It is not surprising that Swiftwater found his last love affair anything but a summer holiday, when it is remembered that his legal wife, Bera, was in Washington, D. C., awaiting his return. Considerations of propriety and, even of the law, seemed to have left Swiftwater’s mind entirely, until Kitty’s mother learned of his elopement and followed the loving pair to Seattle. What followed afterwards was told in the Seattle, Tacoma and Portland newspapers of that time. Learning that Swiftwater and Kitty were registered as man and wife at a Seattle hotel, Kitty’s mother followed them and sought to apprehend them. Then it was that Swiftwater evinced that capacity for resource and tact which, as all his friends know, is one of his most distinguished characteristics. With the irate mother of his newest love lying in wait at night in the lobby of one of Seattle’s best known hotels, it was Swiftwater’s task to show that skill in maneuver and celerity in action which tens of thousands of Northerners attributed to him as the origin of his odd nickname. There was no time to repent for his infatuation for the pretty Kitty Brandon, or to remember the fate of his deserted wife and child in Washington. And Swiftwater was equal to the emergency. Bidding Kitty’s mother wait in the hotel parlor, Swiftwater rushed to his room, telephoned for a hack to come to the rear of the hostelry, and in less than ten minutes Bill and his sweetheart were being driven at breakneck speed through the streets of Seattle, southward over the bridge across the tide flats, headed for Tacoma. It was told by Swiftwater afterwards that in nearly every mile of that trip fear that Kitty’s mother was pursuing him and his inamorita followed him and for the greater part of the way he kept watching down the dark road in the rear of his hack, expecting that at every turn of the road the wrathful parent would be in sight in readiness to pounce upon him. [Illustration: ESCAPE AT NIGHT OF SWIFTWATER AND KITTY BRANDON FROM THE GIRL’S IRATE MOTHER.] From Tacoma, where Swiftwater and Kitty found only temporary shelter, the runaway pair escaped to Portland, to return to Seattle and spend their honeymoon in a little cottage in an obscure district near Interbay. CHAPTER XI.