While I worked and slaved in Nome trying to get a few dollars ahead so that I could care for the baby and make my way out to Seattle to help Bera, I finally got word that she had been left destitute in Washington, D. C. Swiftwater had furnished four nice rooms in an apartment house at Washington, and in their effects was more than $1,000 worth of rare curios and ivory from Alaska. Then came another letter that Bera, unable to pay for her care, food and medical attention--the second baby boy was born August 28th--had been put on board a train with a charity ticket, her ivories and curios sold for a trifle and had been started West for Seattle. I need not dwell on how Bera, more dead than alive from five days traveling in a chair car from Washington to Seattle with her babe at her bosom and unable to sleep at all--with nothing to eat but a few sandwiches which they had given her at Washington--arrived in Seattle and was cared for by friends. They took the girl, so weak she could hardly stand on her feet, to a restaurant and gave her her first hot meal in almost a week. Then Bera and her baby went to Portland to live with her grandma, while Swiftwater and Kitty Gates were touring the country. And do you know that Swiftwater’s polygamous wife, Kitty Gates, was the girl who Bera one year before had fitted out with a nice outfit of clothes and had sent her to a convent school at Portland to be given a good education? Yes, this is the truth, and this was Kitty’s gratitude to Bera and Swiftwater’s crime against the law and his own flesh and blood. How we managed after I came to Seattle from Nome to live in a little room in a small old fashioned house on Fourth Avenue with barely enough to eat and scarcely enough clothes to cover ourselves need not be told here in detail. I sometimes wonder whether or not I have overladen my little narrative with grief and misery and crime against humanity and against human laws, as well as God’s. And then I wonder still more why it was that there were men in Seattle, in San Francisco and in Fairbanks in those days who were always ready to exalt Swiftwater and do him honor and take him by the hand, while the world would look askance at Bera Gates, his wife, whom he had so grieviously wronged. CHAPTER XII. “SWIFTWATER BILL GATES is back.” One morning in Seattle months after Bera and I had set up a little housekeeping establishment in Seattle, I picked up the Saturday evening edition of The Times and almost dropped over in my chair when I saw headlines in the paper as shown in the foregoing. What had been Swiftwater Bill’s fortune in all those months, I knew not, but the fact as stated in the paper that he had returned from Alaska was sufficient for me. Bera said: “Mama, I don’t know any reason why you should fuss around about Swiftwater.” “Never mind me,” said I, “I’ll find him, my dear, just to see what he has to say for himself.”