Why, I have known more than one broad shouldered giant of the trail grow as sick and puny as a singed kitten while waiting in Seattle for his boat to take him, late in February or early in March, to Skagway. I knew one miner, who in health was six feet five inches tall, weighing two hundred and forty pounds without an ounce of fat on him, come within an ace of dying with quick consumption, which it afterwards proved was due to his longing for the biting wind that blows from the top of Alaska’s Coast Range and bears company with the wayfarer down in the valley of the Yukon past the lakes and into the gold camps of the Klondike. Well, all this came to me then as I realized that Swiftwater was gone North once more in search of gold, but, with Bera in Seattle and the two babies, I was shackled as securely as any one of the wretches who walk the streets of this city with chains and ball working out a sentence for vagrancy. It is not a less remarkable thing to be told of Swiftwater that he turned Dame Fortune’s wheel once more with the dial pointing in his direction as quickly as he had raised the necessary money in San Francisco to make a new start in Fairbanks. To all who know of Swiftwater’s kaleidoscopic changes from rich to poor, and back again to rich, it seems as if the fickle Dame, carrying a magic horn spilling gold in all directions, followed Swiftwater wherever he went into Alaska and out again, down to the cities of the States and back again, and, if she seemed to lose him for a while, always to welcome him back with a winning smile. Of course, it is part of my story that after Swiftwater had amassed another fortune on Cleary Creek, in the Tanana, and his friend, Mr. Marks, who had grubstake him, sought to obtain his rights in the property, it was found that the contract between them written by Swiftwater was as full of holes as a sieve. Again the lawyers went to work earning big fees in the litigation which Marks brought to compel Swiftwater to do the honorable thing--to do that by him which any man in Alaska, at least while he lived there, never failed to do--to divide with the man who grubstaked him. Now, Swiftwater, as my reader has by this time safely guessed, was made in a different mould. They used to say in the early days when the stories of the incredible richness of Eldorado’s gold lined bedrock were told on the “outside,” that when a man in Alaska drank the water of the country, the truth left him. I have never, for my own part, fully determined whether this is true, and I may frankly say that in some of my experiences, the opportunities for judging of the truth or falsity of this theory were limited, the reason being that most of the men drink something beside water in that country.