Gold Mountain. Vicki Delany

counter to where Ray kept a good, stout billy club. I signalled to them that it was all right. If Sheridan was so insistent on talking to me, telling me this plan of his, I might as well get it over with.

      And then I would once again tell him to go away.

      “Very well,” I said with an exaggerated sigh. “If you insist.”

      He beamed at me, and I led the way to a table.

      I’ve been in bars and dance halls in London that would put the Savoy to shame, but very few of them made as much money in a week as we did in a night.

      The place had been constructed of green wood, and it groaned in a strong wind. Every night I prayed the second floor balcony wouldn’t come crashing down to crush everyone beneath.

      I had decorated with what little options were available. A large portrait of Her Imperial Majesty hung behind the bar. Her visage was so sour it was a wonder she didn’t poison the whisky stored below. So as to beg favour with the primary nationalities making up the population of the Yukon, we had stuck a Union Jack into the right of the frame and the Stars and Stripes into the left. On either side of the Queen’s portrait hung two nudes, one fair-haired, one dark.

      Unlikely Her Imperial Majesty would approve. I had very briefly had the acquaintance of her fat, indulgent, womanizing son, Edward, the Prince of Wales, and knew he would most definitely approve.

      The walls were covered in heavy red wallpaper with a pattern of gold crowns, making the place look like a bordello. But farmers and miners and labourers seem to think red-and-gold wallpaper equals class, so I’d bought the hideous stuff. Ray and Angus had hung it, covering themselves and everything around them in paste. They hadn’t done all that good a job, and strips of paper were beginning to come unstuck from the upper corners. The Savoy was always thick with smoke, not only from cigars but from the kerosene lamps used to provide light, and the wallpaper was already turning a sickly yellow.

      The bar itself was sturdily constructed of good mahogany and ran the entire length of the room. We were required by law to provide safe drinking water, and a big barrel of it stood in the corner. A few tables and chairs were scattered throughout the room, although most of the men seemed to prefer to stand at the bar.

      Better to hear the gossip, I suspect.

      Men can be so naive — which makes it all the easier to fleece them. They crowded around Barney now, buying him drinks, begging him to tell them stories of Snookum Jim, Taglish Charlie, George Carmacks, and the day they discovered gold on Bonanza Creek. As if hearing Barney tell the story, again, would mean they’d have a similar story to tell someday.

      Few, if any, of them would. The best claims had been staked before word of the strike reached the teeming, depression-plagued cities of the south. It was men like Barney, old timers who’d wandered the north for years, who made it rich. Whereupon most of them quite simply proceeded to spend it all in a series of sprees that would shame a drunken sailor. Barney had gathered together sixteen of his biggest gold nuggets and had a belt made for a dancer at the Horseshoe. She’d accepted the gift, thanked him with a kiss on the cheek, and gone home to her husband.

      A year later, all Barney had left was his reputation. He spent his nights, and most of his days, propping up bars in dance halls up and down Front Street, trading stories for drink.