Читать книгу Gold Digger - Vicki Delany - Страница 9

Men were pouring into the Savoy when I set off for home to have the evening meal with Angus. I stood on the step to catch my breath. It had been a fine day, warm and sunny, but the wind was picking up.

Joey LeBlanc strolled down the centre of the street, not bothering with the boardwalk or duckboards, the hem of her ragged skirt dragging through the mud. She looked me straight in the eye, and her lip turned up in a sneer, which didn’t bother me in the least. I’ve crawled my way up in the world, and more than a few times I’ve acted outside of the law without caring a fig, but I never deliberately hurt anyone who had even less than I in order to ease my way. Joey might look like a slightly-better-dressed Whitechapel street urchin, but her heart (if she owned such a thing) was as black as a Yukon winter’s night. Rumour said that she’d killed her husband in a knife fight in St. Louis after he damaged a piece of the merchandise.

“Nice evening, Mrs. MacGillivray.” Sam Collins came out of the Savoy to stand beside me as I watched Joey pick her way through the mud. He was heading home for supper with his wife, Margaret, as he did every evening.

“It’s going to be busy tonight.” “Yes, ma’am.” He scratched his nose. Like many of the bartenders in Dawson, Sam had grown his fingernails long, so that when he weighed the gold dust in the scales set up on the velvet cloth on the mahogany counter, the residue could collect under his nails. At the end of the night, he might, and often did, scrape a handsome profit out of his own fingernails.

We stood together, enjoying the fresh air of the early evening.

“Strange town, this,” Sam said.

I stretched my arms wide and turned my face to the sun. “Can you think of anywhere you’d rather be?” And for sure, I couldn’t: this was the most thrilling, intoxicating place I had ever been. The very air breathed adventure and excitement, gold, and the chance to win—or lose—a fortune by nothing but the strength and courage of one’s own wits. Along with a goodly portion of luck.

“Yes.” His eyes were dark and serious, although I’d meant the question rhetorically. Sam always seemed so serious, but even more than usual in the last day or so.

I opened my mouth to ask him if everything was all right. Perhaps his wife was ill or begging to leave the Yukon. Things were hard for everyone here, but for people of their age?

I never said the words.

The building a couple of doors down, with the walls sagging inwards and the wooden slats on the roof already lifting off, called itself a bakery. Which was pushing the definition of the word, as they sold nothing but waffles at twenty-five cents each, along with coffee. As Sam and I stood in the pleasant evening sun, talking about nothing of consequence, the front door of the bakery blew out in a wall of flame.