SOMETIMES, when I recall the stirring events in Swiftwater Bill’s career, following the time he used the money I raised by pawning my diamonds and then went to California, I am tempted to wonder whether or not a man of his type of mental makeup ever realized that the hard bumps that he gets along the corduroy road of adversity are one and all of his own making. For, if one will but pause a moment and analyze the events in Swiftwater Bill’s melodramatic career, the inevitable result comes to him, namely, that the bumps over which Swiftwater traveled during all of those years, when, one day he was worth a half million dollars in gold, and the next was hiding in all manner of dark and subterranean recesses in order to avoid deputy sheriffs and constables with writs and court processes, were placed there by his own hands and as skilfully and effectively as if he had deliberately planned to cause himself misery.

Swiftwater’s transformation from a broken down tramp of the Weary Willie order to a fine gentleman and prosperous business man, with new tailor made clothes, patent leather shoes and his favored silk tile, was rapid after he got his hands on the money I borrowed from the jewelers, with my diamonds as the pledge. The change in Swiftwater was simply marvelous. The day before almost, Swiftwater had stood before me, as I have told, without collar or tie, a dirty black growth of beard nearly an inch long on his unshaven chin and cheek, a dark frock coat of a nondescript shape that had seen better days and hung on Bill’s frame as though it might have been loaned to him by some friend; a pair of trousers of mediocre workmanship and his feet almost sticking out of his shoes.

Then picture Swiftwater ready to board the steamer for San Francisco, where his friend Marks was waiting to grubstake him to the tune of $18,000, jauntily wearing his polished beaver on the side of his head, his black moustaches curled and waving in the breezes, his chin as smooth and immaculate as an ivory billiard ball and his air and manner that of a man who had absolute confidence in himself and his future.

It is no wonder then, that when Swiftwater reached San Francisco outfitted as I have described, he found plenty of men, who, charmed by the magic of his description of the golden lure of the North and hypnotized into a state of enthusiasm by the halo of romance and river beds lined with gold attached to Swiftwater’s name, were willing to back him heavily for another venture in the North.

By this time the Tanana District was becoming famous throughout the world and the town of Fairbanks had been located and Cleary had brought forth from the stream that bears his name thousands of dollars of virgin gold, thus proving beyond question the richness of the country.

Now, I am ready to believe that most people will agree with me that Swiftwater was about as rapid and agile a performer as any of his contemporaries who occupy the hall of fame in the annals of Alaska. Because it was only a few short weeks until Swiftwater returns to Seattle with his pockets bulging with currency and prepared to leave for Fairbanks.

Of course, I knew nothing of Swiftwater’s presence in Seattle, though it had been only a few short weeks since I had, with my own hands, in the kitchen in the little two-room apartment we occupied, washed his only suit of underclothes, so that he could go on the street without being annoyed by the police.

The first I knew of Swiftwater’s return from San Francisco was when I read in the morning paper that “W. C. Gates, the well known and opulent Alaska miner,” had entertained a distinguished party of Seattle business men at a banquet at one of the big down town hotels. The cost of that feed, as I afterwards learned, was about $100—of Mr. Marks’ money. Be that as it may, before I could find Swiftwater and gently recall to him the fact that his wife and two little children were almost in absolute want in Seattle he had managed to board a steamer for the Tanana and was off for the North.

Now, when I found that Swiftwater had gone, I was frantic with the desire to follow him up to Alaska. For the year and a half that I had remained in Seattle, waiting like Micawber for something to turn up, the fever to get back to Alaska seemed to be growing in my veins at a rate that meant that something had to be done. For, after Alaska has once laid her spell over a man or woman, in nine times out of ten, she will claim him or her from that time onward to the end of life as her devoted and always loyal slave. I know not, nor have I ever found any who did know, what it is that makes one who has ever lived in Alaska, and who has left there, unhappy and discontented until they go back once more to the land of gold.

I have seen and talked with old “sourdoughs,” trappers and dog team freighters, and they all tell the same story. When the first big clean-up had been made in Dawson, I remember well, the winter following found a mob of big, boisterous, pleasure loving, money spending, carefree and happy hearted Klondike miners in the hotels of Seattle, San Francisco and New York. They lived on nothing but the choicest steaks and the richest wines, and the sight of a plate of beans would start a fight. Then they would all come back to Seattle in the spring, sick, feverish, unhappy, with a look in their eyes like that of a mother hungering for her lost babe. In Seattle they would spend a restless week, but when they struck the trail at White Horse just before the spring breakup in the Yukon every man jack of them was himself again—jolly, joyous, carefree, full voiced and filled with the enthusiasm of a two-year-old.

Why, I have known more than one broad shouldered giant of the trail grow as sick and puny as a singed kitten while waiting in Seattle for his boat to take him, late in February or early in March, to Skagway. I knew one miner, who in health was six feet five inches tall, weighing two hundred and forty pounds without an ounce of fat on him, come within an ace of dying with quick consumption, which it afterwards proved was due to his longing for the biting wind that blows from the top of Alaska’s Coast Range and bears company with the wayfarer down in the valley of the Yukon past the lakes and into the gold camps of the Klondike.

Well, all this came to me then as I realized that Swiftwater was gone North once more in search of gold, but, with Bera in Seattle and the two babies, I was shackled as securely as any one of the wretches who walk the streets of this city with chains and ball working out a sentence for vagrancy.

It is not a less remarkable thing to be told of Swiftwater that he turned Dame Fortune’s wheel once more with the dial pointing in his direction as quickly as he had raised the necessary money in San Francisco to make a new start in Fairbanks. To all who know of Swiftwater’s kaleidoscopic changes from rich to poor, and back again to rich, it seems as if the fickle Dame, carrying a magic horn spilling gold in all directions, followed Swiftwater wherever he went into Alaska and out again, down to the cities of the States and back again, and, if she seemed to lose him for a while, always to welcome him back with a winning smile.

Of course, it is part of my story that after Swiftwater had amassed another fortune on Cleary Creek, in the Tanana, and his friend, Mr. Marks, who had grubstake him, sought to obtain his rights in the property, it was found that the contract between them written by Swiftwater was as full of holes as a sieve. Again the lawyers went to work earning big fees in the litigation which Marks brought to compel Swiftwater to do the honorable thing—to do that by him which any man in Alaska, at least while he lived there, never failed to do—to divide with the man who grubstaked him.

Now, Swiftwater, as my reader has by this time safely guessed, was made in a different mould. They used to say in the early days when the stories of the incredible richness of Eldorado’s gold lined bedrock were told on the “outside,” that when a man in Alaska drank the water of the country, the truth left him. I have never, for my own part, fully determined whether this is true, and I may frankly say that in some of my experiences, the opportunities for judging of the truth or falsity of this theory were limited, the reason being that most of the men drink something beside water in that country.

As for Swiftwater Bill, he never did drink anything but water—I never knew him to take a drop of any intoxicating liquors or wine—so that if the water of Alaska had any demoralizing effect on Swiftwater, it must have been in the direction of his sense of business honor and integrity and a decent sense of his obligations as a husband and a father. And I am satisfied, too, that the water of Alaska, if such was the demoralizing agent in Swiftwater’s case, certainly worked terrific havoc.