Down the Yukon Read Online Free PDF

applauding lustily, gulping champagne, and peeling off bills for the waiter. Cornelius Donner was in the box, Henry Brackett too—all three were in tailcoats. They were surrounded by a bevy of dance-hall girls with heavy nugget chains around their waists.
    I caught Ethan as he was leaving the theater, pulled him away from his friends, and spoke my mind. In fact I poured my heart out. My brother was so drunk he could barely keep on his feet, but he listened, wide-eyed. At the last, I appealed to the memory of our father, who used to call drinking and gambling “the engines of calamity.”
    After a long silence, Ethan said, “Abraham sent you.”
    I shook my head. “No, Ethan, this is me.”
    He went his way, I went mine. I found out the next day that I’d been talking to the owner of a half-interest in a dance hall—the Monte Carlo, no less—and a third share of Forty Above, a fabulously rich claim on Eldorado Creek. Ethan had been winning big. Suddenly he was, if not one of the kings of the Klondike, one of its dukes or earls. Compared to his present station, part ownership of a sawmill was a penny-ante game.
    Dawson City-style, everything kept happening fast. Within days, the men at the mill were saying that Ethan’s luck had turned—he was on a losing streak. I worried that he’d be ruined. An old hand at the mill told me, “He can lose feathers and still fly. It depends on how many get pulled out.”
    Loss was in the air. From the Nugget, Abraham read to me of the passing of Joseph Ladue. The founder of Dawson City was the man who’d set us up in business and granted us 51-percent ownership of the sawmill. He died far from the Klondike, of tuberculosis, at his Adirondacks farm in New York State. After thirteenyears of hardship in the North, he’d finally struck it rich by claiming forty acres of swamp where the Klondike meets the Yukon. A day or two after George Washington Carmack’s fabulous discovery, Ladue guessed right that a town would rise there.
    â€œSic transit gloria,” Abraham commented. “Joseph Ladue was one of the most famous men in the country when he died. Worth five million dollars, they say, and now the worms are making supper of him.”
    â€œDon’t be so gloomy,” I said. I knew Abe was thinking more of Ethan than Joseph Ladue.
    â€œAt least he was able to live a year or so after he returned triumphant. It says he married his long-suffering sweetheart.”

FIVE
    Maybe it was Abraham saying “sweetheart” that set my heart on edge. I went to the Palace Grand to see Arizona Charlie Meadows. I had to find out if he’d heard anything from Jamie’s father regarding their return to Dawson City.
    When Jamie and her father left in July, Arizona Charlie had promised them their place in his show for the following summer. Jamie’s performances of her father’s Klondike poetry, with Homer scribbling in the background against the backdrop of a log cabin, had never failed to pack the house. Yet before ’98 was out, Meadows had invented a new act featuring Little Margie Newman, shamelessly billing her as the Princess of the Klondike.
    I’d been certain that Jamie and Homer’s loyal audiences at the Palace Grand would turn a cold shoulder to the new act, but I was dead wrong. In the place of Jamieperforming her father’s authentic narratives of the rush, Meadows gave the audiences a nine-year-old singing songs so sentimental they were nauseating.
    To my dismay, the same townsmen and the same grizzled men from the creeks who’d showered Jamie with wildflowers not only bestowed the pretender with their affection, they tossed nuggets onto the stage until Little Margie was heel-deep in them while blowing her kisses. All this for a nine-year-old as authentic to the North as a flamingo.
    Jamie, on the other hand, had been born and raised in the North, in the bush no less. Until the age of