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 the cold 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.