Jason's Gold by Will Hobbs Read Free Book Online

You’ve been wet before, he told himself. Captain Shepard was coughing, and looking even older than his sixty years.
    Jason didn’t like the sound of this Chilkoot Pass—straight up at the end. “How much do the packers charge over the Chilkoot?” he asked Jack.
    â€œThirty cents a pound. We’re just sticking with them as far as they can get the canoes up the river. Maybe Thompson can pay, but the rest of us can’t. That’d be $600 for one man’s outfit!”
    â€œYou’re going to hump it over yourself?”
    â€œThat’s my plan.”
    It made Jason wonder what his brothers had done with their $600 of packing money. “Any idea what horse packing costs over on White Pass?”
    â€œCan’t say.”
    He couldn’t be asking Jack to guess which way his brothers had gone.
    His brothers wouldn’t have liked the sound of this straight-up Chilkoot any more than he did. Horses couldgo faster. He’d done some cowboying last fall in Wyoming—helped an old man pack a sheep camp out of the mountains. A packhorse carrying two hundred pounds could cover forty miles in a couple of days. That’s what would make sense to his brothers. Maybe they were still over in Skagway, trying to hire horses!
    Jason reached into the canoe and pulled out his pack. “I’m going to try White Pass,” he told Jack.
    Jack stopped wading and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good luck to you, Jason! Hope you find your Golden Fleece!”
    Jason laughed. “I wouldn’t be disappointed if my gold was the hard, shiny kind instead of a gold sheepskin.”
    They shook hands. “Thank you,” Jason said. “You really helped me out. Hope we meet again—maybe in Dawson City, when both of us have struck it rich. What’s your last name, so I can ask after you?”
    â€œLondon.”
    Jason turned and waded downstream, back to the confusion at the beach. More Indian canoes were starting up the river. He heard someone say that the Dyea River was navigable for five miles upstream. He was happy about that for Jack London—fewer miles to have to lug his ton of gear on his own back.
    It was three miles over to Skagway, and it couldn’t be walked. Fortunately there were scows plying back and forth, and he was able to pile onto one without forking over a dollar he didn’t have. The walrus-mustached operator wasn’t paying any attention. In the chaos of all these shouting people, the mud and the rain and the dogs shaking themselves in his face, the scow pilot looked like Alaska’s version of Charon, sentenced to ferry people across the river to hell.
    Skagway’s beach was like Dyea’s, only worse: piles of gear, stacks of hay and lumber, horses by the hundreds wandering untethered and knocking things over, dogs being whipped, men setting up tents and cooking meals on their Klondike stoves. A hundred yards out on the naked tidal flats, a strange contraption was mired in the mud amid heaps of provisions that had been lost to salt water. It was the two tandem bicycles spanned by the iron bars he’d seen in the Yakima ’s hold. The bicycles hadn’t even made it onto the beach.
    Jason hopped and stepped through the black muck of Skagway’s main street— BROADWAY , a flimsy sign proclaimed. The town was another anthill of activity, with saws and hammers going on all sides and a slowly moving stream of rushers and freight wagons choking the muddy street. Some Klondikers were leading packed horses and some were dragging dogs harnessed to sleds heaped high with gear. The procession passed through a line of thrown-together shacks and the frames of two-and even three-story hotels under construction. Jason counted four saloons, a drugstore in a tent, a blacksmith advertising five dollars a shoe, a restaurant with MEALS —$3 written across the seat of a hanging pair of ragged trousers. Tent sites were being offered at