“You told me to stay away from her, remember?”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Yuri threw up his hands. “Do you think I’m sneaking off at night to visit her? I’m not. I’ve talked to her maybe twice in the past month, and both times she was with a group of other women. I wouldn’t even call us friends, just mutual acquaintances who sometimes end up in the same social setting.”
“Maybe you should become her friend.”
“Alexei, no.” Sacha made a slashing movement with his hand. “You can’t tell Yuri to lead that poor girl on. There’s no way that’s going to end well.”
He blew out a breath, long and slow. “You’re right. I’m getting ahead of myself.” Again. It seemed that was all he ever did these days. He moved his gaze back to Yuri. “Leave Rosalind out of it, Yuri. I’m sorry for asking. We’ll find some other way to get the evidence we need.”
“Don’t apologize,” Yuri said. “I understand what you want to do and why. I just don’t want to be involved in anything that might end up hurting Rosalind.”
Alexei looked down at his desk, where the map of the Pacific Ocean was still splayed. He narrowed his gaze at the long group of islands that formed Southeast Alaska—the Alexander Archipelago. “Maybe we should focus on the Indian tribes. I know the new governor has been sending representatives to meet with various villages. He’s trying to get chiefs to sign treaties and move onto reservations.”
Sacha’s eyebrows winged up. “That’s never going to happen.”
“That’s what I would have thought, but just this morning I heard a rumor that Chief Gookshí down in Ketchikan agreed to a treaty.”
“I don’t believe it,” Yuri said.
“That man isn’t going to give up an inch of his land.” Sacha spoke at the same time.
Alexei rubbed a hand over his jaw. “That’s what makes me think one of us should take a trip down to Ketchikan to figure out what actually happened when someone from our dear, sweet governor’s staff met with the chief.”
Sacha blinked. “You really think talking to the Tlingit will give us the evidence we need to have Simon Caldwell removed as governor?”
In some ways it seemed flimsy, but in other ways... “Americans have been underestimating the tribes here ever since they bought Alaska. If they make a mistake somewhere, it will be with people they don’t view as a threat, and that means visiting Ketchikan is worth a try.”
And at the rate Governor Caldwell was going after their ships, they couldn’t afford to be picky about what they tried next.
9
Stikine River Wilderness
Ablacktail deer crossed Mikhail’s path before he found a rabbit, so he shot it, field-dressed it, and was hauling it back toward camp in less than an hour. He didn’t grumble about the weight of the deer over his shoulders as he carried it up a ravine either. If anything, he wished the deer was heavier, or that he’d brought his pack with rocks in it, or that he had three miles to walk back to the camp instead of a quarter mile. Anything to work off some of the anger stirring inside him.
Richard Caldwell as secretary of the interior. The very notion nearly made his stomach heave. His oldest brother, Alexei, disagreed with Preston Caldwell on everything from the treatment of the different Indian tribes in Alaska to the management of the seal population to the best way to educate Alaska’s native children. But all of that would be trivial compared to the problems that would arise if Richard Caldwell became secretary of the interior.
He didn’t know whether Richard and Heath had found gold on their expedition. If they had, they weren’t prancing around with excitement and broadcasting it, but that wouldn’t stop a mining company from digging up trees from their roots and clear-cutting a mountainside. It wouldn’t stop them from using dynamite to rip a hole in the mountain’s slope to access the gold and divert streams and rivers to refine it. They’d set up a stamp mill and a chlorination plant and transform the beautiful, untouched wilderness he was looking at into a place filled with grime, reeking of chlorine, and pulsing with the sound of dozens of stamps crushing rock day and night.
He wasn’t exaggerating about what a gold mine would do to the environment. This very thing had already happened across the channel from Juneau, on Douglas Island, where the Treadwell Mine had opened eight years ago, and there was nothing anyone could do to preserve the natural beauty there anymore.
But the Stikine and Iskut Rivers and their surrounding mountains and glaciers were pristine, untouched by the dirtiness of industrialization.
So he prayed Heath and Richard hadn’t found so much as a fleck of gold. That no one in Alaska would ever find another ounce.
And he was going to start praying that Richard Caldwell wouldn’t become the next secretary of the interior. Just like he was going to pray that the horrid man wouldn’t marry Miss Wetherby.
If Miss Wetherby knew the full truth about Richard and what happened all those years ago with the Athabaskans, she certainly wouldn’t agree to marry him, and her father and brother wouldn’t be in favor of the wedding either.
But was it his place to tell them? Three strangers he’d known only for a day?
What if he said something and Richard denied it? Mikhail couldn’t exactly prove anything without Sadzi or her grandfather to back him up.
For now, Miss Wetherby seemed insistent on not marrying Richard, so maybe he wouldn’t need to say anything at all. Or at the very least, he could wait until they returned to Sitka to tell her. Hopefully that would ensure a bit of peace on the trip home. He remembered all too well the fighting that had occurred on his first expedition, the one Livy had been on, and he couldn’t afford to repeat that here.
He trudged down a gully to where a pebbled creek meandered its way through the mountains and was preparing to trek up the other side when something near the creek caught his eye. Miss Wetherby. She was sitting on a log with a leather-bound book open on her lap.
