Page 67 of A New World for the Irish Daughter

But he didn’t. He smiled, and then turned to caress Sheetka’s head briefly, and then the puppy’s, and when it came to Maggie, he simply lifted one hand in farewell, and she did likewise.

“I don’t want to miss that boat,” he told her, and then he was gone, striding through the snow, back down 7thStreet and into the town proper, away from her.

Maggie watched him for a few moments before she stirred herself. “Time for school,” she told Sheetka, and she even managed a smile.

The next few weeks passed slowly.

With less than seven hours of sunlight each day, the nights seemed endless and lonely, the days bitterly cold. In mid-December, a letter came on the mail steamer from Brendan; he’d arrived safely in Seattle but would have to stay through Christmas, due to the storms. Maggie wasn’t all that surprised considering the weather, but she was disappointed.

In any case, she and Sheetka spent a pleasant Christmas with Diana Marks and her husband, John. They even brought the puppy, who had been named Biscuit after Sheetka had fed him one straight from the griddle, and he’d gobbled it up, licking his lips in obvious delight.

In January, the weather became even more bitter. The walk from their cabin to the hospital, although not a long distance, became an exercise in endurance, the wind sweeping down from Mount Roberts so icy that Maggie’s eyelashes froze.

The mail steamer didn’t come for three weeks, and when it did, there was no word from Brendan, or from her brother and father. Maggie tried not to worry, but when she was sitting alone, Biscuit at her feet and Sheetka tucked up in bed, the wind howling outside, rocking the whole cabin, it was hard not to give in to fear. Were her father and brother safe? Were they even alive? There were so many ways to die out in the treacherous Yukon. And what about Brendan? Why had he not sent word?

There was nothing to do but keep trudging through the days—working at the hospital, taking care of Sheetka, keeping their home. At least there hadn’t been any trouble. Maggie didn’t know if the good people of Juneau had gotten used to the sight of a white woman and Tlingit child walking hand in hand, but she liked to think she felt fewer stares, heard fewer grumbles.

In early February, the mail steamer came with a letter from Brendan. He’d been delayed waiting on a shipment, and he hoped to be back in Juneau by April.

“April,” Maggie said out loud, trying once more not to give in to despair.

It seemed ages away. And meanwhile, she was learning that Brendan was right. Hopeful prospectors had started to trickle into the city from Fort Wrangell and Victoria, filling the boardinghouses and saloons, swaggering through the street, so sure they were going to find gold. Plenty of them set out for Mooresville with little more than a rucksack of supplies; Maggie doubted they would get far.

In March, miners started coming the other way, with stories of life out in the Yukon, the river still frozen, although some had braved the freezing temperatures by foot, and they stumbled into Juneau with fingers and toes blackened from frostbite, sometimes even their cheeks and noses, as well, half-dead from both cold and starvation.

As Maggie tended to them at St. Ann’s, she listened to stories of men collapsing on the Chilkoot Pass, its ascent as steep as a staircase, and pack animals, overworked and exhausted, dying on the White Pass, so many that some had nicknamed it Dead Horse Pass. And then there was the river journey so many, including Danny and her da, had undertaken in September.

She heard about the flimsily constructed box boats miners had built on the shores of Lake Bennett and Lake Lindeman, cutting down spruce to saw into planks, too inexperienced to realize their crafts weren’t seaworthy for the dangerous rapids on the river.

“I saw four boats go over at once at Five Finger Rapids,” one miner who had only three fingers and four toes left told her. “Every single man lost.”

Maggie could not summon a single word in reply. Could her father and brother build a decent boat? She had no idea, but in her mind’s eye she was already picturing them falling in, claimed by the icy, swirling water.

There was no way to know what had happened, although she did ask the miners she met if they’d come across an Irishman and his son, Declan and Danny O’Halloran, both charming and cocksure.

No one she encountered had seen them.

“But there are a lot of men coming through there now, miss,” one grizzled old miner told her. “And more by the day. Why, when we climbed the Chilkoot, it was like waitin’ in line—one after another we followed the rope all the way to the top, and then back down. Twenty times, I did it. They said the Canadian mounted police are goin’ to start makin’ a man bring two thousand pounds of supplies—do you know how many trips that would be? But maybe that would be better, because, God knows, there are already plenty who’ve starved.”

Had her father and brother starved? Maggie wondered numbly. They certainly hadn’t brought two thousand pounds of supplies, far from it, although maybe they’d been able to stock up in Mooresville, the last outpost of civilization before the newly formed Dawson City, up in the Klondike. Once again, she had no way of knowing.

By April, dozens and dozens more miners had arrived, and Juneau seemed as if it were heaving with restless humanity. Maggie tried not to go out as much, for the streets felt far less safe—so many men swaggering about, many of them mean with drink, angry at having to wait to pan for the gold they fretted other men had already discovered.

Still Brendan did not return.

One afternoon in early May, when spring felt like a promise in the air, the snow melting into rivers of mud in the streets and the days thankfully stretching out into golden sunsets past seven o’clock, Maggie ventured out with Sheetka to replenish some of their supplies at Hamilton’s Dry Goods. She passed O’Donaghue’s, its doors shuttered, as they had been sinceBrendan had left, although he’d told her he’d hired a man, half-Tlingit, to watch over the place.

“What the hell’s a lady doin’ with a half-breed kid?”

The snarling voice stopped Maggie in her tracks, her hand gripping Sheetka’s tightly. A drunken prospector stood in front of her, a flask of spirits held slackly in one hand, his mean eyes squinting at her in a narrow-eyed glare. He was blocking the whole sidewalk, and Maggie didn’t want to step down into the freely flowing mud of the street.

“Kindly let me pass,” she commanded in the crispest voice she could manage.

The man looked between her and Sheetka. “That kid’s anIndian,” he said in the same snarling voice. “And I don’t hold with white woman consortin’ with Indians. Not at all.”

He assumed Sheetka was her daughter, Maggie realized, and shewas, if not like that. She had no desire to explain any of it to the man, and she didn’t think it would make much difference anyway.

“Let me pass,” she commanded again, and the man’s lip curled. He folded his arms, splashing spirits on himself in the process.