Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [132]
Beth did feel more secure once Jack and Sam had completed the cabin, for although only small, it was weatherproof and had a wood floor and a lock on the door. Jack staggered in one day with a cast-iron stove some foolish person had intended to take up over the trail, and Sam found Beth a hip bath too.
Playing nightly at Clancy’s did lift her spirits, and as she saw the town improving almost overnight, with streets laid out and many new permanent buildings, she had hopes that by Christmas it would be more civilized. Clancy’s was built of wood now, and there was a hotel, several more fancy saloons, most of them with brothels upstairs, real shops and a raised sidewalk so people could walk without getting stuck in mud. Even a photographer had arrived and opened up a studio.
There was much to be optimistic about in the town, but Beth was very unhappy at how Theo was behaving. He had found the boom town of his dreams, and suddenly nothing else mattered to him but making money.
Skagway had attracted hundreds of men like him. Soapy Smith and the Clancy brothers were just the same; they knew they didn’t need to go to the Klondike to make their fortunes. They could do that right here. Soapy had his own saloon now, known as Jeff Smith’s Parlour, complete with potted palms and a mahogany bar shipped up from Portland. Both he and the Clancy brothers had a back door from their saloons which led to a row of cribs where their girls worked. They had had a finger in every pie in town, sending in their thugs to terrorize if they weren’t paid protection money.
But these men treated Beth like a lady. No one in Skagway dared steal from her or insult her for she had their protection. Theo, however, used her as if she were his housekeeper and private whore.
Beth couldn’t help but like Soapy, even though she knew most of the swindlers and bully boys in town were in his employ. He flirted with her, made her laugh, and cheered her up when she was feeling glum. He had got his nickname because he’d once run a racket in which he sold tablets of soap, many of which he claimed had a ten-dollar bill tucked in the wrapper. He would get a crowd around his stall and sell a marked tablet to a stooge amongst it, who would immediately shout out that he’d found a note. Everyone clamoured to buy soap then, but there were no more ten-dollar bills.
Soapy ran a telegraph racket here. There were no telegraph lines to Alaska, but he had opened a little telegraph booth down on the shore, and had a cable running into the sea to make it look real. He would take several dollars from people sending a message home, and even fake replies from their wife or mother, begging them to send money home for a child or other family member who was sick.
Beth thought this was pretty shabby, just as the soap con was, but Soapy made up for his badness by making sure the stray dogs in the town were fed, and he gave handouts to those who were penniless, the sick and the widows.
Theo didn’t seem to have a good side any more. He pretended to be an earl and charmed people into trusting him implicitly, taking from anyone who sat down at a card game with him. She knew he cheated, but he was clever enough to make sure he only did this to real greenhorns. One morning Beth had seen a man crying as he tried to sell off his kit to pay for his passage home. Theo had taken every dime he had the night before.
But it wasn’t just his gambling and tricking others that upset her, it was the way he seemed to have forgotten they were supposed to be a team of four. Sam and Jack had worked hard from the day they arrived here, at the sawmill and building a cabin for them all. Now they were building cabins for other people. Beth pulled her weight too by playing at night, cooking them all meals and doing the laundry.
But Theo did nothing for