Since he’d spoke in Russian, I couldn’t understand what he said. Nor could I savvy Olga’s reply. But from her tone I gathered she was riding her sex appeal for all it was worth. From the smug expression her words produced on the Tsar’s cosmeticized face, I could guess she was coming on like a simple peasant girl come to offer her all to her beloved ruler. He beckoned to her to come closer.
Damn democratic of him, I thought to myself. He wasn’t at all rigid about his hermaphrodite activities. Evidently he didn’t mind making a switch in midstroke as it were. It seemed the girl’s appearance didn’t threaten him enough to make him call for the guards. And it could be that while he didn’t mind her catching him in drag, he didn’t want them to see him. In any case, he did motion her toward him.
It was an error in judgment. Olga looked innocent— from the point of view of violence, if not sex—but she wasn’t. When she was about six feet away from him she paused beside a lit candelabra and leaned slightly to one side. The hemp dangling from the package she carried dipped into the flame. Immediately, the action was speed- e up.
Olga lobbed the package at him with both hands-like a basketball player taking an easy lay-up shot. Tsar Peters reflexes took over. He caught the package with outstretched hands. But some instinct of danger made him get rid of it the instant he touched it. He threw it up in the air and it went neatly between the drapes to land in my surprised grasp. Like the Tsar, I’d caught it automatically.
My mouth dropped open. The fuse sputtered. Foolishly I stared at the bomb about to go off in my hands. All this in a split instant. Time froze! And then, as quickly, it thawed!
I’d been left holding the bomb!
Chapter Nine
“GOLD!”
The cry went up before the smoke from the explosion had time to clear. Sourdoughs poured forth from bars and barbershops, dance halls and dime-a-night fleabags, gambling halls and grubstake loan shark offices, sin palaces and stables as the cry spread like wildfire. They scrambled through the muck and slush of the spring thaw like a horde of hopped-up ants on the scent of a discarded Hershey bar. And the fevered cry became an obsessed chant that merged into one mighty voice echoing and reechoing the magic word-—
“GOLD!”
I was damn near trampled into the mire as the crowd stampeded towards the explosion. Up to my tailbone in mud, I managed to sludge-foot my way out of their path. There was a series of wooden planks, sort of a makeshift sidewalk, lining the rickety frame buildings to one side of the street of mud. I sought sanctuary there and watched the mob plop past.
Still shaking from my narrow escape, I stood there and tried to reconstruct what happened. Olga had lit the bomb and tossed it to Tsar Peter. The Tsar had immediately lobbed it in my direction and I’d found myself catching it. Then, appalled, I too had hurled the lethal package. But there had been that instant before I’d thrown it. And that was the instant when I must have made another time jump. It must have been that very instant, for the bomb was still in my grasp and in the next split second I’d flung it away. It hadn’t landed in the Tsar’s palace in St. Petersburg in the year 1762. And neither had I.
I surveyed my surroundings, trying to get some kind of fix on where and when I’d come to roost. I seemed to be at the very end of a sort of main street— if the river of mud in front of me could be called a street—down which the mob was rushing. Back in the direction from which they were coming was a town of sorts. It looked very ramshackle, like it had been thrown together in a hurry. In front of the mob the street came to an end. There was a sort of wooden fence there and the throng fanned out around it.
Most of them milled near a gate set in the fence. It was a high gate in the same rough-hewn style as the pickets marking the boundary of the stockade—or whatever the enclosure was. A sign was nailed to the top of it. Crudely lettered, it proclaimed the entrance to the “LUCKY SEVEN” mine. It also bore the warning: “CLAIM JUMPERS BEWARE!”
Under the sign, behind the gate, two men stood with shotguns. Their clothes were in tatters. They were covered with soot and dust and mud. Their faces and hands were sprouting blisters. Their eyebrows had been completely singed away. One of them had a beard which seemed to have been torn from one side of his face. It wasn’t hard to figure that they must have been very close to where the bomb I’d hurled had exploded. Yet, despite their disastrous appearance, despite the guns they pointed at the crowd, both men were grinning broadly.
The one with the half-beard waved in my direction. “Strike!” he called happily. “The whole creek blew out from under us, but it was worth it. It’s the mother lode! Richest I ever saw! Nuggets the size of your fist!”
“Wahoo!” The voice came from right behind me.
I turned and found myself looking at a shimmering vision of red hair and black sparkle. After a few seconds I realized that the reason her curvy form was wavering was that the sun was bouncing off the sequins covering her dress and distorting my view of her. I squinted and she popped into perspective.
There was a pert face with a peaches and whipped cream complexion under the red hair. The girl was of average height and her figure was a neat arrangement of concave and convex arcs that snuggled revealingly against the dance hall costume she wore. The gown was black, low cut, reaching to just above her knees. There were matching ruffs of black fur at the top and bottom of it. Her legs were long and very shapely in black net stockings. A red garter peeked out from under the ruff. It was halfway up her thigh and it disappeared as she shifted her weight from one high heel to the other.
“Wahoo!” she repeated, yelling. She waved at the two men with shotguns standing in the gateway to the Lucky Seven. Then her eyes met mine and she cocked her head and looked at me quizzically. The lids narrowed a little over the deep green irises, and then she spoke to me in a husky voice.
“You threw that dynamite.” It was a statement of fact, not a question. “I saw you throw it,” she added. She wasn’t accusing, or judging, only relating what she’d seen.
“Yes,” I admitted.
“Why?” It was a natural question.
I didn’t have any really sensible answer. “It was an accident,” I muttered.
“I hope so.” Her voice was still flat. “I’m a partner in the Lucky Seven. It seems you did us a favor, but my partners and I don’t usually cotton to having lit dynamite thrown at our mine.”
I could see her point, even though it wasn’t dynamite. I didn’t bother correcting her. “It really was an accident,” I improvised. “It caught accidentally and I had to get rid of it. So I just flung it away without looking.”
She shrugged noncommittally. I couldn’t tell whether she bought it or not. “Why are you dressed so funny?” she asked.
I looked down at my hundred-year-old Russian togs. Now it was my turn to shrug. I couldn’t think of an explanation.
“Aren’t you cold?”
I nodded.
“You are an odd one.”
“Aren’t you?” I asked.
“Aren’t I what?”
“Cold?”
“Yes. But I just stepped out for a minute when I saw you throw that dyno. Just for some air between numbers.”
We were standing in front of a dance hall and I realized she must work there. She started to go back inside and I blurted out a question before she could leave me.
“What town is this?” I asked.
“Dawson City.” She looked at me curiously.
“Dawson City where?” I persisted.
“The Klondike. In the Yukon.” Her eyes were narrowing.