“Mrs. Beebe,” he said, “here is $50 for your present hotel bills. I must go back to Cleary Creek at once, but I will be back again inside of a week, and then I will straighten everything up.”
When Swiftwater told me that, I believed him—for the last time—for the next morning I found that he had left my room to board a train for Chena, on the Tanana, with a draft for $50,000 in his inside pocket, $10,000 more in cash and a ticket for Seattle.
Swiftwater undoubtedly believed, that being without money I would be compelled to remain an unlimited time in Fairbanks. Not so. I still had a little jewelry left that he had not persuaded me to pawn or sell for his benefit, and on this I raised enough money to buy a ticket to Seattle.
Before I could get there, Swiftwater learned of my coming, and when I arrived on Elliott Bay, he had applied to the Federal Courts to be adjudged a bankrupt and had assigned to Phil Wilson all his interests in the Tanana, amounting to untold wealth.
That case of Swiftwater’s is still pending in the Federal Court in Seattle, and no judge and no court has ever yet, up to this writing, consented to declare him a bankrupt, although he has successfully placed his property in the Tanana beyond the reach of the scores of men who have befriended him in the past without reward on his part.
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
AGAIN it is spring, and I sit all alone in my room in Seattle, knowing that the city is filled with miners, their faces set in the direction of the Golden North, their hearts beating with high hopes, their breasts swelling with the happy purpose of getting back once more to the glacier bound, gold lined gravel beds of Alaska—the treasure land of the world. I know that I cannot go with them, for Swiftwater has robbed me of almost every farthing I ever possessed.