Gold Dust Read Online Free

because you left your bones drying on the trailside.”
    Jonah took a gulp of his whiskey and banged the glass down in appreciation. “It would at that. But I haven’t left my bones
     out to dry yet, and I’ve traveled to plenty of tough places. Those brains I’m sitting on haven’t failed me up to now.”
    “Maybe ‘cause you haven’t asked them to take you to the Klondike before now. Ya know, mister—what you need is a guide.”
    Jonah had known this was coming. “I don’t need a guide,” he said with a tolerant grin.
    “Yes you do.”
    “Why?”
    “You don’t have a gun.”
    “Don’t figure on needing one.”
    “You fight like some swell from Back East.”
    “I am a swell from Back East. Well, Chicago isn’t really. Back East.”
    “It’s far enough east for you to learn to fight like a sissy. That I know for a fact!”
    “I was trying to fight those boys clean. That’s not sissified.”
    The kid shook his head. “That’s what I mean. Fighting fair just invites a knock on the head, or worse. I’d bet you can’t hit
     the side of a barn with a rifle. You can’t skin a rabbit, tell a spavined horse from a sound one…”
    Jonah listened with amusement as the kid listed the reasons a ‘citified greenhorn’ couldn’t possibly survive a Klondike adventure
     without a bit of help from a wilderness-wise woodsman. No doubt the woodsman in question was the kid himself. Lord but the
     boy was a corker! With smooth, blushing cheeks and girlish lashes, he looked no older than twelve, yet he packed more trouble
     in him than most grown men. No doubt he’d need his spunk as he got older, for he didn’t have the build to grow into a bruiser.
     The kid’s hands were delicate beneath the grubbiness of calluses and dirty nails. The bone structure in his face was as fine
     as a girl’s.
    “… and from the looks of it you’ve not done a hard day’s labor in a long time,” the kid concluded, taking Jonah’s hand and
     turning it over to reveal a relatively uncallused palm.
    “I’m a writer, friend. I don’t chop wood for a living.”
    “Writing’s not going to get you to Dawson,” the boy said with an all-knowing nod.
    Jonah chuckled. “If I hired a guide to take me to the Klondike, what makes you think I’d hire you? You’re no bigger than a
     half-grown girl and you look about as tough as a butterfly.”
    The kid flushed. “I did all right with the Hacketts! And there’ve been some others who crossed me and wished they hadn’t.”
    “That so? How old are you? Twelve. Thirteen?”
    The flush staining the too-smooth cheeks deepened. “I’m twenty.”
    Jonah guffawed. “How old are you really?”
    “Ask Myrna!” the kid demanded indignantly. “She knows I’m no youngster!”
    Jonah raised an eyebrow in Myrna’s direction, fully aware the woman had been eavesdropping. She nodded.
    “Well, you’re mighty small.”
    “I can shoot the eye out of a squirrel with a rifle, pistol, or rock sling. I can skin a rabbit and have it cooking before
     your mouth even starts to water. There hasn’t been a horse born that I can’t ride, nor a mule I can’t get to work. I can find
     dry wood in a rainstorm, and build a shelter outta nothing but what the woods have to offer. What’s more, I know how to handle
     trash like the Hacketts, and you’ll be meeting lots of their kind on the way to the goldfields. Hell, mister! Without me,
     you’re gonna be robbed blind, stomped on, chewed up, and spit out before you get halfway to Dawson. If the trash along the
     trail doesn’t do it, then the wilderness will.”
    “Well now,” Jonah said with a smile. “You must be one talented kid.”
    “I’m not a kid, and I know what I’m doing.”
    A talented little con man is what the kid was, but what a character—a real throwback to the days of the wild and woolly Old
     West. The staid bankers and housewives and clerks who read the
Chicago Record
would devour the sketches he could write about the