They took the girl, so weak she could hardly stand on her feet, to a restaurant and gave her her first hot meal in almost a week. Then Bera and her baby went to Portland to live with her grandma, while Swiftwater and Kitty Gates were touring the country.
And do you know that Swiftwater’s polygamous wife, Kitty Gates, was the girl who Bera one year before had fitted out with a nice outfit of clothes and had sent her to a convent school at Portland to be given a good education?
Yes, this is the truth, and this was Kitty’s gratitude to Bera and Swiftwater’s crime against the law and his own flesh and blood.
How we managed after I came to Seattle from Nome to live in a little room in a small old fashioned house on Fourth Avenue with barely enough to eat and scarcely enough clothes to cover ourselves need not be told here in detail. I sometimes wonder whether or not I have overladen my little narrative with grief and misery and crime against humanity and against human laws, as well as God’s. And then I wonder still more why it was that there were men in Seattle, in San Francisco and in Fairbanks in those days who were always ready to exalt Swiftwater and do him honor and take him by the hand, while the world would look askance at Bera Gates, his wife, whom he had so grieviously wronged.
[CHAPTER XII.]
SWIFTWATER BILL GATES is back.”
One morning in Seattle months after Bera and I had set up a little housekeeping establishment in Seattle, I picked up the Saturday evening edition of The Times and almost dropped over in my chair when I saw headlines in the paper as shown in the foregoing.