This ended the case. I turned to go from the courtroom when the Presbyterian minister, Dr. McKenzie, came to me and said: “Mrs. Beebe, I do not know anything about the circumstances that have brought you to this condition, but if you will let me have the child I will see that he has a good home and is well cared for.” But this was not necessary, as it turned out afterwards, because Dr. McKenzie took the matter up with the council, where it was threshed out in all its details. The council voted $125 a month for sustenance for the nurse and the baby. The mounted police took me to the barracks and there provided a cabin and food, with regular supplies of provisions from the canteen. I do not doubt but that the monthly expense during the winter that I lived there with the baby is still a matter of record in Dawson in the archives of the government, and I am equally certain that, although Swiftwater Bill has made hundreds of thousands of dollars since that day and is now reputed to be worth close to $1,000,000, he has never liquidated the debt he owes to the Canadian government for the care and sustenance and shelter they gave his own boy. All of the facts stated in this chapter can easily be verified by recourse to the records of the court and mounted police in Dawson. Although I knew that Swiftwater was making money in Nome, I placed no more dependence in him from that moment and managed to sustain myself by manicuring and hairdressing in Dawson. The winter wore away, and there was the usual annual celebration of the coming of spring with its steamers from White Horse laden with the first papers and the mail from the outside. In May of that year I received a telegram from Swiftwater Bill telling me to leave Dawson on the first boat and come down the river to Nome, as he and Bera would be there on the first boat from Seattle. The day after I received the telegram the mail came and brought a letter written by Swiftwater from Chicago, saying that he had the money to pay me all he owed me and more too, and for me not to fail to meet him and Bera in Nome. Isn’t it curious how a woman will forget all the injustice she suffers at the hands of a man, when it seems to her that he is trying to do and is doing the right thing? Does it seem odd to you, my woman reader, that the thought of meeting Bera again and of giving to her and to Swiftwater the custody of the dear little child I had loved and nursed all winter long, should have appealed to me? And now, as there must be an end to the hardest luck story--just as there is a finish at some time to all forms of human grief and sorrow--so there came an end to that winter in the little cabin near the mounted police barracks at Dawson, where baby and I and the nurse, Lena Hubbell, had spent so many weeks waiting for a change in our luck. Again there was a mob of every kind of people in Dawson.