Now, I am ready to believe that most people will agree with me that Swiftwater was about as rapid and agile a performer as any of his contemporaries who occupy the hall of fame in the annals of Alaska. Because it was only a few short weeks until Swiftwater returns to Seattle with his pockets bulging with currency and prepared to leave for Fairbanks. Of course, I knew nothing of Swiftwater’s presence in Seattle, though it had been only a few short weeks since I had, with my own hands, in the kitchen in the little two-room apartment we occupied, washed his only suit of underclothes, so that he could go on the street without being annoyed by the police. The first I knew of Swiftwater’s return from San Francisco was when I read in the morning paper that “W. C. Gates, the well known and opulent Alaska miner,” had entertained a distinguished party of Seattle business men at a banquet at one of the big down town hotels. The cost of that feed, as I afterwards learned, was about $100--of Mr. Marks’ money. Be that as it may, before I could find Swiftwater and gently recall to him the fact that his wife and two little children were almost in absolute want in Seattle he had managed to board a steamer for the Tanana and was off for the North. Now, when I found that Swiftwater had gone, I was frantic with the desire to follow him up to Alaska. For the year and a half that I had remained in Seattle, waiting like Micawber for something to turn up, the fever to get back to Alaska seemed to be growing in my veins at a rate that meant that something had to be done. For, after Alaska has once laid her spell over a man or woman, in nine times out of ten, she will claim him or her from that time onward to the end of life as her devoted and always loyal slave. I know not, nor have I ever found any who did know, what it is that makes one who has ever lived in Alaska, and who has left there, unhappy and discontented until they go back once more to the land of gold. I have seen and talked with old “sourdoughs,” trappers and dog team freighters, and they all tell the same story. When the first big clean-up had been made in Dawson, I remember well, the winter following found a mob of big, boisterous, pleasure loving, money spending, carefree and happy hearted Klondike miners in the hotels of Seattle, San Francisco and New York. They lived on nothing but the choicest steaks and the richest wines, and the sight of a plate of beans would start a fight. Then they would all come back to Seattle in the spring, sick, feverish, unhappy, with a look in their eyes like that of a mother hungering for her lost babe. In Seattle they would spend a restless week, but when they struck the trail at White Horse just before the spring breakup in the Yukon every man jack of them was himself again--jolly, joyous, carefree, full voiced and filled with the enthusiasm of a two-year-old.