Читать книгу Spawn of the North - Barrett Willoughby - Страница 15

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The evening was in full swing at the Floating Trap.

Under moon-splashed spruce trees the parking space was packed with cars and more were arriving. The float in front was lined with launches. The chug-chug of approaching cruisers mingled with blended sounds of music, laughter, and the rhythmic thump of dancing feet that came through the discreetly shuttered windows of the roadhouse.

Inside, under the subdued light of colored lanterns, Ketchikan made merry in the spacious main room. Walls and ceiling were hung with fishnets from which depended hundreds of balloons shaped like brilliantly colored dolphins. These, swaying in currents of air set in motion by the dancers, swam gayly in a sea of cigarette smoke rising from tables set closely about the square of the dance-floor.

Among the guests moved Blossom Dow resplendent in a brief gown of crimson taffeta and very high-heeled slippers. She stepped as if walking on eggs, a glass in one hand, a bottle of choice Canadian vintage in the other. Her manner of confidential furtiveness was due to Prohibition, which she had never been able to understand, considering it in the light of an affliction like smallpox or the 'flu,' its source unknown, its existence inexplicable.

Business was unusually good tonight, and Blossom surveyed her guests with a look of maternal indulgence slightly tinged with acquisitiveness. The latter was evident when her black eyes turned to the 'kitty'—a small pirate chest into which a tin phonograph horn had been inserted. This receptacle was conspicuously displayed near the musicians' alcove. When the dancers went round too many times without tossing money into the kitty, Blossom's eyes became restless as quicksilver. Her face darkened. Finally, with vigorous determination she elbowed her way through the crowd and with all the clatter possible threw a few dollars into the horn of the kitty.

Briny was in his element in the kitchen, where he stood behind a table shaking up 'moose-milk.' This beverage, famed on the coast of Alaska, embodied among other ingredients eggs, cream, and a generous portion of Hudson's Bay rum, the whole being 'mild as a school-teacher's kiss' if Briny could be taken as an authority.

On this night the crowd at the Floating Trap was democratic as only an Alaskan gathering can be. The dance-floor was a circling mass of rainbow colors streaked with masculine black. There were evening gowns and sports frocks; tuxedos and mackinaws; and every style of dancing ranging from the collegiate drag and jiggle to the deadly earnest stepping of big men who pivoted their partners with a firm paw planted in the curve of the back.

Great-shouldered Scandinavian salmon-trollers from Fish Alley were there with their girls from the canneries. Young captains of cannery tenders, superintendents, men of the Pirate Patrol. Lawyers, merchants, bankers, and packers brought their wives and sweethearts from the homes on Tyee Hill. And there was a sprinkling of college students home for vacation from the South. The common dependence on salmon, together with draughts of the benign moose-milk, had welded the whole into a great family party overflowing with benevolence and hilarity.

At one end of the long room in a raised alcove near the cobblestone fireplace, Ivor Turlon sat at the piano directing the orchestra, which consisted of another college youth who performed with amazing versatility on a drum, a triangle, and a saxophone, depending on the effect desired. Between dances the guests, according to the Alaska custom, furnished their own entertainment. All efforts, good and bad, were awarded thunderous applause.

Ivor, bringing a waltz to a close, turned to look out over the tightly packed dancers. Whom among them should he ask to perform next? He wanted Sockeye Jones to do his fisherman's hornpipe, but Sockeye was escorting Dian and Eve to the Floating Trap tonight, and they had not yet arrived.

His eyes sought Tyler Kemerlee. Ty was a good chap, he thought, even though he was a Kemerlee. Tyler had helped out more than once during the two weeks Ivor had been master of ceremonies at the Floating Trap. He was always ready to make up a jingle, or sing a song, the nature of which he adroitly tempered to the status of his audience. Every woman who came to the roadhouse, whether she was from Tyee Hill or from the Red Line, was eager to hear him sing and play on that old banjo that had seen service with him in Italy.

The banjo was propped against the piano now, a glamorous instrument to Ivor, because the pegs had been whittled out of Alpine ash by a wounded 'wop' soldier Ty had carried in to a dressing-station under fire. Those pegs were carved with the head of Dante, because, Tyler explained with his ironic smile, Dante knew almost as much about hell as the fellows who fought the World War.

'I say, Ive'—the drummer leaned over as Ivor brought the waltz to an end—'why not ask Ty and Jim Kemerlee to do that iceworm song—you know, that one about the "husky, dusky maid up in the Arctic"?'