Walking heavily, she returned to where the dogs stood and checked Rhodes automatically, making sure he was warm and well-protected by his furs. The dogs had ceased quarreling and were resting in their harness. The animals were used to her way of travel by now, short runs and short rests—indeed, they seemed to like it. They were gallant dogs. She gave them and Rhodes a heartbroken look. She had no idea of which direction she should take. She might well be headed toward the Arctic Ocean or the Chukchi Sea instead of Nome. Nightmare stories she had heard of starving sled dogs eating their traces, of starving Eskimos eating their sled dogs, flashed through her mind.
Grimly, she headed in the direction she hoped was right and called to Snowman, “Mush!”
For the first time, Snowman balked. Roxanne looked at the powerful dog in amazement. Then suddenly she understood. Those intelligent eyes were looking at her anxiously; he was trying to tell her she was heading the wrong way. Impulsively, she went over and threw her arms around his beautiful shaggy neck. He licked her face sympathetically.
“Snowman,” she whispered huskily, “get us home.”
The dog made a soft growling sound in his throat. When Roxanne straightened up and resumed her position at the handlebars behind the sled, she snapped the whip high over the dogs’ heads so they could hear its singing message and let Snowman have his head. Straight and true he led the yelping pack off to the right of Roxanne’s original direction. Head aching from the white brilliance, Roxanne leaped on the runners and closed her eyes for a moment against the blinding glare. It would never do to get snow blindness; then they would surely all die. She closed her eyes whenever she stood on the runners, and sometimes briefly even as she ran behind the sled. But she feared falling, too—a broken bone could be just as fatal as snow blindness. Snowman seemed sure of himself as over that desolate wilderness he led his yelping pack.
And Roxanne, hanging on, tending Rhodes as well as she could, somehow keeping him alive, followed the big dog’s lead and prayed.
The trip became a race against time, against the elements, for a hard east wind was blowing which could mean more snow. If they were slowed down by a blizzard Rhodes’s fate was sealed, she was sure, and perhaps all of them would die.
Miraculously, the weather held.
Out of the trackless arctic, they made it into Nome. Exhausted, staggering, Roxanne brought them in, zigzagging a ragged course behind the sled as Snowman, that redoubtable malamute, tirelessly led his flagging fellows. On the sled, slumped in his furs, Rhodes lay insensible. At that point, Roxanne did not know if he was alive or dead.
Down Nome’s snow-packed streets, aglaze with ice, they sped. Past Wyatt Earp’s Only Second Class Saloon in Alaska. Past the jerrybuilt stores and the gawking miners who watched these gaunt furry apparitions sweep down out of the north where no one ought to be at this time of year.
They came to a collapsed halt in front of Josie’s place. Remembering Josie’s boast that she had the hottest house in Nome—steamy warm, for the half-naked women roaming about—Roxanne was sure that delivering Rhodes there was his best clear chance of survival.
Josie, who had been looking out the window through her lace curtains, came out and stared at Roxanne. Bulky in her furs, Roxanne surged toward that overdressed flashy figure in red taffeta and jet. She threw back her parka and cried in a panicky exhausted voice, “Oh, Josie, I need a doctor. Rhodes is hurt—I don’t know how bad. Can we get him inside?”
Josie took one look at Roxanne’s haggard face and let out a holler. Two of her minions came rushing out and unstrapped Rhodes’s inert figure. Having lifted him from the sled, they carried him inside and up to one of the rooms. Within minutes, Josie ushered in a man she proudly introduced as “the best sawbones in Nome.”
As the doctor took over, Roxanne staggered back downstairs, went out into the street where the dogs had collapsed panting in their harness, threw her arms around Snowman and wept uncontrollably. She was too exhausted to notice that a curious crowd had gathered to witness the Dawson blond’s dramatic return to Nome. Now one of the miners approached her. Gently he disengaged Roxanne’s arms from the gallant dog, lifted her from the icy street and stood her up. “I’ve got to get food for my dogs,” she whispered, wavering on her feet. “We wouldn’t have made it without them and they’re starving.”
“We’ll feed your dogs,” he said gruffly and made a grab for her arm as her knees buckled. After all she had been through, Roxanne lost consciousness for the first time. He carried her into Josie’s.
When Roxanne awoke that afternoon, Josie told her that Rhodes could stay in the room where he’d been put. Tiger Lil, as Josie called the Chinese girl, whose room she had appropriated for Rhodes, could take her tricks behind a hastily constructed partition in Yukon Cassie’s room. Roxanne was so grateful she wept again. Josie, her own brown eyes bright with tears, plied her with nourishing hot soup and scolded her. “Come on now, Rox. Nobody’s goin’ to die. With you nursin’ him, your fellow will get well soon—you’ll see.”
“Do you think so?” asked Roxanne, her eyes big and luminous in her thin face. “Oh, Josie do you think so?”
Josie nodded and hustled Roxanne off to be with Rhodes. To Tiger Lil’s complaints about being dispossessed Josie bellowed, “You ain’t never loved a man like that! Rox can have the room for as long as she needs it!”
Upstairs in that tiny room, Roxanne, thin and pale from her bitter adventures in the snows, willed Rhodes to live. His eyes were still closed, his lashes dark on his wasted cheeks. He still had not spoken a word to her.
“Concussed,” Josie’s sawbones called it. The shoulder wound was infected, he’d lost a lot of blood, his pulse was weak. As for the head wound—well, you just couldn’t tell about those, the doctor said, might come to for a minute and sink right back. Asked if Rhodes would make it, the doctor shook his head. No telling, he said cheerfully. These miners were a tough breed.
But Rhodes wasn’t a miner, thought Roxanne wistfully. He was a salt-water sailor, and somewhere his ship, the lovely proud Virginia Lass, awaited his return.
But the important thing was the fact that Rhodes had come for her, come to save her. Out of the trackless wastes, how many weary miles he must have come across country that even Leighton, with his taste for wilderness exploration, called desperate. . . . He must love her very much to have done that. A glow warmed the ice that had built up around her heart since leaving Dawson, and it broke inside her with a thunder greater than the spring thaw along the Yukon. The passion she felt growing within her was like the brilliant subtropical verdure that rose as if by magic in June across the barren subarctic slopes of the Yukon Valley.
Rhodes loved her, loved her . . . nothing else mattered. He had to live. Her fists clenched. She would snatch him from death. She would make him live.
In her narrow room, Roxanne sat and waited while outside, once again, the Dawson blond was the talk of Nome. Some said she had been drugged and kidnapped, others that she’d run away with Lars, and that Denby had pursued her. Some were of the opinion that Roxanne had killed them both and fled back to Nome with the lover who’d come all the way from Dawson by dogsled to claim her.
In the downstairs front room of the posh sporting house where booted miners clomped in and out, Josie shrugged and said not to ask her about it—then they’d hear no lies. Fact was, Rox was holed up, nursing a fellow who was more dead than alive. And if he died, Josie added pessimistically, from the desperate look of her, Rox would hurl herself into the Bering Sea.
The miners listened gravely. They’d long ago put the Dawson blond on a pedestal, and in their sentimental hearts they respected love.
On a night when the swirling aurora outside the small window spilled a sparkling shower of light onto the bleak white landscape, Rhodes opened his eyes. For a moment he stared vacantly at Roxanne in the lamplight, and she thought his lips silently formed her name. Then his eyes closed again, and he went back into that night of the mind that concussion bring
s.
The next day, still unconscious, he developed a raging fever. Quickly, Roxanne summoned the doctor. Shaking his head, the doctor explained that every kind of disease was rife in Nome, and this feller, worn out with his long trek in a state of shock from his concussion, and weakened by loss of blood, had been ripe to pick up any bug that was goin’ by. Could be malaria; he wasn’t sure. If this man’s constitution was tough enough, he’d come through it. If not . . . the doctor shrugged.
“He’ll come through it,” Roxanne said grimly, and the doctor, looking into her pale determined face, believed he would.
That little upstairs room had become Roxanne’s prison—her heaven and her hell. She scarcely left it. Wild with yearning, she sat besides Rhodes, spooning broth and whiskey and life into his wasted body. Aching with tenderness, she wiped his broad forehead gently with damp cloths. And when, after one of the assaults of burning fever, he shook with chills, she warmed his lean, sinewy form with her own warm naked body. Her very heart trembled at the sound of that loved voice when delirium shook him and he raved. Any injury he might have done her in Baltimore was long forgotten. He had loved her in Baltimore and she had not known it . . . then as now, he had loved her. She blanked from her mind the savagery of his attack on her body after the ball. It all seemed so long ago.
Nothing mattered, except that Rhodes loved her.
From gossip and rumors overheard by Josie and the girls, Roxanne was able to piece together some of what had happened to Rhodes after she had had him rolled in Dawson. He had taken a job in one of the mines and had gambled his wages at the Last Nugget Saloon, where he had won heavily from a “black hatted gambler.” Roxanne smiled. Case always wore a black hat. Perhaps he had let Rhodes win deliberately; Case had told her that rolling a man in an alley wasn’t his style.
With his winnings, Rhodes had bought a team of malamutes, a sled, heavy fur clothing and provisions, and had set out overland toward Nome.
When he finally reached Nome he had found his way to Big Mike’s saloon, where he met Gin-Gin, Lars’s disgruntled Eskimo wife. She had been the one who told Rhodes about Lars and Denby, and how they had taken off in two sleds with a bundle that later proved to be Denby’s wife. Gin-Gin was sure that they had headed for her people’s camp far to the north. She was in a murderous rage at Lars, who had taken her clothes and her dogsled and left her to starve in Nome.
Rhodes had set out again almost immediately after his talk with the Eskimo girl.
The rest Roxanne had to imagine: how Rhodes had followed their tracks. His dogs must have been the wolves she and Lars had heard howling that night. Finally, Rhodes must have come upon Denby’s abandoned sled, must have seen the blood and kept on going, cautiously. No doubt he had recognized the glow of their campfire from the distance and left his dogs and sneaked up to find Roxanne and Lars battling over the gun.
And he saved me, she thought, thrilling to the wonder of it.
Rhodes, tossing and turning, sometimes came to enough to talk wildly, eyes staring, unseeing, face burning hot. Roxanne stroked his hair lovingly, spoke soothing words and pressed a damp cloth to his forehead.
One night, he began talking again. And this time, with stunning force, she understood what he was saying.
“. . going to kill her,” he panted, eyes bright and feverish. “Got to get there . . . going to throttle her with these hands. . . He lay back, exhausted, eyes shut.
All the joy left Roxanne’s face. So did the color. White and drawn, she stared down at him, this man she loved more than all the world’s gold.
Rhodes had made that terrible journey, had come to Nome not to save her but to kill her. Silently she stared at him, and then she covered her face with her hands and sobs rocked her body.
Oh, she had done her work well. She had made him hate her. There was no bright future for her with Rhodes. If she had thought him lost to her on the Yukon; now, in Nome, she knew it to be true.
After that she tended Rhodes as lovingly as ever, perhaps a bit more desperately, for she knew that when the fever broke he would try to revenge himself on her. At the very least, he would send her away. So, grieving, she looked out the tiny slit of window at the wheels of light that were a feature of this strange landscape. She stared at these wonders without seeing them, listening to Rhodes’s feverish ravings. When the aurora was a high golden glow outside her window, she kissed him and tasted the salt of her tears on her mouth.
She knew that she was kissing him good-bye.
Soon after that, the doctor assured Roxanne that Rhodes was mending, even though he seemed barely aware of what was going on around him.
When she was not caring for Rhodes, Roxanne passed the time downstairs in the plush Victorian parlor with Josie and the girls.
“This here’s Roxie,” Josie had introduced her. “She’s a lady. So mind your language when she’s around.”
“I just don’t understand you, Rox,” Josie puzzled one day as they all lounged around the front room in various stages of dress and undress. Yukon Cassie was playing solitaire on a pine table that struck a rude note in this luxury, but the rest were gathered around a marble topped table set on a handsome oriental rug, drinking tea or whiskey or gin according to their tastes.
Roxanne put down her teacup and looked at Josie a little sadly. “There’s nothing to understand, Josie. I followed my husband up here, and now he’s dead. That’s all.”
“You ain’t the type to be here,” insisted Josie. “You with those clear blue eyes that look right through a man and make him want to do right by you.”
“I was never after gold,” admitted Roxanne.
“Then why the hell are you here?” wondered Josie, giving her bronze taffeta skirts a shake and adjusting an ornate pin that held her orange boa in place. “I could understand your being lured to the Klondike, but why this godforsaken place? Why Nome?”
“Denby—my husband—changed our tickets without telling me,” admitted Roxanne.
“So you was bamboozled into it by a man.” Josie nodded with understanding.
“Like the way I got into this business in Duluth,” drawled a whiskey-voice, and Roxanne turned to acknowledge the voluptuous strawberry blond in a transparent pink combination who lounged in an overstuffed chair. “A psalm-singing loud-mouthed praying—”
“Shut up, Flossie,” Josie told the Titian beauty. “Can’t you see I’m trying to understand how a lady’s mind works? Who knows but what I might want to be one myself sometime.”
“Works the same as ours,” said a black-eyed Mexican girl, whose big gold earrings dangled against her creamy satin skin and gleaming long black hair, and whose silken negligee was open to display a lithe naked body underneath. “Only maybe,” she added, laughing, “not so good, eh, chiquita?”
Her laughter was joined by that of a French girl wearing high heels, silk stockings held by black garters, and a lacy shawl through which her pink skin glowed.
Josie frowned to silence them both. “Rox, you bring in this fellow who lit out after you in a dogsled—you bring him in half dead and you’re all broke up, and then the doctor tells you he’s goin’ to live and your eyes light up like stars, but now the fellow’s gonna come to any day and you’re all downhearted again.”
“I’m a fool,” said Roxanne sadly. “I just remembered it, and it’s made me sad.”
The girls looked at each other. If this was being a lady, give them a life of sin any day.
No one, not Roxanne, Josie or the girls had been given a clue that the young newspaper reporter for the New York paper had been busy “researching” again. After Roxanne’s dramatic return to Nome, he had made swift inquiries and discovered that she had set out with her husband and another man, but had returned from the white wilds of the north with yet a third. To the reporter the situation was more than clear. Roxanne had undoubtedly plotted with her lover to dispose of Denby and Lars had been caught in the crossfire; then she had brought her wounded lover back to Nome. Roxanne, to the repo
rter’s overheated imagination, was clearly a murderess.
At last, he sat down to write his article.
“Her name is currently Roxanne Barrington,” he wrote. “No one knows what it was before that. She is blond, blue-eyed, beautiful beyond belief. She has a fake Southern accent, but all indications are that she hails from Seattle. A reputable source says she killed a woman in the States, a certain Mary Willis, but was never tried for the crime. Arriving in Dawson City in the spring of 1898, she promptly became notorious as ‘the Dawson blond,’ but I prefer to call her ‘Klondike Roxie.’ In Nome she fraternized with the lowest types, and her flashing skirts and pretty legs could be seen—yes, and danced with any night for a dollar—at Big Mike’s. But deadly Klondike Roxie has now made another kill—her husband, Denby Barrington, a man of the shadows, and perhaps his friend Lars Nelgren, one of Nome’s stalwart citizens. Although the three of them started out together by dogsled over the barren icy hills, only Klondike Roxie returned. She arrived weeping, in the company of a wounded man reputed to be her lover, one Rhodes Coulter, said to have pursued her from Dawson City. Since her return, Klondike Roxie has retired with her lover into the infamous establishment of a certain Madam J—, Nome’s plushiest sporting house.”
The article concluded, “Watch this paper for the next episode in the scandalous affairs of Klondike Roxie.” It reached the telegraph by dogsled. It was yellow journalism at its worst, but so the legend of Klondike Roxie was born.
It made sensational reading in the States as well as the Klondike. It was picked up by the wire services and printed across the nation.
Among those who read the article was Leighton Clarke.
Chapter 30
The ice broke early on the Bering Sea that year of 1900. An old whaler was the first to penetrate the ice barrier that shut Nome off from the world. Not long after that, a ship reputed to be filled with people from Dawson arrived. Since almost everybody in Nome had friends in Dawson, most of Nome’s population turned out to greet the ship. Roxanne, like the rest, came down to the dark beach sands, hoping to see someone she knew. Her expression was somber, as she watched the ship approach. How she wished she could leave on that vessel, so that she would not have to face Rhodes when he was fully recovered. Twice already his green eyes had opened and he had looked at her for a moment as if he knew her, then he had slipped back into a sleep-like state. He was mending nicely, the doctor said, not realizing that to Roxanne “mending” meant she must give him up.
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