trouble.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary, Mr. Luritz.”
“You can’t make a living giving away your work.”
“True. But I did quite well today.”
“I’ll make you the most beautiful dress in Dawson.”
“I fear you’ll be too busy digging for gold.”
He nodded at this. “Would you take one of my nuggets?”
“That would be lovely, Mr. Luritz. But I’ll likely have so many of my own, I’ll not need yours.” She winked at him and he chuckled.
“You’re a good lady, missus.”
She compared this greenhorn to Jack. Two men, both without means, only this one had a clear and useful profession instead of several hundred pounds of baggage. If she had come across Amos first, would he now be her partner? She wished he was, for she felt no inclination toward him. What was so different between this man and the one she had chosen?
She pondered that mystery as Amos trudged along beside her on the half-mile trip to Dyea, yammering all the way about the nuggets he would find and the money he needed to open his own tailor shop in Brooklyn. She stopped him from showing her a photo of his wife and daughters. Lily didn’t want to have their images in her mind should something happen to this brave little tailor.
She worked until the sun hung low in the sky and all the arrivals had made their way to Dyea. Days were growing short now, adding to her anxiousness to be gone from this place.
She stopped at the log home of Yaahl, the Chilkat Indian whose wife, Diinaan, fed Nala in exchange for Lily’s accounting work. The couple and their family carried loads over the pass to the upper end of Lake Lindeman. Diinaan carried only seventy-five pounds a trip, a white man’s load, she called it, but her husband could carry two hundred pounds at twenty-six cents a pound. It was Lily who had encouraged them to increase the asking fee from eighteen cents as the stampeders rushed in to Dyea.
“I found a partner,” she said, sitting beside Diinaan on the bench outside the door.
Nala was busy wolfing down the mixture of rice, dried salmon and bacon grease.
“Oh, so you going now soon. Yes?”
“Yes. I’ll need to pick up the sled and buy dried fish for Nala. Plus I’d like to hear anything more you can tell me about the trail.”
“Yes, I tell you much trail news all the way to top lakes. I miss your good advice and account…” Her words fell off.
“Accounting.”
“Yes.”
Lily had taught Diinaan bookkeeping in exchange for a sled, that for a time there, she had feared she would never need.
“It’s important to keep track so you aren’t cheated.”
They exchanged a smile. Lily would miss Diinaan because, although they were separated by race and culture, at heart they were the same.
Nala began licking the bowl until it spun like a top, the metal bottom ringing against the rock. Lily called her off. It was time to face what she had avoided for much of the day—the man, her partner, waiting in her tent. Her insides went tense as she returned to her tent and Jack.
She reached her temporary home a few minutes later, hopeful that Mr. Snow had dried his clothing and was now wearing both a shirt and trousers. She called out and waited until he shouted a hello, then she drew a large breath of icy air and ducked inside. Lily gasped as her gaze darted about—for in a matter of mere hours the man had turned her orderly home into chaos. Every crate had been opened and the shavings scattered about. Piles of sheet metal and pipe covered her bed, tools and gadgets of unknown usefulness were strewn over her kitchen table. And there in the midst of the chaos sat Mr. Snow, on her bed beside her oil lamp, calmly polishing some kind of round gauge with a bit of white cotton, that she recognized belatedly as one of her embroidered handkerchiefs as he whistled softly to himself.
Her jaw dropped at the sight, her nerves and restless anticipation forgotten amid the anarchy. Lily narrowed her eyes upon him and he stilled. The whistling ceased as silence stretched.
Her voice was a soft exhalation bubbling with indignation. “Isn’t this exactly what comes from letting a man into your home?”
He flushed and rose, staring down at the handkerchief and then hiding it behind his back.
“The packing was all soaked. I have to dry the metal or it will rust.”
“This is the most useless bundle of nonsense I’ve ever