“I am up here to take good care of you, Bill, and incidentally to see that you provide enough money to feed and clothe your children and your wife. I don’t care anything about that other woman over there.”
Bill laughed, and said it was probably a lucky thing for him that he had a mother-in-law to look after his welfare. But if Swiftwater’s mind ever hovered around the idea of criminal proceedings on the score of bigamy, he did not give voice to it. He merely went around in his cheerful way from day to day working vigorously with his men until, finally, early in September, the last of the pay dirt was washed from the dumps into the sluice boxes and the gold sacked and taken to the bank.
Then Bill began paying off his debts. He settled with his partners, and then with a big chunk of bills and drafts in his inside pocket we started for Seattle.
It was getting winter rapidly and we had no time to lose in order to catch the steamship “Ohio,” at St. Michael, for Seattle, before the winter freeze-up on Bering Sea.
Swiftwater, while working on Number 6 Cleary, had been all business and activity. Now, he seemed on the little boat going down the Tanana to be his old self again—by that I mean that Swiftwater reverted to his conduct of early days, which had lead some people to believe that he was descended from the Mormon stock back in Utah. Why Swiftwater had never earned the title of the Brigham Young of the Klondike instead of the Knight of the Golden Omelette or just plain Swiftwater, I never could quite understand.
At Fairbanks Swiftwater induced a woman, whose name I shall not give at this time, to board the steamer for the outside. A half day’s further ride took us to Chena, and there Swiftwater met another friend by the name of Violet—a girl who had worked as housekeeper and cook for a crowd of miners during the summer because her husband had deserted her and left her penniless in Fairbanks.
This Violet was young and comely, and of gentle breeding. The hard life in the mining camps of the Yukon and the bitterness she had suffered at the hands of her truant husband had taken a little of the natural refinement from the girl and had probably shaped her life so that the better side could not be seen.
Be that as it may, Violet came with Swiftwater, but, when she found on the steamship “Ohio” that Swiftwater had tipped one of the crew $100 so as to enable him to have a seat with a woman on each side of him at his meals, Violet refused to have anything to do with him.
At St. Michael, when I found that Swiftwater thought more of the association of women and of having his kind of a good time than of providing for his wife and children, I made up my mind that there would have to be a showdown of some kind. I telegraphed to Bera at Seattle:
“Swiftwater is coming down on the Ohio. You had better see him now, if you want anything.”