Part 2
Winnie Tolley pushed the two leather bags back across her bread table, one at a time.
"No, Mr. Corbin," she said.
Hugh Corbin's face went dark. "Two hundred ounces, then."
"Not for two hundred. Not for a thousand." She wiped her floury hands on her apron. "I didn't drag that flour over the Chilkoot to feed thirty men. I dragged it to feed Dawson."
"Mrs. Tolley." He leaned on the table. His voice was quiet now, and very hard. "I've got thirty men forty feet down in frozen gravel, thawing it with fires, a bucket at a time. A man who doesn't eat can't dig. And a man who can't dig, out here, has nothing at all. I'm not being greedy. I'm keeping my men alive."
"So am I," said Winnie. "All of them."
She went to the Mounted Police that same afternoon.
The sergeant at the post was a tired young Scot with frostbite scars on both cheeks. He listened to her sums. Thirty-one sacks left. A hundred loaves to a sack, near enough, if she made them smaller. A line two blocks long. Six months to the first boat.
"It won't feed all of Dawson," he said.
"No," said Winnie. "But it will feed the ones who need it most, if we stop selling it to whoever has the most gold."
So they made a list.
The sergeant posted it on the door of the police post, and on her tent pole, and read it aloud at the saloons. One loaf every second day to anyone with no cache of his own, checked against the police list of who had brought in an outfit. Not a crumb more for money. A loaf every day for the sick, for nursing mothers, for children. Gold dust would not buy a place in the line. Neither would a beaver coat.
Then Winnie went home and cut her loaves from a pound to three-quarters of a pound, and baked twice as many.
Dawson did not like it at first.
There was shouting at the tent flap. A man from Circle City called her a crazy old woman and threw his loaf in the snow. Hugh Corbin's men came down from Eldorado and were turned away at the tent flap, because Corbin had a cache of his own, and Corbin himself sent word that she would never sell a crumb on Eldorado Creek again as long as he lived.
But the line held. Nobody pushed. The Mounties stood by her tent flap in the dark mornings with their buffalo coats and their rifles slung, and the line moved, one loaf at a time, two blocks of men stamping in the cold.
And at the front of it, every morning, stood Lew Danby.
He was not buying. He was chopping her wood. He had turned up the morning after the list went up, with his gums bleeding and his legs so weak from the scurvy he could hardly lift the axe, and asked if she needed a man to split kindling. She had said yes. She had given him a loaf every day for it, and dried apples, and a cup of something hot and bitter that she brewed every night from spruce tips, the way Joe Kooshan had shown her at the summit of the pass.
By February his gums had stopped bleeding. By March he could carry two pails of water up from the river at once.
"I said I'd be rich enough to buy the bakery by January," he told her once, splitting wood in the snow.
"You did."
"I'm not rich."
"No," said Winnie. "But you're alive. That's worth more, out here."
In the third week of February, Hugh Corbin came back.
He came alone this time, at night, after the line was done. He stood inside her tent flap with his beaver cap in his hands.
"My foreman's down with the scurvy," he said. "Mike Cassidy. He's been with me eleven years. He can't keep anything down but bread. And my men..." He stopped. "I put them on half rations of my own cache in January. Like your list. It was the only way to make it last. It made me think." He cleared his throat. "Mrs. Tolley, I would be grateful if you would put Mike on your sick list."
Winnie looked at him.
"He's already on it, Mr. Corbin," she said. "Since Tuesday. The sergeant brought me his name."
Hugh Corbin stood very still. Then he nodded once, and put on his cap, and went out into the cold.
The next morning, a sled came down from Eldorado Creek and stopped at Winnie's tent. On it were six sacks of flour from Hugh Corbin's own cache, and a note in a big rough hand.
For the list. H. C.
The ice went out of the Yukon on the eighth of May, with a roar like cannon, and on the eighth of June the first steamboat of the season came around the bend below Dawson with her whistle blowing, and the whole town ran down to the riverbank to meet her.
Winnie Tolley had one sack of flour left.
She baked it that morning. All of it. And when the steamboat crew came ashore, filthy and grinning, she stood at the tent flap on Front Street with a basket on each arm and handed out bread to every man who came up from the boat.
"What do we owe you, ma'am?" the captain asked.
"A quarter," said Winnie Tolley. "Same as everyone."