Klondike Betrayal

The steamer’s whistle split the gray morning over Puget Sound just as Henry Butler’s trunk slipped from the dock plank.

He caught the handle before the trunk toppled into the black water. Behind him, Charles laughed with both hands buried in his coat pockets.

“Careful,” Charles said. “That trunk holds your fortune.”

“It holds my boots.”

“Then guard it well. Gold won’t have you if you arrive barefoot.”

Henry hauled the trunk aboard and set it beside the rail. The steamer shuddered beneath his boots, its deck crowded with crates, canvas bundles, and men wrapped against the early-spring cold. Somewhere below, coal clanged into a furnace. The vessel’s iron sides trembled as if eager to be free of Washington and every debt the brothers had left behind.

Henry looked north.

Beyond the harbor, the water lay like hammered pewter beneath a low ceiling of cloud. Alaska waited somewhere beyond that horizon, with its frozen trails, hungry camps, and gold enough - if the stories could be trusted - to make a poor man rich before winter returned.

He touched the folded newspaper inside his coat. The article was three weeks old, but its words had burned into him all the same: gold discovered in the Klondike country. Men washing fortune from northern streams. Claims staked overnight. A wilderness opening its fist.

He wanted a place at that table. More than that, he wanted to step off this steamer in Skagway and prove that the Butlers had not come merely to chase another rumor.

Charles came aboard carrying a carpetbag in one hand and a bottle in the other.

Henry stared at the bottle. “We agreed to keep our heads clear.”

“We agreed you would keep yours clear.” Charles tucked the bottle beneath his coat. “Mine is perfectly sound.”

“You said that in Tacoma.”

“And I was right until the floor moved.”

“The floor did not move.”

Charles grinned. “Then it was the room.”

A deckhand shouted for passengers to clear the gangway. Henry reached for his trunk, but someone stepped between him and the rail.

She wore a dark traveling dress buttoned to the throat and a brown wool coat that had seen better weather. A small hat hid most of her hair, though a loose strand had escaped and flicked across her cheek in the wind. She held a leather valise in one gloved hand and studied the ship with the wary expression of someone who had paid dearly for passage and intended to receive every mile of it.

Charles straightened.

Henry saw it happen - the quick lift of his brother’s chin, the smoothing of his coat, the bottle forgotten beneath his arm.

“Allow me,” Charles said, taking the valise.

The woman tightened her grip. “I have it.”

“Of course you do.” Charles released it at once, though not before his fingers brushed hers. “But the deck is crowded.”

“So is your courtesy.”

Henry coughed to hide a laugh.

Charles shot him a look, then turned back to the woman. “Charles Butler.”

“Lucy.”

She offered no surname.

Henry stepped forward. “Henry Butler. My brother means to say the deck is crowded, and he means to be useful whether anyone asks him or not.”

Lucy looked from one brother to the other. Her eyes were gray, steady, and not easily impressed.

“Then I’ll remember to ask,” she said.

The deckhand called again. A line was cast off. The steamer lurched, and Lucy’s valise swung against her leg. Henry caught it before it struck the rail.

“Thank you,” she said.

Charles’s smile thinned.

Henry handed the valise back. “You’re bound for Skagway?”

“That is what the ticket says.”

“Then we’re traveling the same road.”

“Water,” Lucy replied. “Roads don’t usually move.”

Charles laughed too loudly. “You’ll find there are worse things than moving roads in Alaska.”

“I expect I will.”

A gust swept across the deck, carrying coal smoke and the hard bite of salt. Lucy turned toward the receding dock. Henry watched her face as the warehouses slid away and the figures on shore shrank into dark marks beneath the pale sky.

He wanted her to look at him again.

That was the trouble. He had come aboard to seek gold, yet within ten minutes he had found another prize and could not stop measuring his chances.

*

By noon, the steamer had cleared the harbor and settled into the long northern run. The deck pitched beneath them, and the passageways filled with the groan of timber and the steady thump of engines. Passengers crowded the saloon, where wet coats steamed near the stove and tin cups rattled whenever the ship rolled.

Henry found Lucy at a table near a round window. She had opened a book but was not reading. Her gaze followed the dark water beyond the glass.

“May I?” Henry asked.

“There are other seats.”

“I noticed. They’re occupied by men who snore.”

“Then you have my sympathy.”

He sat across from her before she could refuse. “I was hoping for your company.”

“That sounds like a dangerous confession on the first day.”

“Danger is the reason we’re going north.”

“No. Gold is.”

Henry smiled. “Gold and danger travel together.”

...