'I'm willing to try.'
'No!'
Her curt dismissal annoyed him: 'If the men I see are clever enough to find gold, so are you and me.'
'Two years ago, yes. But now we'd have to go ten, fifteen miles into the country.
Spend a winter there, maybe.'
'If I can build a boat, I can build a cabin.' The idea of spending a winter helping a woman like Missy was not distressing; it was downright agreeable.
But Missy, haunted by the doleful predictions of the Klondike Kernel, saw that he had been correct. The gold of the Yukon lay in servicing the great mass of men, not in competing with them. Sixteen lucky miners were making money that June on their fantastic finds; six hundred were coining gold from their stores, their rental of horses, their trading in leases, their medical or legal services. She saw also that enterprising women no more skilled or determined than she were doing extremely well with fortune telling, the running of brothels, the selling of doughnuts and coffee.
Three women had banded together to run a laundry, which was stacked with miners'
clothing, and one seamstress seemed to be prospering from the sewing of shirts.
'What do we have to offer?' Missy demanded during the long twilight, and Tom replied:
'I can build boats.'
Unwisely she laughed, and when Tom flushed, she pointed to the riverfront where more than a thousand boats were for sale, their mission accomplished. Realizing the ridiculousness of his proposal, he, too, laughed: 'Anyway, I can build cabins.'
They talked on, rejecting one impractical alternative after another, but as they spoke, Missy kept looking at their nearby boat, and this gave her a viable idea:
'Tom, we have double rations in the Aurora.
All our food and all of Buck's too,' and the more they considered this, the more appealing became the idea of opening a food shop of some kind and selling at profit their excess. The arrival this summer of regular boats up the Yukon from the Bering Sea meant that there would be no starvation in 1898 as there had been in '97, but there would be opportunities for enormous rewards.
Using the sail which Sergeant Kirby had sold them atop the Chilkoot Pass, Tom painted an enormous sign, one which dominated the waterfront: MISSY'S GOOD MEALS CHEAP, and the tent restaurant was in business not along the main street where competition would have been severe, but along the river where thousands of men were almost forced to congregate in the first days of their arrival.
To his own surprise, Tom was not loath to knock apart the Aurora, which he had built with such care, and after some of her planks were converted into tables and benches he bought for almost nothing another boat, so poorly built that it practically fell apart.
The two proprietors slaved over their restaurant, Missy doing the cooking, Tom the washing-up and the procurement of additional food from various sources. Mostly they relied upon their own cargo of dried foods so carefully chosen by Buck and the Kernel, and the diet they served was heavy on starches and caribou or moose meat brought in by some hunter.
They learned to equate gold dust, which passed as currency in Dawson, with dollars, and although their banner proclaimed cheap prices, the rates were surprisingly high.
Their specialty, a loss leader you might say, was a breakfast of pancakes and syrup, greasy caribou sausage and cups of steaming coffee for thirty-five cents. Hungry men who gorged on this bargain were apt to return for lunch and supper, on which Missy and Tom made a real profit.
They had been in successful operation some six weeks when Superintendent Steele returned, and hearing that they had arrived in Dawson, came looking for them along the riverfront.
'Hello,' he greeted Tom as he entered the tent. 'You remember me? I'm Samuel Steele, and I'm glad to see you prospering.'
'Hey! Missy! It's the superintendent!' And when she appeared, obviously involved in heavy work, Steele congratulated her on having, as he said, 'found your footing.'
He said that he had her money with him and was prepared to turn it over, but he wondered if she might not prefer to deposit it in one of the reliable banks that had opened since he had last met with her: 'I would advise it, ma'am.'
'I think so too,' she said, for as a businesswoman she was already beginning to wonder how she and Tom could protect the money they were raking in. 'But that special envelope ... for the woman. I'd want to have that, because it isn't my money.'
'I brought it,' Steele said, and that afternoon Missy picked her way along Front Street, the main thoroughfare, then ducked off to a more famous street which paralleled it. This was Paradise Alley, where thoughtful men had built some seventy cribs for the prostitutes who were needed in any boomtown. Over the doors of many of the little huts, arranged in neat rows, hung boards proclaiming the names of the occupants:
TIGER FLO THE MATCHMAKER BETSY Poo
On the largest crib, as befitted the situation:
THE BELGIAN MARE
Knocking sedately on the door beneath this sign, Missy called: 'Ma'am, are you in?'
The big woman inside, five feet ten inches tall, a hundred and seventy pounds, was surprised to hear a woman's voice following the customary rapping, and supposing it to be one of the other Belgian girls, she shouted in Flemish: 'Come in!' Missy, of course, could not understand the words and waited on the stoop.
When her invitation produced no results, the woman came to her door, and showed surprise at the type of person waiting there. Calling to another crib whose occupant spoke both Flemish and English, she asked: 'What does this one want?' and soon half a dozen of the unoccupied girls crowded into the Mare's crib, delighted with the unusual diversion.
'Tell her,' Missy said, 'that I bring something from the Klondike Kernel.'
The interpreter had arrived from Antwerp after the departure of the Kernel on that first boat down the Yukon with news of the strike, so she had not known the man, and at first her explanation made no sense to the Mare, but when Missy repeated the name the big woman's face broke into a beatific smile, and the way she reacted proved she had been unusually fond of the tough Carolinian.
'Ah! The colonel!' she cried in Flemish, and with a military flourish imitating a drum and bugle, she began a vivid march, as if she were one of Wellington's men leaving Brussels for the great battle at Waterloo. Other girls, remembering the Kernel, joined in, and for a few minutes there was jollity and military nonsense and the remembrance of old friends.
'She says,' the interpreter explained as the petite march continued, 'that Kernel, he was one damn fine man.' And another Belgian girl broke in to have the interpreter say: 'He was the lucky one. He found the gold. And he was good to us.'
The Mare, exhausted from her unusual activity, fell onto the second bed in her crib, and while she regained her breath, Missy said: 'Tell her that I liked her dance.
She is an artist.' And when this was translated, the Mare sat straight up and said with great seriousness: 'I was an actress. But the fat, it grew too much. What does this one want?'
Missy wondered if it was prudent for her to display the amount of money the envelope contained, and she decided against it.
Standing so that the other girls could not see, she bent over the Mare, opened the envelope slightly, and allowed her to see the beautiful gold face of the hundred-dollar bill.
Her attempt to protect the Mare was useless, for the latter shouted in French: 'Oh my God! Look at what that dear man sends me!' And she ripped the bill from the envelope, showed it to the girls, then paraded it up and down before the other cribs, shouting in Flemish: 'Look what that dear man sent me!' and soon almost all the girls were in Paradise Alley, looking at the golden bill. A few customers stuck their heads out, wanting to know what the shouting was about, and after a while the procession halted and the Belgian girls returned to their cribs, while the Mare thanked Missy, calling for the interpreter again: 'What business is this one in?' And when she heard that Missy ran the new restaurant down by the river, the Mare went back into the alley and shouted: '
This kind lady runs that new restaurant down by the river. Tell the men to eat there.'
In this accidental way, Missy and Tom obtained customers they would not otherwise have had, and occasionally one of the girls from Paradise Alley would accompany some customer to the restaurant and share breakfast with him. One morning two girls brought with them a tall, dour miner who had been immured in a lonely cabin atop a hill for most of a year, and they told Missy: 'This is one of the loneliest sons-of-bitches in the world. He won't even come to the Alley, but he does bring us fresh meat now and then.'
'And what is your name?' Missy asked, and the man grunted through his beard: 'John Klope, ma'am.'
'From where?'
'Idaho.'
Missy laughed, saying: 'I didn't know anybody lived in Idaho,' and he replied as if she had asked a serious question: 'Quite a few do, ma'am.'
She noticed that although he seemed to be hungry, he toyed with his pancakes, and on two subsequent visits for breakfast he did the same, until out of curiosity she asked: 'Anything wrong with the cakes?' and he said: 'They're disgraceful.' When she winced, he added apologetically: 'No offense to you, ma'am. It's just that you ain't usin' a proper strain of sourdough.'
'What does that mean?'
'Ma'am, to make proper flapjacks, you got to have the right starter to begin with.'
'I use yeast. Bought it in Seattle.'
'You see? You got off on the wrong foot, and can't never recover.'
'What do you use?'
'I got my sourdough from an old woman in Fort Yukon. She'd had the same strain for more'n fifty years. I brought it by sled near three hundred and fifty miles, the way we came, in dead of winter. It makes real flapjacks.'
'I'd like to taste the difference.'
'I'll bring you some of my starter next time I'm in town.'
'Where's your claim?'
'El Dorado. On the Bench. Eldorado Crest, Claim Eighty-seven.'
'Ooooh, one of those millionaires?'
'No, ma'am. Bench means I'm up on the ridge.' v 'Nothing?'
'Not yet.'
He made the tedious trip to his claim and back, just to bring Missy a batch of his sourdough starter, and when he showed her how to use it in preparing pancakes while conserving the strain by keeping it in a cool jug, she had to agree that his sourdough flapjacks were definitely superior to her ordinary pancakes. They were light, they browned well if a customer wanted them that way, and most did, and they were chewy, blending perfectly with either sorghum or honey. She said: 'I'm indebted to you, Mr. Klope, and I hope you strike it rich.'
'I will,' he said, but an even more important consequence of this second series of visits related to the fine dog he brought with him. Missy paid no attention to the well-formed husky, but Tom recognized immediately that this was a superior animal.
He knew little of dogs, really, and nothing about the famous sled dogs of the arctic, but even so, he could see in this dog's bearing, in the intelligence which flowed in his eyes, that he was special.
'Where'd you get him?'
'He pulled our sled ... down from Fort Yukon.' Almost hesitantly he added: 'I couldn't let him go. We went through a lot together.'
In the weeks that followed, when the miner should have been at his diggings above Eldorado, he lingered in Dawson, appearing each morning at the tent for his sourdough flapjacks.
One morning Superintendent Steele stopped by with some startling news for Missy:
'Remember how you suspected my man Kirby because of how Soapy Smith's men behaved at Skagway? And you asked me why I didn't do something about it? And I said I couldn't, because that was America, and America had to clean up its own messes?'
'What happened?'
'Just what I expected to happen. Good men exist everywhere in the world, and when they finally cry "Enough!"watch out.'
'Was somebody brave enough to cry "Enough"?'
'Chap named Reid, if I have it right. Engineering fellow. When Soapy's gang stole the entire poke of a quiet fellow heading home out of the mountains, that was bad enough, but when the hoodlums rallied around and made fun of the little man, the poor chap appealed to the conscience of the community.'
'And?'
'And Mr. Reid shot Soapy dead.'
Missy did not exult, for the dead gambler had on several occasions been good to her and considerate of unfortunates she brought to his attention, but she knew enough of his criminality to realize that sensible people could not allow him to continue unopposed, and she was pleased that he had been stopped: 'I should think that Mr.
Reid would be a hero in Skagway.'
'He's dead too. Soapy got him in the exchange of bullets.'
Missy sat down, and as she looked up at Superintendent Steele and saw the quiet determination he represented she realized that her man, Buchanan Venn, had been on his way to becoming such a person.
Had the Venns stayed in Skagway, the day would have come when Buck would say "Enough!" and it would have been he who gunned down the petty tyrant.
'Tom, come here,' and when the boy stood facing Superintendent Steele, she said:
'You hear what he just told me? About Soapy Smith? Sometimes you have to stand up against such men. Remember that.'
Steele smiled at Tom, then asked if he could speak alone with his mother, using that word even though he knew it did not apply. He did this because of the nature of what he wanted to say next: 'Miss Peckham, it may seem none of my business, but believe me, it is. It's been my business many painful times.'
'Do I need a license or something?'
'I want to warn you against the woman you call the Belgian Mare.'
'She's been a good friend. Brings me business.'
Steele coughed, looked Missy right in the eye, and said: 'She's a horrible woman.
It's not the German pimp who brings these Belgian girls here. She does. It wasn't the businessmen who built the new cribs. She did. She rents them to her girls, takes a huge slice of their earnings. Please, do not interrupt. These are things you must hear.' And he continued with a recital of the Mare's almost criminal behavior: 'When a girl is used up, and some last only a short time, she kicks her out. Even at best, they're treated like animals. If she's being kind to you, it's because she knows that lone women sooner or later run out of money. Then you work for her, on her terms.'
'Please, Superintendent Steele ...'
'I tell you only the truth.'
'But if she's so terrible, why do you allow her in Dawson?'
'With the services her girls provide, there's no rape in my city.'
Aware that he had succeeded only in arousing Missy's indignation, he saluted and left, but he had not been gone long before his place was quietly taken by John Klope, who ordered nothing but who did occupy one of her four stools for nearly an hour, watching her as she worked. She was so busy that she forgot he was there until he suddenly spoke in a loud voice, all in a rush, uttering important words he'd been rehearsing for a week: 'You and Tom are people I like. Come out to Eldorado with me and help find the gold that has to be there.'
'Now what would the two of us do in a mining camp?' she asked lightly, and he lowered his voice, speaking carefully, as he would to a child:
'In the winter we build fires in the earth, to melt the frozen soil. Then we dig in the softened earth. And haul it by ropes to the top, like it was a well and we were drawing water. Because it's so cold, the wet muck freezes immediate, locking in whatever gold we found. Come summer and the thaw, we sluice the muck and find the gold. And then we're rich.'
'Have you found any gold yet?'
'No, but I have a feeling I'm getting close.'
It was obvious to Klope that his two listeners were still interested in gold and that having come so far, they did not want to return to civilization without having at least tried their hands at the great gamble of mining, so although they said nothing, he pressed his case: 'You can go on earning a living here in the tent, but if you come with me, share and share, you might mak
e a fortune.' He hesitated: 'That's what you came here for, wasn't it? Isn't that why we all came?'
'Where did you come from?' Missy asked as she turned away from her cooking to listen to this strange, compelling man.
'Idaho, like I told you before. All washed up, sort of like you, I guess.'
'We were. But now we're safely started. We could have a good life here in Dawson.'
For the first time in their acquaintance John Klope smiled: 'Ma'am, can't you see?
When the gold runs out, Dawson runs out. There's no future here for a tent restaurant.
Only future in the Klondike is gold, and when it ends, you end. All of us do.'
Missy now left her side of the counter and came to sit on one of the stools: 'Just what do you mean, we come and help in your cabin?'
'I need help. I stand very close to gold, of that I'm sure. But when I dig out the softened muck, I need someone to haul it to the top and dump it. In the summer I need someone to help me sluice it. Your son here ...'
'He's not my son. We ... It would be too complicated to explain.'
'I could use him.'
'And me?'
'We'd both need someone to mind the cabin. You know, it's not a shack. It's got real sides and a window.'
They did not explore, at this first discussion, the role that Missy as a human being and a woman would play, but on subsequent mornings Klope did quietly intimate that he was not married and that he did not drink. There was nothing about his silent, austere manner which would tempt a woman to move in with him, regardless of the arrangement, and he, realizing this, did not press his case, and things might have ended on that tentative note had not two extraneous incidents muddied the situation of the Venns.
The impact of Klope's suggestion that they move to Eldorado fell most heavily on young Tom, for it caused him to think seriously about his future, and after long speculation and study of Dawson, he drafted a surprisingly mature letter to Mr. Ross back in Seattle:
I hope you will remember me. My father, Buck Venn, worked in your office and I think you respected him. He was killed in a freak accident. I hope you also remember my mother, Missy, who worked on your ship the Alacrity, but maybe you didn't meet her. I was the newspaper boy who became your helper on the docks. So our whole family was Ross & Raglan, and I hope you remember us well, because we tried to work well.