From that time on, Bill was my right hand. As the number of typhoid victims increased, he made his saloon an intelligence office, finding and reporting to me all new cases. The example of the Odd Fellows stimulated the various social orders represented in the camp--the Masons, Knights of Pythias, Elks, Eagles, and others--to a like humane work; and Bill looked up their sick members and reported to their committees. He saw that all the sick had medical attention, and guaranteed the payment of scores of doctor's bills. Each steamboat that left Nome for the "outside" carried a number of convalescents and broken-down and moneyless men, and funds had to be raised for their passage. Bill headed nearly all of these subscription lists, as well as those for fitting up the four temporary hospitals we opened and filled with sick men. Being for over six weeks the only clergyman in that whole region, I conducted all the funerals. One week I had eleven--all typhoid cases. Bill attended them all, looking after the digging of the graves and making coffins, and often acting as undertaker. Now, I am not setting up my saloon friend as a saint. Quite the contrary. I suppose he had been guilty of every crime mentioned in the Decalogue. He had never known any home life, but had knocked about from camp to camp of the western frontiers ever since boyhood. His ideas of morality, therefore, were very vague. He was said to have been "run out" of several towns in Montana and Idaho. He had a violent temper and, as the phrase went, was "quick on the trigger." Rumor said that he had the blood of more than one man on his hands; although it was claimed, in every case, that he had not sought the quarrel. He sold whiskey and drank it, gambled and swore habitually without a thought of any of these things being wrong. He was simply an uncultured, ignorant, rough-and-ready, Irish-American backwoodsman. But to those of us in the raw camp of Nome who witnessed Bill's untiring kindness and self-sacrifice during those weeks of distress, his faults faded into the background behind the light of his many good deeds. St. Peter says, "Charity covers a multitude of sins," and surely Bill's charity "abounded" overwhelmingly, putting out of sight much of the evil in his life.