2. Gold
My dreams drove me to rise early and splash water on my face from the cracked bowl of the washbasin. As I shaved in the dingy mirror, Doug opened one eye and groaned theatrically. “Up already?”
“I’m not the one who finished off the whiskey,” I reminded him. Sleep had left my hair disarranged; I combed it, then styled it in such a way as to hide the white scar slashing high up on the left side of my forehead.
“I suppose not.” Doug sat up with a wince. “I was thinking we ought to go down to San Francisco next. If we can get a few other people in on the soap racket with us, it might work out better.”
“Make friends?” I asked, surprised. He’d never suggested bringing anyone else into our circle of two.
He waved his hand impatiently. “Of course not. It’s just you and me, brother—we start making friends, we lose our edge. Get weak. No, just someone to distract the police if they show up, add a couple of other shills in the audience…it would mean less for us in the short term, but in the long run I think we’d see some real success.”
“And it would get us away from Hunter,” I guessed.
“That, too.”
I suppressed a sigh. It wasn’t that I particularly enjoyed Seattle; this month was one of the few when it hadn’t rained every single day since we arrived. And I certainly hadn’t bothered to get to know anyone here—there was no point, when we’d be gone in a week, or a month. It was just that we’d barely arrived, and now we were moving yet again. Chasing the horizon as always.
“Steamer or train?” I asked, hoping for steamer.
Doug frowned a moment, then rolled out of bed. He knelt by the floorboard we’d deliberately loosened and lifted it to reveal our dwindling cash supply. “Not the train—you can’t haggle a lower price from those cheap bastards. Go see if you can find a steamer we can work on to pay our way.”
Now it was my turn to frown. I hated haggling and didn’t have the gift of it that he did. “Why aren’t you going?”
“I’m going to see if I can find a friendly card game and rustle us up some more cash.”
I hated when he did that. Swindles were one thing—occasionally people would get mad, but for the most part we’d be long gone before they realized they’d been duped, if they ever did. Gambling, on the other hand, tended to attract men who would respond with violence the first moment they suspected cheating.
But I also knew there would be no dissuading him. “Be careful.”
He waved off my concern. “Don’t worry about me.”
I dodged the landlady as I went down the stairs, hurrying out the front door to the sound of her threats concerning our overdue rent. It was a fair morning, the sky for once blue rather than gray. I bought a sausage roll from a push cart for my breakfast, eating as I walked down the steep hill toward Puget Sound. To the southeast, the snow-clad heights of Mount Rainier seemed to float above the horizon like a distant beacon.
As I approached the wharf, the number of people on the streets increased, many of them hurrying toward the water. “Hurry up!” a boy shouted to the friends trotting after him, “we’ve got to see the gold ships!”
Gold ships? My curiosity piqued, I broke into a jog.
The flow of the crowd swept me to Schwabacher’s Wharf, slowing as the jam of bodies grew. A steamer was in the process of docking alongside the wharf; it seemed to be the focus of attention, though for the life of me I couldn’t see why. Boys climbed atop piles of cargo to get a better vantage, and adults trained binoculars and opera glasses on what looked like a normal, even a bit shabby, ship.
“Show us the gold!” someone yelled at the figures on deck, and the cry was quickly taken up into a chant. “Show us the gold! Show us the gold!”
All the passengers held up bags, coffee cans, blankets—anything that might be used as a container—and wild cheering broke out. The crowd swayed forward, only to be held back by a mix of police and Wells-Fargo guards. Carriages and coaches, accompanied by more guards, fought through the crowd, the drivers shouting and snapping their whips to clear a path.
“What the devil?” I said aloud.
A man around my age turned and gave me such a dazzling smile that my heartbeat quickened at the sight. His hair was the color of wheat beneath the sun, his eyes as blue as the summer sky above us. Broad shoulders strained his worn coat, and his skin bore the tan of a man who spent a great deal of time outside. “That’s the Portland, friend.”
So distracted was I by his good looks, I almost missed what he said. “I’m not familiar with her.”
“I guess you haven’t heard?” he said, still smiling. “They’ve struck gold in the Klondike. Everyone on board that steamer left a poor man and is coming home a millionaire.”
Impossible,was my first thought. The memory of the California Gold Rush still drew miners westward, and every once in a while someone would manage to scrabble out enough to keep alive the dream, but few had become rich even in the bonanza days before I was born. Surely this was just a rumor, blown wildly out of proportion.
A grizzled old man seemed to have the same thought. “What a load of bollocks,” he said, spitting on the ground for emphasis.
The younger man seemed more amused than anything by his statement. “What do you mean, old-timer?”
“My paw was a forty-niner. I was young, just gone ten years old, when he left us behind. Told Ma he was coming back rich, and she’d be a fine lady with servants of her own, instead of wearing her fingers to the bone washing other people’s clothes.” The corner of his mouth twisted down. “He came back just as poor, but…different. Changed, and not for the better.”
Pity softened the blue eyes of the handsome man. “I’m sorry that happened, but look at those folks on the boat right now. They’re rich.”
The old man shook his head angrily, turned his back on us, and left. He was one of the few; the crowd had by now swelled to thousands, with more streaming in every moment. As the first moose-hide clad miner came down the gangplank, he struggled to lift a fat satchel for the crowd to see.
I didn’t know who started the cry, but within a moment thousands of throats were shouting “Hooray for the Klondike!” The grinning miners, and in a couple of cases their wives, disembarked into the waiting arms of the police and Wells Fargo guards. Soon they were in the carriages and coaches, while the police and guards went ahead, forcing a path through the jubilant crowd.
“I’m going to the Klondike as soon as I can!” someone shouted, and was answered with a cheer and more cries of assent. Within moments, it seemed everyone had come to the same decision.
The blond man nudged me. “What about you?”
The fact that the bank had come out to greet the returning miners suggested their gold was more than a rumor this time. I had only the most vague idea where the Klondike might be—somewhere in Canada? Or was it Alaska?—and none as to how long it would take to get there.
But Doug and I had already traveled so far, back and forth across the country. Surely we could make it to the gold fields.
Could this be the answer to our wandering life? The last horizon, over which we’d finally find riches beyond our wildest dreams?
Reluctantly, I turned away from the other man. “I need to find my brother.”
* * *
GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!
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Sixty-eight rich men on the steamer Portland
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STACKS OF THE YELLOW METAL!
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STEAMER CARRIES $700,000!
Doug stared down at the front page of the evening edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, his eyes aflame with excitement. “Yes!” He slapped his palm on the splintery wood of the apartment’s lone table. “This is it, Col. Our big chance.”
Within hours of the Portland docking, the streets became jammed—in part because a sizable number of streetcar drivers walked off the job with the intent to go to the Klondike, leaving their trolleys where they stood. A celebratory air hung over the city, tinged with wild anticipation.
I’d had some time to think during my slow walk back to the apartment, and while waiting for Doug to return from his card game. “That’s what I thought. But we don’t have any experience mining.”
“That’s what’s so brilliant—we don’t need it.” He flipped through the paper and pointed at the columns recounting the biographies of everyone aboard who had returned laden with gold. “Look, this fellow was a busboy before he went to the Klondike. And this one a fruit farmer from Fresno. If they can do it, we certainly can.”
His excitement was infectious; I found myself nodding along. “We’ll need supplies.” A large ad on the front page for Cooper and Levy, merchants, proclaimed their ability to outfit prospective miners at short notice. “Can we afford to go?”
Doug turned the pages until coming to the classified ads. A smile slowly spread across his face.
“Leave it to me,” he said.