Gold Dust (44 page)

“That was when I first—” The crumpled page bounced off his nose.

“Surely one of the West’s most colorful females,” she read in a cold voice. “Pandora, Calamity Jane, and Buffalo Bill
contained in one boyishly scruffy package. Even wearing skirts and a cunning straw hat she snaps the world to attention with
the forwardness and manner of a man.”

The second crumpled page hit him between the eyes. Jonah was grateful Katy didn’t have a gun in her hand. “Katy, I wrote that
when I first met you.”

“Well you got to know me real fast, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t know you at all!”

“And you decided to let me tag along with you so you could fill in the details for your damned Chicago newspaper.”

“That’s ridiculous! I fired you.”

“And took up with me again when you needed more drivel for your readers Back East.”

“I don’t write drivel. And you were the one who took up with me!”

“You say you want to marry me? How do I know you don’t want to take me back to your stupid Chicago and put me in a cage at
the zoo for people to gawk at!”

“Katy! For God’s sake!”

“I should have known!” Tears streamed down her face.

Jonah stifled the urge to go to her and fold her in his arms. He didn’t live that dangerously. “You should have known what?”

“Why you stuck with me, pursued me, acted like you wanted to marry me!”

“You don’t really believe that’s true, you little idiot!”

“Now I’m an idiot, am I? As well as a ragamuffin, scalawag, a Wild West side show, and those other clever names you pinned
on me.”

“Yes, you’re an idiot. I wrote that when I first met you, and I was looking for colorful Western characters to entertain my
readers. Now you’re using it as an excuse to back out of marrying me because, just like before, you’re scared.”

“Hah!”

“You listen to an ounce of truth about yourself and want to go back where you’re safe and don’t have to take chances!”

“Truth?” She heaved his pack at him. “You’re a newspaper reporter! What do you know about the truth? There’s your stuff. Get
out!”

“Give me my notes—those that you haven’t already thrown at me.”

She shoved the sheaf of papers his way.

“Be in town by tomorrow, Katy. We don’t know just when that boat is going to leave.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be on the damned boat!”

“Be there, Katy, or I’ll come after you and carry you down the trail over my shoulder! I swear I will! And if reason won’t
cool you down, we’ll see if a dunk in the Yukon will do it.”

She shouted after him, “You and whose goddamned army, greenhorn?”

Hunter looked at him inquiringly as the cabin door slammed shut.

“Don’t ever get involved with a female,” Jonah advised him sourly. Hell, he’d just been thinking that life with Katy was going
to be precarious. He hadn’t known how soon she would prove him right.

“O’Connell. Hmm.” The claims office clerk perused his files and expelled a sibilant stream of air through the space between
his two front teeth.

Gabe tapped a finger on the wooden counter and tried to curb his impatience. His little Katy had been with this newspaper
fellow for weeks. Another few hours was not going to matter, one way or another. He’d heard stories of the passage over the
Chilkoot and White Pass trails. The passengers on the steamer, glad they were traveling to Dawson the easy way, had repeated
every grisly horror story about mud, bogs, floods, killer rapids, and mud slides. He hoped like hell that Katy and that jackass
reporter had traveled the all water route, as he had done, but he doubted it. Katy hadn’t taken enough money with her to afford
the passage, and if this reporter wanted to write about the Klondike gold rush, he would want
to be in the thick of things. No doubt he’d gone over one of the passes and dragged poor Katy with him.

“Let’s see, here’s an O’Connell. James. Nope.” The clerk scratched a balding pate. “Katy O’Connell, hm. Here’s a Kathleen
Mary O’Connell. Would that be her?”

Gabe’s heart leapt. “That’s her!”

“She filed a claim up on Skookum Gulch. Number fourteen.”

“Do you have a map?”

“Yes.” The little man unrolled a much-used plat of the numerous streams and gulches in the Dawson area. His finger traveled
up the Klondike, veered off at Skookum Gulch, and landed on claim number fourteen. “It looks to be about a half day’s hike
from here. The claim’s a joint one. Kathleen O’Connell, Jonah Armstrong, and Alexandra Reese. Now, if you’d given me Mr. Armstrong’s
name, I would have known who you was talkin’ about right off. He’s the newspaper fella who comes in here on and off to talk
about what’s going on. Yessir, he’s got the pulse of ever’thin’ happenin’ in Dawson.”

“Is Armstrong in town?” Gabe asked. His hand tightened into a fist.

“He was in just the other day. Saw ‘im havin’ dinner down at the hotel. Heard he and his partners struck it big. Might still
be here. If I see him, I’ll tell him you’re lookin’ for him.”

“You do that,” Gabe said grimly. “Thanks for your help.”

Gabe spent the day searching Dawson, just in case Armstrong was still in town. A couple of bartenders knew him, but didn’t
know of Katy. A clerk at the Alaska Commercial Company store knew them both.

“Jonah and his wife? Sure,” the burly man said. “Good people. They got a strike, I hear.”

“His wife?”

Big as he was, the clerk backed away from the menace in Gabe’s voice.

“Well, I figured she was. He lets her draw off his account
here. I’ve seen ‘em together at the hotel, and they’ve been livin’ together in a shack up at their claim.”

A haze of red misted Gabe’s vision.

“She’s a right feisty little gal. Gives ol’ Jonah a run for his money, I’d say, though she don’t even come up to his shoulder.”

“She won’t be quite so feisty when I get through with her,” Gabe growled. “You got a map of this area you can sell me? One
with Skookum Gulch on it?”

The midafternoon sunset was blazing crimson across the sky as Gabe marched grimly back to the Great Northern Hotel. He itched
to be on his way to Skookum Gulch, but even prospectors who knew these mountains didn’t brave the trails after sunset. He
began more and more to appreciate how Olivia’s father had felt when his bright, sophisticated daughter had run off with a
ex-fugitive from Montana.

“Mr. O’Connell!” The clerk at the hotel desk waved Gabe over. “You were asking earlier about Jonah Armstrong, sir?”

“Yes?”

“Well, sir, that’s Mr. Armstrong coming down the street just now.”

Jonah still seethed. The long hike into town had done little to cool his exasperation. Of all the women his mother had tried
to match him with, of all the women he’d met in a career that had taken him around the country, and sometimes exotic places
out of the country, why did he have to fall in love with a stubborn, childish, hoydenish, volatile, jackass of a woman like
Katy O’Connell? She was ornerier than a mule and flighty as a chipmunk. Damned if he was going to let her do this to him.
If she didn’t cool off and come to her senses in time to get on that boat with him, he’d march right back up to that cabin
and shake her until these stupid notions of hers shook right out of her silly head.

“Jonah Armstrong?”

Jonah looked up. A tall man stood just outside the entrance
to the hotel, his feet planted wide apart, his arms crossed upon his chest. Even allowing for the bulk of his sheepskin jacket,
Jonah could see the man was fit and muscular. The way he balanced on the balls of his feet, the set of his broad shoulders,
and the glitter in his eyes—all said here was a man set for a fight.

“I’m Armstrong,” Jonah admitted, shrugging off his pack.

“I’m Katy O’Connell’s father.”

“Oh shit!” Jonah muttered.

“I believe you know my daughter.”

Jonah sighed. “Unfortunately.”

O’Connell stepped closer. His hands were balled into fists. This morning Katy had tried to pelt him to death, and this afternoon
her father was going to beat him to a pulp, and Gabriel O’Connell looked like a man who could do it.

“Where is she?” O’Connell demanded.

“Sitting on her high horse up in Skookum Gulch.”

“You make a practice of luring innocent young girls from their homes and dragging them halfway across creation, boyo?”

“Innocent young girl?” Jonah had to laugh. His temper had taken just about as much as it could take today. “Ask your stubborn
mule of a hotheaded daughter just who lured which innocent into what.”

“You can’t talk that way about my daughter, friend.”

“The hell I can’t!”

Gabe lunged, and Jonah stood fast to meet him. Both men were too near the edge of their tempers to have time for explanations
or excuses. Gabe’s fist caught Jonah on the jaw. Jonah staggered back, then charged forward with fists flying, landing a punch
to Gabe’s chin and another to his sternum. The air whooshed from Gabe’s lungs, but he recovered in time to stick out a foot
and trip his adversary on the next charge. They both went down in a tangle of limbs and flying fists.

A small but interested audience gathered. The clerk from
the hotel placed a bet on Jonah. A prospector in town for supplies laid odds on Gabe.

“Saw ‘im walking down the street earlier,” the prospector explained to the clerk. “Looked ready to kill somebody.”

Jonah’s head bounced against the frozen mud of the street as Gabe landed a blow. Jonah growled, grabbed at Gabe’s throat,
and squeezed. Gabe punched him again, then landed a knee in his crotch.

Jonah howled and released him.

Gabe’s face was red from Jonah’s chokehold, but gleeful just the same. “That one’s for my Katy!”

Jonah swung and missed. “Katy can land her own blows,” he gritted out. “And has.”

Gabe threw a left hook. Jonah ducked, staggered, and nearly lost his balance.

They looked at each other. Painfully bent over, hands braced on their thighs to hold themselves upright, they were both bloodied,
bruised, and breathing heavily.

“Are we through yet?” Jonah gasped.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“You’re Katy’s pa all right. You’ve got the same left hook.”

“I taught it to her,” Gabe said, eyes narrowing.

“And she taught it to me. Said I didn’t know how to fight worth a damn.”

Gabe’s mouth twitched. “You do okay.”

“Katy’s a passable teacher.”

They looked at each other a moment longer, Jonah cautious, Gabe considering.

“Let’s take a break for a drink,” Gabe suggested. “We can finish this later if we have to.”

“All right by me,” Jonah agreed. “God! Could I use a drink!”

As they stumbled together toward the Palace Saloon, a small figure broke from the audience and ran. A pinafore peeked from
beneath her parka, and short red curls bounced beneath its hood.

* * *

Katy sat on the cold ground, clutching her parka around her, caught in the awful limbo of indecision. The disassembled rocker,
lying on the tarp next to the cabin, had neither moved nor spoken, no matter how long she stared at it. It was being no help
at all. Neither was Hunter, who sat on his haunches, looking at her as though she were some sort of strange creature he’d
never before seen.

She was a strange creature, Katy reminded herself sourly. She was “Pandora, Calamity Jane, and Buffalo Bill contained in one
boyishly scruffy package.” To her face Jonah had told her she was a beautiful woman worthy of a man’s devotion—his devotion.
Behind her back, he’d been writing comments like that for his sophisticated readers in Chicago to laugh at. Why in hell did
he want to marry her? So he could write “Calamity Jane Goes to Chicago,” or “Pandora Takes on New York”?

She didn’t know what to do. All the day before she had walked up and down the gulch or paced the floor of the little cabin,
wondering which way to choose in this fork in life’s road. Now it was morning and she had no better idea than yesterday.

What she
had
to do, though, was decide whether or not to store the rocker in the cabin for the winter and meet Jonah at the boat, therefore
following in the best female tradition of being humble and obedient, or put the damned thing back together and resign herself
to a winter alone, melting gravel and fighting frostbite, wondering how Jonah would have explained himself if she had given
him a chance. If she let the morning progress much further in this confusing state, time would make the decision for her.
The steamer would leave without her, and so would Jonah.

Why did life have to be so dagblamed confusing?

Katy was so absorbed in her dilemma that she didn’t hear the horse until it trotted into sight. It was the rawboned bay from
the livery, and bouncing along on the horse’s back was Andy.

“Katy! Thank goodness you’re here! I looked all over town for you, and you weren’t anywhere!”

Katy got to her feet and took the horse’s reins while Andy jumped from the saddle. “I’m not there,” she said, “because I’m
here. What are you doing here? Does Camilla know where you are?”

“Yeah. Listen—”

“I see she didn’t burn your britches,” Katy observed with a smile.

“Skirts ain’t good for ridin’. Listen Katy! I come to tell you that yesterday dusk I saw Jonah get the tar beaten out of him
in the street in front of the hotel.”

“What?”

“’Course, he was givin’ as good as he was takin’.”

“Omigod! Was he hurt?”

“Dunno. Probably. There was blood all over.”

“Who beat him up? Who was it?”

“Some big guy I ain’t never seen before. Throws a punch like a mule’s kick. He looked pretty tattered himself. They jist about
wore each other out, and they were talkin’, but I didn’t hear what they said. I ran off to find you.”

“Did he get robbed?”

“Dunno!”

“Well, damn! I’m going to have to run to his rescue again!” Katy couldn’t make the words sound properly disgusted, because
her heart was suddenly lighter, in spite of the alarm and anxiety for Jonah. The man simply couldn’t get along without her.