Winter Kill

“Yes, but he was going to. You could tell that.”

The young man was right. And if Conway hadn’t walloped the sailor, Frank thought, he probably would have. That really would have set off a fracas.

“Do you think we’ll get a chance to spend any more time with the ladies before we get to Skagway?” Conway went on in a plaintive voice.

Frank clapped a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t know, son. Probably not, if Mrs. Devereaux has anything to say about it, and she’s in charge of them. But you got those good memories you were talking about, the ones you can hang on to when you’re wondering why the hell you came to Alaska in the first place.”

“I suppose so,” Conway said with a smile. “I just hope that’s enough.”

Frank did, too, but mostly he hoped that the rest of the voyage to Skagway would pass peacefully.

Chapter 12

He should have known better.

Even before he climbed out of his bunk the next morning, Frank knew something was wrong. The ship was pitching around more than it had been earlier in the voyage, and he could hear the wind howling. He got up, swallowing the queasiness that tried to take hold in his stomach, and pulled on his clothes, including the sheepskin coat. Then he headed for the deck to look for Captain Hoffman and find out what was going on.

His boots slipped as soon as he stepped outside, and he had to grab hold of the side of the door to keep from falling. A thin, almost invisible layer of ice coated the deck. More sleet pelted down, making little thudding sounds against his hat as he started cautiously across the desk toward the stairs leading up to the bridge.

He went up them carefully, and when he reached the top he saw Hoffman at the wheel, huddled there in a slicker and rain hat. “Captain!” Frank called.

Hoffman looked back over his shoulder in surprise. “Mr. Morgan!” he exclaimed. “You’d better get back to your cabin! This isn’t fit weather for you to be out!”

“It doesn’t look like fit weather to be sailing in!”

“Don’t worry about the Montclair! She can handle a little blow like this!”

If Hoffman thought this was a little blow, Frank would have hated to see what the captain considered a major storm. The wind lashed viciously at the ship, and the angry waves seemed to be trying to toss it straight up into the sky. The sails were lowered, so the Montclair was running on its engines alone. Frank thought the wind would probably rip the sails to shreds if they were raised.

He leaned closer to Hoffman and asked, “We’re not that far from the coastline, are we? Maybe you should make a run for shore so we can ride out the storm there!”

“And risk being battered to pieces on some rocks?” Hoffman shook his head. “I know what I’m doing, Morgan! We’ll be all right! This squall will blow itself out before the day’s over!”

Frank didn’t believe that. It looked to him like the first of the winter storms had arrived a few weeks earlier than Hoffman expected it.

But he had to admit that he was no sailor, and certainly no expert where the sea was concerned. Hoffman had made this Seattle-to-Skagway run before. He ought to know what he was doing.

“All right!” Frank said. “But if there’s anything I can do to help…”

“Just go below, dry off, and don’t worry! We’ll be fine!”

As the day went on, though, it began to look like they would be anything but fine. The storm continued unabated. If anything, its ferocity seemed to grow stronger. Fiona and all the young women were sick again, as were some of the cheechakos. The ones who had purchased deck space were allowed belowdecks to huddle miserably in the corridors, because they would have frozen to death and wound up ice-covered corpses if they had remained topside.

Frank weathered the storm better than most of the landlubbers. His stomach was a little unsettled, but he never completely lost his appetite. He wound up taking his meals in the officers’ mess, at Captain Hoffman’s invitation. The officers expressed confidence in the captain and in the Montclair’s ability to handle this rough weather, but Frank thought he saw worry lurking in their eyes.

It was the same sort of concern he had seen more than twenty years earlier at Fort Lincoln, in the eyes of some of the junior officers of the Seventh Cavalry as they were about to follow Colonel George Armstrong Custer into Indian country. Frank had been passing through, headed in the opposite direction, and he remembered thinking that he wouldn’t have gone with those soldier boys for all the money in the world.

Now he had no choice but to put his trust in Captain Rudolph Hoffman. Hoffman was the only man who could get them where they were going.

The seas were still extremely rough that evening, but the wind had died down slightly. Sleet showers still lashed the vessel and added to the layer of ice that had formed on the deck. Frank slept only fitfully, and during the night he heard groans coming from some of the other cabins. The women were suffering a lot more than he was, but there was nothing he could do for them.

The next morning, he sought out Hoffman again and found the captain in his cabin, pouring over the charts. “Do you still think we’ll reach Skagway today?” Frank asked bluntly. He knew from looking at the maps that they would have to sail through Glacier Bay and then up a long inlet to reach the port city, and he hoped that once they made it to the bay, the water would be calmer.

“I…I don’t know,” Hoffman replied, and Frank didn’t like what he heard in the captain’s voice. The confidence and decisiveness that had been there earlier were gone now. “I’ve never seen a gale quite this bad. So early, I mean.”

Frank had a feeling Hoffman meant he had never encountered a storm this bad before, period. That wasn’t good.