The Moor - Laurie R. King [48]
"I see my friend has been talking about me," he said with a smile.
"Gould has said nothing about your past," said Holmes.
Ketteridge raised his eyebrows and looked slightly wary—the standard response when Holmes pulled personal history out of what appeared to be thin air.
"You guessed—" Ketteridge instantly corrected himself with a conspiratorial smile. "You deduced that? Perhaps I won't ask what you based it on." His smile was a bit strained, and he took a swallow from his glass before continuing.
"It was Alaska," he began. "Not the Californian fields, which were either worked out or under claim long before I was born. I was living in Portland in July of 1887, twenty-one years old and making a not very good living as a small shopkeeper, when on the sixteenth of the month rumours began to spread like wildfire that a ship had put in to San Francisco with fifty-thousand dollars of gold in a single suitcase. The next day this old rust-bucket the Portland put into Seattle harbour with nearly two tons of gold—two tons! More than a million dollars of gold, right there in one ship. Two hours after the news hit Portland, my dry-goods store was up for sale, cheap. I unloaded it in less than a week, bought my provisions, and lit out for the north.
"I never did find how many ships full of gold seekers had already left, but I was on one of the first dozen. Still, the river route freezes early, and I couldn't risk getting stuck, so cross-country it was, to Skagway and Dyea, across the Chilkoot Pass and north into the Yukon. Thought I'd make it to the goldfields before winter set in, but between one thing and another, I met it full on. Jesus—oh, pardon me, Mrs Holmes. Lord, it was cold. I nearly died—you wouldn't believe the kind of cold there. Tears freeze your eyes shut and break your lashes right off, spit is frozen solid before it hits the ground, leather boots that get wet will crack right across if they're not kept greased. And oh yes, if you don't see a tiny hole in your glove, your finger's turned to ice before you notice the cold."
Smiling, he held out his left hand and wiggled the stump of the little finger.
"Still, I was lucky. I didn't starve or freeze, or get washed away in a river half turned to ice or buried under an avalanche or eaten alive by mosquitos or bears or wolfs or shot by an ornery claim-jumper or any of the thousand other ways to die. No, I made it, a little the worse for wear, it's true, but with adventure enough for a lifetime, and gold enough as well. Yes, I was lucky. When I got to the fields I found that there was still plenty of gold for a man possessed of stamina and a shovel. Within months of the discovery, the smallest creek and most remote hole were claimed."
Richard Ketteridge was soon gone from the fields, with gold enough to buy his luxury for life.
"I married my childhood sweetheart, and buried her ten years later. Somehow it wasn't all so fine after she died, and so I sold up and began to wander: the Japans, Sydney, Cape Town. I ended up here a couple of years ago, heard about it from a friend up in Scotland less than two weeks after I entered the country. Now if that isn't fate for you—it took my fancy and so I stayed. I like the air here. It reminds me of the best parts of Alaska, in the spring. Still, the winters are cold, and I'm beginning to feel the old itch again, more than the odd month in New York or Paris can scratch."
His story had the worn and polished texture of a favourite possession, taken out regularly to be handed around and admired, and I could easily imagine him sitting with his new friends in a Scottish hunting lodge after a day's rough shoot, trading stories of unlikely places and successful ventures.
"You plan to move, then?" Holmes asked.
"I think so."
"Baring-Gould will miss you," commented Holmes.
"I'll miss him. He's a crazy old coot, but he does tell some fine stories. I'll think of him when I'm sitting in the sun, in the south of France, maybe, or even Hong Kong for a real change. My secretary would like that, wouldn't you,