The Call of the Wild: Klondike Cannibals, Vol. 2 (7 page)

*  *  *  *  *

Annie stood with her aunt in a small huddle of people just off the main dockland road, in the shadow of a large brick warehouse.

Jack
walked a little closer.

A
tall Indian with sad eyes stood behind a hastily-erected gaming table, smoking a cigar. Beside him stood a pale showman of middle age, wearing tiny, round-rimmed glasses fitted with dark-blue lenses. He had a dark goatee, an ivory-tipped cane, a slick long-coat and top hat. A cheap showbiz poster pasted on the brick wall behind them announced their names:
The Uncanny
Dr. Fiddler and Indian Jack, “Wendigo Hunter.”

On the surface of the table
were three upside-down clamshells.

Alarmed
now, Jack quickly pushed his way towards the front of the crowd, where Annie stood.

“…
but it’s obvious it’s the one on the left,” Jack overheard Annie say to her aunt.

Dr. Fiddler stroked hi
s goatee, and fixed Annie with an intense stare. “Are you sure?”

Annie
nodded nervously.

At Dr. Fiddler’s signal,
Indian Jack lifted the clamshell, revealing nothing. No pea.

The crowd booed.

“We lost again, dear!” Annie’s aunt croaked.

At that moment Annie noticed
Jack. She seemed genuinely surprised and somewhat embarrassed to see him standing there.

Jack seized
the opportunity to walk to her side. “What are you doing here?” he whispered. “It isn’t safe, this game.”

“I know
!” She grabbed the back of his arm tightly, and he felt a singular thrill shoot through his body. “But now I owe them money…”

S
he let go of Jack’s arm and stepped forward. Reaching both hands up behind her ears, she unclasped her necklace. “This is all I have… Please…”

A
nnie laid the necklace down on the table.

Jack
saw that it was a cameo: a profile portrait of a woman, carved in cowry-shell.

Annie’s aunt was aghast. “But
that was your mother’s, dear!”

Jack looked around the circle, coolly sizing up the crowd.
There were a number of dangerous-looking men eyeing Annie closely. He knew that many—if not all—of the crowd were actually shills, and were in on the scam. The trick would be to extricate Annie and her aunt before they got in any deeper. He needed a distraction.

Jack
stepped forward. “How much does the lady owe?”

“
No! Please,” Annie said to him. “You don’t have to do this.” There was an edge of desperation in her voice.

“
Four hundred dollars,” Dr. Fiddler said to Jack, with the faint trace of a smile on his bluish lips.

Jack grunted, a little shocked. But there was no backing down now.
“I’m good for the money,” he said. “Let me stand in her place. Double or nothing.”

The words were out of his mouth before he could fully think through the consequences. But Jack
lived life on the fly, and liked it better that way.

Dr. Fiddler laughed, looking at the crowd in disbelief.
“Eight hundred dollars is a lot of money, son.”

Jack opened his wallet and took out
the cash that Joe had given him. He placed it on the table.

T
he crowd gasped with excitement. Here, at last, was some gambling worth watching!

“She gets to keep the necklace,” Jack said. “And we go one more round.”

“Ladies and Gentlemen!” Dr. Fiddler bellowed, twirling his cane gleefully, suddenly energized. “Can our young hero outwit Indian Jack? Let’s find out!” He signalled to Indian Jack, who held up a dried pea in between his fingers for everyone to see.

Then Indian Jack
put the pea down on the table, and placed the middle of the three clamshells upon it. Starting slowly, he began sliding the shells around on the table, leisurely at first, and then faster and faster, until the shells were a blur, shifting positions at incredible speed.

It was mesmerizing to watch
. Indian Jack’s hands slid the shells effortlessly around the table. Jack remembered what Scotty had said:
He had a way about him, I’ll give him that.

Annie and her
aunt watched the shells whirl about, trying desperately to keep track of where the pea ended up.

But
Jack didn’t bother. He was too busy thinking. He knew that, now that he’d shown his money to the gang, they would try their best to separate him from it, regardless if he won or not. He glanced around, trying to locate a possible escape route. He noticed three young toughs at the back of the group watching him like hungry wolves, and knew they would be the ones to come for him, when the time came.

Jack
leaned over to Annie. “Get ready to run,” he whispered very carefully in her ear.

S
he looked torn. But she nodded, ever so slightly.

Finally, In
dian Jack slowed his movements, and then the shells slid to a stop.

“
And so, young man,” Dr. Fiddler pointed theatrically at the table with his cane. “Where is the pea?”

“T
he middle one,” Annie’s aunt whispered.

Jack ignored her, and leaned in, as if to take a closer look.

“That’s an
easy one, Doc—” he said, reaching out and scooping up his cash. “It ain’t on the table!”

Before Dr. Fiddler could react, Jack
kicked the table over, scattering all three shells onto the cobblestones.

It was true. T
here was no pea under any of them.

Annie looked
up at Jack, astonished.

Indian Jack had been
palming the pea, and placing it under whichever shell he chose. That way he could let an easy mark like Annie win the first few rounds, before suckering her into wagering some real money.

Jack had hung around in saloons long enough to
know
that
trick.

For a split second no one moved.

Jack was dismayed to see that Annie didn’t immediately turn and run. But there was no time to think now—

He
tucked his cash back in his pocket, then whirled around to face the three young wolves, who—as he’d suspected—were headed straight for him.

He ducked under the first one’s swing, getting his weight low to the ground
before springing upward, savagely striking the man in the chin with his shoulder, knocking him down. The second managed to grab Jack by the collar, which was a mistake because Jack grabbed his hand and twisted, once, twice, forcing him to the ground with a broken wrist. The third punched Jack hard across the face, but he recovered quickly, punching the man squarely in the nose. He must’ve broken it, because it made a satisfying crunching noise, and blood shot out all over the place.

Then someone hit Jack over the back of the head, and darkness took him.

*  *  *  *  *

When Jack came to, he could taste blood in his mouth.

His eyelids fluttered open. He saw dark cobblestones swimming before his eyes. Long, pulsing waves of nausea throbbed through his head.

Without warning
he began to vomit. He put his head down between his hands and rode it out, vomiting again and again, until there was nothing left in his quivering stomach. But still spasms continued to roll up out of him, though thankfully they seemed to be easing. He spat and coughed and spluttered until, finally, his heaving stopped.

He
wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked around.

It was sometime after dark, and though there were still a few dozen people walking to and fro on the docks, no one paid him any attention. There were too many men sleeping in the gut
ter already to notice one more.

Jack sat up. He probed the back of his head gingerly with his fingertips, feeling a little dried blood encrusted in his hair, where the blackjack—or whatever
it was they had hit him with—had struck him down. Memories of what had happened started coming back to him in fragmentary images, as if illuminated by flashes of heat-lightning: Indian Jack whirling shells, Dr. Fiddler’s small blue lenses, the wolves swinging at him…

Annie’s necklace.

It was only after a moment or two of sitting there in a stupor that Jack realized he’d been robbed.

His
pockets were empty: his wallet was missing, along with the cash he’d gotten from Joe. He reached down and checked his clothing several times, with no luck. It was all gone. His identification, his bills of ownership and receipts from the Alaska Trade & Transportation Company…

Four
years’ wages. Gone in a flash.

His mental fog cleared
. Just a couple of hours ago he’d felt on top of the world: he’d been a hero, heading North... Now he was back to square one.

No money,
no outfit, no ticket.

Hi
s ridiculous attempt to save Annie had failed, backfired even. Surely they wouldn’t have hurt her? For a moment, Jack’s imagination conjured up horrific scenes out of a dime novel: the gang had kidnapped and sold her into white slavery. For a moment he imagined rough, foreign hands grabbing at her, and he couldn’t bear the thought.

But they
weren’t murderers: otherwise Jack wouldn’t have woken up at all. They could’ve easily slit his throat and slipped his body into the Bay when he was out cold, but they didn’t.

All they wanted was his money.

So there was a good chance they let her go. Or that she escaped in the confusion.

He got to his feet
shakily and looked around. The gaming table was gone, along with the cheap poster on the brick wall. There was no sign of Indian Jack, or Dr. Fiddler, or any of the other members of the crowd…

Jack
thought about going to the police. But he remembered what Scotty had said about the local patrolman. If this gang was the same one—and he was pretty sure it was—then that might be a bad decision. He could be thrown in prison himself.

Or worse.

Jack thought briefly about going to a different police station he knew uptown. But what would he say? He guessed that mentioning that a young lady of class was in danger and possibly kidnapped would get their attention, but he didn’t even know Annie’s last name, or where she was from.

And, assuming the police
believed him, where would they even begin to look for her?

*  *  *  *  *

One night, about four or five years before, while throwing back a prodigious amount of cheap whisky with some California Fish Patrol pals up in Benecia, Jack had fallen off a wharf.

Nobody saw him fall
, though his friends noticed he was gone soon enough, and came looking for him. It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world for Jack to call out to them: they’d have laughed, and fished him out in a minute, and everyone could’ve gone back to drinking whisky and swapping stories about their girls, or their boats.

But
he’d said nothing.

I
n the grip of drunkenness, watching the stars whirl silently overhead, he allowed the tide to sweep him out into the Carquinez Strait.

No one knew where he was!
He’d lived for a time, tasted life, and now he could go again. Without a struggle. It would be beautiful: if not a hero’s death, exactly, at least a death on his own terms, at sea.

After an hour or two adrift
, alone with his beautiful melancholy, Jack sobered up. And as he did, he found he did not want to die after all. He did not regret letting himself be swept out by the tide—it had been a kind of religious experience for him—but he wanted to live, and remember it. Perhaps have many more experiences like it.

And to d
o that, he had to survive.

He knew that his only hope
to free himself was to cut across the current. So he began to swim purposefully.

But
he’d been swept out too far.

He’d
almost given up when a Greek fisherman out of Vallejo picked him up and took him ashore.

*  *  *  *  *

The stillness of dawn was shattered by the shriek of a seagull.

Jack
had managed to close his eyes for an hour or two in an alleyway not far from the dockyard square, but strong hunger pains woke him just after dawn.

Now the
streets glowed ghostly pink in the pale light.

He’
d spent a rough night out on the streets, wandering around San Francisco like a ghost, his mind strangely blank. He had nowhere to go, no one to turn to… not without Eliza finding out what had happened, anyway.

And that was the last thing he wanted.

She wouldn’t yet know that he hadn’t returned to Oakland the night before, but she would certainly be very worried if she didn’t hear from him before the day was through. As far as he knew, she was still planning to come see him off on the
Umatilla
, which left—Jack did a quick calculation in his head—in just over thirty hours.

H
e knew that the direction of his whole life hinged on the actions he would take before then.

H
e stood up. He hadn’t eaten any food since lunch at the seafood restaurant, the day before. If he was to put any sort of plan into action, he’d need to eat something.

But how?
He had no money, and couldn’t ask for help from anyone he knew, for fear of Eliza finding out what had happened.

After wandering around
blankly for about an hour or so, he managed to find a little wooden shack down by the Southern Pacific tracks, where a poor couple in their fifties lived.

They took pity on him,
fed him a bowl of thin soup made from whatever scraps they could find—what hoboes called “mulligan”—and gave him a handful of carrots they’d grown in the little garden they’d planted nearby.

He thanked them and made his way back to the dockyard square.