A LITTLE, low-eaved, common, ordinary looking road house, built of logs, with one room for the bunks, another for a kitchen and a third for miscellaneous purposes, used to be well known to travelers in the Yukon Valley in Alaska at Circle City. The straggling little mining camp, its population divided between American, French-Canadians of uncertain pedigree, and Indians with an occasional admixture of canny Scotchmen, whose conversation savored strongly of the old Hudson Bay Trading Company’s days in the far north, enjoyed no reputation outside of Forty Mile, Juneau and the Puget Sound cities of Seattle and Tacoma. From the wharves of these cities in 1895 there left at infrequent intervals, small chuggy, wobbly steamers for Southeastern Alaska points usually carrying in the spring months motley cargoes of yelping dogs, rough coated, bearded, tanned miners and prospectors from all points of the globe, and great quantities of canned goods of every description.

In those days the eager and hardy prospector who fared forth to the Yukon’s dangers in search of gold was usually indifferent to whatever fate befell him. He figured that at best the odds were overwhelmingly against him, with just one chance, or maybe ten, in a hundred of striking a pay streak. It was inevitable that a great proportion of the venturous and ignorant Chechacos, or newcomers, who paid their dollars by the hundred to the steamship companies in Seattle, should, after failing in the search for gold, seek means of gaining a miserable existence in some wage paid vocation.

Were it in my power to bring my hero on the stage under more auspicious circumstances than those of which I am about to tell, I would gladly do it. But the truth must be told of Swiftwater Bill, and at the time of the opening of my narrative—and this was before the world had ever heard the least hint of the wonderful Klondike gold discovery—Swiftwater stood washing dishes in the kitchen of the road-house I have just described.

The place was no different from any one of a thousand of these little log shelters where men, traveling back and forth in the dead of winter with dog teams, find temporary lodging and a hurried meal of bacon and beans and canned stuff. It was broad daylight, although the clock showed eleven P. M., in August, 1896. The sun scarcely seemed to linger more than an hour beneath the horizon at nightfall, to re-appear a shimmering ball of light at three o’clock in the morning.

“Bring us another pot of coffee!” shouted one of three prospectors, who sat with their elbows on the table, greedily licking up the remnants of a huge platter full of bacon and beans garnished with some strips of cold, canned roast beef and some evaporated potatoes, which had been made into a kind of stew.

The hero of my sketch wiped his hands on a greasy towel and, taking a dirty, black tin coffee pot from the top of the Yukon stove, he hurried in to serve his customers.

One of these was six feet two, broad shouldered, sparsely built, hatchet faced, with a long nose, keen blue eyes and with auburn colored hair falling almost to his shoulders. French Joe was the name he went by, and no more intrepid trapper and prospector ever lived in the frozen valley of the Yukon than he. The other two were nondescripts—one with a coarse yellow jumper, the other in a dark blue suit of cast off army clothes. The man in the jumper was bearded, short and chunky, of German extraction, while the other was a half-blood Indian.

Swiftwater, as he ambled into the room, one hand holding his dirty apron, the other holding the coffee pot, was not such a man as to excite the interest of even a wayfarer in the road-house at Circle. About 35 years old, five feet five inches tall, a scraggly growth of black whiskers on his chin, and long, wavy moustaches of the same color, curling from his upper lip, Swiftwater did not arouse even a passing glance from the trio at the table.

“Boys, de’ done struck it, al’ right, ’cause Indian George say it’s all gold from ze gras’ roots, on Bonanza. An’ it’s only a leetle more’n two days polin’ up ze river from ze T’hoandike.”

It was French Joe who spoke, and then when he drew forth a little bottle containing a few ounces of gold nuggets and dust, Swiftwater Bill, as he poured the third cup of coffee, gazed open mouthed on the showing of yellow treasure.

It is only necessary to say that from that moment Swiftwater was attentive to the needs of his three guests, and when he had overheard all of their talk he silently, but none the less positively, made up his mind to quit his job forthwith and to “mush” for the new gold fields.

And this is why it was that, the next morning, the little Circle City road-house was minus a dishwasher and all round handyman. And before the little community was well astir, far in the distance, up the Yukon river, might have been seen the little, dark bearded man poling for dear life in a flat-bottom boat, whose prow was pointed in the direction of the Klondike river.