Hod and Smokey have a heavy crate in hand. “This here?”
“Yes!”
“You sure?”
“Yes!”
They lay the crate on the ground. “Where you going with it?”
“Over the Pass to the goldfields, goddam it, what do you think?”
Hod rests a foot on the crate and stares at it, scratching his head.
“How you gone get it there?”
The mark gets a shrewd look in his eye. “You men packers?”
“No, but we work for the Merchant Exchange. That’s who will set you up with packers.”
“That’s where we goin,” says Smokey, “once we load up some goods offen this boat.”
The mark narrows his eyes even more. “How much to haul my lot over there?”
Hod shrugs, grins. “Our horny-handed sons of toil,” Niles Manigault is fond of saying, “possess more guile than is apparent.”
“We goin there anyhow,” he says. “Don’t spose it’s no bother.”
They pile the wagon with the mark’s whole outfit and four crates of fresh oysters Jeff Smith has promised somebody for a favor and roll up Runnalls Street to Jeff’s Merchant Exchange building which also holds the Dominion Telegraph Service where greenhorns send their messages home, five dollars for ten words, on wires that end three yards from the back door. Syd Dixon is working the store.
“You get them oysters to the Golden North?” he says, face buried in a ledger book.
“This fella here going over the Pass.”
Dixon jumps to his feet, looking pale but not as shaky as some mornings.
“You’re a lucky man, sir, to be spared the riffraff at the wharf. We are a young city, growing every day, and it is much too easy for an honest fortune-seeker like yourself to be — well — taken advantage of. You’ve already purchased the necessary equipment, I trust?”
“I—”
“We left it on the boardwalk out front.”
“Capital.” Dixon makes a shooing gesture with his hand. “Now get those oysters to the hotel before they spoil.”
The mark gives Hod a dollar coin for a tip.
“You done all the talkin,” says Smokey when Hod offers it to him, riding back to the Palace of Delight for the tables.
“Mr. Smith pays me to pick things up and put em down,” says Hod, laying the coin in Smokey’s lap. “I don’t want any profit from the other.”
At least once a week he has to be the Eager Prospector, making a show at the Assay Office in front of some mark who will be inveigled to buy out from under him the worthless claim that he lacks the proper paperwork to file on. Or the Desperate Husband, forced to relinquish promising digs to join his dying wife in Kansas. Or the Assayer, approached to verify that the bar of coated lead Doc is peddling, at a severe financial loss, mind you, is indeed solid gold.
“Men so greedy,” Jeff Smith likes to say when he has an audience gathered, “men so ignorant, such men cannot withstand the rigors of the frozen wilderness. We do them a service, skinning them down to their birthday suits before they can put their lives in peril.”
They drop off the oysters and haul a crated player piano from the wharf to the Garden of Joy just as the winter sun drops behind the mountain and the dance halls begin to fill up. Smokey leaves Hod outside the Nugget.
“You watch out for them womens,” he grins, and turns the nag toward the livery barn.
The floor is shaking under the weight of heavy-footed men and brightly dressed women dancing to band music, Hod fading into a corner to watch Addie Lee work. She twirls with one clomping sourdough or another as the fiddler saws out shortened versions of Mountain Canary or Turkey in the Straw or The Irish Washerwoman at a dollar a go till the girls are breathless and suggest their partners sit out the ballad, sung by Dingle Rafferty, who during the daylight hours removes horseflops from in front of those establishments willing to pay, and there is Addie Lee drinking teawater and the sourdough a two-dollar whiskey, sitting in one of the little boxes partitioned against the north wall—
As I trip across the Dead Horse Trail
With an independent air
— sings little Rafferty from atop a liquor crate next to the piano, chin lifted to the ceiling, eyes closed—
You can hear the girls declare
“He must be a millionaire!”
— Hod watching from his corner as half the men crowd back to the bar for a quick one, Suds dealing out the house mixture and sloppily weighing dust on the scales and the percentage girls who are left with no partner clustering together to steady themselves on each other’s shoulders as they adjust shoes and straighten stockings and the ones in the boxes allowing just enough to keep their escorts’ pokes open—
You can see them sigh and wish to die
You can see them wink the other eye
At the man who found the mother lode in Dawson!
— Rafferty adding verses till he gets the high sign from somebody in the bar and finishing with a high, sweet, wavering note, men stomping and clapping as he hops off his box with the fiddle skreeking a lead-up to a schottische, the banjo man and tubthumper waiting till negotiations on the floor are settled before joining in and Addie Lee out being hurled around in yet another man’s paws.
She is catching her breath near the entrance door during a waltz, Rafferty sentimentally warbling After the Ball, when Hod steps in.
“Young McGinty.” She likes to tease him with the name, though she knows it isn’t his real one.
“I was wondering — later—”
Addie Lee nods. “I got one lined up already, but if you want to wait—”
He doesn’t want to wait, but she has expenses to keep up and he is a barter client.
“I’ll be here.”
“All you men,” she says, giving him something like a smile. “Give a girl a big head.” And then the band swings into American Beauty and she is two-stepped away by a man with a hundred-dollar bill pasted to his sweaty forehead.
The dancing goes on and on, Hod watching the other girls work their marks, easing away from three different fistfights, his reputation in the camp as a fighter now a liability, Rafferty’s tenor lifting higher after every drink he takes. They are still dancing, fresh prospectors replacing the ones who are too drunk or tapped out, when Addie Lee crosses back toward the bar with Ox Knudsen staggering after her like a drunken bear. The fiddler apparently knows only five songs and no one seems to care as he repeats them again and again till he is spelled by a professor who bangs out Coonville Cakewalk on the ivories, the girls rolling their eyes at each other and giggling as the men, reeking of booze and tobacco and wet wool, gallantly offer their arms to escort them in a wavering parade around the floor.
There is no mystery where she is going with the Swede and what they’ll be up to. Hod can’t help himself and follows.
Jeff Smith and Niles and big Arizona Charlie and skinny Billy Mizner and Tex Rickard down from Circle City are at a table playing poker and eyeing the marks. Rickard has been setting up fights for the Ox, who works as a blacksmith when he isn’t bulldogging startled prospectors in the ring.
“Our young Apollo,” notices Niles Manigault, always paying more mind to the room than to his cards. “Mooning over his soiled dove.”
Hod finds an empty stool and turns his back to them.
“Make him an eggnog,” calls Charlie Meadows. It has become a source of great amusement to them all that he doesn’t drink.
“No liquor, no tobacco,” says Niles, drawing a pair. “If it wasn’t for his fascination with the scarlet sisterhood he’d be a model for our youth.”