Page 70 of A New World for the Irish Daughter

“Not good,” the man replied, and Maggie flinched. “They are in a cabin, on creek. Hunker Creek, they call it. The young one has a broken leg.”

Maggie gave a soft gasp, her hand clapped to her mouth, and Brendan glanced at her in reassurance.

“A broken leg, only?” he asked.

The man nodded grimly. “But it is not good. Very… broken. He cannot move, and there is no doctor in Dawson. They are running out of food.”

“Oh no…” Maggie whispered.

“How long ago did you see them?” Brendan asked, and the man shrugged.

“Ten, eleven days, I mushed past there? By sled, I travel very fast.”

Brendan nodded in understanding. The miners’ slow trek over the pass and down the river in a boat, once the ice had broken up, could take months, but the natives knew the terrain well and were accustomed to it. On a dogsled, they could travel down the Yukon to Dawson in a week or less.

“Can you take us?” Brendan asked the man, and Maggie looked at him in surprise. She’d always considered the trek to Dawson and beyond as good as impossible to undertake—too far, too cold, too terribly dangerous. But if they traveled by dogsled with an experienced guide… maybe it waspossible?

Slowly, the man shook his head. “Too far. Too long. And soon the ice break up. I cannot do it.” His voice was firm, brookingabsolutely no argument. Maggie couldn’t blame him; to travel five hundred miles back the way he came was no small thing.

“When does the ice break up?” Brendan asked, and the man shrugged.

“In two, three weeks? But in a week, maybe less, it won’t be safe. When it breaks up, you can go by boat. But that takes long time.”

“I know,” Brendan agreed heavily. He glanced at Maggie. “Even if we left this very moment, it would be at least three weeks before we reached them, and that’s traveling as fast as we could, with no accidents or bad weather. Most miners take months.”

Three weeks.

And Danny and her da were already running out of food, Danny with a broken leg, a bad break by the sounds of it. In three weeks, they could both be dead. They mightlikelybe dead. She pictured them in their weathered little cabin, hungry, alone, unable to move, as time ran out on any chance of survival.

Maggie met Brendan’s troubled gaze. “We still have to go,” she pleaded. “We have to try.”

He stared back bleakly, the barest smile touching his lips. “I know,” he said quietly.

The next twenty-four hours passed in a blur of motion and fear. Maggie arranged for a leave of absence from the hospital, and Diana Marks offered to take care of both Sheetka and Biscuit.

Although it just about broke Maggie’s heart in two to leave Sheetka behind in Juneau, she knew she had to. The Yukon trail was no place for a small child. Most would say it was no place for a woman, even.

Brendan organized their outfit from his new stock, and Maggie could only imagine how much it cost him to keephis store shuttered for who knew how long, and miss the prospectors flocking to town to buy their outfits.

“A day to travel to Mooresville,” he said, tracing the trail on the map, just as Maggie had with her father and brother back in September. “Then up the White Pass—it’s a few miles longer, but the Chilkoot is so steep, and we’d have to hike up it with all our supplies on our backs. If we take the White Pass, we can bring a horse and lead it up.”

“Dead Horse Pass,” Maggie said softly, and he nodded, his expression somber.

“It’s not an easy trail, on either man or beast.”

After that, they’d camp on the shores of Lake Bennett while they built their boat, something neither of them were experienced in, and then then they’d sail five hundred miles down the Yukon River, through treacherous rapids that Maggie already knew had cost many men their lives, camping each night by the side of the river.

Besides the dangers of the river, there were other threats—grizzly bears, wolves, accidents. One miner Maggie had patched up had told her a man had cut his own hand off with a whipsaw while building his boat. Considering she’d never even used a saw before, Maggie feared a similar fate was possible for her, or even Brendan.

Just a day after the man had shown up at their door with news of Danny and Da, Maggie took Sheetka and Biscuit to Diana’s home on 5thStreet, her heart aching with both love and fear for the little girl as well as her father and brother.

“Iwillbe back,” she told Sheetka, while Diana looked on, her homely face full of sorrow. “As soon as I can. And with Danny and Da!” She injected a note of jolliness into her voice that didn’t raise so much as a flicker of a smile from the girl. “And you have Biscuit and Mrs. Marks to keep you company…”

Maggie scanned Sheetka’s face, wishing she knew what thoughts and emotions were veiled by the girl’s dark, opaque eyes. In the nearly two years since Maggie had brought her into her home, Sheetka had not spoken a single word. She’d laughed, she’d cried, she’d screeched the house down, but she had yet to frame one syllable. Maggie still lived in hope that she would, and occasionally, Sheetka had looked at her in a certain way, an interest livening her expression, her lips parted, and Maggie had thought she’d been about to speak.

But she never had.

Maggie dropped to her knees in front of the girl and gently put her arms around her thin shoulders. “I love you,” she whispered fiercely against her hair as Sheetka clung to her. “I love you so much, Sheetka, and I will be back for you, Ipromise.”