SWIFTWATER BILL had struck it again.

On Number 6 Cleary Creek, in the Tanana, the man who gained his chiefest fame in the early days of Dawson by walking around the rapids of Miles Canyon, because he was afraid to navigate them, thereby earning his cognomen, “Swiftwater Bill,” had found another fortune in the yellow gold that lines countless tens of thousands of little creeks and dry gulches in that great northern country—Alaska.

Swiftwater had obtained a big working interest in the mine on Cleary Creek, a stream that has produced its millions in yellow gold. And, after the first discovery of placer gold in paying quantities in the Tanana, the whole Western coast of the American continent knew the story. Like Dawson, the town of Fairbanks quickly sprang from the soil as if reared by the magic of some unseen genii of the Arabian Nights.

Of course, the word came out to me in a letter from a friend at Fairbanks. And I sometimes think that, after all, I must have had a great many friends in Alaska who remembered the hard task that the fates had put upon me when they made me, through no wish of my own, the mother-in-law of Swiftwater Bill.

As I remember now, the news that Swiftwater had struck another pay streak impressed upon me the necessity of immediate action. Swiftwater’s previous conduct, particularly that $100 dinner that he gave in Seattle a few months before, had taught me one thing, and that was that if Gates was ever to do the square thing by me and by Bera and the babies it would be only when some one with sufficient will power to accomplish the task would reach him and see that he did not forget his duty.

Now, it is no May day holiday for a woman to “mush” over the ice from the coast of Alaska to the interior mining camps. First you have to get an outfit in Seattle, and by that I mean sufficient heavy underclothing, outer clothing, heavy boots, furs and sleeping bag and the like to make travel over the ice comfortable. Ten years ago any woman who made that journey—that is, from Dyea over the mountain passes covered with glaciers and thence down the Upper Yukon on the ice—was considered almost as a heroine and the newspapers were eager to print the stories of such exploits. When I determined to go into the Tanana to find Swiftwater mining gold on Number 6 Cleary there were few, if any, of the comforts of present-day winter travel on the Valdez-Fairbanks trail, such as horse stages and frequent road-houses.

Consequently, I determined to follow the old route, and I went to Skagway, thence over the White Pass road to White Horse and, crossing Lake Le Barge on the ice, there to await the departure for Dawson of the first down river steamer.

It was in the early spring of the year—that is, early for Alaska, although when I left Seattle the orchards were in bloom and lawns were as green as in mid-summer. Lake Le Barge was still frozen over, and the upper waters of the Yukon were beginning to show their first gigantic unrest of that spring—a mighty unrest that carries with it the movement of vast ice gorges down the canyon of the Upper Yukon to the Klondike, and which, if suddenly halted on its way to the sea by an unexpected drop in temperature, is likely to work havoc with men and property and sometimes human lives.

The Yukon River is not like any other stream on the American continent with which you and I are familiar. It seems to be a thing alive when the spring sun begins to loosen the icy chains that bind it hard and fast to old Mother Earth through eight long and dreary winter months. No greater phenomena of nature, showing the change that spring brings to all forms of life—human, animal and plant—is to be found anywhere than the awakening of the Yukon River after her voiceless sleep.

At White Horse the freight for Dawson and the Tanana mines was stacked twenty feet high in all directions when we boarded the first steamer and followed the ice jam down the river to Dawson. Eventually, on a little steamer that plied between Dawson and Fairbanks when the ice is far enough gone to make navigation safe, I made my way to the chief mining camp of the Tanana—Fairbanks, named after the vice-president, who visited the North when he was a senator from Indiana.

I had no trouble in finding Gates.

“Swiftwater,” I said, “I am here to have you provide for your wife and children, and to pay at least part of what you owe me.”

Bill was courteous, suave, obliging and well mannered.

“Mrs. Beebe,” said Bill, “at last I am fixed so that I can do the right thing by you and all others. As soon as I can make my last payment on my Cleary Creek property, I will square everything up, and give you plenty of money for Bera and the boys.”

Now, I know that everyone who reads this little book will say to themselves:

“If Mrs. Beebe don’t get her money now, she certainly is foolish.”

Swiftwater, to be sure, saw that my hotel bills were paid and told me every day that in a short time he would clean up enough gold to make himself independent, and provide bountifully for Bera and the two boys—and I believed him.

Swiftwater’s sister, the mother of Kitty, his polygamous wife, was, I quickly learned, living in a tent on Bill’s claim, waiting to lay hold of him and his money as soon as the clean-up was finished. Long before this he had deserted Kitty, and in all the turmoil and trouble that came after his bigamous marriage to his niece I had lost all track of that unfortunate girl.

I remember now how odd it struck me that Swiftwater’s sister was there, living in a little white canvas tent, and enduring the privations which any woman must suffer in that country, while I, actuated by the same desire, was waiting for Swiftwater to finish washing up the dumps on his claims. And I recalled at the time that when Swiftwater mined thousands of gold from his claims in the Klondike he allowed his own mother to cook in a cabin of a miner on a claim not far from his own, and although rich beyond his fondest dreams had permitted that poor woman to earn her own living by the hardest kind of drudgery and toil.