Brent laughed, happily, and before she could elude him his arms were about her and he had drawn her close. "Indeed you shall see them!" he cried. "You and I shall see them together. We'll be married at Dawson, and we'll make a strike——"
With a low cry the girl freed herself from his arms, and drew away to the other side of the fire: "No, no, no!" she cried, with a catch in her voice, "I can never marry you! Oh, why must we love!
Why must we suffer, when the fault is not ours? They would hate me, and despise me, and point at me with the finger of scorn!"
Brent laughed: "Hold on girl!" he cried, "Some of the best families in the world have Indian blood in their veins—and they're proud of it! I know 'em! They'll come a long way from hating you. Why, they'll pile all over themselves to meet you—and a hundred years from now our great-grand-children will be bragging about you!" Suddenly, he grew serious, "But maybe you won't marry me, after all—when you've heard what I've got to say. Maybe you'll despise me—and it'll be all right if you do. It will be what I have earned. It isn't a pretty story, and it's going to hurt to tell it—to you. But, you've got to know—so here goes.
"In the first place, you think I'm good. But, I'm not good—by most of the ten commandments, and a lot of by-laws. I'm not going to do any white-washing—I'm going to begin at the beginning and tell you the truth, so you can see how far I've dropped. In the first place my family tree is decorated with presidents, and senators, and congress-men, and generals, and diplomats, and its branches are so crowded with colonels, and majors and captains and judges, and doctors, that they have to prop them up to keep them from breaking. Some were rich, but honest; and some were poor, but not so honest, and a lot of them were half way between in both wealth and honesty. But, anyway, you can't
turn twenty pages of United States history without running onto the trail of at least one man that I can claim kin to. As for myself, I'm a college man, and a mining engineer—that means I was fitted by family and education to be a big man, and maybe get a chance to slip into history myself—I've made some, over on the Yukon, but—it ain't fit to print.
"Hooch was at the bottom of the whole business. I couldn't handle hooch like some men can. One drink always called for another, and two drinks called for a dozen. I liked to get drunk, and I did get drunk, every chance I got—and that was right often. I lost job after job because I wouldn't stay sober—and later some others because I couldn't stay sober. I heard of the gold on the Yukon and I went there, and I found gold—lots of it. I was counted one of the richest men in the country. Then I started out to get rid of the gold. I couldn't spend it all so I gambled it away. Almost from the time I made my strike I never drew a sober breath, until I'd shoved my last marker across the table. Then I dealt faro—turned professional gambler for wages in the best place in Dawson, but the hooch had got me and I lost out. I got another job in a saloon that wasn't so good, but it was the same story, and in a little while I was tending bar—selling hooch—in the lowest dive in town—and that means the lowest one in the world, I reckon. That last place, The Klondike Palace; with its painted women, who sell themselves nightly to men, with the scum of the
earth carousing in its dance-hall, and playing at its tables, was the hell-hole of the Yukon. And I was part of it. I stood behind its bar and sold hooch—I was the devil that kept the hell-fires stoked and roaring. And I kept full of hooch myself, or I couldn't have stood it. Then I lost out even there, on—what you might call a technicality—and after that I was just a plain bum. Everybody despised me—worst of all, I despised myself. I did odd jobs to get money to buy hooch, and when I had bought it I crawled into my shack and stayed there till it was gone. I was weak and flabby, and dirty. My hands shook so I couldn't raise a glass of hooch to my lips, until I'd had a stiff shot. I used to lap the first drink out of a saucer like a dog. I dodged the men who had once been my friends. Only Joe Pete, who had helped me over the Chilkoot, and who remembered that I was a good man on the trail, and a girl named Kitty, would even turn their heads to glance at the miserable drunkard that slunk along the street with his bottle concealed in his ragged pocket.
"There is one more I thought was my friend. His name is Camillo Bill, and he is square as a die, and he did me a good turn when he cleaned me out, by holding my claims for only what he had coming when he could have taken them all. But he came to see me one day toward the last. He came to tell me that the claims had petered out. I wanted him to grub-stake me, for a prospecting trip
and he refused. That hurt me worse than all the rest—for I thought he was my friend. He cursed me, and refused to grub-stake me. Then I met a real friend—one I had never seen before, and he furnished the gold for my trip to the Coppermine, and—here I am."