Free Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold

outside, the way Jenks loomed at the periphery of the garden, blotting out the sun.
    “I don’t know.”
    “I think he knows,” James said. “And Daddy was supposed to pay him today.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Daddy and I go over the accounts sometimes,” James said.
    Charles and Mr. Carter had never gone over the accounts. He didn’t even know what the accounts were. James continued to sketch on the window, making a fat body under the smiling face. Charles felt himself shrinking.
    “When do you look at the accounts?”
    “We’ll see Mr. Jenks soon. Today was his payday.”
    But Jenks did not show himself, and it continued to snow long into the next day.

CHAPTER 4
    For almost ten years, the blizzard of 1897 stood as the worst natural disaster to hit San Francisco. Telegraph wires snapped. Water mains burst so that awkward ice sculptures dotted Market Street. Some buildings under construction, like the new civic library, partially collapsed under the weight of the snow. Transportation halted—the streetcars wouldn’t run, and even though horse and buggies could make emergency trips, few knew how to drive in the snow, and there were many accidents. San Francisco’s cobblers, it was said, produced fine shoes for walking, but not for skiing. So pedestrians stayed indoors, waiting out the storm.
    Though Jenks was accustomed to snow, he preferred to stay in his cottage, far out of the eye of strangers he might startle.
    Years ago, he had looked all over the country for a fortune, and Alaska was supposed to be the last stop. He had prospected for gold, losing three fingers and all of his toes to frostbite. Finally, a stick of dynamite had blown a brass ingot through his cheek.
    He sold his claim at a loss, and came to San Francisco, where the Carters took pity on him. Officially, he was the gardener, but he was excused from any sort of adequacy in that regard. He also was available if anything heavy needed to be lifted.

    His cottage overflowed with the Carters’ old newspapers, which he burnt without reading, for reading reminded him of how hard it was to think. But the day of the blizzard, when he rolled and bound a hundred pounds of newsprint into dozens of tight logs, a headline caught his eye. How could he miss it—it took up half the front page: GOLD STRIKE! Beneath it, a map of Alaska, showing exactly where the Klondike was.
    Involuntarily, Jenks made a small sound, like fabric tearing. Tears welled up in his eyes.
    . . .
    By the morning of the thirty-first, it had stopped snowing, and had begun to thaw. Across the city, people were taking the first tentative steps back into life. But there was still no sign of Mr. Carter, or Cook, or Patsy.
    That day, their third in solitude, was the first that Charles hadn’t performed a hygienic inspection for himself and James. If their faces looked a bit grey, Charles wasn’t sure if he cared anymore.
    He began to trespass. He wasn’t listening for imps; he felt instead like a detective looking for clues with which he could punish the guilty for having left him alone. His first area of ingress, his mother’s dressing room, was also his last, for he found something truly baffling there.
    It was a wooden box about the size of a dictionary, with twin latches that opened easily. Inside was a metal object with a round head and long nose, and a hand grip. It could almost have been a pistol but for its immense weight—further, it had a cord and an electrical plug. Charles had seen but one object in his life that had an electrical plug: the toaster. His father had explained that one day, there would be an electrical refrigerator and an electrical oven, and that Patsy had an electrical sewing machine upstairs that eased her chores. “Electricity is a marvel,” Mr. Carter said. “It starts here, in the kitchen, and one day will be in every room.”
    Charles wondered if this odd appliance was related to sewing somehow. There were a half dozen attachments,