Page 80 of A New World for the Irish Daughter

“Well, you’re a nurse?—”

“Yes, but I don’t have proper medicines, and Danny’s leg…” Maggie shook her head again. “I’ll do what I can,” she promised. “And the first thing is getting you both something to eat—and making you wash!”

She let out a trembling laugh as she gazed at them both. Despite the state they were in, she was so very glad to see them at last… alive.

The next few hours passed in a haze of motion. Brendan built a fire in the stove and warmed up a can of beans and another of stew, which her father wolfed down, and then was promptly sick. He shuffled back into the cabin, shamefaced.

“Too much, too soon, I reckon,” he said as he slumped into a chair.

Maggie suspected her father would recover well enough with food and rest, but Danny, she feared, was far sicker. She soaked cloths in the cold water of the Hunker and covered his whole body, hoping to bring down the fever. She also examined his leg, which had healed badly, his shin sticking out unnaturally so she doubted he would be able to walk on it at all. The only way to have it heal properly would be to have a surgeon break and set it again, something that could hardly happen out here.

At least there was no visible infection; Maggie had worried there might be, due to his fever, but she suspected the fever was simply from Danny’s worn-out body giving up. Her brother was emaciated and insensible, his eyelids barely fluttering as she tended to him.

“He’ll get better, now you’re here,” her father insisted, holding onto his cheerfulness, if only just. “He will, won’t he?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie admitted. “I’ll do all I can.” She’d brought a small medical kit with her that had thankfully survived the trip down the Yukon, and she dosed her brother with quinine and cold compresses for the rest of the day. By evening, he seemed a touch cooler, and he’d managed a few spoonfuls of broth.

“Maggie?” he asked incredulously, his voice slurred with sleep, as she spooned some broth into his slack mouth. “What thedevil…”

“It should be the good Lord you’re invoking, not the devil,” Maggie replied with a smile, although she was near tears. “If I hadn’t come, you might very well be dead.” And he wasn’t out of the woods yet, she thought grimly, but did not say.

“I’ll get better though, won’t I?” Danny asked with the boyish eagerness she remembered from so long ago. Her dear, foolish brother, always so charming, so reckless, so impossible. She loved him. She loved both him and her father, and yet right then she could have knocked their heads together for being so foolhardy, gold nugget or not.

“I’ll do everything I can to help you recover,” Maggie promised, and tears sheened his eyes as he grappled for her hand.

“But you’ll do it? You’ll be able to? I need to get better, Maggie, I need to walk again!” His voice rose pathetically as he stared at her in dawning fear, realizing that Maggie had not made any more promises.

She pressed his thin hand between her own as she answered, “Danny, you’re very ill, very weak, and your leg… your leg will have to be broken again?—”

“Brokenagain?—”

“So it can be set properly. If we can get you to a decent doctor, with chloroform and morphine, you won’t be in any pain.” She swallowed hard, knowing that such a procedure was risky, and might even leave her brother a permanent cripple. And that was if they could get him to a doctor in the first place. In the state he was in, she had no certainty about the matter.

A tear slipped down Danny’s cheek. “I’ll do whatever you say,” he whispered. “Anything, Maggie, anything! I know I’ve been stupid, I know it, all these years…” He shook his head despairingly. “I’ll be different now, I swear, if I can just get better.”

“Oh, Danny.” Maggie’s throat closed as she stared into his pleading eyes. She wished she could promise him it would be so, but she knew she could not. And whether her brother could be different… well, she knew he meant what he said, in this moment. “I’ll do what I can,” she promised. “As much as I can.”

Maggie did the best she could cleaning the filthy cabin, but it still wasn’t a hospitable place as she and Brendan spread out their bedrolls later, Maggie’s next to Danny so she could check on him in the night.

“I’m thankful they’re alive,” she told Brendan in a low voice, “so thankful. But the state they’re in?—”

“Tomorrow I’ll go to Dawson and see about a doctor. Maybe one’s arrived by now. I’ll try to get Declan to bring some of that gold in, as well. I feel like they could use the cash!”

“I know.” Maggie smiled through her tears. “I know,” she said again, and rested her head against his shoulder.

“And as soon as we can,” Brendan reminded her, a hint of a smile in his voice, “we’re finding that preacher!”

CHAPTER 40

JUNEAU, ALASKA

September 1897

Juneau emerged out of the morning mist as if limned in gold, the harbor bustling with steamers and sailing vessels. In July, word had finally reached the Outside, when theSS Excelsiorarrived in Seattle with half a ton of gold.

Since then, prospectors had poured into the city for the treacherous journey north. So quickly had the area expanded that Dawson City now boasted more than ten thousand souls, and Maggie, Brendan, her father and brother had been able to travel home by boat rather than hiking up the Chilkoot or White Pass. They’d first gone up the Yukon in a riverboat to St Michael and then taken a steamer all the way to Juneau. The fare price had been outrageous—five hundred dollars each—but Declan had insisted, saying he was a rich man now.

He wasn’t, Maggie knew,thatrich. Their precious pay dirt had ended up giving them the admittedly impressive sum of sixteen thousand dollars. It was certainly a goodly amount, and it meant they could travel back to Juneau in style, but her father and brother were far from millionaires.