Goldie O’Gilt, pausing to remember Scrooge

[Lupinegirl]

Based on the comic book series by Don Keno Rosa and the music of Tuomas Holopanien called “The Life and Times of Scrooge.” I highly recommend reading them!

While everyone else was out celebrating, Goldie stared at a steaming cup of coffee, remembering a brew too thick to drink from long ago. A cup shared in the middle of White Agony Creek wilderness, where an argonaut eeked out a living scratching and blowing up the permafrost to find gold.
Goldie had everything she needed at her saloon. She’d rebuilt it many times since its humble frontier general store beginnings. She was spangled and glitzy: the so called “Star of the North” and she bore the less flattering nickname of “the Ice Queen” because she had refused many a hopeful suitor, and thrown many a prospector out in the cold after chatting him up, drugging his coffee, and stealing his gold poke. She’d never hurt a harmless person and the fellows she had thrown out were ruffians who deserved a cold shoulder, but the only man who had ever cracked the protective shield of ice in her heart was a duck as icy as she was. A duck who defeated a baker’s dozen of the scrappiest, toughest men in two minutes tops. A duck who destroyed a steamboat after its owner taunted him about his mother’s death and sentenced Scrooge to die. Scrooge was short on stature, but a giant in mind, willpower, courage, and strength. There never was and never would be another King of the Klondike like him. If only he had answered her letter...

Goldie sighed and sipped her coffee, taking out her fancy hair comb.
“Happy New Year, Scrooge. Wherever you are.”

It was another cold, empty night for the Star of the North.