Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [158]
‘If he was here we’d all be arguing what to do next,’ she said, half smiling as she imagined how excited he would have been.
‘Then we must do what we aimed for, for him,’ Theo said unexpectedly. ‘He wanted to get here more than all of us. So we can’t let him down now.’
Tears prickled in Beth’s eyes and she buried her face against Theo’s chest to hold them back. He was right — the best kind of memorial they could give to Sam would be to succeed here. That way, maybe they’d be able to cope with their loss.
Beth lifted her head away from Theo and wiped her moist eyes. ‘Then I must find somewhere to play tonight,’ she said. ‘And you two must start looking for opportunities.’
Beth went into the Monte Carlo Saloon on Front Street while Theo and Jack went to check out a few other places.
From the outside the Monte Carlo looked the smartest and busiest of all the saloons, with fresh paint and a large picture of Queen Victoria over the door, and it had signs claiming to have gaming rooms and a theatre. But the timber facade which promised sophistication was false. Inside it was unprepossessing, only one step up from a rough and ready shed, the gaming rooms dark and dreary, the theatre small and spartan with hard benches.
Undeterred, Beth approached a man with a swirling moustache and a fancy waistcoat behind the bar and asked him if she could play her fiddle there.
He looked her up and down and shrugged. ‘You wanna take the risk, then that’s your funeral,’ he said. It was clear he didn’t believe the young woman before him, in her shabby dress and gumboots, could possibly entertain his customers.
‘So if I just come in and start playing, and pass a hat round at the end, it will be all right with you?’
‘Sure, honey,’ he said, already turning away to reach for a glass and bottle. ‘But don’t expect too much, or fer me to look out fer you. It gets rough in here at nights.’
The man’s obvious conviction she would only make a fool of herself made Beth anxious to prove him wrong. She went back to the tent, washed her hair in a bucket, dug out her scarlet dress and polished up her best boots. It was only a couple of hours later that she learned from the people in the next tent that the man behind the bar was Jack Smith, one of the men who’d struck it rich out on Bonanza Creek and built the Monte Carlo.
But it transpired he wasn’t such a good judge of character, for he’d sent his partner, Swiftwater Bill Gates, off to Seattle with ten thousand dollars in gold to buy mirrors, velvet carpets and chandeliers for the saloon. News had already filtered back here that Gates had actually gone to San Francisco and was being called the King of the Klondike because he was distributing the gold to one and all while he lived the high life in the city’s best hotel.
Beth was amused by the story and it made her even more purposeful. At seven that evening she was back outside the Monte Carlo, which was almost shaking with the thunderous noise coming from within. But with shining hair trimmed with a feathered comb, her red dress and determination in her heart, she was ready for anything. She slipped off her muddy gumboots, leaving them by the door with her fiddle case, put on her clean, shiny boots and, with Theo and Jack looking anxiously on, tucked her fiddle under her chin, striking up a spirited jig, she walked in.
It took a few minutes for the music to percolate around the saloon. Beth was nervous, her fingers sticky with sweat from the heat, and she was intimidated by quite so many rough-looking men in one small space, but she let her mind conjure up Sam, imagined him standing before her as he’d so often done in the past when she played. And she played only for him.
She could see his smile, the way his wide mouth turned up at the corners and a dimple appeared in his right cheek. She could see his blue eyes sparkle and the way he pushed his blond hair impatiently out of his eyes.
Mentally, she left the sweaty saloon and went back to the immigrant ship, watching him charm the girls