Читать книгу Gold Fever - Vicki Delany - Страница 11

After leaving Angus MacGillivray at his boxing lesson with Sergeant Lancaster, Sterling continued on his rounds. He walked through saloons and dance halls, checking for crooked tables, clumsily-poured drinks, gold scales out of alignment, underage drinkers, men spoiling for a fight, indecency, all of the detritus of a gold rush town where the innocent sometimes made it as hard to protect them as it was to prosecute the guilty. The drunken Indian played on his mind.

Eventually his heavy black boots led him down Church Street to St. Paul’s.

He took off his hat as he opened the church doors. It was a rough wooden structure, looking exactly like what it was— a building thrown up out of the wilderness in a few short weeks. But it was also a rarely-visited sanctuary offering an island of serenity in an ocean of turbulent humanity. The minister’s wife was polishing the arms of the pews, a thankless task. In Dawson, dust and sawdust continually fell in a fine rain on everything indoors and out.

She put down her rag and wiped her hands on her apron while walking towards him with a welcoming smile. “Constable. How nice to see you. Come to check on your Indian friend?”

“Yes, ma’am. Did you fetch him then?” “My husband has taken him down to Moosehide.”

Moosehide was a small island in the Yukon River, not far from town, where the Han Indians lived. Moosehide was also the name of the ancient rockslide that had long ago taken an enormous chunk out of the side of the hill looming over the town.

“Thank you.” Sterling tipped his hat. “I’ll be off then.”

“Have you time for a cup of tea, Constable?”

A lot of dust got into a man’s throat on a hot day walking rounds in Dawson, but he couldn’t accept the friendly offer. Sterling’s father had been a preacher, a stern, cold, hard man, who had slowly drained every bit of joy out of his timid wife, until she was almost as much of a shell as he. Richard Sterling had been raised in a cold, hard home. It was irrational, he knew, but he could never make himself comfortable in the presence of a man or woman of God.

“Another time perhaps, ma’am.” He walked back out into the sunshine and the dust.