Reckoning of Boston Jim by Claire Mulligan Page A

mariner,” Kines calls. He is attending to another customer, is wrapping a many-handled thing in swathes of brown paper.
    Boston closes the brass casing and puts it down. She is not a mariner. It is a novelty, certainly, but a gift should be of some use. Now these.
    Kines is at his elbow. “They do not come cheaply, sir.”
    â€œThat one.”
    The music box is disguised as a prayer book. Kines demonstrates its repertoire of canticles and hymns. Church is not something the Dora woman mentioned with any enthusiasm. Boston points to an harmonium. Kines turns the crank. Boston knows the tune, Illdare having hummed it once.
    â€œBach,” Kines says, “a damned Kraut, but what of it?”
    An assistant enters from a back room. He is a young man with freckled arms and teeth lapping his lower lip. He busies himself with checking through a sheaf of accounts that bear Kines’ signature in a large, square hand. Customers come and go. Boston studies another music box, from which a porcelain lady slowly rises. She revolves on a velvet platform to a tinkling tune. Her infinite doubles, reflected in the mirrors behind and below, stretch back to a vanishing point. He has seen such things before; no doubt the Dora woman has as well. It would not be long before she tired of it.
    â€œAre you searching for an item for yourself?” Kines asks.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œA friend?”
    â€œThat one.”
    â€œAh, my most valuable item. It is an automaton. Direct from Europe.”
    Kines places it on the counter. It is a hand’s span wide. The dome arches over trees fashioned of what might be clay. Painted on the inside of the globe is a waterfall and a distant hill with a castle. Inside the globe is a couple in clothes the likes of which Boston has never seen. The woman’s hat is a high cone; the man has shoes curled up like fiddleheads. They wait amid the trees, one opposite the other. Kines turns the key and they twirl about each other to a stately tune that Boston has never heard. A swan glides by, then vanishes behind the waterfall.
    â€œIt was wrought by a master Venetian craftsman for Duchess Saphina herself, a woman of gross appetites, as are all aristocrats. The dancing woman is in her likeness, down to her dimpled cheek. The man is Antonio, one of her many lovers, a captain of the guard who was banished when the Duke became suspicious. Lovesick Saphina ordered the automaton made so that each night she could see herself in her lover’s embrace, so that each night she could relive the night they first met, when first they danced to the strains of the very music that you hear now.”
    Boston has never seen the like. It will be enough, more so. It is an ingenious thing. Still . . . he lifts it to see the mechanisms beneath. Such things are plagued with rust, with delicate spokes and cogs that break at a nudge, or work only for the one who displays them.
    â€œWhat’s the cost?”
    â€œAh, you must understand, given the story behind its creation . . .”
    â€œSome story don’t make it worth more.”
    â€œI should think it does.”
    â€œTen pounds. Give you that.”
    Kines smiles broadly. “I do not accept pounds. A monarch’s head does not belong on a coin, nor a bill. It belongs on a spike.”
    â€œDollars then.”
    â€œOne hundred.”
    â€œWhat fool do you take me for?”
    Kines frowns and reaches for the automaton. Boston is handing it to him when the assistant, crouching below the counter, grunting over a crate, straightens abruptly and bumps against Kines. There is a fumbling as of three incompetent jugglers, and then a shattering.

Six
    To gold by the fistful! The cartload! The motherlode!” Eugene calls and raises his glass to the other men clumped about him in the saloon of the paddlewheeler SS Champion. They are anchored in a sheltered bend of the Fraser River on an evening that is cool and faintly