as I thought.”
“There are a lot of things I don’t know, but I’m learning fast. Men like to talk. That’s one of the first things I found out. But they don’t mean half of what they say. It was kind of you to step in, but it wasn’t really necessary.”
She wanted to make it clear that she was happy here and didn’t care to have any Good Samaritan intervening, however well-intentioned. She liked the men who came in and talked and joked with her. She had never been offended by anything they said or did, nor had she considered their behavior to be out of line.
She walked away from the table still wondering about this preacher who had such peculiar ideas about right and wrong. Obviously he believed that he had rescued her from an unfortunate situation on two occasions—yet he carried a hidden gun and frequented saloons.
“I need a stack, Mabe,” Marisha told the cook and owner, then lingered in the overheated kitchen. “Do you know a preacher named Deacon Cole?”
“Preacher?” He snorted and turned away from the range, mopping his face with an already damp rag. “I’d venture to say the only gospel Deacon Cole knows is the one according to Soapy Smith.”
Marisha frowned. Soapy Smith was a name she had heard bandied about by the local townspeople in conjunction with the band of swindlers and con artists who preyed on those passing through with money in their pockets on their way to the Klondike.
“You mean Cole isn’t a preacher,” Marisha concluded.
“Hardly. He’s a cardsharp—a professional gambler. Anybody who’s fool enough to sit in a game of poker or faro with him deserves to lose their money. Folks call him Deacon ’cause of the way he dresses, but gambling is his only religion.”
“What’s his real name then?”
“Who knows?” He shrugged. “Nobody uses their right name up here—or damned few, if any.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause here it don’t matter much who or what they were ‘Below,’ ” he said, using a local term for the United States. “Here a man can put distance between himself and the past and make a fresh start.”
The comment started Marisha thinking. She had begun a new life but kept the same old name. Marisha Blackwood was the girl who had worn headscarfs and dowdy clothes, who hadn’t been allowed to talk to men or look them in the eye, who had seldom smiled or laughed. What she really needed in this new life was a new name. She had changed, and it was time she changed her name, too. But, to what?
That night she sat cross-legged on the bed and unwrapped the meat scraps that she’d filched from the restaurant and hidden in the large pockets of her old brown skirt along with half a loaf of bread. She spread the paper on the mattress so Justin could help himself. The bed creaked noisily as she shifted to watch him tear the bread in half again.
“I’m going to change my name.” She was barely able to contain the excitement she felt over her recent decision. “I haven’t come up with a new one yet. But it’s not going to be anything that sounds Russian. I want a name that’s unique. Don’t you think?” She picked up a bread crumb that had fallen on the paper and chewed thoughtfully on it, too absorbed by the task of choosing a name to notice his silence. “Do you have any ideas, Justin?” When no answer was forthcoming, she frowned at him. “Justin, did you hear me?”
He sat staring at the bread in his hands, not touching it or the meat scraps. Her second question finally roused him from his brooding silence. “What’d you say?” he grunted, but it was a poor attempt at feigning interest.
“You haven’t been listening, have you?” The last two days he’d been extremely moody and depressed over his failure to find a good-paying job. She was getting tired of his silence and inattention that only ended when the lights were out and they were in bed. He dropped the bread onto the paper with the meat and pushed off the bed, then wandered to the window by the washstand. “After all I went through to get this, aren’t you going to eat it?”
“I
’m not hungry.” He faced the night-darkened window-panes, his hands thrust deeply into his trouser pockets.
Marisha sighed. “What’s wrong now?”
“Have you noticed the leaves are starting to turn on the trees in the mountains?”
“No. It’s dark when I go to work and dark when I get off.” Truthfully she couldn’t care less whether the leaves were changing colors or not.
Justin turned to look at her. “Don’t you know what that means?”
“Why don’t you tell me?” She folded her arms in front of her in a gesture that was both tolerant and challenging.
“I’m running out of time. If we don’t leave for the Klondike soon, it’s going to be too late in the season to make the trip. I could be stuck here in Skaguay for the winter.” He faced the window again and stared at the dark panes. “A whole damned winter wasted.” He slammed the flat of his hand against the window frame. “I’ve gotta get the money I need! Somehow I’ve gotta figure out a way to get there.”
“How much more money do we still need?”
“I could get by with ten more dollars, but at the rate we’re going it might as well be a hundred.”
“Maybe I could get another job.”
“Doing what? And when? You work from dawn to dusk as it is,” he reminded her.
“I could work a few hours at night, cleaning or scrubbing floors some place.”
He swung away from the window to face the bed where she sat. “Let’s face it, Marisha. There’s only one kind of night work a woman could do that would raise the kind of money we need!” He strode toward the door and grabbed his coat from the wall hook as he passed it. “I’m going out for some air.” He yanked open the door, then paused. “I won’t be long.”
Sitting alone in the dreary room, Marisha drew her knees up under her chin and tucked her long skirt over her stockinged feet. She knew what kind of night work Justin meant. She knew prostitutes made their living by charging money for their favors. If she hadn’t been too certain about what that entailed before, she knew now.
She closed her eyes and visualized what that ore sample had looked like and the shiny, sparkling flecks of gold that ran through it. The streams in the Klondike had gold nuggets the size of pebbles in their gravel beds. In her mind, she pictured the sight and tried to imagine what it would be like to scoop up a handful of gravel and pick out the shiny gold nuggets.
For two days she could think of little else. She listened to every snippet of conversation at the restaurant that mentioned the gold camps of the Klondike. It seemed everyone was on his way there, except her. She worried that maybe they’d find it all before she and Justin got there.
As she left the restaurant, she paused outside the building and heard the sharp click of the door lock behind her. She bunched the fur-lined burnous around her neck but didn’t raise its hood to cover her head. Tired and footsore after a long day’s work, she started down the boardwalk toward the rooming house.
The long street was without the normal daytime traffic of rumbling horse-drawn vehicles and braying mules and donkeys. Most of the town’s bustling activity now took place inside the saloons and gaming halls that Marisha passed. She could hear a tinny piano playing some ragtime song and a man encouraging others to “Place your bets.” There was a steady hum of voices in the background, sometimes punctuated by laughter or an exultant shout. Through some of the grimy windows she could see saloon girls dancing with customers. Always she could hear the muted clink of coins. Money—the thing she and Justin didn’t have, the thing they wanted, needed.
Her footsteps made a hollow sound as she walked along the boardwalk, her way lighted intermittently by the rectangular patches of light that came from the saloon windows. Three men in obvious high spirits came charging out of a saloon door just ahead of her. One of them noticed her. As they all turned to look at her, Marisha recognized Curly and the two companions that had been with him the other day.
“Would you looky there? It’s our Glory Girl.” The bearded man immediately doffed his hat in greeting, but he didn’t appear quite as scruffy as the first time she’d seen him. His beard was neatly trimmed and his hair parted precisely down the middle. As she drew nearer, she noticed that Curly had on a clean shirt.
“Good evening.” She nodded to them and continued on by the saloon, but they swung around to walk with her.
“Whatcha doin’ walkin’ the street yourself? Where’s that man friend of yores?” Curly demanded. “He should be here to make sure you don’t come to no harm.”
“It seems there’s no need for him to be here. I have the three of you to escort me safely to my rooming house.” She smiled.
“If you was our gal, we’d never take a risk like that,” the third man insisted.
“Why not instead of goin’ to yore roomin’ house, why don’t we walk ya to our shack?” the bearded man suggested. “I guarantee it’ll be a lot more fun.”
Marisha started to ignore the remark as she had always done, then in a moment of daring she paused and swung around to face her three would-be escorts. “Do you really want me to go to your shack?”
“Shore,” the bearded man blurted in surprise.
“And if I went, how much would you pay me?” she demanded. Their mouths gaped wordlessly as they stared at her. In their silence, she heard rejection and pivoted sharply away, feeling a hot flush of humiliation burn her cheeks. “It was all just more talk, wasn’t it? You didn’t really mean what you were saying,” she said bitterly and began walking away.
Instantly they hurried after her. “We meant it. Honest we did. It’s just that we never thought you was …” Curly faltered in midsentence.
“Yeah. We never suspected you was the kind who … well …” The third man couldn’t get the words out either. “We jest didn’t know.”
“We want ya t’ come to our place, don’t we, boys?” the bearded one insisted. “We’d pay ya.”
Marisha halted again and waited for them to flock around her. “How much?”
“Well.” The bearded man shifted uncomfortably and glanced at his companions. “The goin’ rate is usually three dollars, an’ there’s three of us, so that’d be nine.”
“I want ten dollars.” Her throat felt dry.
“It’s a deal.” Curly wiped the palm of his hand on his pants leg, then thrust it out to shake hands with her.
“Deal.” When she gripped his hand, he gave it an arm-pumping shake.
“Eee-hah!” The bearded man gave a triumphant shout, then turned to the third member of their group and gave him a slapping shove on the back that propelled him toward the door of the nearest saloon. “Hank, go fetch us a bottle. We gonna have us a high time tonight. Ain’t that right, Glory Girl? Why, you know, we don’t even know yore name.”
“You just said it. My name’s Glory.”
“Glory. Why, I’ll be damned. Did you know that, Curly?”
“I surely didn’t, but it fits her to a tee.”
Her legs felt a little rubbery and there were nervous flutterings in her stomach. Yet she had no doubts about this decision—no second thoughts, no regrets. It was exactly the same as when she had left Sitka. If she and Justin were ever to get to the Klondike and find that gold, they had to have money. And time was running out. This was the quickest and surest way to get the ten dollars they needed; Justin had said so himself. Now that her mind was made up, Marisha was committed, with no looking back.
Papers were stuffed in the cracks to keep the wind from blowing in the crudely built shack. Its single room measured no more than ten by twelve and had only one window. Curly hurriedly lit the lamp and began stoking the fire in the potbellied stove. Judging by the nearly empty pot of beans and sow belly that sat on top of it, Marisha guessed it was used for both cooking and heating.
Two bunk beds stacked one on top of the other sat along one wall. In the corner next to them stood a narrow cot. A couple of kegs and a wooden crate served as chairs for the crudely made table by the window. A
ll three men stood by the table as the man called Hank uncorked the whiskey bottle and poured a generous shot into each of the three tin mugs lined up on the table.
As she watched them, an inner voice cautioned her. “I’ll take my money first, boys.” She didn’t know where the warning came from. Maybe it was left over from her aunt’s oft-repeated edict that men couldn’t be trusted. Either way, she didn’t want to be cheated out of what was rightfully hers.
They hesitated momentarily, then started digging into their pockets. As they pooled their money to come up with the requisite ten dollars, there was a brief debate over which of them had to pay more, since ten couldn’t be equally divided by three, but the problem was quickly resolved.
“There you are, Glory.” Curly dropped the coins into her cupped palm. “Ten silver dollars.”
Clutching them in her hand, she turned away and walked to the corner cot. They had kept their side of the bargain, and regardless of how fast her heart was beating, she knew it was time to keep hers. She removed the warm burnous and slipped the coins into one of its deep side pockets, then laid it on the nearby lower bunk. Keeping her back to the men, she took off her blouse and long skirt and laid them on top of the burnous. As she continued to undress, she added a flannel petticoat and long-sleeved chemise to the stack of clothes. She wore no corset. Her aunt had always regarded that undergarment as figure-flattering, and therefore forbidden. Clad only in a plain camisole and a pair of flannel drawers, she turned around to face the open-eyed men. Determinedly, she ignored the drumming of her pulse.
“Who’s going to be first?” She began unbuttoning the front of her camisole.
“That’s me,” the bearded man declared. Quickly he gulped down the last of the whiskey in his cup and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He hitched up his trousers by the waistband and swaggered toward the cot. A wide grin split his bearded face as he hooted to his companions. “I’m goin’ t’ glory, boys! I’m a-goin’ t’ glory!”
