Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [185]
‘Well, missy,’ Oz said, turning back to her. ‘I sure do hope you’ve brought your fiddle with you, for I’ve heard a great deal about how sweet you play it.’
Suddenly Jack was up on a hill above them, running down as though the hounds of hell were after him, whooping as he came.
‘I’d say the lad is pleased to see you, missy,’ Oz said with a toothless grin.
Jack had grown a thick beard, his hair was touching his shoulders, and in mud-daubed clothes and boots he looked just the way all the miners did. But his face glowed with health and he’d lost that strained look he’d had in the last weeks at the Golden Nugget.
He hugged Beth and spun her round, laughing with delight.
But her heart sank when Oz asked them into his cabin for a cup of coffee, for she couldn’t see how Jack could fit in there, let alone her too. It was tiny, with a hard-packed dirt floor, a bed made out of old packing cases, a table, stool and another chair, all made out of rough wood. But it was very warm, for there was a tin stove, and Oz laced the coffee liberally with whisky.
Both Jack and Oz were anxious to hear every detail about the fire. They’d got news of it a couple of days after the event, and Jack said he’d been set to come to Dawson to see if Beth was all right. But then he was told that the Monte Carlo was still standing and she’d been looking after the homeless.
It was only when Cal got up to go, saying that he’d get her bag from the sledge, and then he must be on his way to pick up a load of timber, that Beth realized both Jack and Oz thought she’d just come for the day and would be returning with Cal.
‘I had hoped I could stay with you for a while,’ she explained. ‘But I can see there’s no room. So perhaps I’d better go back with Cal.’
‘You certainly won’t,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘I don’t live here with Oz. I’ve got my own cabin up on the hill. If you can stand the roughness of it, I’d be more than glad for you to stay.’
They waved Cal off and, picking up Beth’s valise, Jack led the way round Oz’s cabin and on up the steep hill, past a great deal of snow-covered equipment.
‘It’s real good to see you,’ Jack said, his dark eyes shining the warmest of welcomes. ‘I guess something went wrong with you and Fallon? But you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’
Beth was too out of breath to speak, and she was a little horrified that Jack had heard that there had been something between her and John. She ought to have expected it, though, for no one could do anything in Dawson without everyone hearing about it.
Jack’s cabin was a log one, much like Oz’s, but larger and newer and the furniture was less crude.
‘You can have the bed,’ he said as he stirred up his stove and put some more wood on it. ‘I’ve got a camp bed, that’ll do me.’
‘What did you hear about Fallon and me?’ she asked, sitting down on a miner’s string chair.
Jack shrugged. ‘Just that you’d taken up with him, but I was a bit sad you didn’t feel able to tell me in any of your letters.’
‘Do you tell me every time you have a new woman in your life?’ she retorted.
‘I would if she meant anything special.’
‘Well, Fallon wasn’t special. It was just a bit of—’ She paused, not knowing how to explain without admitting it was just sex.
‘A fling?’ he prompted.
‘Yes, that’s all it was.’
Jack nodded in understanding. ‘So who ended it?’
There was nothing for it but to tell him how it was. But as she began to tell him what John had said after the fire, she saw the funny side of it and began to laugh.
‘Oh, Jack, it was so weird. I’d never have put him down as a Holy Joe, and when he came out with all that turning away from wickedness, and saying Dawson was like Sodom and Gomorrah, I couldn’t keep a straight face.’
Jack laughed too. ‘I sometimes think that all the strangest people in the world end up in Dawson. I always found Fallon a bit of an oddball. He used to come into the Nugget and have just one drink while you were playing. He didn’t seem to have any pals, he never gambled, I couldn’t see what attracted him to the Klondike, or why he bought the Monte