UP AND DOWN
By Bertha Lowry Gwynne
Rhyolite Rose kept always her curiously unfeminine sense of humour. Standing in the doorway of the Bodega where nightly she accompanied herself on a battered piano, and sang indecorous songs with the voice of a seraph, she listened, vastly diverted, to the crap dealer’s flights of fancy.
“Get your money down, boys; six, eight, field or come—play a favourite. Here comes the lucky man! He throwed nine, Long Liz, the ham and egg gal.”
Rhyolite was booming, and Rhyolite was fortune-mad. It was Saturday night. Outside on Golden Street crowds surged up and down. There were miners, promoters, engineers, cooks, crooks, tin horns and wildcatters; good women, bad women, and boarding-house keepers. Adventurers all; each confident that to-morrow would bring him fortune.
The Bodega overflowed with a good-humoured crowd that stood four deep at the bar. Around the crap table was a restless throng, drawn by the dealer’s recitative, a curious chant detailing the fortunes of Big Dick from Boston, Little Joe, Miss Phoebe, and many more of the fanciful folk that indicate the fall of the dice.
Mining booms a-plenty Rose had seen. For five years she had followed them since she had first appeared in the Klondike a young girl with a lovely face, a gentle voice, and a consuming passion for Scotch whiskey. Each year since then had taken some of the innocence from her face, and set deeper shadows in her eyes; each year found her growing sadder till evening came, and then very gay, indeed; for by night Rose’s sorrow, whatever it was, had been drowned in a square bottle.
The pasty-faced crap dealer droned on: “Now and then I earn a small one,” he was saying. “Miss Ada, yore maw wants you——”
He faltered, and came to a pause. A shot had sounded on the street outside, and almost instantly the saloon was emptied.
Following the crowd, and still smiling, went Rhyolite Rose. She gathered from snatches of agitated conversation that “Sidewinder,” the camp’s bad man, in shooting at an unbearable acquaintance, had killed a stranger.
Not dead, but desperately wounded, the man lay on the boardwalk. Rose pushed her way to his side. As she looked down upon him her face blanched, the red of her cheeks standing out in odd relief.
“He’s a friend of mine,” she said to the men around her. “Take him to my cabin, and send for the doctor.”
Rose darted into the saloon, and snatching a decanter of whiskey, saturated her handkerchief with it. As she ran she rubbed the rouge from her face. She passed the little procession, and reaching her cabin made preparations for the man’s coming. That done, she dug into a trunk, taking from it a much-crumpled dress. Hastily she put it on.
The unconscious man was laid on the bed, and in a few minutes the doctor came. He gazed at Rose astounded. She was garbed in the habit of a novitiate of a nursing sisterhood.
“What the——” he began. She interrupted him, and underneath her flippancy the man saw real misery.
“It’s Sister Rose now,” the woman said. “I shed my sins with my scenery. Get me?”
The doctor nodded. Carefully he tended the wounded man.
“There is nothing we can do,” he said at length. “He is dying.”
“Suits me, Doc,” said Rose.
He left, and the woman sat quietly by the bed, her face set, her body tense, waiting. In a little while the man opened his eyes, and she saw that he knew her. She leaned over and lifted him into her arms. His head rested on her thin bosom.
“Little Sister, is it true?” he said in a whisper. “I dream so much. Every night and every night I dream that I have found you. I have hunted for you so long, Little Sister; everywhere; up and down the whole world.” His voice died out.
When he spoke again it was with an effort. “The other woman ... she didn’t count. When you left I went mad.” He raised himself with a burst of strength, his face distorted. “It was the uncertainty, the uncertainty! You were so little,” he muttered. “I have looked for you,” he repeated, drearily, “everywhere up and down the whole world.”
“Never mind.” Rose spoke serenely. Subtly, indefinably she had become again a gentlewoman. “Oh, my dearest, yes, I forgive you. God has watched over me, honey. There is a typhoid epidemic here. The sisters sent me.”
The man gave a long sigh. “My little girl, unhurt.”
She laid him down, and he drowsed awhile. Just before dawn he stirred.
“Sing, Little Sister,” he whispered.
“I am far frae my hame
I am weary aften whiles——”
Rose sang a song of her childhood. Her voice had withstood the ravages of cigarette smoke, whiskey, and overstrain. It rose clear and true,
“Like a bairn to its mither,
A wee——”
“Little Sister!” She bent to hear him.
“I have looked for you everywhere; up and down——” he was dead.
Tearless, Rose sat by the bed a long time. She came to herself with a sudden start.
In the dead man’s hands she placed a crucifix; and, kneeling, with little lapses of memory, she recited the prayer for the dead.
Then, as if moved by some force without herself, with eyes staring, she rose from her knees and hurried to the kitchen. She took down from a shelf a bottle of Scotch whiskey. With fingers that trembled she poured herself out a long drink.
“Now and then I earn a small one,” said Rhyolite Rose.