Page 44 of A New World for the Irish Daughter

Her father scratched his cheek, giving Danny a questioning glance, which her brother returned with a shrug. “Well, a man’s got to find his way,” her da stated. “Don’t he, though?”

“Find hisway?—”

“That’s right, Maggie.”

She whirled around to see Brendan standing on the wharf, suitcase in hand, smiling at her tiredly.

“What’s right?” she demanded, and she sounded furious when what she really felt was scared. “Brendan?—”

“This is where we part ways.” Brendan’s voice was gentle but unbearably firm. “You belong with your family, and like your da said, I need to find my way.” His face hardened a little as he kept her incredulous stare. “It’s better like this.”

Maggie wanted to argue, but a busy dockside was hardly the place, and in any case, she knew she wouldn’t convince him of anything. In a town of two thousand, she told herself, they were likely to run into each other, anyway. It wasn’t as if she’d never see him again.

And yet… that was exactly how it felt.

“I’m sure I’ll see you all around,” Brendan said, and tipping his hat to them, he started down the wharf toward the town.

“Sometimes,” her father remarked reflectively, “distance is the only way for a broken heart to heal.”

A broken heart…!Maggie bit her lip hard to keep her tears at bay as she watched Brendan disappear into the crowds heading into town. Her father might believe—and maybe Brendan himself did too—that he was suffering with a broken heart, but right now, as she blinked back more tears, Maggie couldn’t help but feel that the person with a broken heart was her.

CHAPTER 23

The boarding house they found on Front Street was the largest log cabin Maggie had ever seen—not that she’d seen all that many before coming to Alaska.

It was three stories, made of rough-hewn logs, with the ground floor one enormous room with a massive cookstove and two long trestle tables.

When they arrived, it was just in time for the noonday meal, and a serving girl, who looked no more than fourteen, wearing, to Maggie’s shock, bib overalls and a plaid shirt, was bringing out platter after platter of thick steaks, which Maggie later discovered were bear meat, along with slices of pork and vats of beans, all to be washed down with canned milk.

When her father approached the landlady, Mrs. Compton, a capable, red-faced woman, her plain dress swathed by an enormous apron, she informed them that they could have a shared room with three square meals a day for four dollars a week each. Da paid for their first week then and there, and they sat down to one of the most unusual yet delicious meals of Maggie’s life.

Everythingfelt so startlingly strange—stranger even than when she and Danny had first set foot in New York and beenoverwhelmed by the noise and commotion of the city, the clatter of wagons and carriages and the tall buildings that had seemed to blot out the sky.

This was a different kind of strangeness—for while there was certainly nothing unusual about having a meal in a boarding house, everything about the meal and boarding house was entirely novel, in a way that was both entertaining and, Maggie had to admit, a little alarming, but at least the novelty kept her from dwelling on Brendan’s unexpected farewell overmuch.

Howcould he have left her like that? And yet, Maggie knew, it had been all too easy. Necessary, even—at least according to Brendan.

Their dining companions were, for the most part, some of the toughest, most weatherbeaten-looking men Maggie had ever seen, even when she’d been living on the Barbary Coast, which had certainly had plenty of rough characters.

The men seated around the table were a motley mix of grizzled miners and prospectors intending to strike out, often with a wad of chewing tobacco tucked in their cheeks even as they ate their meal. They were dressed in a jumbled mix of flannel shirts and weathered denim overalls, along with mackinaws and what Maggie learned were calledmukluks, soft, knee-high boots made from moosehide and caribou fur.

The conversation was a mix of cheerful complaint about the conditions at the mine with what Maggie soon discovered was absurd bragging about the gold they’d found, the cold they’d endured, the miles they’d traveled. Sixty below zero was nothing, one old-timer assured the rest of the table, as long as he had his sleeping bag. This boast was met with a chorus of guffaws and good-natured insults.

There was plenty of swearing, too, although at least half the time the man in question would catch sight of Maggie, his shoulders drooping as he’d mumble a heartfelt apology for hissalty language. Maggie accepted these apologies with a nod and a smile, not wanting to seem too prim, because it was quite clear that even so much as a hint of priggishness was not to be found anywhere.

Juneau was, she was quickly realizing, a mining camp that was still very much in the process of turning into a town. In another ten years or so, one miner assured her, Juneau would have a proper main street with stone buildings and public parks; it already had electricity, just this last year, and there was talk of the telephone being added, as well. “And,” he added meaningfully, “in ten years there’ll be no Indians.”

Maggie stiffened at his suddenly surly tone. “No Indians?” she queried cautiously. “But don’t they work in the mines?”

“Yeah, takin’ourjobs,” another miner chimed in, propping his elbow on the table as he leaned over and jabbed a finger meaningfully in the air. “And willing to do the same work for less pay. We already got rid of the Chinese?—”

“Save for Joe,” the first miner reminded him, and the second man grinned, revealing a full set of blackened, broken teeth.

“Save for Joe,” he agreed. “Good old Joe.”

“Who’s Joe?” Maggie asked. She was curious as well as cautious, for she sensed an ugliness beneath the miners’ conversation that she didn’t want to probe too deeply.

“He runs a bakery right here in town,” the second man explained. “Back in ’86, they ran all the Chinese out of town, shipped ’em off to Fort Wrangell. They were workin’ in the mine for half-pay. It wouldn’t do.”