This was the reason I was in Moab. My parents had divorced when I was ten. I had stayed in contact with my father (who never really was a Dad in the context that my school friends understood) by working as an office boy after school -supposedly with a long-range intention of my following his footsteps in the practice of law. About the time I sold my first photograph I ever submitted to a magazine—a real fluke I was to discover later in a media career—Wm. B. realized I meant it when I said I wanted to be a freelance, he started chipping away at me to become a geologist.

I have to admit, being that most of my magnificent salary of 25¢ an hour went to pay for skiing, or mountain climbing, every weekend, the adventure of being a miner had some appeal. One of Dad's clients, an old, old man named Mr. Landau, loved to set me down in the waiting room of the office and spin tales of his climbing the Chilkoot Pass, building a boat at Lake Bennet, and doing a fair-to-middling bit of mining on a pup (a sourdough's word for a small gulch) off Bonanza Creek. First time I met him he extended a big weathered paw with the offer, "Shake the hand that held the hand of Klondike Kate."

Kate, if you have never heard of her, was the Queen of the Dance Hall Girls of the Yukon. She also was from Portland, and had returned to the city of her birth when she retired, a very wealthy woman. I was present, at the big round table my father presided over at Mannings Coffee Cafeteria every day from eleven until two, when he wasn't in court, when Mr. Landau, a frequent lunchtime companion, looked up and shouted, "Kate?"

Truthfully I had the thought this old-timer had embellished his stories of the rush of '98, and the Queen of The North just a bit. However an old woman, wearing a necklace of nuggets, stopped and turned. She put a pair of glasses on, came to our table with a hand out, one finger pointing, and asked tentatively, "Henry?"