Alaska (104 page)

Then the man added: 'There's a Mr. Reed, I think maybe he's from an insurance company in Denver. He's very eager to talk with you, Venn,' and from the way this news was delivered, it was clear to Tom that the R&R man might think that he was involved in some shady operation, because insurance inspectors did not come all the way from Denver just to say 'How's business?'

'Tom, do you know this Mr. Reed?' the R&R man asked. 'From Denver ... in insurance?'

'Never heard of him. I don't carry insurance yet.'

'You should. Every young man who expects to get married one of these days should start an insurance plan. This fellow Reed did mention a Mrs. Concannon. Death claim or something. You know anything about a Mrs. Concannon?'

'I'm afraid not.' Then, most suspiciously, he did remem-629

her: 'Oh yes! Her husband was killed when a boom snapped on one of our ships. The Alacrity, I think.'

'Were we culpable?'

'Oh no! Act of God, as they say.'

'Was her claim in any way spurious?'

'No, couldn't have been. He was killed flat out.'

'Did you handle the paperwork on her insurance? I mean for R&R?'

'No.' Again he had to correct himself, and again he appeared duplicitous: 'I serve as sort of mayor or coroner or something in Nome. We have no government, as you probably know. All of us businessmen . . . Well, I did sign the Concannon death certificate.'

'No flimflammery? No complications on your part?'

Tom did not like the way this interrogation was going, and said so: 'Look, sir. Everything I do for R&R is open and aboveboard. Same in my private life.'

'Son, wait a minute! If tomorrow a man came in here, a responsible insurance detective from Denver with good credentials, and he started asking questions about me . . .

Wouldn't you wonder what was up?'

'I suppose I would.'

'Well, Mr. Reed, an insurance inspector from Denver, was asking questions about you, and you're one of our employees. Naturally I perked up my ears. Son, you are turning pale. Do you want a glass of water?'

Tom fell into the chair and covered his face for some moments, then said: 'He wasn't from Denver. He's from Chicago. And he's not an insurance man. He's a private detective hired by my mother . . . that is, my other mother, the one I don't want.'

He was trembling so furiously that the R&R man sat down beside him and asked gently: 'Do you want to talk about it?' and Tom said: 'Only if Missy is here too,' and through the storm that was now beginning to lash Nome, he and the man ran to the Murphy shack, where Tom broke the news.

'One of those detectives we were running away from, Missy, he's found us.'

'Oh God!' She fell into a chair and remained silent. She had never told either Klope or Murphy of her flight from Chicago to avoid the law, and she had not the heart now to review that painful time.

But Tom did speak. He told of how Missy Peckham had saved his family and of how his mother and her lawyers had harassed them and of how brave Missy had been on the Chilkoot and of his father's death on Lake Lindeman. As the 630

passions of seven years swept over him he did not weep, but he could say no more.

'What in hell!' the man from R&R, father of six, cried. 'You got nothing to worry about. Your mother was a bitch, let's use simple words, and Mr. Reed ought to be ashamed of himself. I'd like to punch a man like that in the nose.' A little while ago he had been cautioning Tom against behavior that might bring discredit to R&R, and now he was prepared to slug an insurance inspector. Trying to restore some steel to Tom Venn's backbone, he resorted to comforting old sayings: 'Let the dead past bury its dead. Tom, I'd defend you through every court in this land. Besides, an honest man never has anything to fear.'

On the morning of the fifteenth, in the last week of summer, the people of Nome awoke to find themselves assaulted by one of the greatest storms of the decade, indeed, five or six decades, as a tremendous wind howled out of Siberia. At dawn it measured forty-seven miles an hour; at eight o'clock it stood at fifty-nine on the anemometer; and then it began to gust up into the seventies and eighties.

Great waves pounded the unprotected shore, sucking rail huts and tents into the sea.

Relentlessly, the waves ate away the shore until they lashed at houses and shops two hundred yards inland, and water came up to the steps of the new R&R warehouses.

By nightfall a quarter of Nome's houses were destroyed, and for three terrible days the storm raged. A minister, gathering his flock, read passages from Revelation proving that God had come to Nome to scourge the Antichrist, and the men with chloroform swabs looked only to their own safety.

Tom Venn spent the three stormbound days with Missy and Matt, talking over strategy for dealing with the detective and whatever problems he would present. They were a mournful crew, and as squalls swept in from the sea, they anticipated the typhoon of troubles which would soon engulf them. But then Murphy, with his healthy peasant doubt, began to bring some sanity into the discussion.

'Wait a minute! What do you really know about this Mr. Reed? You don't even know who he is.'

'He asked about me. More than once, I think.'

'You don't even know whether he's an insurance man like he said or a detective like you said. Or maybe neither.'

'He was looking into things, personal things.'

'You don't know whether he's from Denver or Chicago. Or again, maybe neither.'

'What are you suggesting?' Missy asked, for in her time with Matt she had learned to trust his common sense.

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'That we wait till this damned storm dies down and your Mr. Reed can come ashore and explain himself. In the meantime, it does no good to get ourselves all worked up over things we don't know.'

This was such sober counsel that Missy and Tom stopped lacerating themselves, and while the storm increased in its fury, their fears subsided; the apprehensive pair could not escape their sense of doom but they could maneuver it onto a plateau where it could be managed. And in this waiting period while the storm raged, Tom offered various reflections: 'I owe so much to you two, I want to see you happy. I want you to work with me at R&R. Judge Grant and Hoxey will have to leave here soon, or as Matt says, someone is likely to shoot them. Then Missy will be free and we can work together. Matt, why don't you marry her?' and Matt revealed to Tom what he had long ago told Missy: 'I have a wife in Ireland.' He said this so flatly and with such finality that comment was uninvited, and for some time the three sat, listening to the howling of the wind as it rose in fury to match the pounding rain.

'There'll be a lot of houses go down this morning,' Tom said, 'and when we rebuild, I'd like to see wider streets. Make this city something to be proud of.'

Matt said: 'Go careful, Tom. Men like you wanted better government and you got Judge Grant.'

'I don't think Nome can stay a big city. When the Senator sails, if it's ever able to unload, our committee has more than four hundred miners who want to sail with it. But they haven't a dime.'

'What will you do?'

'Our committee will give each one a blue ticket. Free fare south. And I'll bet four hundred others will be paying their own fare to sleep on deck, just to get out of here.'

'What will they do in Seattle?'

'Some'11 mix in, most'll move on. Drift until they find work, and start over again.

If a city is big enough, it can absorb men with no money. A small place like Nome can't.'

'Nome's pretty big,' Missy said. 'Biggest city in Alaska.'

Tom listened to the storm as it reached its howling peak, and he said: 'I had a vision last night, I guess you'd call it that. Couldn't get to sleep worrying about the detective . . .'

'You're not sure he is a detective,' Matt said again.

'And I saw Alaska as a huge ship, much bigger than the Senator lying out there, and it survived this storm only because it was firmly anchored. This gold rush has to die down,

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and when it does I think we must do everything possible to strengthen our lifeline to Seattle. As it goes, we go.'

But Missy said: 'I'm not so sure. Any good that comes to Alaska, will come from Alaska.'

On the evening of the seventeenth when the storm began to abate, Tom and Matt walked through the heavy rain to survey the damage, and were aghast at the large number of houses destroyed, the small number of tents left standing. Nome, with no protection of any kind against the Bering Sea, would have been erased from the map had it not been for the persistence of the miners who were prepared to rebuild their city of gold.

'What we must have, sooner or later,' Tom said, 'is a sea wall to give us protection against such storms.'

As they walked in the fading light they were joined by several businessmen, some of whose establishments had been completely washed away. Others found two feet of water in their stores, and only the better of the sixty-odd saloons were in any condition to reopen.

'The rain did some good,' one of the men said. 'At least the Golden Gate Hotel didn't burn again.'

It was when they came to the beach, to any part of its wild twenty-six-mile extent, that they appreciated the tremendous power of this storm, because not a single piece of gold-dredging equipment was visible. The little box sluices and the huge machines that gobbled up the sand and wrestled it for gold were gone, every one of them. The beach had been swept clean, without leaving a vestige of the great gold rush, and when one of the town's clergymen joined the group, he could not refrain from saying: 'Look for yourselves, men. It's as if God had grown tired of our excesses and had wiped the slate clean. There's your gold rush.”

'No,' a miner said. 'Out there's your gold rush, the men waiting on that ship to come ashore. Two days from now, the beach'll be covered with men the way a piece of venison gets covered with ants.'

'I agree with you, Reverend,' another miner said, 'but I reach a contrary conclusion.

I think God sent the storm, but He did it to rearrange the placer rights. And to move in a fresh cargo of gold. I can hardly wait to get started again.' And as he spoke two older men, dragging behind them some monstrous contraption, came down to the beach, picked a spot where gold had once been abundant, and resumed dredging the sand for gold.

But the lasting image as the historic storm of September 1900 subsided was the large steamer Senator far offshore riding the turbulent waves and waiting to discharge the next 633

influx of gold seekers. It held also a Mr. Reed, who was more impatient to get ashore than any of the would-be miners.

IF HE HAD BEEN VISIBLY RESTIVE AT SEA, HE BECAME

almost unnoticeable ashore. Registering at the undamaged Golden Gate Hotel as Mr.

Frank Reed, Denver, Colorado, he spent three days familiarizing himself with the lay of Nome, where its original claims had been along the streams and how the men who came swarming back to the beaches like flies established their rights to this stretch of sand or that. He visited the main stores to see what they were selling and tested the beer at several saloons, where he said nothing but did listen. He was appalled, as any sensible man would be, when he saw the way Nome handled its sewage, and he ate only sparingly those first days.

On his fourth day in town he began visiting the so-called leaders, and his questions were so diverse and unrevealing that three older men went to the Golden Gate asking to talk with him, and on the way they encountered Tom Venn and took him along.

'Mr. Reed, your activities have perplexed us.'

'You're no more perplexed than I am.'

'Who are you?'

The stranger considered this for some moments and his whole inclination was to reveal himself to these honest, worried men, but since long experience had warned him against being premature, he temporized: 'Gentlemen, I'm not at liberty to answer your questions yet, but believe me, I come meaning no embarrassment to men like you.' He knew they deserved to know more, so taking a document from his inside pocket, he said: 'You're Mr. Kennedy. I was told you were a man of honor. I came here to see you.' He read off two other names with similar comment, and then he turned to Tom: 'I don't believe I know you.'

'You didn't come for me?' Tom blurted out in tremendous relief.

'I didn't come for anybody.'

'I'm Tom Venn. Ross & Raglan.'

'Well, well!' Mr. Reed cried, evidencing a surprise which he could not mask. 'I had no idea you'd be so young. You're the man I wanted to see first.'

Tom felt his knees shake and his mouth go dry, but he had agreed with Missy that he would brave this thing out: 'What did you want to see me about?' and now Mr. Reed simply had to disclose part of his hand: 'The Concannon case.'

'Oh!' Tom sighed so heavily that if Mr. Reed had come to 634

look into a major bank robbery, he would have had to judge by that sigh that Tom was the thief.

'You signed Mr. Concannon's death certificate, did you not?'

'Yes. We have no coroner, you know.'

'I know.'

'So they asked some of us ... I think Mr. Kennedy here signed it too.'

'That's right,' Mr. Reed said. 'His name was on the document. Now let's sit down, gentlemen, and you tell me what you know about the Concannon case.'

He was like a ferret, dissecting even the most remote details of what had been a normal accident at sea when ships rolled and booms snapped: 'The Alacrity was an R&R ship, was it not?'

'A small one,' Venn said, 'built for the Skagway run but diverted when the great rush to the beaches began.'

'Isn't it rather strange that an employee of the company that owns a ship involved in a fatal accident should authenticate the death warrant?'

'At first I didn't even know he died on our Alacrity. I was just called in to sign the papers. Somebody had to, or Mrs. Concannon wouldn't get her insurance.'

'Yes, the people in Denver explained that.'

'Then you're not from the insurance company?'

'No. They alerted the authorities that something odd might have happened in the Concannon case, and it seemed to fit a pattern.'