Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [188]
There were a few women along Bonanza. In the main they were a tough, hard-bitten breed who dug holes in the frozen ground as efficiently as their men, and often did other jobs as well, like washing for other miners or baking bread and pies to earn badly needed extra money. They rebuffed Beth’s tentative overtures of friendship, and while Jack said this was because they didn’t want a pretty woman near their men, Beth felt it was more likely that they had heard the gossip about her.
While that didn’t matter here, Beth realized with a little alarm that once back on the Outside she was going to face more serious social disapproval.
A dance-hall girl, or even a whore, might get married, or become a nurse or a secretary, with little fear of anyone discovering what she had done here. But Beth knew she was up there with Klondike Kate, Diamond Tooth Gertie and other women who’d made a big splash in Dawson City, and the stories about them all had spread all over the world through newspaper articles about the Klondike.
So unless she gave up playing her fiddle in public, and never told a soul on the Outside that she’d been to Dawson City during the Gold Rush, the more scandalous parts of her time here in Dawson were going to get out.
Beth had been thinking about this problem one morning as she got washed and dressed. She had no solution as her fiddle-playing was the only way she had of making a living. But as the sun was shining, she thought she would stop worrying about her future and see if she could tempt Jack into leaving his digging to go for a walk with her.
She knew the temperature had risen the second she walked out of the cabin for her face didn’t tingle as it usually did. Then she heard dripping. It was all around her, coming from the snow-covered machinery, the roof of the cabin, the path down to Oz’s, everywhere.
The snow was melting!
Excitedly, she ran up behind the cabin and up the hill, calling to Jack. He paused in his digging as she approached him and leaned on his shovel with a wide grin on his face.
Beth stopped short, whatever she was going to say forgotten at the sight of him without his beard.
‘When did you do that?’ she asked.
‘Do what?’
‘You know! Your beard’s gone.’
‘Oh, that.’ He rubbed his chin as if he was surprised to find no hairy mass there. ‘I saw the thaw had come this morning, and I thought it was time the beard went too.’
‘You look much nicer,’ she said. In fact he looked very handsome, for his square jaw and wide mouth were two good features he never should have covered. ‘And much younger.’
‘I’m glad it meets with your approval,’ he said. ‘But what were you rushing up here to tell me? Is Queen Victoria dead?’
‘Not as far as I know.’ Beth laughed. ‘I was just excited because the snow is melting.’
‘Remember how it was last year?’ Jack mused. ‘Up to our knees in mud at Lake Bennett and you skipping off to look for spring flowers!’
‘Let’s go and do that again,’ she suggested.
‘There won’t be any flowers for a while,’ he reminded her.
‘But there might be in sheltered places. Let’s go and look?’
Jack stuck his shovel hard into the ground. ‘All right, just to please you.’
As they reached the woods at the top of the hill, the thaw was even more apparent, for the sound of snow plopping from the branches of trees was almost a symphony. Beth made a snowball and threw it at Jack, and he quickly retaliated. She ran for it, but each time she took shelter behind a tree, she made another snowball to hurl at him.
The game went on and on, both of them shrieking with laughter each time they were hit and jeering at each other when they missed.
They had gone further and further into the wood, and Beth found a very big tree to hide behind. Jack was suddenly silent, so she peeped round the tree trunk to see