[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 to the 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.