Down the Yukon Read Online Free PDF Page A

apartment that cost five dollars a month. Back then I worked at a cannery for ten cents an hour, ten hours a day. It was the going wage in the States, and if wages had improved in the several years since, it couldn’t have been by more than a couple cents.
    Silent Sam called Golden and raised him. There was now $150,000 in that pot.
    Goldie in turn called him and raised him. He had a smile playing at his lips.
    This time Bonnifield was content to call.
    With a triumphant flourish, Goldie laid down four queens.
    Silent Sam, with no expression whatsoever, laid down four kings. His long arm reached across the table and raked in a fortune.
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    The next time I went looking for Ethan I found him at the Bodega Saloon. This time Ethan wasn’t looking on. He was gambling, though not with large amounts, and he was winning more than he was losing. To my surprise, Cornelius Donner came and went from the table, and the two of them seemed fast friends.
    In fact, I was astounded. To me the warmth in Donner’s voice sounded no more genuine than his costume. When Donner looked at me out of the corner of his penetrating eyes—he never addressed me—I saw nothing in them but the depths and darkness of a bottomless well.
    When I caught Ethan alone I alluded to his gambling money by kidding that he must have turned prospector and discovered a new gold creek. He told me that Donner was the owner of the saloon and had staked him.
    I wondered why Donner would give Ethan money. I guessed it was a way of trying to bribe Ethan into more boxing matches, even though Ethan had told everyone in town he’d never fight again.
    In the days to come, now that Ethan had a cash grubstake, he turned in earnest to playing the fool on fortune’s wheel. Roulette, poker, faro, three-card monte, he played them all, not only at the Bodega but all up and down Front Street, and at midnight he went dancing. One night Abe sent me to try to bring him home, but Lucky Ethan was winning. He assured me that he was “really living” for the first time in his life. “Tell Abraham…,” he declared, and then Ethan couldn’t come up with the words. He’d been drinking and he couldn’t think straight. “Why even bother?” he said finally.
    The rest of April there was alcohol on Ethan’s breath. He no longer checked in at the mill.
    â€œI’ve lost him,” Abe lamented.
    So had I.
    The trouble was, Ethan kept winning. Not all the time, but often enough for his nickname to seem deserved. Still, “lucky” isn’t the word I would have used to describe him.
    There were storm warnings wherever Ethan might have looked, but he wasn’t looking. All Dawson was talking about another gambler, a nattily dressed man who waltzed into the Northern, directly to the roulette wheel, and laid a thousand dollars on the red. The wheel stopped on black. He bet another thousand on the red, and lost again. Stolidly, he bet on the red a third time, laying another thousand on the felt. Again, it went to the house.
    Like a mule butting its bloodied head against its stall, the man bet seven more times on the red, and lost every time.
    Finally, showing no emotion, the man walked away. At the bar, he ordered a drink. The next day the newspaper reported that he said to the bartender, “I went broke.” With that, he walked into the street and shot himself in the head.
    Another man who’d lost everything stayed drunk and raved that a huge black python was after him.
    Ethan must have heard about these two, and others. He couldn’t quit.
    I questioned my long infatuation with the Golden City. A madness had infected the San Francisco of the North, and it had ahold of my brother.
    One night I heard he might be at the Opera House attending a vaudeville show, and I set out to find him. Amid a sea of men on the ground floor I tracked him by his hearty laugh to one of the private boxes above, wherehe was