She and I didn’t cross paths until I had found out the hard-scrabble truth. There were some jobs in the Fairbanks district for the gold season, but they were for skilled labor. I didn’t have the skill.
The hello-fellow in the head office of Dawn Gold, a Mr. Pippin, was good enough to warn me about placer prospecting. It was a wash-out for the same reason I wasn’t getting work. The gravel had gold, a lot of gold, but the yellow stuff was spread too thinly for a lone operator to squeeze a profit out of the land. Mining the stuff took big equipment, none of which I knew, and big equipment takes a deep pocket. Unless one was rich, it took the pooled funds of a corporation.
So it did not matter that I had bought a coat and got here early to beat the late-spring rush. There was no job for me anyway. My prospects were as cold as the air, as spotty as the dirty snow patches still lingering on the ground, as muddied as the rest of the ground.
Seeing as how I was out of luck, I hinted about a flop for my tired bones. Picking up on my distress, he smiled and said there was millions of acres’ worth of flophouse in Alaska. “Only trouble is the weather,” he ended with a grin.
Seeing something in my face that called him to the Lord’s charity, he told me less bluffly that he knew places where a man could squat without any trouble. It took building a cabin, and not raising any ruckus, but it would do for a fellow that could not afford the homesteading fee. Food would have to be the bounty of Nature, which presented a problem to a man without a gun, but the storms of life could be waited out indefinitely. There were even men who shared a cabin. “You could find someone with a gun, and he’d feed you while you were building for the two of you,” he suggested. I had refrained from telling him about the five dollars I had.
Fate did not haveth my name on her smile card. In came the man’s daughter. She was a good height, but thin. Her brown hair fell free to her shoulders and wasn’t styled. The cut was like an extended page-boy bob. Her eyes were somewhat like brown almonds; above was a featureless brow. It was hard to tell the girl’s age, as she still had a liking for one-piece dungarees under her plain but serviceable coat, but the signs of womanhood were evident. She wore no cosmetics.
Noticeably, her teeth were good and straight when she smiled. A lucky girl.
“I have a gun,” she said agreeably. “I heard guns being talked about,” she explained to her pa.
Smiling, he adroitly reminded her that she had a gosh-living placer claim too. I was a grown man; I was only four years from my twenty-first. She could have been anywhere from thirteen to sixteen. That put a gulf profound between us. So, I took his hint as meaning she was a tomboy.
Proud to be in the same line as her pa, if only titularly, she rattled on about the claim having a river running through it. There was gold galore! All it took was some fine young man to see to the work.
Looking at Mr. Pippin’s eyes, I saw what I expected to see. “Mattie,” he said gently, “don’t tease a man so hard up. Old Wayne here, he might be squatting.”
“A fine man like you,” she said, her expressionless eyes staring into mine. It may have been my imagination, but I though I saw a hint of sulk.
“A fine man with nothing to do,” she continued. “And here I am with a claim and a pan.” Poetic, the poor little thing tried to be; musical, she was not.
Turning to her father, Mattie Pippin asked if she could borrow me like a library book. I knew now why her father did not introduce us. “That’s up to him, sweetie,” Mr. Pippin replied. So she, despite appearances, was a ‘sweetie’.
How untrue that was, I was to find out.
Naturally, like a fool, I agreed. Trusting her, I broke the five-dollar bill for a week’s worth of food and supplies. Respecting my parsimony, she recommended sourdough, hardtack and salt. “No need for a gun,” she said with a butter-won’t-melt-in-my-mouth tone. “I’m bringing mine.”
Like the fool I was, I took this to mean that she’d be shooting for game. That proved to be true, but she had something else in mind too. I bought the bread and the smoke-dried meat, plus a rough tent that was used and a sleeping bag that was moldy. Matches, too; I would need them. All those and a back pack. It was all I could afford, said goods taking a lot of value from my five.
The store clerk looked sad as he handed over my silver change. My mind on my supplies, I dismissed it.
Getting to her claim was quite a hike. Like a man, I volunteered to carry her supplies along with mine. Since the capacious back pack was full with my own supplies, hers had to be hand-carried. Thank the stars, her pan fit in the back pack and her shovel's handle did too.
When we got to the river on her chilly claim, once she had located a promising eddy in which to pan, I turned to her and tried to bring her little playlet to an end.
“I do not know if your father told you so,” I declared after foolishly setting the back pack down, “but that claim you have will not be yielding gold. The gold around here is too finely spread and too thin for anything except heavy machines. I am afraid you just took us on a nice hike.”
That, she did not like at all. Her eyes flared, and not in any womanly way. Her mouth shrunk into a slit, but I could see a pout where her lower lip was.
So, being a man and a fool, I sized her up as merely petulant. “Sweetie, Prince Charming isn’t buried in that chilly gravel. It’s all frog.” I lightened it with a smile.
“Well, that’s a mighty fine way for an out-of-towner to talk.” The words were thick in her throat. I just smiled and turned around, looking idly at her vain dream.
The next thing I knew, two rings of steel were jutted into my back. “Well, we’re going to find out you and me. ‘Cos you’re now my slave.”
My planned remark about Little Miss In-Towner not knowing about Abraham Lincoln, let alone being cognizant of the fourteenth article of amendment to the United States Constitution, died in my throat. The way she had placed the shotgun said she knew about shooting. The force she used, plain through my coat, said something else about her experience. The girl knew her shotgun; that was clear enough.
What was not clear was how far she could go. Having the barrel of a shotgun in his kidney makes a man think like a roadster. She was well-liked; I saw it in the store. I was unknown, not even from the territory.
Conclusion: were I to go the law, I would be an utter laughingstock. They wouldn’t believe me a bit. A full-grown man, beaten by a girl. Worse: kidnapped by a girl. As sure as a two-headed coin flip, she’d play innocent. She pulled the wool over my blindness; that was for sure.
That thought led to another that got my ears ringing and froze me beyond the cold. I’d heard tales from the South about slips of girls so good with the innocent act they could get a man hanged.
My mind backing away from that trail, I came to the grim decision that she would only get her just deserts if her pa or someone else - like her mother - caught her red-handed. They might go looking for her if she got gold-hungry and stayed a while. The weather, albeit sunny, was not pleasant.
I held up my hands and asked her what she wanted me to do.
And so, there I was sloshing through cold dirt and soil like a washer-woman. Break up clots, shake, discard the coarser gravel, wash, rinse, repeat, freeze, resuscitate hands by riverside fire. By the time I had blundered to the end, under her watchful eye and ready gun, there was little more than black sand left. For the life of me, literally, I could not see any gold in the pan.
Informing her, I handed over the pan as her unarmed hand commanded. Yes, she knew her shotgun. I don’t know how she got the patience or poise to stand over me, watching, ready to shoot.
“Where’d you steal it?” she barked.
Using her eyes as a gauge of her nuttiness, I informed her that there was none to steal. Hearing no lip in my soft slow speech, she told me to get in the river and leave the pan. Like a townie, I had no idea how to use the river to advantage. Besides that, it was darn near freezing!
The girl now traded her shotgun for a six-gun pointed in my direction. Deftly, using her free hand, she went though the remains about four times faster than I. I was too far away to jump her, and I would not try if I could. Unlike some men, I don’t fancy myself as stepping out of a moving picture. Real bullets hurt.
At the end of her inspection, she looked as if she were about to spit in the pan. Rather than save the concentrates, she threw them into the river. “Get back here and do it again. I’ve got all day and so do you.” The cold seemed to not affect the Ice Princess a bit.
All day was what I spent, with the same result. Like the girl she was, she had no interest in keeping the concentrates to sift for the small stuff. It was nuggets or nothing. And I was the one that kept the fire going.
By the time my aching arms and legs greeted the sunset, it was still nothing. She ordered me to hitch up another fire, set up the tent, and put the two sleeping bags therein.
Yes, she was a girl of a certain sort. Seeing my awkwardness, she saw advantage. Her shotgun went in with her in her bag, and the six-gun was deployed on hazard of any funny ideas I might have. Meaning, escape.
I will raise no eyebrows by admitting I took my time nodding off. Mulling over escape, I bumped into the quandary of where I would go. I was and am no man of the woods; she thrived in them. It was the pan differential all over again. Had I ran, to where I knew not, she would likely track and find me like I was a runaway beef steer. Although the season had become grudgingly co-operative before high noon, there was still the matter of the night freeze.
My musings were only that, as I found out while shifting my nerves quiet. Instantly awake, she warned me not to try anything funny. No frog in her throat while doing it, either.
The next day, and the next, was spent panning after relocating to other promising beds on the convex sides of the river. Same results.
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