As for Swiftwater Bill, he never did drink anything but water--I never knew him to take a drop of any intoxicating liquors or wine--so that if the water of Alaska had any demoralizing effect on Swiftwater, it must have been in the direction of his sense of business honor and integrity and a decent sense of his obligations as a husband and a father. And I am satisfied, too, that the water of Alaska, if such was the demoralizing agent in Swiftwater’s case, certainly worked terrific havoc. [Illustration: SWIFTWATER BILL GATES, FREDDIE GATES AT RIGHT, AND CLIFFORD GATES, AT BOTTOM.] CHAPTER XIV. SWIFTWATER BILL had struck it again. On Number 6 Cleary Creek, in the Tanana, the man who gained his chiefest fame in the early days of Dawson by walking around the rapids of Miles Canyon, because he was afraid to navigate them, thereby earning his cognomen, “Swiftwater Bill,” had found another fortune in the yellow gold that lines countless tens of thousands of little creeks and dry gulches in that great northern country--Alaska. Swiftwater had obtained a big working interest in the mine on Cleary Creek, a stream that has produced its millions in yellow gold. And, after the first discovery of placer gold in paying quantities in the Tanana, the whole Western coast of the American continent knew the story. Like Dawson, the town of Fairbanks quickly sprang from the soil as if reared by the magic of some unseen genii of the Arabian Nights. Of course, the word came out to me in a letter from a friend at Fairbanks. And I sometimes think that, after all, I must have had a great many friends in Alaska who remembered the hard task that the fates had put upon me when they made me, through no wish of my own, the mother-in-law of Swiftwater Bill. As I remember now, the news that Swiftwater had struck another pay streak impressed upon me the necessity of immediate action. Swiftwater’s previous conduct, particularly that $100 dinner that he gave in Seattle a few months before, had taught me one thing, and that was that if Gates was ever to do the square thing by me and by Bera and the babies it would be only when some one with sufficient will power to accomplish the task would reach him and see that he did not forget his duty.