“Mrs. Beebe,” said Bill, “at last I am fixed so that I can do the right thing by you and all others. As soon as I can make my last payment on my Cleary Creek property, I will square everything up, and give you plenty of money for Bera and the boys.” Now, I know that everyone who reads this little book will say to themselves: “If Mrs. Beebe don’t get her money now, she certainly is foolish.” Swiftwater, to be sure, saw that my hotel bills were paid and told me every day that in a short time he would clean up enough gold to make himself independent, and provide bountifully for Bera and the two boys--and I believed him. Swiftwater’s sister, the mother of Kitty, his polygamous wife, was, I quickly learned, living in a tent on Bill’s claim, waiting to lay hold of him and his money as soon as the clean-up was finished. Long before this he had deserted Kitty, and in all the turmoil and trouble that came after his bigamous marriage to his niece I had lost all track of that unfortunate girl. I remember now how odd it struck me that Swiftwater’s sister was there, living in a little white canvas tent, and enduring the privations which any woman must suffer in that country, while I, actuated by the same desire, was waiting for Swiftwater to finish washing up the dumps on his claims. And I recalled at the time that when Swiftwater mined thousands of gold from his claims in the Klondike he allowed his own mother to cook in a cabin of a miner on a claim not far from his own, and although rich beyond his fondest dreams had permitted that poor woman to earn her own living by the hardest kind of drudgery and toil. CHAPTER XV. SWIFTWATER’S clean-up on Number 6 Cleary Creek was $75,000 in gold. The summer was come to an end and there were signs on the trees, in the crackling of the frosted grass in the early morning and in the bite of the night wind from the mountain canyons that told of the quick approach of winter in the Tanana. Swiftwater had been more than usually fortunate. His mine on Number 6 Cleary had yielded far beyond his expectations. Swiftwater had every reason to believe his friends who told him that his luck was phenomenal. As there are compensating advantages and disadvantages in almost every phase of human life in this world, it may possibly be said that as an offset to Swiftwater’s phenomenal luck, he had two women, the mothers of his two wives, waiting patiently at Fairbanks for him to bring out enough money to properly provide for his families. I had told Swiftwater: “I am up here to take good care of you, Bill, and incidentally to see that you provide enough money to feed and clothe your children and your wife. I don’t care anything about that other woman over there.”