In a still more leisurely tone the Doctor said:
"Elaine, would you mind telling these gentlemen how you found your father?"
"No," she answered promptly, with what might have been taken for a sigh of relief. She looked at Wallion and said: "All along I have been anxious to tell you all I knew. There isn't anything I want to keep back ... but a great deal ... oh, such a great deal that I don't understand."
Tom was quite surprised at her evident eagerness, and it had a similar effect upon Wallion. She no longer looked at any one in particular, but was pale and nervous, as if she feared the opportunity might slip away from her, and began her story at once, in a low, subdued voice:
"My father was born in Sweden, for William Robertson is only an alteration of his Swedish name, which he has not used for the last thirty years. The name he bore during his boyhood in Sweden is no longer remembered. The narrow-minded and proud relations who forced him to leave his native land are all gone."
"They forced him?" interposed Wallion.
"Yes," she went on. "Perhaps it is not such an unusual story. His father was a lawyer and wanted his son to become one also. At Upsala he got among the artists, discovered that he had a talent for sculpture, neglected his studies and evil rumors came to the ears of his father. They led to a crisis which ended in his leaving the country precipitately. He has never done wrong to any one, never deceived or slandered others as they have slandered him. He came over to the United States, broken down, without means and, though a well-educated University man, was by turns reporter on a 'gold' paper, barman, steward on a fruit-ship, and lastly a tramp. Then he went out West, and was stableman on a wheat-farm until he became foreman. The owner of the farm, Mr. Bridgeman, took an interest in him, and one day, happening to see a sketch my father had made—a pastoral idyll—sent it to a paper in San Francisco, which accepted it, and, in a few years' time, my father became a popular, well-paid draughtsman. That was his best time. He married Violet Seymour and settled in San Francisco. I was born on January 10, 1898." Here she paused.
The siren over their heads sent a deafening signal out into the night, and was answered by another in the offing. When all was quiet, Elaine again took up the thread of her story:
"On New Year's Day, 1902, my father accidentally came across two Swedes whom he had known from childhood. They were the cousins Dreyel, Victor and Christian, and they told him they were just going to Alaska. At that time Klondyke had not the same old lure, but gold had been discovered in the sand on the shores of the Seward peninsula in 1898, and the two Dreyels met a Scotchman, Sandy MacCormick by name, who professed to know quite a new place for digging the precious metal. When my father heard their glowing promises he, too, was seized with the gold-fever and resolved to join them. He begged my mother to remain in San Francisco, and promised her he would return within a twelvemonth. Then, with the two Dreyels and MacCormick, he set off for Alaska."
"Aha!" ejaculated Wallion, whose eyes were glittering, "you won't object to my jotting down a few notes, will you?"