CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VI.A FULL thirty days after Swiftwater and Hathaway had left Seattle, following the affair on the decks of the steamer “Humboldt,” found the miner and his friend in Skagway. It was in the height of the spring rush to the gold fields, and there are undoubtedly few, if any, living today who will ever witness on this continent such scenes as were enacted on the terrible Skagway trail over the Coast Range of the Alaska mountains, which separated 50,000 eager, struggling, quarreling, frenzied men and women drawn thither by the mad rush for gold from the upper reaches of the Yukon River and the lakes which helped to form that mighty stream.No pen can adequately portray the bitter clash, and struggling, and turmoil—man against man, man against woman, woman against man, fist against fist, gun against gun, as this mob of gold-crazed human beings surged into the vortex of the Yukon’s valley and found their way to the new Golconda of the north.Skagway was a whirling, tumbling, seething whirlpool of humanity. Imagine the spectacle ofa mob of 40,000 half-crazed human beings assembled at the foot of the almost impassable White Pass, with the thermometer 90 degrees in the shade at the foot of the range, and ten feet of snow on the Summit, three miles away. Then picture to this, if you can, the innumerable crimes against humanity that broke out in this mob of half-crazy, fighting, excited, bewildered multitude of men and women.There was no rest in the town—no sleep—no time for meals—no time for repose—nothing but a mad scramble and the devil take the hindmost.There was one cheap, newly constructed frame hotel in Skagway and rooms were from $5 to $20 a day. The only wharf of the town was packed fifty feet high with merchandise of every description—65 per cent. canned provisions, flour and dried fruits and the rest of it hardware, mining tools and clothing for the prospectors. Teams of yelping, snarling, fighting malamutes added their cries to the eternally welling mass of sound.And Swiftwater was there. Almost the first face I saw as I entered the hotel was that of Gates.“Mrs. Beebe,” he said, “let us forget bygones. In another day or two I would have been over the Summit with my outfit. It is lucky that I am here, because possibly I can help you in some way.”I could do nothing more than listen to what Swiftwater said. There was no other hotel, or indeedany place in the town where I could get shelter for myself and my two girls. Knowing the black purpose in Swiftwater’s heart, I watched my girls Bera and Blanche day and night. My own goods were piled up unsheltered and unprotected on the beach.Swiftwater, with all his cunning, could not deceive me of his real intent, yet my own perplexities and troubles made it easy for him to keep me in constant fear of him.“Mrs. Beebe,” he would say, “you can trust me absolutely.”With that, Swiftwater’s face would take on a smile as innocent as that of a babe. There was always the warm, soft clasp of the womanish hand—the low pitched voice of Swiftwater to keep it company.And now, as I remember how innocent Bera was, how girlish she looked, how confiding she was in me, yet never for a moment forgetting, perhaps, the lure of the gold studded gravel banks of Eldorado which Swiftwater held constantly before her, it seems to my mind that no woman can be wronged as deeply and as eternally as that woman whose daughter is stolen from her through guile and soft deceit.We had been in Skagway but a trifle more than a week, when, one evening, returning to the hotel, I found my room empty and Bera missing.“I have gone with Swiftwater to Dawson, Mamma. He loves me and I love him.” This was what Bera had written and left on her dresser.That was all. There was one chance only to prevent the kidnaping of Bera. That was for me to get to the lakes on the other side of the mountains, at the head of navigation on the Yukon and seek the aid of the Canadian mounted police.At White Horse, there was trace of Swiftwater and Bera, but they had twenty-four hours the start of me and, when I finally found that they had gone through to Dawson, I simply quit.Down the Upper Yukon there was a constant stream of barges, small boats and rafts. Miles Canyon, with its madly rushing, white-capped waters, extending over five miles of rock-ribbed river bed and sand bar, was scattered o’er with timbers, boards, boxes and casks containing the outfits and all the worldly possessions of scores of unfortunates.“On, on, and ever and eternally on, down the Yukon to Dawson!” That was the cry in those days and it bore, as unresistingly and as mercilessly as the tide of the ocean carries the flotsam and jetsam of seacoast harbors, the brave and the strong, the weak and crippled, the wise and the foolish, in one inchoate mass of humanity to that magic spot where more gold lay underground waiting for the pick ofthe poverty-struck miner than the world had ever known of—“The Klondike.”All things finally come to an end. I was in Dawson. At the little temporary dock on the Yukon’s bank, stood Bera and Swiftwater. The miner did not wait till I landed from the little boat. He went up the gang plank and grasped me in his arms.“Mrs. Beebe,” he said, “we’re married. Come with us to our cabin. We are waiting for you, and dinner is on the table.”Swiftwater during all that summer and winter in Dawson was the very soul of chivalry and attention both to Bera and myself. There was nothing too good for us in the little market places at Dawson and a box of candy at $5 a box just to please Bera or to satisfy my own taste for sweetmeats was no more to Swiftwater than the average man spending a two-bit piece on the outside.As the spring broke up the river and then summer took the place of spring in Dawson, the traders from the outside brought in supplies of fresh eggs, fresh oranges, lettuce, new onions—all the delicacies greatly to be prized and more esteemed after a long winter than the rarest fruits and dainties of the States.When summer came, Dawson got its first shipment of new watermelons from the outside, Swiftwaterbought the first melon he could find and paid $40 in dust for it, and brought it home, simply to please Bera and to make his home that much happier.CHAPTER VII.HYDRAULIC mining in the Klondike country, by the time that Swiftwater had assembled his big outfit on Quartz Creek was in its very infancy, yet there were plenty of wise men in Dawson who knew that the tens of thousands of acres of hillside slopes and old abandoned creek beds would some day produce more gold when washed into sluice boxes with gigantic rams, than the native miner and prospector had been able to show, even with the figures, $50,000,000, output to his credit.The Canadian government had given Swiftwater and his partner, Joe Boyle, a princely fortune in the three mile concession on Quartz Creek. So great was the reputation of Swiftwater Bill—so intimately was his name linked with the idea of immense quantities of gold—and so high was his standing as a practical miner, that Swiftwater was able to borrow money right and left to carry on his work on Quartz Creek. Thus it was that before anybody could realize it, including myself, Swiftwater’s financial standing actually was $100,000 worse off than nothing. This was about the amount of money that he used and in that tidy sum was allthe savings of my winter in Dawson and my dividends from my hotel, which aggregated at least $35,000.“When Joe comes in this spring from London,” said Swiftwater to me, “we’ll have all the money we want and more, too, Mrs. Beebe. He has cabled twice to Seattle that our money is all raised and we will have a million-dollar clean-up on Quartz Creek this fall.”As the spring came on and reports from the mines on Quartz Creek became brighter, Swiftwater became more enthusiastic and confident. The fact that his creditors were beginning to worry, and that there is a nasty law in Canada which affects debtors who seek to leave the country in a restraining way, did not seriously worry Swiftwater. He seemed to think more of the coming of his child than anything else, next to the work on Quartz Creek.“That baby is going to be born on Quartz Creek, Mrs. B—” Swiftwater said. “It is my determination that my first child shall be born where I will make a greater fortune than anybody hereabouts.”I told Swiftwater that he was talking arrant nonsense.“It would be the death of Bera in her condition,” said I, “for her to take the trip up there in this cold, nasty weather, with the roads more like swamps than anything else and the hills still covered withsnow. More than that, there are doctors here in Dawson and on Quartz Creek we would be thirty miles from the nearest human settlement.”But nothing would deter Swiftwater. He set about rigging up a big sled which could be pulled by two horses. It was made of heavy oaken timber, and the long low bed was filled with furs, blankets, bedding, etc. Swiftwater went to Dr. Marshall, our physician, when all arrangements had been practically completed for the journey to Quartz. He had effectually stopped my protests before he said to Dr. Marshall:“I will give you $2,000 or more, if necessary, to take six weeks off and go with me up to Quartz Creek where my child will be born. Just name your figure if that is not enough.”Bera was seventeen years old, immature and delicate, yet brave and strong, and willing to imperil her own life to gratify Swiftwater’s whim. So it finally came about that I was delegated to do the final shopping in advance of our journey.I went to Gandolfo’s and bought with my own money a case of oranges and a crate of apples. Each orange cost $3 in dust and the apples about the same. Next I ordered a barrel of bottled beer, for Swiftwater wanted to treat his men with a feast when the baby was born and the bottled beer was what he thought to be the proper thing. The barrel of beer cost me close to $500 in gold.BERA BEEBE GATESFrom a photograph taken at Washington, D. C., where she was deserted by Swiftwater Bill.All this stuff was loaded on the sled. They started over the twenty-eight miles of crooked, winding, marshy trail to Quartz Creek. The journey was something terrible. The days were short and the wind from the hills and gulches was wet with the thawing of the snow and so cold that it seemed to make icicles of the drippings from the trees. Bera, wrapped a foot thick in furs, seemed to stand the trip all right, and in due time the baby was born and christened.There was great rejoicing in the camp and Swiftwater weighed out $3,000 in dust to Dr. Marshall and sent him back to Dawson. A month afterwards one of our men brought from Dawson the word that the mail had arrived over the ice, but Swiftwater looked in vain for a letter from Joe Boyle. He had confidently expected a draft for $50,000.For two days Swiftwater scarcely spoke. The cabin in which we lived was only a quarter of a mile from the nearest dump where the men were working. I used to go out every once in a while and take up a few shovels full of gravel which would wash out between $5 and $10 and if I had had the good common sense which comes only after years of hard knocks in this troublesome world, I could then and therehave protected myself against the bitter misfortunes which came to me in a few months afterwards.I was washing some of the baby’s clothes in the kitchen and drying them on a line over the fire, when Swiftwater came in from the diggings, clad in his rubber boots which reached to his hips.The miner asked for some hot water and a towel and began to shave the three weeks’ black growth from his chin.“What are you going to do now, Swiftwater?” I asked.“I’m going down to town.”For two days the cabin had been without food except some mush and a few dried potatoes and a can of condensed milk for the baby. Swiftwater had sent a man over the trail to Dawson for food two days before.“You’ll not go without Bera! You are not going to leave us here to starve,” said I.“Bera cannot possibly go,” said Bill.I turned and went to Bera’s room and told her to dress immediately. Then I washed the baby, put an entire new change of clothes on him, wrapped up his freshly ironed garments in a package, got a bottle of soothing syrup and a can of condensed milk.It was always my belief and is now, that Swiftwater’s mind contained a plan to abandon Bera, thebaby and me, and to run away from the Yukon to escape his troubles.We got a small boat and filled one end of it with fir boughs, covered them over with rugs, and put Bera and the baby there. Then Swiftwater and I got in the boat and pushed off down stream.Swiftwater confessed to me for the first time that he was in serious trouble.“There have been three strange men from Dawson out here on our claims,” said Swiftwater, “and I know who sent them out. They are watching me.”As I look back upon that awful trip down Indian River, with poor, wan, white-faced Bera hugging the little three weeks’ old baby to her bosom, so sick that she could hardly talk, I wonder if there is any hardship, and peril, and privation, and suffering, a woman cannot endure.The boat was heavy—terribly heavy. In the small stretches of still water it was desperately hard, bone-racking toil to keep moving.In the rushes of the river, where rapids tore at mill-race speed over boulders and pebbly stretches, we were constantly in danger of being upset. An hour of this sort of work made me almost ready for any sort of fate.Finally we struck a big rock and the current carried us on a stretch of sandy beach. Swiftwater and I got out and waded up to our armpits in thecold stream to get the boat started again. Then we climbed aboard and once more shot down the rocky canyon to another stretch of still water beyond. By nightfall we had reached an old cabin half way to Dawson, in which the fall before Swiftwater had cached provisions. The baby’s food was all gone, and Bera, in a fit of anger, had thrown what little bread and butter sandwiches we had put up for ourselves, overboard. I had not eaten all day, nor had Swiftwater.It was growing dusk when we painfully pulled the boat on the bank at Swiftwater’s cache. Gates went inside to get some grub and prepared to build a fire. He came out a moment later, his face ashy pale, his eyes downcast.“They have stolen all I had put in here,” he said.It seemed to me that night as if the very limit of human misery on this earth was my bitter portion as we waited all through the weary hours in the cabin huddled before a little fire, waiting (it is light all the time in summer) to resume our journey to Dawson.The next day we reached Dawson shortly after noon, famished, cold, and completely exhausted. I actually believe the baby would have died but for the bottle of soothing syrup and water which I had brought along.Swiftwater took us to the Fairview Hotel and sent for the doctor for Bera and the baby.CHAPTER VIII.TO THE people of Dawson, in those days, starving through weary winter months for want of frequent mail communication with the civilized world, and hungering for the ebb and flow of human tide that is a natural and daily part of the lives of those in more fortunate places, the arrival of the first steamer from “the outside” in the spring is an event even greater than a Fourth of July celebration to a country town in Kansas.For days before our arrival down Indian River from Quartz Creek, the men and women of Dawson had eagerly discussed the probability of the coming of the Yukoner, the regular river liner from White Horse due any moment, with fresh provisions from Seattle and the first papers and letters from “the outside.”For two days after Swiftwater had taken Bera to the Fairview Hotel, the doctor had cared for her so as to enable her to recover from the hardships of the trip down Indian River. I took the baby to my own rooms and carefully nursed him through all one day. This brought him quickly round, and he soon looked as bright and cheerful as a new twenty dollar gold piece.It was on the third morning after we arrived in Dawson that the steamer Yukoner’s whistle sounded up the river, and the whole populace rushed to the wharves and river banks. Miners came from all points up the creeks to welcome friends or to get their mail that the Yukoner had brought. The little shopkeepers in Dawson, particularly the fruit venders, were extremely active, bustling amongst the crowd on the dock and fighting their way to get the first shipments of early vegetables, fruits, fresh eggs, fresh butter and other perishable commodities for which Dawson hungered.But Swiftwater, keen eyed, nervous, straining, yet trying to be composed, saw none of this, nor felt the least interest in the tide of newcomers who stepped from the Yukoner’s decks and made their way up town surrounded by friends.Swiftwater was looking for one face in the crowd—that of his partner, Joe Boyle, who had promised to bring him $100,000 from London, where the big concession on Quartz Creek had been bonded for $250,000.Swiftwater stood at the gang plank and eagerly scanned every face until the last man had come ashore and only the deck hands remained on board.“There is certainly a letter in the mail, anyhow,” said Swiftwater.For the first time in all of this miserable experienceI realized that a heavy burden was on Swiftwater’s shoulders—a load that was crushing the heart and brain of him—and that would, unless relieved, destroy all of the man’s native capacity to handle his tangled affairs, even under the most unfavorable circumstances.I decided to watch Swiftwater very closely. I noticed that he was not to be seen around town in his usual haunts. I did not dare ask him if he feared arrest, for that would show that I knew that his crisis had come.Two hours after the Yukoner’s mail was in the postoffice, Swiftwater came to my room.“There is no letter from Joe,” was all he said.I made no reply except to say:“Have you told Bera?”“No, and I’m not going to—now,” said Swiftwater and then left the room.Swiftwater had between $35,000 and $40,000 of my money in his Quartz Creek concession. I had felt absolutely secure for the reason that if the property was well handled my interest should be worth from $100,000 to $250,000. My faith in the property has been justified by subsequent events, as all well informed Dawson mining men will testify.But the want of money was bitter and keen at that moment. Yet I scarcely knew what to advise Swiftwater to do.Gates and Bera came to my rooms after dinner that night.“Will this help you pay a few pressing little bills?” asked Swiftwater, as he threw two fifty dollar paper notes in my lap.“My God, Swiftwater, can’t you spare any more than $100?” I gasped.“Oh, that’s just for now—I’ll give you plenty more tomorrow,” said he.As they arose to go, Bera kissed me on the mouth and cheek with her arms around my neck.“You love the baby, don’t you mama?” said Bera, and I saw then, without seeing, and came afterwards to know that there were tears in Bera’s eyes and a smile dewy with affection on her lips.Swiftwater put his arm around me and kissed me on the forehead.“We’ll be over early for you for breakfast tomorrow,” said Swiftwater as they went down the stairs.Holding the baby in my arms at the window, I watched Swiftwater and Bera go down the street, Bera turning now and again to wave her hand and throw a kiss to me, Swiftwater lifting his hat.Now, what I am about to relate may seem almost incredible to any normal human mind and heart; and especially so to those thousands of Alaskans who knew Swiftwater in the early days to be jolly,though impractical, yet always generous, whole-souled, brave and honest.An hour after Swiftwater and Bera had gone, there was a knock at my door. I opened it and there stood Phil Wilson—an old associate and friend of Swiftwater’s.“Is Bill Gates here?” asked Wilson.“Why, no,” said I. “They went over an hour ago.”“Thank you,” said he, and lumbered heavily down the stairs.The next morning I waited until 11 o’clock for Swiftwater and Bera to come for me to go to breakfast. I had slept little or none the night before and my nerves were worn down to the fine edge that comes just before a total collapse.When it seemed as if I could not wait longer, there came a knock at the door.When I opened the door there stood George Taylor, a friend of Swiftwater’s of some years’ standing.“Mrs. Beebe, I came to tell you that Swiftwater and Bera left early this morning to go to Quartz Creek on horseback. I promised Swiftwater I would help you move to his cabin and get everything ready for their return on Saturday.”“In Heaven’s name, what is Swiftwater trying to do—kill Bera?” I exclaimed. “That ride toQuartz Creek in her condition, through the mud and mire of that trail, will kill her.”Taylor merely looked at me and did not answer.“Are you telling me the truth?” I demanded.“I am,” he said.Taylor walked away and I closed the door and went back to the baby.“Baby,” said I, “I guess we’re left all alone for a while and you haven’t any mama but me.”Although I afterward learned of the fact, it did me no good at that trying moment that Swiftwater had told Bera, before she would consent to leave me, that he had sent me $800 in currency by Wilson. Of course, Swiftwater did nothing of the kind, yet his story was such as to lead Bera to believe that I was well protected and comfortable.Then I set to work to move my little belongings into Swiftwater’s cabin, there to wait for four days hoping that every minute would bring some word from Bera and Gates. There was little to eat in the cabin and the $100 that Swiftwater had given me had nearly all gone for baby’s necessities. The little fellow had kept up well and strong in spite of everything, and when I undressed him at night and bathed him and got him ready for his bed, he seemed so brave and strong and sweet that I could not, for the life of me, give way to thefeeling of desolation and loss that my circumstances warranted.On the third day after Bera and Swiftwater had gone and I was getting a little supper for the baby and myself in the cabin, there came a clatter of heavy boots on the gravel walk in front of the house and a boisterous knock on the door.Jumping up from the kitchen table, I nearly ran to the door, believing that Bera and Swiftwater were there. Instead there stood a messenger from the McDonald Hotel in Dawson with a letter for me. It simply said:“We have gone down the river in a small boat to Nome with Mr. Wilson. I will send you money immediately on arrival there, so that you can join us.SWIFTWATER.”That was all.I read the letter through again and then the horror of it came over me—I all alone in Dawson with Swiftwater’s four weeks’ old baby, broke and he owing me nearly $40,000.Then everything seemed to leave me and I fell to the floor unconscious. Hours afterward—they said it was 9 o’clock at night, and the messenger had been there at 4 in the afternoon—I came to. The baby was crying and hungry. It seemed to me I had been in a long sickness and I could notfor a while quite realize where I was or what ill shape of a hostile fate had befallen me. And, when I think of it now, it seems to me any other woman in my place would have gone crazy.For two months I stayed in that cabin, trying my best to find a way out of Dawson and unable to move a rod because of the fact that I had no money. Swiftwater, as I learned afterwards, took a lay on a claim on Dexter Creek and cleaned up in a short time $4,000.When I heard this, I wrote to him for money for the baby, but none came.A month passed and then another and no word from Swiftwater. I felt as long as I had a roof over my head, I could make a living for myself and the baby by working at anything—manicuring, hairdressing or sewing. Then, one evening, just after I had finished dinner, came a rap at the door.It was Phil Wilson.“Swiftwater has given me a deed to this house and power of attorney over his other matters,” said he. “I shall move my things over here and occupy one of these three rooms.”I knew better than to make any objection then, but the next day I told Wilson:“You will have to take your things down town—you cannot stay here.”“I guess I’ll stay all right, Mrs. Beebe,” said he.“And it will be all winter, too. And, I think it would be better for you, Mrs. Beebe, if you stayed here with me.”I knew just what that meant. I said:“Mr. Wilson, I understand you, but you will go and take your things now.”Wilson left in another minute and I did not see him for two days. On the second afternoon I locked the door with a padlock and went down town to do some shopping for the baby, who I had left with a neighbor. I also wanted to send a fourth letter to Swiftwater, begging him to send me some money to keep me and his baby from starving.When I got back at dusk that evening, the door to the cabin was broken open, and the chain and padlock lay on the ground shattered into fragments.I went inside. All my clothes, the baby’s and even the little personal belongings of the child were piled together in a disordered heap in the center room.CHAPTER IX.IT WAS pitch dark when I left the cabin and made my way directly, as best I could, to the town with its dimly lighted streets. It seemed to me that I had never had a friend in all this world. Friend? Yes, FRIEND. That is to say—a human being who could be depended upon in any emergency and who was right—right all the time in fair as well as in foul weather.There was only one thought in my mind—that was to find some man or woman in all that country to whom I could go for shelter and for aid. I knew naught of Swiftwater and Bera, except that they had left me. Swiftwater’s child, I felt as if he was my own—that little babe smiling up into my face as I had held him in my arms but a few minutes before, seemed to me as if he was my own.I knew instinctively that there was none in all that multitude of carefree or careworn miners who thronged the three cafes and the dance halls of Dawson who could do much, if anything, to help me.Past the dance halls and saloons and gambling halls of Dawson I went my way, down beyond the town and finally found the dark trail that led tothe barracks of the mounted police. I told the captain exactly what had happened. I said:“Captain, I am left all alone here by Swiftwater Bill and I have to find some place to shelter his little two months’ old child and to feed and clothe him. He told me to live in his cabin. But I have no home there now as long as that man Wilson lives there.”No woman who has never known the hard and seamy side of life in Dawson can possibly understand how good are the mounted police to every human being, man, woman or child, who is in trouble without fault of their own. The captain said.“Mrs. Beebe, I have long known of you, and I do not doubt that a wrong has been done you. You and your little grandson shall not suffer for want of shelter or food tonight.”With that the captain detailed two officers with instructions to accompany me to Swiftwater’s cabin and to see that I was comfortably and safely housed there, no matter what the circumstances. We went back that long, dark way, a mile over the trail to the cabin. When we arrived there, the two officers went inside.“Place this woman’s clothes and belongings where they were before you came in here, and do it at once,” commanded one of the mounted police.Wilson looked at me in amazement, and then his face was flushed with an angry glow as he saw that the two officers meant business.Without a word, he picked up all the baby’s clothes and my own and put them back where they had been before. Then he took his pack of clothes and belongings and left without a word.It would merely encumber my story to tell how I was summoned into court by Phil Wilson, and how the judge, after hearing my story of Swiftwater’s brutality—of his leaving me in Dawson penniless with his baby—said that he could hardly conceive how a man could be so inhuman as Swiftwater was, to leave the unprotected mother of his wife and his baby alone in such a place as Dawson and in such hands as those of the man who stood before him. He said that such brutality, in his judgment, was without parallel in Dawson’s annals and that, while he felt the deepest sympathy for me, left as I had been helpless and with Swiftwater’s baby, yet the law gave Phil Wilson the right to the cabin.This ended the case. I turned to go from the courtroom when the Presbyterian minister, Dr. McKenzie, came to me and said:“Mrs. Beebe, I do not know anything about the circumstances that have brought you to this condition,but if you will let me have the child I will see that he has a good home and is well cared for.”But this was not necessary, as it turned out afterwards, because Dr. McKenzie took the matter up with the council, where it was threshed out in all its details. The council voted $125 a month for sustenance for the nurse and the baby. The mounted police took me to the barracks and there provided a cabin and food, with regular supplies of provisions from the canteen.I do not doubt but that the monthly expense during the winter that I lived there with the baby is still a matter of record in Dawson in the archives of the government, and I am equally certain that, although Swiftwater Bill has made hundreds of thousands of dollars since that day and is now reputed to be worth close to $1,000,000, he has never liquidated the debt he owes to the Canadian government for the care and sustenance and shelter they gave his own boy. All of the facts stated in this chapter can easily be verified by recourse to the records of the court and mounted police in Dawson.Although I knew that Swiftwater was making money in Nome, I placed no more dependence in him from that moment and managed to sustain myself by manicuring and hairdressing in Dawson.The winter wore away, and there was the usual annual celebration of the coming of spring withits steamers from White Horse laden with the first papers and the mail from the outside. In May of that year I received a telegram from Swiftwater Bill telling me to leave Dawson on the first boat and come down the river to Nome, as he and Bera would be there on the first boat from Seattle. The day after I received the telegram the mail came and brought a letter written by Swiftwater from Chicago, saying that he had the money to pay me all he owed me and more too, and for me not to fail to meet him and Bera in Nome.Isn’t it curious how a woman will forget all the injustice she suffers at the hands of a man, when it seems to her that he is trying to do and is doing the right thing?Does it seem odd to you, my woman reader, that the thought of meeting Bera again and of giving to her and to Swiftwater the custody of the dear little child I had loved and nursed all winter long, should have appealed to me?And now, as there must be an end to the hardest luck story—just as there is a finish at some time to all forms of human grief and sorrow—so there came an end to that winter in the little cabin near the mounted police barracks at Dawson, where baby and I and the nurse, Lena Hubbell, had spent so many weeks waiting for a change in our luck.Again there was a mob of every kind of people in Dawson.On the first steamer leaving Dawson I went with the child, after giving up a good business that netted me between $200 and $300 a month. I took the nurse girl with me—who had been in unfortunate circumstances in Dawson—and I speak of her now, as she figures prominently in another chapter in this book.It matters little now that Swiftwater could have provided handsomely for me and the child—that he took the money that he made from his lay on Dexter Creek and spent it gambling at Nome; and that Bera, knowing my circumstances, took from a sluice box on his claim enough gold to exchange for $500 in bills at Nome, to send to me.And when I think of this my blood boils, for Bera, after she had the $500 in bills wrapped in a piece of paper and sealed up in an envelope addressed to me, met Swiftwater on the street in Nome and he took the money away from her, saying:“Bera, I’ll mail that letter to your mother.”Of course, I never got the money because Swiftwater gambled it away, and I laying awake nights crying and unable to sleep because of my worry, and working hard throughout the long winter days to support Swiftwater’s child.So it came about that we boarded the big river steamer Susie for Nome. Her decks were jammed with people eager to get outside or anxious to try their fortunes in the new Seward Peninsula gold fields or the beach diggings at Nome. The Yukon was clear of ice, wide, deep and beautiful to look upon in summer, though in winter, when the ice is packed up one hundred feet high, it carries the death dealing blizzards that bring an untimely fate to many a hardy traveler.In Nome I found no further news of Swiftwater nor Bera and waited there for three weeks. Then, after days of watching at the postoffice, I got a letter from Swiftwater, saying that it would not be possible for him to come to Nome, and there was not even so much as a dollar bill in the letter.Disheartened and miserable, I turned to go back to my hotel. As I turned from the postoffice a news-boy rushed up from the wharf, crying out:“SEATTLE TIMES—ALL ABOUT SWIFTWATER BILL RUNNING AWAY WITH ANOTHER WOMAN.”CHAPTER X.AS I write this chapter, which is to interest not only the friends and acquaintances of Swiftwater Bill, but which also may throw a new light on his character, and may even arouse a general interest in the odd freaks of human nature which one finds in the northern country, I am moved to wonder whether or not there is a human pen capable of portraying all of the many-sided phases of Swiftwater’s nature. The story in the Seattle paper merely gave an outline of Swiftwater’s escapade, when he ran away with Kitty Brandon, took her from Portland to Seattle and back to Chehalis and there married her on June 20th, 1901.If Swiftwater Bill’s title as the Don Juan of the Klondike had ever been questioned before this affair, it seems to me that his elopement with Kitty Brandon from Portland early in June of that year would have forever settled the matter in his favor. The Seattle paper merely told that Swiftwater and Kitty had been married, against the will and wish of her mother at Chehalis, and that the girl’s mother learning of the affair had followed the lovers to Seattle.Kitty was a fragile, neatly formed girl of fifteen years, when she went to St. Helen’s Hall in Portlandas a student. Swiftwater left Bera in the spring of that year at Washington, D. C., and hurried across the continent, intending, as he told me in all his letters, on making another fortune in Alaska. He had valuable interests in the gold mining district near Teller, Alaska, and in his fond imagination there was every reason to believe that the Kougarok country was as rich, if not richer, than Eldorado and Bonanza in the Klondike.“Bring my baby down to Nome and meet me at Teller,” Swiftwater wrote me. “I am so glad you have taken such good care of my darling son all winter in Dawson. I shall pay you all that you have loaned me and I will see that you make more money in Teller City than you ever made in Dawson. I could hug and kiss you for taking such good care of our baby boy.”Such was the language of Swiftwater’s letters to me, written in Washington in the spring of that year. Swiftwater reasoned that all of Alaska is underlaid with gold; that the fabulous riches of Eldorado and Bonanza would be duplicated again and again on Seward peninsula. To his mind, the making of a fortune of a million of dollars in a summer in the new diggings near Teller was one of the simplest things in the world, and it is not to be wondered at that there were hundreds among his friends who believed then and do now that hismining judgment and fairy-like luck were such as to enable him to go forth into the north at any time and bring out hundreds of thousands of dollars in the precious yellow stuff.Be that as it may, when Swiftwater reached the coast, he happened by ill chance to stop at Portland. In St. Helen’s Hall there was Kitty Brandon, known as his niece, a girl of more than ordinary mental and physical charms. Once again the amorous nature of Swiftwater Bill asserted itself. It is related that he called at St. Helen’s Hall and interviewed Kitty Brandon, and then after that was a frequent visitor, taking Kitty at odd times driving through the beautiful city of Portland or entertaining her at lunch or dinner, as the case might be, in Portland’s swell cafes.That Swiftwater had no plans for his immediate future can well be believed when it is known that after a few days of courtship of Kitty Brandon, he eloped with the little girl and came to Seattle. On the way to Seattle Kitty and Swiftwater were married at Chehalis.It is not surprising that Swiftwater found his last love affair anything but a summer holiday, when it is remembered that his legal wife, Bera, was in Washington, D. C., awaiting his return. Considerations of propriety and, even of the law, seemedto have left Swiftwater’s mind entirely, until Kitty’s mother learned of his elopement and followed the loving pair to Seattle.What followed afterwards was told in the Seattle, Tacoma and Portland newspapers of that time. Learning that Swiftwater and Kitty were registered as man and wife at a Seattle hotel, Kitty’s mother followed them and sought to apprehend them. Then it was that Swiftwater evinced that capacity for resource and tact which, as all his friends know, is one of his most distinguished characteristics.With the irate mother of his newest love lying in wait at night in the lobby of one of Seattle’s best known hotels, it was Swiftwater’s task to show that skill in maneuver and celerity in action which tens of thousands of Northerners attributed to him as the origin of his odd nickname. There was no time to repent for his infatuation for the pretty Kitty Brandon, or to remember the fate of his deserted wife and child in Washington.And Swiftwater was equal to the emergency. Bidding Kitty’s mother wait in the hotel parlor, Swiftwater rushed to his room, telephoned for a hack to come to the rear of the hostelry, and in less than ten minutes Bill and his sweetheart were being driven at breakneck speed through the streets of Seattle, southward over the bridge across the tide flats, headed for Tacoma. It was told by Swiftwater afterwards that in nearly every mile of that trip fear that Kitty’s mother was pursuing him and his inamorita followed him and for the greater part of the way he kept watching down the dark road in the rear of his hack, expecting that at every turn of the road the wrathful parent would be in sight in readiness to pounce upon him.ESCAPE AT NIGHT OF SWIFTWATER AND KITTY BRANDON FROM THE GIRL’S IRATE MOTHER.From Tacoma, where Swiftwater and Kitty found only temporary shelter, the runaway pair escaped to Portland, to return to Seattle and spend their honeymoon in a little cottage in an obscure district near Interbay.CHAPTER XI.AS I look back on that day in Nome and recall the sensation created in the little mining camp when the paper containing the story of Swiftwater’s perfidy was circulated abroad among the people, I am tempted to wonder if the duplicate or parallel of Swiftwater’s enormities at this time can be found in all the annals of this great Northwestern country. The Times’ story seemed, even to those like myself, who knew something of Swiftwater’s character, to be almost incredible, and for my part it was several hours before I realized, in a dumb unfeeling sort of a way, that Swiftwater had absolutely stolen his own sister’s child—Kitty Brandon—a girl not more than sixteen years old, had eloped with her, committed bigamy by marrying her in Chehalis, Wash., and at the same time had deserted his wife and left her penniless in Washington, D. C.It was long after nightfall as I sat in my room, the baby sound asleep in his little crib, the nurse gone for the night, and I had read The Times’ story about Swiftwater and Kitty over the twentieth time, that I felt the real force of the shame and scandal which the miner had placed about himself and Bera, and which did not even leave me and mylittle grandson, Clifford, outside of its dark and forbidding pall.All that night I lay awake and wondered how in Heaven’s name I could get word to Bera—or if she had received a telegram from friends in Seattle and the blow had killed her—or whether she was then on her way West, or whatever fate had befallen her.I knew little about Swiftwater’s business affairs just at that time except that he had gone to Washington in the hope of furthering his mining ventures in the North and had taken Bera with him. Then I remembered that in his letters to me and telegrams urging me to join him at Nome he had spoken about having raised considerable money and was able to pay his debt to me and lift me out of the mire of toil and drudgery in Alaska, in which I had sojourned for so many months.All that night I neither slept nor rested. It seemed to me at times as if my head would split into a thousand pieces with the thought of Swiftwater’s treachery to Bera and myself. Then I realized the utter futility and helplessness of a woman situated as I was in Nome, absolutely unable to get a telegram or quick letter to Bera or to hear from her telling me of her condition. For aught I knew, she might have been deathly sick, cared for only by strangers or left destitute atsome place in the East and without any means whatever of righting herself.It seems to me, now when I think of that all night’s vigil in the little hotel in Nome, that Providence must have been watching over me, that I did not lose my reason. At last I found that unless I went to work doing something, I would sure go crazy, and then I started to get work, first borrowing some money, which I sent out by mail the next day to Bera at her last address.While I worked and slaved in Nome trying to get a few dollars ahead so that I could care for the baby and make my way out to Seattle to help Bera, I finally got word that she had been left destitute in Washington, D. C. Swiftwater had furnished four nice rooms in an apartment house at Washington, and in their effects was more than $1,000 worth of rare curios and ivory from Alaska. Then came another letter that Bera, unable to pay for her care, food and medical attention—the second baby boy was born August 28th—had been put on board a train with a charity ticket, her ivories and curios sold for a trifle and had been started West for Seattle.I need not dwell on how Bera, more dead than alive from five days traveling in a chair car from Washington to Seattle with her babe at her bosom and unable to sleep at all—with nothing to eat buta few sandwiches which they had given her at Washington—arrived in Seattle and was cared for by friends.They took the girl, so weak she could hardly stand on her feet, to a restaurant and gave her her first hot meal in almost a week. Then Bera and her baby went to Portland to live with her grandma, while Swiftwater and Kitty Gates were touring the country.And do you know that Swiftwater’s polygamous wife, Kitty Gates, was the girl who Bera one year before had fitted out with a nice outfit of clothes and had sent her to a convent school at Portland to be given a good education?Yes, this is the truth, and this was Kitty’s gratitude to Bera and Swiftwater’s crime against the law and his own flesh and blood.How we managed after I came to Seattle from Nome to live in a little room in a small old fashioned house on Fourth Avenue with barely enough to eat and scarcely enough clothes to cover ourselves need not be told here in detail. I sometimes wonder whether or not I have overladen my little narrative with grief and misery and crime against humanity and against human laws, as well as God’s. And then I wonder still more why it was that there were men in Seattle, in San Francisco and in Fairbanks in those days who were always ready to exaltSwiftwater and do him honor and take him by the hand, while the world would look askance at Bera Gates, his wife, whom he had so grieviously wronged.

CHAPTER VI.A FULL thirty days after Swiftwater and Hathaway had left Seattle, following the affair on the decks of the steamer “Humboldt,” found the miner and his friend in Skagway. It was in the height of the spring rush to the gold fields, and there are undoubtedly few, if any, living today who will ever witness on this continent such scenes as were enacted on the terrible Skagway trail over the Coast Range of the Alaska mountains, which separated 50,000 eager, struggling, quarreling, frenzied men and women drawn thither by the mad rush for gold from the upper reaches of the Yukon River and the lakes which helped to form that mighty stream.No pen can adequately portray the bitter clash, and struggling, and turmoil—man against man, man against woman, woman against man, fist against fist, gun against gun, as this mob of gold-crazed human beings surged into the vortex of the Yukon’s valley and found their way to the new Golconda of the north.Skagway was a whirling, tumbling, seething whirlpool of humanity. Imagine the spectacle ofa mob of 40,000 half-crazed human beings assembled at the foot of the almost impassable White Pass, with the thermometer 90 degrees in the shade at the foot of the range, and ten feet of snow on the Summit, three miles away. Then picture to this, if you can, the innumerable crimes against humanity that broke out in this mob of half-crazy, fighting, excited, bewildered multitude of men and women.There was no rest in the town—no sleep—no time for meals—no time for repose—nothing but a mad scramble and the devil take the hindmost.There was one cheap, newly constructed frame hotel in Skagway and rooms were from $5 to $20 a day. The only wharf of the town was packed fifty feet high with merchandise of every description—65 per cent. canned provisions, flour and dried fruits and the rest of it hardware, mining tools and clothing for the prospectors. Teams of yelping, snarling, fighting malamutes added their cries to the eternally welling mass of sound.And Swiftwater was there. Almost the first face I saw as I entered the hotel was that of Gates.“Mrs. Beebe,” he said, “let us forget bygones. In another day or two I would have been over the Summit with my outfit. It is lucky that I am here, because possibly I can help you in some way.”I could do nothing more than listen to what Swiftwater said. There was no other hotel, or indeedany place in the town where I could get shelter for myself and my two girls. Knowing the black purpose in Swiftwater’s heart, I watched my girls Bera and Blanche day and night. My own goods were piled up unsheltered and unprotected on the beach.Swiftwater, with all his cunning, could not deceive me of his real intent, yet my own perplexities and troubles made it easy for him to keep me in constant fear of him.“Mrs. Beebe,” he would say, “you can trust me absolutely.”With that, Swiftwater’s face would take on a smile as innocent as that of a babe. There was always the warm, soft clasp of the womanish hand—the low pitched voice of Swiftwater to keep it company.And now, as I remember how innocent Bera was, how girlish she looked, how confiding she was in me, yet never for a moment forgetting, perhaps, the lure of the gold studded gravel banks of Eldorado which Swiftwater held constantly before her, it seems to my mind that no woman can be wronged as deeply and as eternally as that woman whose daughter is stolen from her through guile and soft deceit.We had been in Skagway but a trifle more than a week, when, one evening, returning to the hotel, I found my room empty and Bera missing.“I have gone with Swiftwater to Dawson, Mamma. He loves me and I love him.” This was what Bera had written and left on her dresser.That was all. There was one chance only to prevent the kidnaping of Bera. That was for me to get to the lakes on the other side of the mountains, at the head of navigation on the Yukon and seek the aid of the Canadian mounted police.At White Horse, there was trace of Swiftwater and Bera, but they had twenty-four hours the start of me and, when I finally found that they had gone through to Dawson, I simply quit.Down the Upper Yukon there was a constant stream of barges, small boats and rafts. Miles Canyon, with its madly rushing, white-capped waters, extending over five miles of rock-ribbed river bed and sand bar, was scattered o’er with timbers, boards, boxes and casks containing the outfits and all the worldly possessions of scores of unfortunates.“On, on, and ever and eternally on, down the Yukon to Dawson!” That was the cry in those days and it bore, as unresistingly and as mercilessly as the tide of the ocean carries the flotsam and jetsam of seacoast harbors, the brave and the strong, the weak and crippled, the wise and the foolish, in one inchoate mass of humanity to that magic spot where more gold lay underground waiting for the pick ofthe poverty-struck miner than the world had ever known of—“The Klondike.”All things finally come to an end. I was in Dawson. At the little temporary dock on the Yukon’s bank, stood Bera and Swiftwater. The miner did not wait till I landed from the little boat. He went up the gang plank and grasped me in his arms.“Mrs. Beebe,” he said, “we’re married. Come with us to our cabin. We are waiting for you, and dinner is on the table.”Swiftwater during all that summer and winter in Dawson was the very soul of chivalry and attention both to Bera and myself. There was nothing too good for us in the little market places at Dawson and a box of candy at $5 a box just to please Bera or to satisfy my own taste for sweetmeats was no more to Swiftwater than the average man spending a two-bit piece on the outside.As the spring broke up the river and then summer took the place of spring in Dawson, the traders from the outside brought in supplies of fresh eggs, fresh oranges, lettuce, new onions—all the delicacies greatly to be prized and more esteemed after a long winter than the rarest fruits and dainties of the States.When summer came, Dawson got its first shipment of new watermelons from the outside, Swiftwaterbought the first melon he could find and paid $40 in dust for it, and brought it home, simply to please Bera and to make his home that much happier.

A FULL thirty days after Swiftwater and Hathaway had left Seattle, following the affair on the decks of the steamer “Humboldt,” found the miner and his friend in Skagway. It was in the height of the spring rush to the gold fields, and there are undoubtedly few, if any, living today who will ever witness on this continent such scenes as were enacted on the terrible Skagway trail over the Coast Range of the Alaska mountains, which separated 50,000 eager, struggling, quarreling, frenzied men and women drawn thither by the mad rush for gold from the upper reaches of the Yukon River and the lakes which helped to form that mighty stream.

No pen can adequately portray the bitter clash, and struggling, and turmoil—man against man, man against woman, woman against man, fist against fist, gun against gun, as this mob of gold-crazed human beings surged into the vortex of the Yukon’s valley and found their way to the new Golconda of the north.

Skagway was a whirling, tumbling, seething whirlpool of humanity. Imagine the spectacle ofa mob of 40,000 half-crazed human beings assembled at the foot of the almost impassable White Pass, with the thermometer 90 degrees in the shade at the foot of the range, and ten feet of snow on the Summit, three miles away. Then picture to this, if you can, the innumerable crimes against humanity that broke out in this mob of half-crazy, fighting, excited, bewildered multitude of men and women.

There was no rest in the town—no sleep—no time for meals—no time for repose—nothing but a mad scramble and the devil take the hindmost.

There was one cheap, newly constructed frame hotel in Skagway and rooms were from $5 to $20 a day. The only wharf of the town was packed fifty feet high with merchandise of every description—65 per cent. canned provisions, flour and dried fruits and the rest of it hardware, mining tools and clothing for the prospectors. Teams of yelping, snarling, fighting malamutes added their cries to the eternally welling mass of sound.

And Swiftwater was there. Almost the first face I saw as I entered the hotel was that of Gates.

“Mrs. Beebe,” he said, “let us forget bygones. In another day or two I would have been over the Summit with my outfit. It is lucky that I am here, because possibly I can help you in some way.”

I could do nothing more than listen to what Swiftwater said. There was no other hotel, or indeedany place in the town where I could get shelter for myself and my two girls. Knowing the black purpose in Swiftwater’s heart, I watched my girls Bera and Blanche day and night. My own goods were piled up unsheltered and unprotected on the beach.

Swiftwater, with all his cunning, could not deceive me of his real intent, yet my own perplexities and troubles made it easy for him to keep me in constant fear of him.

“Mrs. Beebe,” he would say, “you can trust me absolutely.”

With that, Swiftwater’s face would take on a smile as innocent as that of a babe. There was always the warm, soft clasp of the womanish hand—the low pitched voice of Swiftwater to keep it company.

And now, as I remember how innocent Bera was, how girlish she looked, how confiding she was in me, yet never for a moment forgetting, perhaps, the lure of the gold studded gravel banks of Eldorado which Swiftwater held constantly before her, it seems to my mind that no woman can be wronged as deeply and as eternally as that woman whose daughter is stolen from her through guile and soft deceit.

We had been in Skagway but a trifle more than a week, when, one evening, returning to the hotel, I found my room empty and Bera missing.

“I have gone with Swiftwater to Dawson, Mamma. He loves me and I love him.” This was what Bera had written and left on her dresser.

That was all. There was one chance only to prevent the kidnaping of Bera. That was for me to get to the lakes on the other side of the mountains, at the head of navigation on the Yukon and seek the aid of the Canadian mounted police.

At White Horse, there was trace of Swiftwater and Bera, but they had twenty-four hours the start of me and, when I finally found that they had gone through to Dawson, I simply quit.

Down the Upper Yukon there was a constant stream of barges, small boats and rafts. Miles Canyon, with its madly rushing, white-capped waters, extending over five miles of rock-ribbed river bed and sand bar, was scattered o’er with timbers, boards, boxes and casks containing the outfits and all the worldly possessions of scores of unfortunates.

“On, on, and ever and eternally on, down the Yukon to Dawson!” That was the cry in those days and it bore, as unresistingly and as mercilessly as the tide of the ocean carries the flotsam and jetsam of seacoast harbors, the brave and the strong, the weak and crippled, the wise and the foolish, in one inchoate mass of humanity to that magic spot where more gold lay underground waiting for the pick ofthe poverty-struck miner than the world had ever known of—“The Klondike.”

All things finally come to an end. I was in Dawson. At the little temporary dock on the Yukon’s bank, stood Bera and Swiftwater. The miner did not wait till I landed from the little boat. He went up the gang plank and grasped me in his arms.

“Mrs. Beebe,” he said, “we’re married. Come with us to our cabin. We are waiting for you, and dinner is on the table.”

Swiftwater during all that summer and winter in Dawson was the very soul of chivalry and attention both to Bera and myself. There was nothing too good for us in the little market places at Dawson and a box of candy at $5 a box just to please Bera or to satisfy my own taste for sweetmeats was no more to Swiftwater than the average man spending a two-bit piece on the outside.

As the spring broke up the river and then summer took the place of spring in Dawson, the traders from the outside brought in supplies of fresh eggs, fresh oranges, lettuce, new onions—all the delicacies greatly to be prized and more esteemed after a long winter than the rarest fruits and dainties of the States.

When summer came, Dawson got its first shipment of new watermelons from the outside, Swiftwaterbought the first melon he could find and paid $40 in dust for it, and brought it home, simply to please Bera and to make his home that much happier.

CHAPTER VII.HYDRAULIC mining in the Klondike country, by the time that Swiftwater had assembled his big outfit on Quartz Creek was in its very infancy, yet there were plenty of wise men in Dawson who knew that the tens of thousands of acres of hillside slopes and old abandoned creek beds would some day produce more gold when washed into sluice boxes with gigantic rams, than the native miner and prospector had been able to show, even with the figures, $50,000,000, output to his credit.The Canadian government had given Swiftwater and his partner, Joe Boyle, a princely fortune in the three mile concession on Quartz Creek. So great was the reputation of Swiftwater Bill—so intimately was his name linked with the idea of immense quantities of gold—and so high was his standing as a practical miner, that Swiftwater was able to borrow money right and left to carry on his work on Quartz Creek. Thus it was that before anybody could realize it, including myself, Swiftwater’s financial standing actually was $100,000 worse off than nothing. This was about the amount of money that he used and in that tidy sum was allthe savings of my winter in Dawson and my dividends from my hotel, which aggregated at least $35,000.“When Joe comes in this spring from London,” said Swiftwater to me, “we’ll have all the money we want and more, too, Mrs. Beebe. He has cabled twice to Seattle that our money is all raised and we will have a million-dollar clean-up on Quartz Creek this fall.”As the spring came on and reports from the mines on Quartz Creek became brighter, Swiftwater became more enthusiastic and confident. The fact that his creditors were beginning to worry, and that there is a nasty law in Canada which affects debtors who seek to leave the country in a restraining way, did not seriously worry Swiftwater. He seemed to think more of the coming of his child than anything else, next to the work on Quartz Creek.“That baby is going to be born on Quartz Creek, Mrs. B—” Swiftwater said. “It is my determination that my first child shall be born where I will make a greater fortune than anybody hereabouts.”I told Swiftwater that he was talking arrant nonsense.“It would be the death of Bera in her condition,” said I, “for her to take the trip up there in this cold, nasty weather, with the roads more like swamps than anything else and the hills still covered withsnow. More than that, there are doctors here in Dawson and on Quartz Creek we would be thirty miles from the nearest human settlement.”But nothing would deter Swiftwater. He set about rigging up a big sled which could be pulled by two horses. It was made of heavy oaken timber, and the long low bed was filled with furs, blankets, bedding, etc. Swiftwater went to Dr. Marshall, our physician, when all arrangements had been practically completed for the journey to Quartz. He had effectually stopped my protests before he said to Dr. Marshall:“I will give you $2,000 or more, if necessary, to take six weeks off and go with me up to Quartz Creek where my child will be born. Just name your figure if that is not enough.”Bera was seventeen years old, immature and delicate, yet brave and strong, and willing to imperil her own life to gratify Swiftwater’s whim. So it finally came about that I was delegated to do the final shopping in advance of our journey.I went to Gandolfo’s and bought with my own money a case of oranges and a crate of apples. Each orange cost $3 in dust and the apples about the same. Next I ordered a barrel of bottled beer, for Swiftwater wanted to treat his men with a feast when the baby was born and the bottled beer was what he thought to be the proper thing. The barrel of beer cost me close to $500 in gold.BERA BEEBE GATESFrom a photograph taken at Washington, D. C., where she was deserted by Swiftwater Bill.All this stuff was loaded on the sled. They started over the twenty-eight miles of crooked, winding, marshy trail to Quartz Creek. The journey was something terrible. The days were short and the wind from the hills and gulches was wet with the thawing of the snow and so cold that it seemed to make icicles of the drippings from the trees. Bera, wrapped a foot thick in furs, seemed to stand the trip all right, and in due time the baby was born and christened.There was great rejoicing in the camp and Swiftwater weighed out $3,000 in dust to Dr. Marshall and sent him back to Dawson. A month afterwards one of our men brought from Dawson the word that the mail had arrived over the ice, but Swiftwater looked in vain for a letter from Joe Boyle. He had confidently expected a draft for $50,000.For two days Swiftwater scarcely spoke. The cabin in which we lived was only a quarter of a mile from the nearest dump where the men were working. I used to go out every once in a while and take up a few shovels full of gravel which would wash out between $5 and $10 and if I had had the good common sense which comes only after years of hard knocks in this troublesome world, I could then and therehave protected myself against the bitter misfortunes which came to me in a few months afterwards.I was washing some of the baby’s clothes in the kitchen and drying them on a line over the fire, when Swiftwater came in from the diggings, clad in his rubber boots which reached to his hips.The miner asked for some hot water and a towel and began to shave the three weeks’ black growth from his chin.“What are you going to do now, Swiftwater?” I asked.“I’m going down to town.”For two days the cabin had been without food except some mush and a few dried potatoes and a can of condensed milk for the baby. Swiftwater had sent a man over the trail to Dawson for food two days before.“You’ll not go without Bera! You are not going to leave us here to starve,” said I.“Bera cannot possibly go,” said Bill.I turned and went to Bera’s room and told her to dress immediately. Then I washed the baby, put an entire new change of clothes on him, wrapped up his freshly ironed garments in a package, got a bottle of soothing syrup and a can of condensed milk.It was always my belief and is now, that Swiftwater’s mind contained a plan to abandon Bera, thebaby and me, and to run away from the Yukon to escape his troubles.We got a small boat and filled one end of it with fir boughs, covered them over with rugs, and put Bera and the baby there. Then Swiftwater and I got in the boat and pushed off down stream.Swiftwater confessed to me for the first time that he was in serious trouble.“There have been three strange men from Dawson out here on our claims,” said Swiftwater, “and I know who sent them out. They are watching me.”As I look back upon that awful trip down Indian River, with poor, wan, white-faced Bera hugging the little three weeks’ old baby to her bosom, so sick that she could hardly talk, I wonder if there is any hardship, and peril, and privation, and suffering, a woman cannot endure.The boat was heavy—terribly heavy. In the small stretches of still water it was desperately hard, bone-racking toil to keep moving.In the rushes of the river, where rapids tore at mill-race speed over boulders and pebbly stretches, we were constantly in danger of being upset. An hour of this sort of work made me almost ready for any sort of fate.Finally we struck a big rock and the current carried us on a stretch of sandy beach. Swiftwater and I got out and waded up to our armpits in thecold stream to get the boat started again. Then we climbed aboard and once more shot down the rocky canyon to another stretch of still water beyond. By nightfall we had reached an old cabin half way to Dawson, in which the fall before Swiftwater had cached provisions. The baby’s food was all gone, and Bera, in a fit of anger, had thrown what little bread and butter sandwiches we had put up for ourselves, overboard. I had not eaten all day, nor had Swiftwater.It was growing dusk when we painfully pulled the boat on the bank at Swiftwater’s cache. Gates went inside to get some grub and prepared to build a fire. He came out a moment later, his face ashy pale, his eyes downcast.“They have stolen all I had put in here,” he said.It seemed to me that night as if the very limit of human misery on this earth was my bitter portion as we waited all through the weary hours in the cabin huddled before a little fire, waiting (it is light all the time in summer) to resume our journey to Dawson.The next day we reached Dawson shortly after noon, famished, cold, and completely exhausted. I actually believe the baby would have died but for the bottle of soothing syrup and water which I had brought along.Swiftwater took us to the Fairview Hotel and sent for the doctor for Bera and the baby.

HYDRAULIC mining in the Klondike country, by the time that Swiftwater had assembled his big outfit on Quartz Creek was in its very infancy, yet there were plenty of wise men in Dawson who knew that the tens of thousands of acres of hillside slopes and old abandoned creek beds would some day produce more gold when washed into sluice boxes with gigantic rams, than the native miner and prospector had been able to show, even with the figures, $50,000,000, output to his credit.

The Canadian government had given Swiftwater and his partner, Joe Boyle, a princely fortune in the three mile concession on Quartz Creek. So great was the reputation of Swiftwater Bill—so intimately was his name linked with the idea of immense quantities of gold—and so high was his standing as a practical miner, that Swiftwater was able to borrow money right and left to carry on his work on Quartz Creek. Thus it was that before anybody could realize it, including myself, Swiftwater’s financial standing actually was $100,000 worse off than nothing. This was about the amount of money that he used and in that tidy sum was allthe savings of my winter in Dawson and my dividends from my hotel, which aggregated at least $35,000.

“When Joe comes in this spring from London,” said Swiftwater to me, “we’ll have all the money we want and more, too, Mrs. Beebe. He has cabled twice to Seattle that our money is all raised and we will have a million-dollar clean-up on Quartz Creek this fall.”

As the spring came on and reports from the mines on Quartz Creek became brighter, Swiftwater became more enthusiastic and confident. The fact that his creditors were beginning to worry, and that there is a nasty law in Canada which affects debtors who seek to leave the country in a restraining way, did not seriously worry Swiftwater. He seemed to think more of the coming of his child than anything else, next to the work on Quartz Creek.

“That baby is going to be born on Quartz Creek, Mrs. B—” Swiftwater said. “It is my determination that my first child shall be born where I will make a greater fortune than anybody hereabouts.”

I told Swiftwater that he was talking arrant nonsense.

“It would be the death of Bera in her condition,” said I, “for her to take the trip up there in this cold, nasty weather, with the roads more like swamps than anything else and the hills still covered withsnow. More than that, there are doctors here in Dawson and on Quartz Creek we would be thirty miles from the nearest human settlement.”

But nothing would deter Swiftwater. He set about rigging up a big sled which could be pulled by two horses. It was made of heavy oaken timber, and the long low bed was filled with furs, blankets, bedding, etc. Swiftwater went to Dr. Marshall, our physician, when all arrangements had been practically completed for the journey to Quartz. He had effectually stopped my protests before he said to Dr. Marshall:

“I will give you $2,000 or more, if necessary, to take six weeks off and go with me up to Quartz Creek where my child will be born. Just name your figure if that is not enough.”

Bera was seventeen years old, immature and delicate, yet brave and strong, and willing to imperil her own life to gratify Swiftwater’s whim. So it finally came about that I was delegated to do the final shopping in advance of our journey.

I went to Gandolfo’s and bought with my own money a case of oranges and a crate of apples. Each orange cost $3 in dust and the apples about the same. Next I ordered a barrel of bottled beer, for Swiftwater wanted to treat his men with a feast when the baby was born and the bottled beer was what he thought to be the proper thing. The barrel of beer cost me close to $500 in gold.

BERA BEEBE GATESFrom a photograph taken at Washington, D. C., where she was deserted by Swiftwater Bill.

BERA BEEBE GATESFrom a photograph taken at Washington, D. C., where she was deserted by Swiftwater Bill.

BERA BEEBE GATES

From a photograph taken at Washington, D. C., where she was deserted by Swiftwater Bill.

All this stuff was loaded on the sled. They started over the twenty-eight miles of crooked, winding, marshy trail to Quartz Creek. The journey was something terrible. The days were short and the wind from the hills and gulches was wet with the thawing of the snow and so cold that it seemed to make icicles of the drippings from the trees. Bera, wrapped a foot thick in furs, seemed to stand the trip all right, and in due time the baby was born and christened.

There was great rejoicing in the camp and Swiftwater weighed out $3,000 in dust to Dr. Marshall and sent him back to Dawson. A month afterwards one of our men brought from Dawson the word that the mail had arrived over the ice, but Swiftwater looked in vain for a letter from Joe Boyle. He had confidently expected a draft for $50,000.

For two days Swiftwater scarcely spoke. The cabin in which we lived was only a quarter of a mile from the nearest dump where the men were working. I used to go out every once in a while and take up a few shovels full of gravel which would wash out between $5 and $10 and if I had had the good common sense which comes only after years of hard knocks in this troublesome world, I could then and therehave protected myself against the bitter misfortunes which came to me in a few months afterwards.

I was washing some of the baby’s clothes in the kitchen and drying them on a line over the fire, when Swiftwater came in from the diggings, clad in his rubber boots which reached to his hips.

The miner asked for some hot water and a towel and began to shave the three weeks’ black growth from his chin.

“What are you going to do now, Swiftwater?” I asked.

“I’m going down to town.”

For two days the cabin had been without food except some mush and a few dried potatoes and a can of condensed milk for the baby. Swiftwater had sent a man over the trail to Dawson for food two days before.

“You’ll not go without Bera! You are not going to leave us here to starve,” said I.

“Bera cannot possibly go,” said Bill.

I turned and went to Bera’s room and told her to dress immediately. Then I washed the baby, put an entire new change of clothes on him, wrapped up his freshly ironed garments in a package, got a bottle of soothing syrup and a can of condensed milk.

It was always my belief and is now, that Swiftwater’s mind contained a plan to abandon Bera, thebaby and me, and to run away from the Yukon to escape his troubles.

We got a small boat and filled one end of it with fir boughs, covered them over with rugs, and put Bera and the baby there. Then Swiftwater and I got in the boat and pushed off down stream.

Swiftwater confessed to me for the first time that he was in serious trouble.

“There have been three strange men from Dawson out here on our claims,” said Swiftwater, “and I know who sent them out. They are watching me.”

As I look back upon that awful trip down Indian River, with poor, wan, white-faced Bera hugging the little three weeks’ old baby to her bosom, so sick that she could hardly talk, I wonder if there is any hardship, and peril, and privation, and suffering, a woman cannot endure.

The boat was heavy—terribly heavy. In the small stretches of still water it was desperately hard, bone-racking toil to keep moving.

In the rushes of the river, where rapids tore at mill-race speed over boulders and pebbly stretches, we were constantly in danger of being upset. An hour of this sort of work made me almost ready for any sort of fate.

Finally we struck a big rock and the current carried us on a stretch of sandy beach. Swiftwater and I got out and waded up to our armpits in thecold stream to get the boat started again. Then we climbed aboard and once more shot down the rocky canyon to another stretch of still water beyond. By nightfall we had reached an old cabin half way to Dawson, in which the fall before Swiftwater had cached provisions. The baby’s food was all gone, and Bera, in a fit of anger, had thrown what little bread and butter sandwiches we had put up for ourselves, overboard. I had not eaten all day, nor had Swiftwater.

It was growing dusk when we painfully pulled the boat on the bank at Swiftwater’s cache. Gates went inside to get some grub and prepared to build a fire. He came out a moment later, his face ashy pale, his eyes downcast.

“They have stolen all I had put in here,” he said.

It seemed to me that night as if the very limit of human misery on this earth was my bitter portion as we waited all through the weary hours in the cabin huddled before a little fire, waiting (it is light all the time in summer) to resume our journey to Dawson.

The next day we reached Dawson shortly after noon, famished, cold, and completely exhausted. I actually believe the baby would have died but for the bottle of soothing syrup and water which I had brought along.

Swiftwater took us to the Fairview Hotel and sent for the doctor for Bera and the baby.

CHAPTER VIII.TO THE people of Dawson, in those days, starving through weary winter months for want of frequent mail communication with the civilized world, and hungering for the ebb and flow of human tide that is a natural and daily part of the lives of those in more fortunate places, the arrival of the first steamer from “the outside” in the spring is an event even greater than a Fourth of July celebration to a country town in Kansas.For days before our arrival down Indian River from Quartz Creek, the men and women of Dawson had eagerly discussed the probability of the coming of the Yukoner, the regular river liner from White Horse due any moment, with fresh provisions from Seattle and the first papers and letters from “the outside.”For two days after Swiftwater had taken Bera to the Fairview Hotel, the doctor had cared for her so as to enable her to recover from the hardships of the trip down Indian River. I took the baby to my own rooms and carefully nursed him through all one day. This brought him quickly round, and he soon looked as bright and cheerful as a new twenty dollar gold piece.It was on the third morning after we arrived in Dawson that the steamer Yukoner’s whistle sounded up the river, and the whole populace rushed to the wharves and river banks. Miners came from all points up the creeks to welcome friends or to get their mail that the Yukoner had brought. The little shopkeepers in Dawson, particularly the fruit venders, were extremely active, bustling amongst the crowd on the dock and fighting their way to get the first shipments of early vegetables, fruits, fresh eggs, fresh butter and other perishable commodities for which Dawson hungered.But Swiftwater, keen eyed, nervous, straining, yet trying to be composed, saw none of this, nor felt the least interest in the tide of newcomers who stepped from the Yukoner’s decks and made their way up town surrounded by friends.Swiftwater was looking for one face in the crowd—that of his partner, Joe Boyle, who had promised to bring him $100,000 from London, where the big concession on Quartz Creek had been bonded for $250,000.Swiftwater stood at the gang plank and eagerly scanned every face until the last man had come ashore and only the deck hands remained on board.“There is certainly a letter in the mail, anyhow,” said Swiftwater.For the first time in all of this miserable experienceI realized that a heavy burden was on Swiftwater’s shoulders—a load that was crushing the heart and brain of him—and that would, unless relieved, destroy all of the man’s native capacity to handle his tangled affairs, even under the most unfavorable circumstances.I decided to watch Swiftwater very closely. I noticed that he was not to be seen around town in his usual haunts. I did not dare ask him if he feared arrest, for that would show that I knew that his crisis had come.Two hours after the Yukoner’s mail was in the postoffice, Swiftwater came to my room.“There is no letter from Joe,” was all he said.I made no reply except to say:“Have you told Bera?”“No, and I’m not going to—now,” said Swiftwater and then left the room.Swiftwater had between $35,000 and $40,000 of my money in his Quartz Creek concession. I had felt absolutely secure for the reason that if the property was well handled my interest should be worth from $100,000 to $250,000. My faith in the property has been justified by subsequent events, as all well informed Dawson mining men will testify.But the want of money was bitter and keen at that moment. Yet I scarcely knew what to advise Swiftwater to do.Gates and Bera came to my rooms after dinner that night.“Will this help you pay a few pressing little bills?” asked Swiftwater, as he threw two fifty dollar paper notes in my lap.“My God, Swiftwater, can’t you spare any more than $100?” I gasped.“Oh, that’s just for now—I’ll give you plenty more tomorrow,” said he.As they arose to go, Bera kissed me on the mouth and cheek with her arms around my neck.“You love the baby, don’t you mama?” said Bera, and I saw then, without seeing, and came afterwards to know that there were tears in Bera’s eyes and a smile dewy with affection on her lips.Swiftwater put his arm around me and kissed me on the forehead.“We’ll be over early for you for breakfast tomorrow,” said Swiftwater as they went down the stairs.Holding the baby in my arms at the window, I watched Swiftwater and Bera go down the street, Bera turning now and again to wave her hand and throw a kiss to me, Swiftwater lifting his hat.Now, what I am about to relate may seem almost incredible to any normal human mind and heart; and especially so to those thousands of Alaskans who knew Swiftwater in the early days to be jolly,though impractical, yet always generous, whole-souled, brave and honest.An hour after Swiftwater and Bera had gone, there was a knock at my door. I opened it and there stood Phil Wilson—an old associate and friend of Swiftwater’s.“Is Bill Gates here?” asked Wilson.“Why, no,” said I. “They went over an hour ago.”“Thank you,” said he, and lumbered heavily down the stairs.The next morning I waited until 11 o’clock for Swiftwater and Bera to come for me to go to breakfast. I had slept little or none the night before and my nerves were worn down to the fine edge that comes just before a total collapse.When it seemed as if I could not wait longer, there came a knock at the door.When I opened the door there stood George Taylor, a friend of Swiftwater’s of some years’ standing.“Mrs. Beebe, I came to tell you that Swiftwater and Bera left early this morning to go to Quartz Creek on horseback. I promised Swiftwater I would help you move to his cabin and get everything ready for their return on Saturday.”“In Heaven’s name, what is Swiftwater trying to do—kill Bera?” I exclaimed. “That ride toQuartz Creek in her condition, through the mud and mire of that trail, will kill her.”Taylor merely looked at me and did not answer.“Are you telling me the truth?” I demanded.“I am,” he said.Taylor walked away and I closed the door and went back to the baby.“Baby,” said I, “I guess we’re left all alone for a while and you haven’t any mama but me.”Although I afterward learned of the fact, it did me no good at that trying moment that Swiftwater had told Bera, before she would consent to leave me, that he had sent me $800 in currency by Wilson. Of course, Swiftwater did nothing of the kind, yet his story was such as to lead Bera to believe that I was well protected and comfortable.Then I set to work to move my little belongings into Swiftwater’s cabin, there to wait for four days hoping that every minute would bring some word from Bera and Gates. There was little to eat in the cabin and the $100 that Swiftwater had given me had nearly all gone for baby’s necessities. The little fellow had kept up well and strong in spite of everything, and when I undressed him at night and bathed him and got him ready for his bed, he seemed so brave and strong and sweet that I could not, for the life of me, give way to thefeeling of desolation and loss that my circumstances warranted.On the third day after Bera and Swiftwater had gone and I was getting a little supper for the baby and myself in the cabin, there came a clatter of heavy boots on the gravel walk in front of the house and a boisterous knock on the door.Jumping up from the kitchen table, I nearly ran to the door, believing that Bera and Swiftwater were there. Instead there stood a messenger from the McDonald Hotel in Dawson with a letter for me. It simply said:“We have gone down the river in a small boat to Nome with Mr. Wilson. I will send you money immediately on arrival there, so that you can join us.SWIFTWATER.”That was all.I read the letter through again and then the horror of it came over me—I all alone in Dawson with Swiftwater’s four weeks’ old baby, broke and he owing me nearly $40,000.Then everything seemed to leave me and I fell to the floor unconscious. Hours afterward—they said it was 9 o’clock at night, and the messenger had been there at 4 in the afternoon—I came to. The baby was crying and hungry. It seemed to me I had been in a long sickness and I could notfor a while quite realize where I was or what ill shape of a hostile fate had befallen me. And, when I think of it now, it seems to me any other woman in my place would have gone crazy.For two months I stayed in that cabin, trying my best to find a way out of Dawson and unable to move a rod because of the fact that I had no money. Swiftwater, as I learned afterwards, took a lay on a claim on Dexter Creek and cleaned up in a short time $4,000.When I heard this, I wrote to him for money for the baby, but none came.A month passed and then another and no word from Swiftwater. I felt as long as I had a roof over my head, I could make a living for myself and the baby by working at anything—manicuring, hairdressing or sewing. Then, one evening, just after I had finished dinner, came a rap at the door.It was Phil Wilson.“Swiftwater has given me a deed to this house and power of attorney over his other matters,” said he. “I shall move my things over here and occupy one of these three rooms.”I knew better than to make any objection then, but the next day I told Wilson:“You will have to take your things down town—you cannot stay here.”“I guess I’ll stay all right, Mrs. Beebe,” said he.“And it will be all winter, too. And, I think it would be better for you, Mrs. Beebe, if you stayed here with me.”I knew just what that meant. I said:“Mr. Wilson, I understand you, but you will go and take your things now.”Wilson left in another minute and I did not see him for two days. On the second afternoon I locked the door with a padlock and went down town to do some shopping for the baby, who I had left with a neighbor. I also wanted to send a fourth letter to Swiftwater, begging him to send me some money to keep me and his baby from starving.When I got back at dusk that evening, the door to the cabin was broken open, and the chain and padlock lay on the ground shattered into fragments.I went inside. All my clothes, the baby’s and even the little personal belongings of the child were piled together in a disordered heap in the center room.

TO THE people of Dawson, in those days, starving through weary winter months for want of frequent mail communication with the civilized world, and hungering for the ebb and flow of human tide that is a natural and daily part of the lives of those in more fortunate places, the arrival of the first steamer from “the outside” in the spring is an event even greater than a Fourth of July celebration to a country town in Kansas.

For days before our arrival down Indian River from Quartz Creek, the men and women of Dawson had eagerly discussed the probability of the coming of the Yukoner, the regular river liner from White Horse due any moment, with fresh provisions from Seattle and the first papers and letters from “the outside.”

For two days after Swiftwater had taken Bera to the Fairview Hotel, the doctor had cared for her so as to enable her to recover from the hardships of the trip down Indian River. I took the baby to my own rooms and carefully nursed him through all one day. This brought him quickly round, and he soon looked as bright and cheerful as a new twenty dollar gold piece.

It was on the third morning after we arrived in Dawson that the steamer Yukoner’s whistle sounded up the river, and the whole populace rushed to the wharves and river banks. Miners came from all points up the creeks to welcome friends or to get their mail that the Yukoner had brought. The little shopkeepers in Dawson, particularly the fruit venders, were extremely active, bustling amongst the crowd on the dock and fighting their way to get the first shipments of early vegetables, fruits, fresh eggs, fresh butter and other perishable commodities for which Dawson hungered.

But Swiftwater, keen eyed, nervous, straining, yet trying to be composed, saw none of this, nor felt the least interest in the tide of newcomers who stepped from the Yukoner’s decks and made their way up town surrounded by friends.

Swiftwater was looking for one face in the crowd—that of his partner, Joe Boyle, who had promised to bring him $100,000 from London, where the big concession on Quartz Creek had been bonded for $250,000.

Swiftwater stood at the gang plank and eagerly scanned every face until the last man had come ashore and only the deck hands remained on board.

“There is certainly a letter in the mail, anyhow,” said Swiftwater.

For the first time in all of this miserable experienceI realized that a heavy burden was on Swiftwater’s shoulders—a load that was crushing the heart and brain of him—and that would, unless relieved, destroy all of the man’s native capacity to handle his tangled affairs, even under the most unfavorable circumstances.

I decided to watch Swiftwater very closely. I noticed that he was not to be seen around town in his usual haunts. I did not dare ask him if he feared arrest, for that would show that I knew that his crisis had come.

Two hours after the Yukoner’s mail was in the postoffice, Swiftwater came to my room.

“There is no letter from Joe,” was all he said.

I made no reply except to say:

“Have you told Bera?”

“No, and I’m not going to—now,” said Swiftwater and then left the room.

Swiftwater had between $35,000 and $40,000 of my money in his Quartz Creek concession. I had felt absolutely secure for the reason that if the property was well handled my interest should be worth from $100,000 to $250,000. My faith in the property has been justified by subsequent events, as all well informed Dawson mining men will testify.

But the want of money was bitter and keen at that moment. Yet I scarcely knew what to advise Swiftwater to do.

Gates and Bera came to my rooms after dinner that night.

“Will this help you pay a few pressing little bills?” asked Swiftwater, as he threw two fifty dollar paper notes in my lap.

“My God, Swiftwater, can’t you spare any more than $100?” I gasped.

“Oh, that’s just for now—I’ll give you plenty more tomorrow,” said he.

As they arose to go, Bera kissed me on the mouth and cheek with her arms around my neck.

“You love the baby, don’t you mama?” said Bera, and I saw then, without seeing, and came afterwards to know that there were tears in Bera’s eyes and a smile dewy with affection on her lips.

Swiftwater put his arm around me and kissed me on the forehead.

“We’ll be over early for you for breakfast tomorrow,” said Swiftwater as they went down the stairs.

Holding the baby in my arms at the window, I watched Swiftwater and Bera go down the street, Bera turning now and again to wave her hand and throw a kiss to me, Swiftwater lifting his hat.

Now, what I am about to relate may seem almost incredible to any normal human mind and heart; and especially so to those thousands of Alaskans who knew Swiftwater in the early days to be jolly,though impractical, yet always generous, whole-souled, brave and honest.

An hour after Swiftwater and Bera had gone, there was a knock at my door. I opened it and there stood Phil Wilson—an old associate and friend of Swiftwater’s.

“Is Bill Gates here?” asked Wilson.

“Why, no,” said I. “They went over an hour ago.”

“Thank you,” said he, and lumbered heavily down the stairs.

The next morning I waited until 11 o’clock for Swiftwater and Bera to come for me to go to breakfast. I had slept little or none the night before and my nerves were worn down to the fine edge that comes just before a total collapse.

When it seemed as if I could not wait longer, there came a knock at the door.

When I opened the door there stood George Taylor, a friend of Swiftwater’s of some years’ standing.

“Mrs. Beebe, I came to tell you that Swiftwater and Bera left early this morning to go to Quartz Creek on horseback. I promised Swiftwater I would help you move to his cabin and get everything ready for their return on Saturday.”

“In Heaven’s name, what is Swiftwater trying to do—kill Bera?” I exclaimed. “That ride toQuartz Creek in her condition, through the mud and mire of that trail, will kill her.”

Taylor merely looked at me and did not answer.

“Are you telling me the truth?” I demanded.

“I am,” he said.

Taylor walked away and I closed the door and went back to the baby.

“Baby,” said I, “I guess we’re left all alone for a while and you haven’t any mama but me.”

Although I afterward learned of the fact, it did me no good at that trying moment that Swiftwater had told Bera, before she would consent to leave me, that he had sent me $800 in currency by Wilson. Of course, Swiftwater did nothing of the kind, yet his story was such as to lead Bera to believe that I was well protected and comfortable.

Then I set to work to move my little belongings into Swiftwater’s cabin, there to wait for four days hoping that every minute would bring some word from Bera and Gates. There was little to eat in the cabin and the $100 that Swiftwater had given me had nearly all gone for baby’s necessities. The little fellow had kept up well and strong in spite of everything, and when I undressed him at night and bathed him and got him ready for his bed, he seemed so brave and strong and sweet that I could not, for the life of me, give way to thefeeling of desolation and loss that my circumstances warranted.

On the third day after Bera and Swiftwater had gone and I was getting a little supper for the baby and myself in the cabin, there came a clatter of heavy boots on the gravel walk in front of the house and a boisterous knock on the door.

Jumping up from the kitchen table, I nearly ran to the door, believing that Bera and Swiftwater were there. Instead there stood a messenger from the McDonald Hotel in Dawson with a letter for me. It simply said:

“We have gone down the river in a small boat to Nome with Mr. Wilson. I will send you money immediately on arrival there, so that you can join us.

SWIFTWATER.”

That was all.

I read the letter through again and then the horror of it came over me—I all alone in Dawson with Swiftwater’s four weeks’ old baby, broke and he owing me nearly $40,000.

Then everything seemed to leave me and I fell to the floor unconscious. Hours afterward—they said it was 9 o’clock at night, and the messenger had been there at 4 in the afternoon—I came to. The baby was crying and hungry. It seemed to me I had been in a long sickness and I could notfor a while quite realize where I was or what ill shape of a hostile fate had befallen me. And, when I think of it now, it seems to me any other woman in my place would have gone crazy.

For two months I stayed in that cabin, trying my best to find a way out of Dawson and unable to move a rod because of the fact that I had no money. Swiftwater, as I learned afterwards, took a lay on a claim on Dexter Creek and cleaned up in a short time $4,000.

When I heard this, I wrote to him for money for the baby, but none came.

A month passed and then another and no word from Swiftwater. I felt as long as I had a roof over my head, I could make a living for myself and the baby by working at anything—manicuring, hairdressing or sewing. Then, one evening, just after I had finished dinner, came a rap at the door.

It was Phil Wilson.

“Swiftwater has given me a deed to this house and power of attorney over his other matters,” said he. “I shall move my things over here and occupy one of these three rooms.”

I knew better than to make any objection then, but the next day I told Wilson:

“You will have to take your things down town—you cannot stay here.”

“I guess I’ll stay all right, Mrs. Beebe,” said he.“And it will be all winter, too. And, I think it would be better for you, Mrs. Beebe, if you stayed here with me.”

I knew just what that meant. I said:

“Mr. Wilson, I understand you, but you will go and take your things now.”

Wilson left in another minute and I did not see him for two days. On the second afternoon I locked the door with a padlock and went down town to do some shopping for the baby, who I had left with a neighbor. I also wanted to send a fourth letter to Swiftwater, begging him to send me some money to keep me and his baby from starving.

When I got back at dusk that evening, the door to the cabin was broken open, and the chain and padlock lay on the ground shattered into fragments.

I went inside. All my clothes, the baby’s and even the little personal belongings of the child were piled together in a disordered heap in the center room.

CHAPTER IX.IT WAS pitch dark when I left the cabin and made my way directly, as best I could, to the town with its dimly lighted streets. It seemed to me that I had never had a friend in all this world. Friend? Yes, FRIEND. That is to say—a human being who could be depended upon in any emergency and who was right—right all the time in fair as well as in foul weather.There was only one thought in my mind—that was to find some man or woman in all that country to whom I could go for shelter and for aid. I knew naught of Swiftwater and Bera, except that they had left me. Swiftwater’s child, I felt as if he was my own—that little babe smiling up into my face as I had held him in my arms but a few minutes before, seemed to me as if he was my own.I knew instinctively that there was none in all that multitude of carefree or careworn miners who thronged the three cafes and the dance halls of Dawson who could do much, if anything, to help me.Past the dance halls and saloons and gambling halls of Dawson I went my way, down beyond the town and finally found the dark trail that led tothe barracks of the mounted police. I told the captain exactly what had happened. I said:“Captain, I am left all alone here by Swiftwater Bill and I have to find some place to shelter his little two months’ old child and to feed and clothe him. He told me to live in his cabin. But I have no home there now as long as that man Wilson lives there.”No woman who has never known the hard and seamy side of life in Dawson can possibly understand how good are the mounted police to every human being, man, woman or child, who is in trouble without fault of their own. The captain said.“Mrs. Beebe, I have long known of you, and I do not doubt that a wrong has been done you. You and your little grandson shall not suffer for want of shelter or food tonight.”With that the captain detailed two officers with instructions to accompany me to Swiftwater’s cabin and to see that I was comfortably and safely housed there, no matter what the circumstances. We went back that long, dark way, a mile over the trail to the cabin. When we arrived there, the two officers went inside.“Place this woman’s clothes and belongings where they were before you came in here, and do it at once,” commanded one of the mounted police.Wilson looked at me in amazement, and then his face was flushed with an angry glow as he saw that the two officers meant business.Without a word, he picked up all the baby’s clothes and my own and put them back where they had been before. Then he took his pack of clothes and belongings and left without a word.It would merely encumber my story to tell how I was summoned into court by Phil Wilson, and how the judge, after hearing my story of Swiftwater’s brutality—of his leaving me in Dawson penniless with his baby—said that he could hardly conceive how a man could be so inhuman as Swiftwater was, to leave the unprotected mother of his wife and his baby alone in such a place as Dawson and in such hands as those of the man who stood before him. He said that such brutality, in his judgment, was without parallel in Dawson’s annals and that, while he felt the deepest sympathy for me, left as I had been helpless and with Swiftwater’s baby, yet the law gave Phil Wilson the right to the cabin.This ended the case. I turned to go from the courtroom when the Presbyterian minister, Dr. McKenzie, came to me and said:“Mrs. Beebe, I do not know anything about the circumstances that have brought you to this condition,but if you will let me have the child I will see that he has a good home and is well cared for.”But this was not necessary, as it turned out afterwards, because Dr. McKenzie took the matter up with the council, where it was threshed out in all its details. The council voted $125 a month for sustenance for the nurse and the baby. The mounted police took me to the barracks and there provided a cabin and food, with regular supplies of provisions from the canteen.I do not doubt but that the monthly expense during the winter that I lived there with the baby is still a matter of record in Dawson in the archives of the government, and I am equally certain that, although Swiftwater Bill has made hundreds of thousands of dollars since that day and is now reputed to be worth close to $1,000,000, he has never liquidated the debt he owes to the Canadian government for the care and sustenance and shelter they gave his own boy. All of the facts stated in this chapter can easily be verified by recourse to the records of the court and mounted police in Dawson.Although I knew that Swiftwater was making money in Nome, I placed no more dependence in him from that moment and managed to sustain myself by manicuring and hairdressing in Dawson.The winter wore away, and there was the usual annual celebration of the coming of spring withits steamers from White Horse laden with the first papers and the mail from the outside. In May of that year I received a telegram from Swiftwater Bill telling me to leave Dawson on the first boat and come down the river to Nome, as he and Bera would be there on the first boat from Seattle. The day after I received the telegram the mail came and brought a letter written by Swiftwater from Chicago, saying that he had the money to pay me all he owed me and more too, and for me not to fail to meet him and Bera in Nome.Isn’t it curious how a woman will forget all the injustice she suffers at the hands of a man, when it seems to her that he is trying to do and is doing the right thing?Does it seem odd to you, my woman reader, that the thought of meeting Bera again and of giving to her and to Swiftwater the custody of the dear little child I had loved and nursed all winter long, should have appealed to me?And now, as there must be an end to the hardest luck story—just as there is a finish at some time to all forms of human grief and sorrow—so there came an end to that winter in the little cabin near the mounted police barracks at Dawson, where baby and I and the nurse, Lena Hubbell, had spent so many weeks waiting for a change in our luck.Again there was a mob of every kind of people in Dawson.On the first steamer leaving Dawson I went with the child, after giving up a good business that netted me between $200 and $300 a month. I took the nurse girl with me—who had been in unfortunate circumstances in Dawson—and I speak of her now, as she figures prominently in another chapter in this book.It matters little now that Swiftwater could have provided handsomely for me and the child—that he took the money that he made from his lay on Dexter Creek and spent it gambling at Nome; and that Bera, knowing my circumstances, took from a sluice box on his claim enough gold to exchange for $500 in bills at Nome, to send to me.And when I think of this my blood boils, for Bera, after she had the $500 in bills wrapped in a piece of paper and sealed up in an envelope addressed to me, met Swiftwater on the street in Nome and he took the money away from her, saying:“Bera, I’ll mail that letter to your mother.”Of course, I never got the money because Swiftwater gambled it away, and I laying awake nights crying and unable to sleep because of my worry, and working hard throughout the long winter days to support Swiftwater’s child.So it came about that we boarded the big river steamer Susie for Nome. Her decks were jammed with people eager to get outside or anxious to try their fortunes in the new Seward Peninsula gold fields or the beach diggings at Nome. The Yukon was clear of ice, wide, deep and beautiful to look upon in summer, though in winter, when the ice is packed up one hundred feet high, it carries the death dealing blizzards that bring an untimely fate to many a hardy traveler.In Nome I found no further news of Swiftwater nor Bera and waited there for three weeks. Then, after days of watching at the postoffice, I got a letter from Swiftwater, saying that it would not be possible for him to come to Nome, and there was not even so much as a dollar bill in the letter.Disheartened and miserable, I turned to go back to my hotel. As I turned from the postoffice a news-boy rushed up from the wharf, crying out:“SEATTLE TIMES—ALL ABOUT SWIFTWATER BILL RUNNING AWAY WITH ANOTHER WOMAN.”

IT WAS pitch dark when I left the cabin and made my way directly, as best I could, to the town with its dimly lighted streets. It seemed to me that I had never had a friend in all this world. Friend? Yes, FRIEND. That is to say—a human being who could be depended upon in any emergency and who was right—right all the time in fair as well as in foul weather.

There was only one thought in my mind—that was to find some man or woman in all that country to whom I could go for shelter and for aid. I knew naught of Swiftwater and Bera, except that they had left me. Swiftwater’s child, I felt as if he was my own—that little babe smiling up into my face as I had held him in my arms but a few minutes before, seemed to me as if he was my own.

I knew instinctively that there was none in all that multitude of carefree or careworn miners who thronged the three cafes and the dance halls of Dawson who could do much, if anything, to help me.

Past the dance halls and saloons and gambling halls of Dawson I went my way, down beyond the town and finally found the dark trail that led tothe barracks of the mounted police. I told the captain exactly what had happened. I said:

“Captain, I am left all alone here by Swiftwater Bill and I have to find some place to shelter his little two months’ old child and to feed and clothe him. He told me to live in his cabin. But I have no home there now as long as that man Wilson lives there.”

No woman who has never known the hard and seamy side of life in Dawson can possibly understand how good are the mounted police to every human being, man, woman or child, who is in trouble without fault of their own. The captain said.

“Mrs. Beebe, I have long known of you, and I do not doubt that a wrong has been done you. You and your little grandson shall not suffer for want of shelter or food tonight.”

With that the captain detailed two officers with instructions to accompany me to Swiftwater’s cabin and to see that I was comfortably and safely housed there, no matter what the circumstances. We went back that long, dark way, a mile over the trail to the cabin. When we arrived there, the two officers went inside.

“Place this woman’s clothes and belongings where they were before you came in here, and do it at once,” commanded one of the mounted police.

Wilson looked at me in amazement, and then his face was flushed with an angry glow as he saw that the two officers meant business.

Without a word, he picked up all the baby’s clothes and my own and put them back where they had been before. Then he took his pack of clothes and belongings and left without a word.

It would merely encumber my story to tell how I was summoned into court by Phil Wilson, and how the judge, after hearing my story of Swiftwater’s brutality—of his leaving me in Dawson penniless with his baby—said that he could hardly conceive how a man could be so inhuman as Swiftwater was, to leave the unprotected mother of his wife and his baby alone in such a place as Dawson and in such hands as those of the man who stood before him. He said that such brutality, in his judgment, was without parallel in Dawson’s annals and that, while he felt the deepest sympathy for me, left as I had been helpless and with Swiftwater’s baby, yet the law gave Phil Wilson the right to the cabin.

This ended the case. I turned to go from the courtroom when the Presbyterian minister, Dr. McKenzie, came to me and said:

“Mrs. Beebe, I do not know anything about the circumstances that have brought you to this condition,but if you will let me have the child I will see that he has a good home and is well cared for.”

But this was not necessary, as it turned out afterwards, because Dr. McKenzie took the matter up with the council, where it was threshed out in all its details. The council voted $125 a month for sustenance for the nurse and the baby. The mounted police took me to the barracks and there provided a cabin and food, with regular supplies of provisions from the canteen.

I do not doubt but that the monthly expense during the winter that I lived there with the baby is still a matter of record in Dawson in the archives of the government, and I am equally certain that, although Swiftwater Bill has made hundreds of thousands of dollars since that day and is now reputed to be worth close to $1,000,000, he has never liquidated the debt he owes to the Canadian government for the care and sustenance and shelter they gave his own boy. All of the facts stated in this chapter can easily be verified by recourse to the records of the court and mounted police in Dawson.

Although I knew that Swiftwater was making money in Nome, I placed no more dependence in him from that moment and managed to sustain myself by manicuring and hairdressing in Dawson.

The winter wore away, and there was the usual annual celebration of the coming of spring withits steamers from White Horse laden with the first papers and the mail from the outside. In May of that year I received a telegram from Swiftwater Bill telling me to leave Dawson on the first boat and come down the river to Nome, as he and Bera would be there on the first boat from Seattle. The day after I received the telegram the mail came and brought a letter written by Swiftwater from Chicago, saying that he had the money to pay me all he owed me and more too, and for me not to fail to meet him and Bera in Nome.

Isn’t it curious how a woman will forget all the injustice she suffers at the hands of a man, when it seems to her that he is trying to do and is doing the right thing?

Does it seem odd to you, my woman reader, that the thought of meeting Bera again and of giving to her and to Swiftwater the custody of the dear little child I had loved and nursed all winter long, should have appealed to me?

And now, as there must be an end to the hardest luck story—just as there is a finish at some time to all forms of human grief and sorrow—so there came an end to that winter in the little cabin near the mounted police barracks at Dawson, where baby and I and the nurse, Lena Hubbell, had spent so many weeks waiting for a change in our luck.

Again there was a mob of every kind of people in Dawson.

On the first steamer leaving Dawson I went with the child, after giving up a good business that netted me between $200 and $300 a month. I took the nurse girl with me—who had been in unfortunate circumstances in Dawson—and I speak of her now, as she figures prominently in another chapter in this book.

It matters little now that Swiftwater could have provided handsomely for me and the child—that he took the money that he made from his lay on Dexter Creek and spent it gambling at Nome; and that Bera, knowing my circumstances, took from a sluice box on his claim enough gold to exchange for $500 in bills at Nome, to send to me.

And when I think of this my blood boils, for Bera, after she had the $500 in bills wrapped in a piece of paper and sealed up in an envelope addressed to me, met Swiftwater on the street in Nome and he took the money away from her, saying:

“Bera, I’ll mail that letter to your mother.”

Of course, I never got the money because Swiftwater gambled it away, and I laying awake nights crying and unable to sleep because of my worry, and working hard throughout the long winter days to support Swiftwater’s child.

So it came about that we boarded the big river steamer Susie for Nome. Her decks were jammed with people eager to get outside or anxious to try their fortunes in the new Seward Peninsula gold fields or the beach diggings at Nome. The Yukon was clear of ice, wide, deep and beautiful to look upon in summer, though in winter, when the ice is packed up one hundred feet high, it carries the death dealing blizzards that bring an untimely fate to many a hardy traveler.

In Nome I found no further news of Swiftwater nor Bera and waited there for three weeks. Then, after days of watching at the postoffice, I got a letter from Swiftwater, saying that it would not be possible for him to come to Nome, and there was not even so much as a dollar bill in the letter.

Disheartened and miserable, I turned to go back to my hotel. As I turned from the postoffice a news-boy rushed up from the wharf, crying out:

“SEATTLE TIMES—ALL ABOUT SWIFTWATER BILL RUNNING AWAY WITH ANOTHER WOMAN.”

CHAPTER X.AS I write this chapter, which is to interest not only the friends and acquaintances of Swiftwater Bill, but which also may throw a new light on his character, and may even arouse a general interest in the odd freaks of human nature which one finds in the northern country, I am moved to wonder whether or not there is a human pen capable of portraying all of the many-sided phases of Swiftwater’s nature. The story in the Seattle paper merely gave an outline of Swiftwater’s escapade, when he ran away with Kitty Brandon, took her from Portland to Seattle and back to Chehalis and there married her on June 20th, 1901.If Swiftwater Bill’s title as the Don Juan of the Klondike had ever been questioned before this affair, it seems to me that his elopement with Kitty Brandon from Portland early in June of that year would have forever settled the matter in his favor. The Seattle paper merely told that Swiftwater and Kitty had been married, against the will and wish of her mother at Chehalis, and that the girl’s mother learning of the affair had followed the lovers to Seattle.Kitty was a fragile, neatly formed girl of fifteen years, when she went to St. Helen’s Hall in Portlandas a student. Swiftwater left Bera in the spring of that year at Washington, D. C., and hurried across the continent, intending, as he told me in all his letters, on making another fortune in Alaska. He had valuable interests in the gold mining district near Teller, Alaska, and in his fond imagination there was every reason to believe that the Kougarok country was as rich, if not richer, than Eldorado and Bonanza in the Klondike.“Bring my baby down to Nome and meet me at Teller,” Swiftwater wrote me. “I am so glad you have taken such good care of my darling son all winter in Dawson. I shall pay you all that you have loaned me and I will see that you make more money in Teller City than you ever made in Dawson. I could hug and kiss you for taking such good care of our baby boy.”Such was the language of Swiftwater’s letters to me, written in Washington in the spring of that year. Swiftwater reasoned that all of Alaska is underlaid with gold; that the fabulous riches of Eldorado and Bonanza would be duplicated again and again on Seward peninsula. To his mind, the making of a fortune of a million of dollars in a summer in the new diggings near Teller was one of the simplest things in the world, and it is not to be wondered at that there were hundreds among his friends who believed then and do now that hismining judgment and fairy-like luck were such as to enable him to go forth into the north at any time and bring out hundreds of thousands of dollars in the precious yellow stuff.Be that as it may, when Swiftwater reached the coast, he happened by ill chance to stop at Portland. In St. Helen’s Hall there was Kitty Brandon, known as his niece, a girl of more than ordinary mental and physical charms. Once again the amorous nature of Swiftwater Bill asserted itself. It is related that he called at St. Helen’s Hall and interviewed Kitty Brandon, and then after that was a frequent visitor, taking Kitty at odd times driving through the beautiful city of Portland or entertaining her at lunch or dinner, as the case might be, in Portland’s swell cafes.That Swiftwater had no plans for his immediate future can well be believed when it is known that after a few days of courtship of Kitty Brandon, he eloped with the little girl and came to Seattle. On the way to Seattle Kitty and Swiftwater were married at Chehalis.It is not surprising that Swiftwater found his last love affair anything but a summer holiday, when it is remembered that his legal wife, Bera, was in Washington, D. C., awaiting his return. Considerations of propriety and, even of the law, seemedto have left Swiftwater’s mind entirely, until Kitty’s mother learned of his elopement and followed the loving pair to Seattle.What followed afterwards was told in the Seattle, Tacoma and Portland newspapers of that time. Learning that Swiftwater and Kitty were registered as man and wife at a Seattle hotel, Kitty’s mother followed them and sought to apprehend them. Then it was that Swiftwater evinced that capacity for resource and tact which, as all his friends know, is one of his most distinguished characteristics.With the irate mother of his newest love lying in wait at night in the lobby of one of Seattle’s best known hotels, it was Swiftwater’s task to show that skill in maneuver and celerity in action which tens of thousands of Northerners attributed to him as the origin of his odd nickname. There was no time to repent for his infatuation for the pretty Kitty Brandon, or to remember the fate of his deserted wife and child in Washington.And Swiftwater was equal to the emergency. Bidding Kitty’s mother wait in the hotel parlor, Swiftwater rushed to his room, telephoned for a hack to come to the rear of the hostelry, and in less than ten minutes Bill and his sweetheart were being driven at breakneck speed through the streets of Seattle, southward over the bridge across the tide flats, headed for Tacoma. It was told by Swiftwater afterwards that in nearly every mile of that trip fear that Kitty’s mother was pursuing him and his inamorita followed him and for the greater part of the way he kept watching down the dark road in the rear of his hack, expecting that at every turn of the road the wrathful parent would be in sight in readiness to pounce upon him.ESCAPE AT NIGHT OF SWIFTWATER AND KITTY BRANDON FROM THE GIRL’S IRATE MOTHER.From Tacoma, where Swiftwater and Kitty found only temporary shelter, the runaway pair escaped to Portland, to return to Seattle and spend their honeymoon in a little cottage in an obscure district near Interbay.

AS I write this chapter, which is to interest not only the friends and acquaintances of Swiftwater Bill, but which also may throw a new light on his character, and may even arouse a general interest in the odd freaks of human nature which one finds in the northern country, I am moved to wonder whether or not there is a human pen capable of portraying all of the many-sided phases of Swiftwater’s nature. The story in the Seattle paper merely gave an outline of Swiftwater’s escapade, when he ran away with Kitty Brandon, took her from Portland to Seattle and back to Chehalis and there married her on June 20th, 1901.

If Swiftwater Bill’s title as the Don Juan of the Klondike had ever been questioned before this affair, it seems to me that his elopement with Kitty Brandon from Portland early in June of that year would have forever settled the matter in his favor. The Seattle paper merely told that Swiftwater and Kitty had been married, against the will and wish of her mother at Chehalis, and that the girl’s mother learning of the affair had followed the lovers to Seattle.

Kitty was a fragile, neatly formed girl of fifteen years, when she went to St. Helen’s Hall in Portlandas a student. Swiftwater left Bera in the spring of that year at Washington, D. C., and hurried across the continent, intending, as he told me in all his letters, on making another fortune in Alaska. He had valuable interests in the gold mining district near Teller, Alaska, and in his fond imagination there was every reason to believe that the Kougarok country was as rich, if not richer, than Eldorado and Bonanza in the Klondike.

“Bring my baby down to Nome and meet me at Teller,” Swiftwater wrote me. “I am so glad you have taken such good care of my darling son all winter in Dawson. I shall pay you all that you have loaned me and I will see that you make more money in Teller City than you ever made in Dawson. I could hug and kiss you for taking such good care of our baby boy.”

Such was the language of Swiftwater’s letters to me, written in Washington in the spring of that year. Swiftwater reasoned that all of Alaska is underlaid with gold; that the fabulous riches of Eldorado and Bonanza would be duplicated again and again on Seward peninsula. To his mind, the making of a fortune of a million of dollars in a summer in the new diggings near Teller was one of the simplest things in the world, and it is not to be wondered at that there were hundreds among his friends who believed then and do now that hismining judgment and fairy-like luck were such as to enable him to go forth into the north at any time and bring out hundreds of thousands of dollars in the precious yellow stuff.

Be that as it may, when Swiftwater reached the coast, he happened by ill chance to stop at Portland. In St. Helen’s Hall there was Kitty Brandon, known as his niece, a girl of more than ordinary mental and physical charms. Once again the amorous nature of Swiftwater Bill asserted itself. It is related that he called at St. Helen’s Hall and interviewed Kitty Brandon, and then after that was a frequent visitor, taking Kitty at odd times driving through the beautiful city of Portland or entertaining her at lunch or dinner, as the case might be, in Portland’s swell cafes.

That Swiftwater had no plans for his immediate future can well be believed when it is known that after a few days of courtship of Kitty Brandon, he eloped with the little girl and came to Seattle. On the way to Seattle Kitty and Swiftwater were married at Chehalis.

It is not surprising that Swiftwater found his last love affair anything but a summer holiday, when it is remembered that his legal wife, Bera, was in Washington, D. C., awaiting his return. Considerations of propriety and, even of the law, seemedto have left Swiftwater’s mind entirely, until Kitty’s mother learned of his elopement and followed the loving pair to Seattle.

What followed afterwards was told in the Seattle, Tacoma and Portland newspapers of that time. Learning that Swiftwater and Kitty were registered as man and wife at a Seattle hotel, Kitty’s mother followed them and sought to apprehend them. Then it was that Swiftwater evinced that capacity for resource and tact which, as all his friends know, is one of his most distinguished characteristics.

With the irate mother of his newest love lying in wait at night in the lobby of one of Seattle’s best known hotels, it was Swiftwater’s task to show that skill in maneuver and celerity in action which tens of thousands of Northerners attributed to him as the origin of his odd nickname. There was no time to repent for his infatuation for the pretty Kitty Brandon, or to remember the fate of his deserted wife and child in Washington.

And Swiftwater was equal to the emergency. Bidding Kitty’s mother wait in the hotel parlor, Swiftwater rushed to his room, telephoned for a hack to come to the rear of the hostelry, and in less than ten minutes Bill and his sweetheart were being driven at breakneck speed through the streets of Seattle, southward over the bridge across the tide flats, headed for Tacoma. It was told by Swiftwater afterwards that in nearly every mile of that trip fear that Kitty’s mother was pursuing him and his inamorita followed him and for the greater part of the way he kept watching down the dark road in the rear of his hack, expecting that at every turn of the road the wrathful parent would be in sight in readiness to pounce upon him.

ESCAPE AT NIGHT OF SWIFTWATER AND KITTY BRANDON FROM THE GIRL’S IRATE MOTHER.

ESCAPE AT NIGHT OF SWIFTWATER AND KITTY BRANDON FROM THE GIRL’S IRATE MOTHER.

ESCAPE AT NIGHT OF SWIFTWATER AND KITTY BRANDON FROM THE GIRL’S IRATE MOTHER.

From Tacoma, where Swiftwater and Kitty found only temporary shelter, the runaway pair escaped to Portland, to return to Seattle and spend their honeymoon in a little cottage in an obscure district near Interbay.

CHAPTER XI.AS I look back on that day in Nome and recall the sensation created in the little mining camp when the paper containing the story of Swiftwater’s perfidy was circulated abroad among the people, I am tempted to wonder if the duplicate or parallel of Swiftwater’s enormities at this time can be found in all the annals of this great Northwestern country. The Times’ story seemed, even to those like myself, who knew something of Swiftwater’s character, to be almost incredible, and for my part it was several hours before I realized, in a dumb unfeeling sort of a way, that Swiftwater had absolutely stolen his own sister’s child—Kitty Brandon—a girl not more than sixteen years old, had eloped with her, committed bigamy by marrying her in Chehalis, Wash., and at the same time had deserted his wife and left her penniless in Washington, D. C.It was long after nightfall as I sat in my room, the baby sound asleep in his little crib, the nurse gone for the night, and I had read The Times’ story about Swiftwater and Kitty over the twentieth time, that I felt the real force of the shame and scandal which the miner had placed about himself and Bera, and which did not even leave me and mylittle grandson, Clifford, outside of its dark and forbidding pall.All that night I lay awake and wondered how in Heaven’s name I could get word to Bera—or if she had received a telegram from friends in Seattle and the blow had killed her—or whether she was then on her way West, or whatever fate had befallen her.I knew little about Swiftwater’s business affairs just at that time except that he had gone to Washington in the hope of furthering his mining ventures in the North and had taken Bera with him. Then I remembered that in his letters to me and telegrams urging me to join him at Nome he had spoken about having raised considerable money and was able to pay his debt to me and lift me out of the mire of toil and drudgery in Alaska, in which I had sojourned for so many months.All that night I neither slept nor rested. It seemed to me at times as if my head would split into a thousand pieces with the thought of Swiftwater’s treachery to Bera and myself. Then I realized the utter futility and helplessness of a woman situated as I was in Nome, absolutely unable to get a telegram or quick letter to Bera or to hear from her telling me of her condition. For aught I knew, she might have been deathly sick, cared for only by strangers or left destitute atsome place in the East and without any means whatever of righting herself.It seems to me, now when I think of that all night’s vigil in the little hotel in Nome, that Providence must have been watching over me, that I did not lose my reason. At last I found that unless I went to work doing something, I would sure go crazy, and then I started to get work, first borrowing some money, which I sent out by mail the next day to Bera at her last address.While I worked and slaved in Nome trying to get a few dollars ahead so that I could care for the baby and make my way out to Seattle to help Bera, I finally got word that she had been left destitute in Washington, D. C. Swiftwater had furnished four nice rooms in an apartment house at Washington, and in their effects was more than $1,000 worth of rare curios and ivory from Alaska. Then came another letter that Bera, unable to pay for her care, food and medical attention—the second baby boy was born August 28th—had been put on board a train with a charity ticket, her ivories and curios sold for a trifle and had been started West for Seattle.I need not dwell on how Bera, more dead than alive from five days traveling in a chair car from Washington to Seattle with her babe at her bosom and unable to sleep at all—with nothing to eat buta few sandwiches which they had given her at Washington—arrived in Seattle and was cared for by friends.They took the girl, so weak she could hardly stand on her feet, to a restaurant and gave her her first hot meal in almost a week. Then Bera and her baby went to Portland to live with her grandma, while Swiftwater and Kitty Gates were touring the country.And do you know that Swiftwater’s polygamous wife, Kitty Gates, was the girl who Bera one year before had fitted out with a nice outfit of clothes and had sent her to a convent school at Portland to be given a good education?Yes, this is the truth, and this was Kitty’s gratitude to Bera and Swiftwater’s crime against the law and his own flesh and blood.How we managed after I came to Seattle from Nome to live in a little room in a small old fashioned house on Fourth Avenue with barely enough to eat and scarcely enough clothes to cover ourselves need not be told here in detail. I sometimes wonder whether or not I have overladen my little narrative with grief and misery and crime against humanity and against human laws, as well as God’s. And then I wonder still more why it was that there were men in Seattle, in San Francisco and in Fairbanks in those days who were always ready to exaltSwiftwater and do him honor and take him by the hand, while the world would look askance at Bera Gates, his wife, whom he had so grieviously wronged.

AS I look back on that day in Nome and recall the sensation created in the little mining camp when the paper containing the story of Swiftwater’s perfidy was circulated abroad among the people, I am tempted to wonder if the duplicate or parallel of Swiftwater’s enormities at this time can be found in all the annals of this great Northwestern country. The Times’ story seemed, even to those like myself, who knew something of Swiftwater’s character, to be almost incredible, and for my part it was several hours before I realized, in a dumb unfeeling sort of a way, that Swiftwater had absolutely stolen his own sister’s child—Kitty Brandon—a girl not more than sixteen years old, had eloped with her, committed bigamy by marrying her in Chehalis, Wash., and at the same time had deserted his wife and left her penniless in Washington, D. C.

It was long after nightfall as I sat in my room, the baby sound asleep in his little crib, the nurse gone for the night, and I had read The Times’ story about Swiftwater and Kitty over the twentieth time, that I felt the real force of the shame and scandal which the miner had placed about himself and Bera, and which did not even leave me and mylittle grandson, Clifford, outside of its dark and forbidding pall.

All that night I lay awake and wondered how in Heaven’s name I could get word to Bera—or if she had received a telegram from friends in Seattle and the blow had killed her—or whether she was then on her way West, or whatever fate had befallen her.

I knew little about Swiftwater’s business affairs just at that time except that he had gone to Washington in the hope of furthering his mining ventures in the North and had taken Bera with him. Then I remembered that in his letters to me and telegrams urging me to join him at Nome he had spoken about having raised considerable money and was able to pay his debt to me and lift me out of the mire of toil and drudgery in Alaska, in which I had sojourned for so many months.

All that night I neither slept nor rested. It seemed to me at times as if my head would split into a thousand pieces with the thought of Swiftwater’s treachery to Bera and myself. Then I realized the utter futility and helplessness of a woman situated as I was in Nome, absolutely unable to get a telegram or quick letter to Bera or to hear from her telling me of her condition. For aught I knew, she might have been deathly sick, cared for only by strangers or left destitute atsome place in the East and without any means whatever of righting herself.

It seems to me, now when I think of that all night’s vigil in the little hotel in Nome, that Providence must have been watching over me, that I did not lose my reason. At last I found that unless I went to work doing something, I would sure go crazy, and then I started to get work, first borrowing some money, which I sent out by mail the next day to Bera at her last address.

While I worked and slaved in Nome trying to get a few dollars ahead so that I could care for the baby and make my way out to Seattle to help Bera, I finally got word that she had been left destitute in Washington, D. C. Swiftwater had furnished four nice rooms in an apartment house at Washington, and in their effects was more than $1,000 worth of rare curios and ivory from Alaska. Then came another letter that Bera, unable to pay for her care, food and medical attention—the second baby boy was born August 28th—had been put on board a train with a charity ticket, her ivories and curios sold for a trifle and had been started West for Seattle.

I need not dwell on how Bera, more dead than alive from five days traveling in a chair car from Washington to Seattle with her babe at her bosom and unable to sleep at all—with nothing to eat buta few sandwiches which they had given her at Washington—arrived in Seattle and was cared for by friends.

They took the girl, so weak she could hardly stand on her feet, to a restaurant and gave her her first hot meal in almost a week. Then Bera and her baby went to Portland to live with her grandma, while Swiftwater and Kitty Gates were touring the country.

And do you know that Swiftwater’s polygamous wife, Kitty Gates, was the girl who Bera one year before had fitted out with a nice outfit of clothes and had sent her to a convent school at Portland to be given a good education?

Yes, this is the truth, and this was Kitty’s gratitude to Bera and Swiftwater’s crime against the law and his own flesh and blood.

How we managed after I came to Seattle from Nome to live in a little room in a small old fashioned house on Fourth Avenue with barely enough to eat and scarcely enough clothes to cover ourselves need not be told here in detail. I sometimes wonder whether or not I have overladen my little narrative with grief and misery and crime against humanity and against human laws, as well as God’s. And then I wonder still more why it was that there were men in Seattle, in San Francisco and in Fairbanks in those days who were always ready to exaltSwiftwater and do him honor and take him by the hand, while the world would look askance at Bera Gates, his wife, whom he had so grieviously wronged.

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