The Call of the Wild: Klondike Cannibals, Vol. 2

by Herbert Ashe

  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 his 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…”

  She 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…”

  Annie 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.

  The 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.

  She looked torn. But she nodded, ever so slightly.

  Finally, Indian 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?”

  “The 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. There 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 gutter 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’ wag
es. 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.

  His 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.

  In 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 do 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.

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

  He 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.

  * * * * *

  His plan was simple: try to spot Dr. Fiddler, Indian Jack, or any of the shills he remembered from the gaming table the day before, and follow them back to wherever the gang was.

  He didn’t know what he would do when he found them, but he was sure he would figure something out.

  The trick was to keep moving.

  He figured he had to spot one of the gang passing through the dockyard square sooner or later, right? After all, this was their turf, and there seemed to be even more people around than the day before. More fools to be fleeced.

  How could they resist?

  After scouting out a number of possible vantage points, Jack chose the roof of a large wooden warehouse across the square from the Alaska Trade & Transportation Company.

  He climbed a wooden pole in the back alley behind it, and climbed across onto the roof without too much trouble.

  After a brief scout, he found a good location for a perch, near the corner. It was a perfect spot: he could lie down in the shade of the warehouse’s façade, and have a bird’s-eye-view of the dockland road, where it opened onto the expanse of the square, and see the faces both coming and going.

  * * * * *

  Just after noon, Jack spotted Dr. Fiddler.

  Jack held his breath for a moment, squinting a little, concentrating all his powers of perception upon the single-horse, open-top Hansom cab rolling slowly through heavy traffic along the dockland road below him, towards the square...

  Yes! Now he was sure: it was Dr. Fiddler, sitting next to a man wearing a fashionable burgundy suit and matching bowler hat.

  For a moment Jack was torn with indecision: what should he do?

  Try to watch the carriage from up here and risk the chance that it left the square? Or risk losing sight of it as he climbed back down the pole in the back alley? Or—

  He briefly visualized jumping into the open cab below, grabbing Dr. Fiddler, wrestling him into submission… But that would be suicidal.

  He made a snap decision.

  He took one last look at the cab, burning the details into his memory: its direction, speed, the look of its horse, and driver… then he was off, racing across the long roof towards the back of the warehouse, and the wooden pole he’d climbed. He shimmied down it as fast as he could, dropping the last four feet to the ground, feeling a dull ache shoot through the balls of his feet as he hit the ground running.

  * * * * *

  Jack was breathing hard by the time he burst into the square.

  He spotted the cab immediately, heading along the waterfront in the general direction of the pier where the Umatilla was being loaded with last-minute supplies.

  For a moment, Jack wondered if Dr. Fiddler was about to board the Umatilla in his place, using his ticket… He sped up a little, a storm of rage building inside him.

  Jack cut diagonally across the square, walking briskly, not wanting to attract attention.

  He passed the spot where, the day before—it seemed a century a
go—Annie had fallen into his arms. And just beyond it was where he’d haggled with Joe over Captain Shepard’s ticket and outfit. So much history in the square already…

  Suddenly finding a break in the traffic, the driver of Fiddler’s carriage cracked a long whip over the horse’s head. Jack watched the cab surge forward along the remaining portion of the road, and disappear behind the warehouse on the far corner of the square.

  He broke into a run.

  * * * * *

  Rounding the corner at a full sprint, Jack saw the cab, stopped no more than twenty yards away from him, on the side of the road in front of a mid-sized steamship.

  The name Argo was written in large white block letters upon the steamship’s lime-green hull.

  Dr. Fiddler and the man in the burgundy bowler hat were making their way up the gangplank, towards a pair of hulking billiard-hall bruisers who guarded the entrance to the ship.

  Having heard him round the corner, the Hansom cab driver turned to stare at Jack.

  Jack immediately slowed down, and began walking along the other side of the road, nonchalantly, trying not to arouse any suspicion. The last thing he needed was for Dr. Fiddler to look back and notice him skulking about.

  Thankfully, the cab driver quickly lost interest, turning back around and cracking his whip. The Hansom clattered up the road, then turned a corner up ahead, and was gone.

  All at once, Jack could feel the suspicious eyes of the bruisers on him.

  He continued walking down the street, looking down at the ground, trying to think of his next move. He spotted a narrow gap between two brick warehouses nearby, and figured that if he could get into that space from the other side, he would probably be able to stay hidden while watching the ship.

  So he circled around the block, found the far entrance to the gap between the buildings, and slipped inside.

  * * * * *

  Jack waited there until nightfall, watching the ship.

  He knew an approach from the water was his best bet for getting on board the Argo without raising the alarm. He’d learned during his oyster pirate days that it was almost impossible to spot a swimmer at night, particularly if he was near docks or boats.