Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [161]
‘I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to stay,’ she said, meeting Wilbur as he came back across the saloon. She took the drink from his hand and downed it in one. ‘Will you take me home now, please?’
The bright daylight always made it hard to sleep, but Beth was so nervous she could barely manage to shut her eyes. She had grown accustomed to Theo’s losses over the last year, but to her knowledge he’d never before gambled more than he could afford to lose. It was different here: prospectors, saloon owners, shop keepers and dancing girls — they were all basically gamblers. With fortunes casually changing hands nightly, even the most level-headed person could easily lose their grip on reality.
She must have been lying awake for a couple of hours when she finally heard Theo and Jack approaching the tent. They were stumbling as if they were very drunk and that made her feel even angrier at them.
Theo stuck his face through the tent-door flap. ‘Are you awake, my sweetheart? he asked, grinning inanely.
‘I am now,’ she said sarcastically.
Theo withdrew his head and spoke to Jack. ‘She’s cross with me,’ he said. ‘D’you think she’ll be even crosser when I tell her our news?’
‘You’ll have our neighbours cross with you if you wake them up,’ Beth said tersely. ‘So come in here and be quiet.’
They came stumbling in and Jack flopped down beside her. ‘Sorry we’re drunk. But we had to celebrate cos Theo’s won a building lot on Front Street.’
Beth sat bolt upright. ‘He has?’ She was astounded: a building lot on Front Street cost around forty thousand dollars.
‘Sure thing, my darling,’ Theo said, dropping down on the other side of her. ‘A knuckle-biting game with Mack Dundridge. They said he couldn’t be beat, but they were wrong.’
Beth frowned. She didn’t like it when Theo became boastful, and it crossed her mind he might have cheated.
‘Don’t worry, Beth.’ Jack grinned at her as if reading her mind. ‘He won it fair and square. And he had the sense to stop once he’d twisted the bloke’s arm to throw the building lot in. Might have been a different story if it had been his goldmine.’
‘We’re made now,’ Theo chortled. ‘We can build our own gambling saloon and we’ll have rooms upstairs to live in. We’ll even give you the bathroom you’ve always wanted.’
They were too drunk to explain properly how it had come about, but Beth understood enough to realize Theo had set out with the intention of getting Mack to use the Front Street lot as a stake.
‘I reckoned he wouldn’t care so much about that,’ Theo said smugly. ‘If his goldmine was on the table, he’d have kept me there playing till he won it back.’
‘Theo played a blinder,’ Jack said, his face alight with awe. ‘I thought he had a bad hand at the end; he was sweating like a pig and looked shit scared. You could have heard a pin drop when Mack asked to see him. I couldn’t even look. But he had four nines, Mack had four eights. The whole place went wild. Even Mack said he’d met his match.’
Beth lay down again and tried to go back to sleep when the boys went outside to smoke their pipes, but the rise and fall of their drunken, excited voices as they planned their gambling saloon prevented her from sleeping.
She was thrilled, and had no doubt they would get it built. Jack would see to that. She even felt it would lessen the sorrow of losing Sam for all of them, for they would be making his dream come true.
But getting what they had planned for so long, so easily, just by the turn of a card, felt strange and unreal.
In the days that followed, as the boys started organizing the building of their gambling saloon, Beth often reflected that everything in the town was strange: sunshine that lasted twenty-two hours a day, the mud that didn’t dry up, the false fronts of the saloons, and steamers arriving from Seattle and San Francisco almost daily bringing champagne, oysters and every other kind of luxury.
It seemed bizarre that they’d each been forced to haul a ton of provisions over those