Gold Dust (25 page)

“It’s good to be home again.” Olivia’s hand sought her husband’s. He took her small hand into his much larger one and squeezed
gently.

“I believe this journey of ours was your idea,” he reminded her with a lift of one brow.

“And a good idea it was. I’m sure Ellen appreciated having us to help her get settled at Cornell. And after eight years of
marriage, it was time you passed my father’s inspection.”

Gabe grimaced. “Your father makes a lynch mob look like a friendly church social.”

Olivia gave him a dimpled smile. “I think you held your own in that quarter.”

“Surviving a lynch mob or surviving your father?”

“Both,” she said with a chuckle. Her eyes surveyed the vista below—the neat log ranch house and outbuildings, the cattle that
were dark brown dots against the green sweep of the valley. In the clear, cool morning air, everything looked almost unnaturally
sharp and clean. “It was good to go,” she mused aloud, “but it’s better to be back.”

“You got that right,” Gabe agreed. He slapped the reins along the horses’ back. “Git up there, you nags. My stomach’s growling,
and I’m hoping that Katy didn’t eat all the breakfast.”

“Just hope that Katy didn’t cook the breakfast,” Olivia commented with a fond grin.

As the wagon rumbled down the slope, the blankets piled in the back with the luggage stirred and groaned. “Are we there yet?”
Five year old David O’Connell emerged from the blankets, auburn curls springing up every which way from his head and sleepy
green eyes cast pleadingly toward his parents.

“Almost, sweetie,” Olivia answered. “Want to come up here and see?”

Davie scrambled into his father’s lap, placed chubby hands on Gabe’s brawny arms, and bounced up and down as if the activity
would make the horses pick up their pace.

“There’s the ranch! I c’n see it!”

“That’s it all right,” Gabe agreed.

“We’re comin’, Katy; we’re comin’, Hunter; we’re comin’, Katy,” the boy chanted all the way down the wagon track until they
stopped in front of the barn. “Where’s Katy?” he asked when he didn’t immediately see his older sister.

Olivia wasn’t worried when Katy didn’t greet them in the yard. If her stepdaughter was working the cattle, she’d probably
seen the wagon and would come in soon. “Katy will be here,” she promised Davie.

“Where’s Hunter?” Davie cried impatiently as his father swung him down from the wagon. “I want Hunter!”

“You don’t need to shout to the mountains about it,” Gabe chided. “Hunter’s probably with your sister.”

“Yeah,” came a new voice. “I’d guess that he is.”

“Clem!” Olivia greeted the ranch manager with a smile.

“Howdy, Olivia, Gabriel. Got your letter. Glad to see you got in okay.”

“Where’s Katy?” Gabe asked as he shook the older man’s hand.

Clem Jenkins took off his battered felt hat and scratched his balding pate with one finger. “Well, now, that’s a purty good
question, Gabe.”

Gabe’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?” His face instantly transformed from open and pleasant to a countenance no one would
want to face behind the barrel of a gun. Olivia knew that for a fact, because she’d been there—facing that grim expression
over the business end of a pistol.

She placed a calming hand on her husband’s arm. “Clem, what are you saying?”

The ranch manager handed Gabe a piece of notepaper. “Found this one morning back in late July. It was addressed to you, but
I read it anyways.”

Gabe scanned the lines on the page. With every word he read, his scowl grew darker. “I’m going to wallop her little behind
until she can’t sit for a month,” he finally growled.

Olivia felt a tingle of alarm. “What is it?”

He gave her the note to read. “Oh my!” she exclaimed. Then she smiled wryly. “That’s Katy.”

“Why the hell didn’t you telegraph us?”

“I did,” Jenkins said. “You’d left New York for Paris, and I couldn’t find the name of that friend of Olivia’s where you were
staying.”

“Damnation! What possessed the little idiot? Running off on a wild-goose chase for gold—alone, to the Klondike of all places?”

Jenkins looked at the ground, shifted his scrawny weight from one foot to the other, and cleared his throat. “Well now, Gabriel,
she ain’t exactly alone.”

“Did Katy take Hunter?” Davie demanded indignantly.

“Yes. Yes, she did,” Jenkins said. “And though Katy didn’t say anything about it in that note of hers, oP Myrna up at the
saloon said she weaseled her way into guidin’ some tenderfoot newspaper writer up to Dawson.”

“Newspaper writer?” Gabe repeated ominously. “A man?”

Jenkins squirmed. “Well… yeah.”

“Katy’s gone to the Klondike with a man.” Gabe’s voice was quiet, as though he were trying the idea on for size, but Olivia
knew the signs—the twitch at the hinge of his jaw, the narrowing of his eyes, the flare of his nostrils.

She squeezed his arm. “Gabe, let’s talk about this inside. Davie, would you help Clem put the team away, please? Come on,
Gabriel, let’s go inside.”

“I’ll kill him,” Gabe said quietly as Olivia pulled him toward the log ranch house. “And I’ll break every bone in his body
before I put him out of his goddamned misery.”

“Now Gabe…”

He grabbed the first thing at hand when they entered the house and sent it crashing across the kitchen. Fortunately, the milk
pail was unbreakable, and the dent it put in the wooden cabinet just added a bit of rustic atmosphere to the kitchen.

Olivia sighed. Her husband had many virtues, but an even temper was not one of them. “Gabriel, sit down. You’re acting just
like a typical father!”

“I am a father! I’m an outraged father! Goddamn it to hell, what the hell kind of burr does she have under her blanket to
go and do something like this?”

“Sit down. Let me get you a cool drink.”

He thumped himself down on the bench that ran the length of the kitchen table. “Stop treating me like one of your patients.”

“I will when you stop behaving like a grizzly with a bee sting on its butt. Do you recall how my father acts whenever he sees
you?”

Gabe just growled.

“That’s exactly how you’re acting. Gabriel, Katy is a grown woman capable of making her own decisions. She was very restless
here. We both knew it. She needs to find a place for herself and choose her own life.”

“In the goddamned Klondike? Olivia, do you have any idea what it’s like up in that country?”

Olivia propped her hands on her hips. “You think it’s something Katy can’t handle? When she was ten she rescued you from a
lynch mob. When she was twelve she saved us both from Ace Candliss by riding down a mountain and fetching Crooked Stick and
his band. Really, Gabriel, I don’t think Katy needs a nursemaid.” She filled a glass of cool water from the pump in the sink
and set it on the table in front of him.

Gabe took a swallow and scowled. “Katy might not need a nursemaid, but she sure as hell doesn’t need to be playing nursemaid
to some slick city Don Juan.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions.” Olivia sat down beside her husband and patted his knee. “For all we know this poor fellow might
be sixty years old, stand four and a half feet tall, and have no hair on his head. Besides, Katy’s old enough to protect herself
from a man.”

“Olivia, you were twenty-six when I met you, and you weren’t old enough to protect yourself from me.”

“Mmm,” she said with a smile. “But if I’d been as capable as Katy, I probably would have shot out both your knees when you
dragged me up that mountain.”

Gabe turned a simmering look on her. “That’s not what you would have shot out, and you know it.”

She lifted a brow. “That’s probably so.”

“According to your father, you should have.”

She smiled. “It would have put a crimp in your style.”

In a lightning move, he kissed her. Without releasing her mouth, he stood and scooped her off the bench into his arms. “You
know what getting mad does to me,” he whispered against her lips.

“My love, getting mad has nothing to do with it. Everything does that to you.”

He chuckled and headed toward their bedroom. “Only when I’m with you.”

“Gabriel,” Olivia said as he deposited her on their bed, “I’m glad that I didn’t shoot your knees out when you dragged me
up that mountain.” She grinned wickedly. “Or anything else.”

“So am I.” He lowered himself beside her, nuzzled her neck, and started to work on the buttons of her bodice. “But if that
tenderfoot is doing anything like this to Katy, I’ll kill him.”

Katy and Jonah were on the trail by midmorning with the Indian packers that Andy had procured. The climb was a grim one. Just
above Stone House, the trail crossed a vast snow-field with its treacherous broken ice and slippery footing. The sun blazed
off the snow in a blinding brilliance that hid pitfalls and dangerous irregularities. A man ahead of them lost a toehold on
the slope and slid down the icy incline to the sharp rocks below. He lay there until someone reached him by climbing over
the boulder field above Stone House. His rescuers waved to his comrades above that he was alive, but he had a broken leg.
His trek to the goldfields, for the time being at least, was over.

Above the snowfield, the trail all but disappeared. Flags, cairns, and splashes of paint on boulders marked the way, and in
places rough handrails had been erected to help the struggling hikers pull themselves up the steep ascent. The landscape was
a jumble of boulders, some bigger than a house, others small and ready to roll and shift under unwary feet. The Klondikers
scrambled, crawled, or leapt precariously from boulder to boulder—however they could manage the task. Progress was slow and
irksome.

During the first hour of climbing, Katy conceived a healthy
respect for the professional packers who labored over this trail again and again to haul goods for the hopeful gold kings.
A wire-rope tramway intended to lift people and goods over the summit was in the initial stages of construction, but until
it was finished, the only way to conquer this most formidable barrier between the seacoast and the goldfields was sweat and
muscle. The packers put a good amount of both into every trip they made. Any fee, no matter how steep, was paltry considering
what they had to endure.

The climb was grim, however, for reasons other than the difficulty of the trail. Jonah was dour and silent—very unlike him.
Katy was equally morose. She spent most of the morning telling herself that if Jonah was stupid enough to propose, then he
deserved the setdown she’d given him. A little humility would do him good. Then she spent the afternoon telling herself she
had made the right decision. She could have jumped into Jonah’s arms and told her better judgment to go to hell. That was
the way she usually did things, Katy admitted, and it had gotten her a pantload of trouble more than once. She should be congratulated
for showing some good sense this once in her life.

Nine hundred vertical feet above Stone House they reached the plateau known as the “Scales.” Katy rested against one of the
boulders that littered the brittle, hummocky grass while the packers took their turn reweighing their packs. Caches of goods
were piled here and there under tarps that were weighted down with stones. Klondikers who shuttled their provisions across
the pass in numerous trips often stored their goods at the Scales and hoped they would stay there undisturbed.

Exhausted and sore, Katy couldn’t imagine having to make this terrible climb more than once. Even gold could not tempt her
to such agony. As her breath slowly returned, she cast a surreptitious look at Jonah, who sat resting against one of the covered
caches, his head tilted back against the tarp, his eyes squinted shut in the bright sunlight. Katy felt free to admire the
column of muscle in his throat, the strong line of his jaw,
the sunburned height of his wide brow. He’d made the climb so far without complaint. In fact, he’d even shared a joke or two
with Andy and their packers. How had she ever believed him to be a weak dandy just because he was from east of the Mississippi?

Suddenly his eyes opened and focused onto her as if, even with closed eyes, he’d known she was looking at him. He lifted his
hand in a casual salute—mocking or real, Katy couldn’t decide—before he dropped his head back onto its rough pillow and stared
at the sky.

Six hundred more vertical feet of climb earned them the summit of Chilkoot Pass, 3550 feet above where they had started the
trek at Dyea. Exhausted, heads swimming from shortness of breath, dry-mouthed, and aching, they dropped their backpacks and
collapsed against them. Even the professional packers were staggering by now. Ten full minutes passed before Katy noted the
crowds, the tents, the Royal Mounties’ tent that guarded the border between Alaska and Canada. The summit was a hive of activity—more
so than she would have imagined. Not far from the Mountie station, a group of men indulged in a fest of backslapping and laughter.
How did they find the energy? Katy wondered wearily. How did they even find the breath to laugh after that climb?