For a few minutes after finding the handkerchief at his door, Alan experienced a feeling of mingled curiosity and disappointment--also a certain resentment. The suspicion that he was becoming involved in spite of himself was not altogether pleasant. The evening, up to a certain point, had been fairly entertaining. It was true he might have passed a pleasanter hour recalling old times with Stampede Smith, or discussing Kadiak bears with the English earl, or striking up an acquaintance with the unknown graybeard who had voiced an opinion about John Graham. But he was not regretting lost hours, nor was he holding Mary Standish accountable for them. It was, last of all, the handkerchief that momentarily upset him.
Why had she dropped it at his door? It was not a dangerous-looking affair, to be sure, with its filmy lace edging and ridiculous diminutiveness. As the question came to him, he was wondering how even as dainty a nose as that possessed by Mary Standish could be much comforted by it. But it was pretty. And, like Mary Standish, there was something exquisitely quiet and perfect about it, like the simplicity of her hair. He was not analyzing the matter. It was a thought that came to him almost unconsciously, as he tossed the annoying bit of fabric on the little table at the head of his berth. Undoubtedly the dropping of it had been entirely unpremeditated and accidental. At least he told himself so. And he also assured himself, with an involuntary shrug of his shoulders, that any woman or girl had the right to pass his door if she so desired, and that he was an idiot for thinking otherwise. The argument was only slightly adequate. But Alan was not interested in mysteries, especially when they had to do with woman--and such an absurdly inconsequential thing as a handkerchief.
A second time he went to bed. He fell asleep thinking about Keok and Nawadlook and the people of his range. From somewhere he had been given the priceless heritage of dreaming pleasantly, and Keok was very real, with her swift smile and mischievous face, and Nawadlook's big, soft eyes were brighter than when he had gone away. He saw Tautuk, gloomy as usual over the heartlessness of Keok. He was beating a tom-tom that gave out the peculiar sound of bells, and to this Amuk Toolik was dancing the Bear Dance, while Keok clapped her hands in exaggerated admiration. Even in his dreams Alan chuckled. He knew what was happening, and that out of the corners of her laughing eyes Keok was enjoying Tautuk's jealousy. Tautuk was so stupid he would never understand. That was the funny part of it. And he beat his drum savagely, scowling so that he almost shut his eyes, while Keok laughed outright.
It was then that Alan opened his eyes and heard the last of the ship's bells. It was still dark. He turned on the light and looked at his watch. Tautuk's drum had tolled eight bells, aboard the ship, and it was four o'clock in the morning.
Through the open port came the smell of sea and land, and with it a chill air which Alan drank in deeply as he stretched himself for a few minutes after awakening. The tang of it was like wine in his blood, and he got up quietly and dressed while he smoked the stub-end of a cigar he had laid aside at midnight. Not until he had finished dressing did he notice the handkerchief on the table. If its presence had suggested a significance a few hours before, he no longer disturbed himself by thinking about it. A bit of carelessness on the girl's part, that was all. He would return it. Mechanically he put the crumpled bit of cambric in his coat pocket before going on deck.
He had guessed that he would be alone. The promenade was deserted. Through the ghost-white mist of morning he saw the rows of empty chairs, and lights burning dully in the wheel-house. Asian monsoon and the drifting warmth of the Japan current had brought an early spring to the Alexander Archipelago, and May had stolen much of the flowering softness of June. But the dawns of these days were chilly and gray. Mists and fogs settled in the valleys, and like thin smoke rolled down the sides of the mountains to the sea, so that a ship traveling the inner waters felt its way like a child creeping in darkness.
Alan loved this idiosyncrasy of the Alaskan coast. The phantom mystery of it was stimulating, and in the peril of it was a challenging lure. He could feel the care with which the Nome was picking her way northward. Her engines were thrumming softly, and her movement was a slow and cautious glide, catlike and slightly trembling, as if every pound of steel in her were a living nerve widely alert. He knew Captain Rifle would not be asleep and that straining eyes were peering into the white gloom from the wheel-house. Somewhere west of them, hazardously near, must lie the rocks of Admiralty Island; eastward were the still more pitiless glacial sandstones and granites of the coast, with that deadly finger of sea-washed reef between, along the lip of which they must creep to Juneau. And Juneau could not be far ahead.
He leaned over the rail, puffing at the stub of his cigar. He was eager for his work. Juneau, Skagway, and Cordova meant nothing to him, except that they were Alaska. He yearned for the still farther north, the wide tundras, and the mighty achievement that lay ahead of him there. His blood sang to the surety of it now, and for that reason he was not sorry he had spent seven months of loneliness in the States. He had proved with his own eyes that the day was near when Alaska would come into her own. Gold! He laughed. Gold had its lure, its romance, its thrill, but what was all the gold the mountains might possess compared with this greater thing he was helping to build! It seemed to him the people he had met in the south had thought only of gold when they learned he was from Alaska. Always gold--that first, and then ice, snow, endless nights, desolate barrens, and craggy mountains frowning everlastingly upon a blasted land in which men fought against odds and only the fittest survived. It was gold that had been Alaska's doom. When people thought of it, they visioned nothing beyond the old stampede days, the Chilkoot, White Horse, Dawson, and Circle City. Romance and glamor and the tragedies of dead men clung to their ribs. But they were beginning to believe now. Their eyes were opening. Even the Government was waking up, after proving there was something besides graft in railroad building north of Mount St. Elias. Senators and Congressmen at Washington had listened to him seriously, and especially to Carl Lomen. And the beef barons, wisest of all, had tried to buy him off and had offered a fortune for Lomen's forty thousand head of reindeer in the Seward Peninsula! That was proof of the awakening. Absolute proof.
He lighted a fresh cigar, and his mind shot through the dissolving mist into the vast land ahead of him. Some Alaskans had cursed Theodore Roosevelt for putting what they called "the conservation shackles" on their country. But he, for one, did not. Roosevelt's far-sightedness had kept the body-snatchers at bay, and because he had foreseen what money-power and greed would do, Alaska was not entirely stripped today, but lay ready to serve with all her mighty resources the mother who had neglected her for a generation. But it was going to be a struggle, this opening up of a great land. It must be done resourcefully and with intelligence. Once the bars were down, Roosevelt's shadow-hand could not hold back such desecrating forces as John Graham and the syndicate he represented.
Thought of Graham was an unpleasant reminder, and his face grew hard in the sea-mist. Alaskans themselves must fight against the licensed plunderers. And it would be a hard fight. He had seen the pillaging work of these financial brigands in a dozen states during the past winter--states raped of their forests, their lakes and streams robbed and polluted, their resources hewn down to naked skeletons. He had been horrified and a little frightened when he looked over the desolation of Michigan, once the richest timber state in America. What if the Government at Washington made it possible for such a thing to happen in Alaska? Politics--and money--were already fighting for just that thing.
He no longer heard the throb of the ship under his feet. It was his fight, and brain and muscle reacted to it almost as if it had been a physical thing. And his end of that fight he was determined to win, if it took every year of his life. He, with a few others, would prove to the world that the millions of acres of treeless tundras of the north were not the cast-off ends of the earth. They would populate them, and the so-called "barrens" would thunder to the innumerable hoofs of reindeer herds as the American plains had never thundered to the beat of cattle. He was not thinking of the treasure he would find at the end of this rainbow of success which he visioned. Money, simply as money, he hated. It was the achievement of the thing that gripped him; the passion to hew a trail through which his beloved land might come into its own, and the desire to see it achieve a final triumph by feeding a half of that America which had laughed at it and kicked it when it was down.
The tolling of the ship's bell roused him from the subconscious struggle into which he had allowed himself to be drawn. Ordinarily he had no sympathy with himself when he fell into one of these mental spasms, as he called them. Without knowing it, he was a little proud of a certain dispassionate tolerance which he possessed--a philosophical mastery of his emotions which at times was almost cold-blooded, and which made some people think he was a thing of stone instead of flesh and blood. His thrills he kept to himself. And a mildly disturbing sensation passed through him now, when he found that unconsciously his fingers had twined themselves about the little handkerchief in his pocket. He drew it out and made a sudden movement as if to toss it overboard. Then, with a grunt expressive of the absurdity of the thing, he replaced it in his pocket and began to walk slowly toward the bow of the ship.
He wondered, as he noted the lifting of the fog, what he would have been had he possessed a sister like Mary Standish. Or any family at all, for that matter--even an uncle or two who might have been interested in him. He remembered his father vividly, his mother a little less so, because his mother had died when he was six and his father when he was twenty. It was his father who stood out above everything else, like the mountains he loved. The father would remain with him always, inspiring him, urging him, encouraging him to live like a gentleman, fight like a man, and die at last unafraid. In that fashion the older Alan Holt had lived and died. But his mother, her face and voice scarcely remembered in the passing of many years, was more a hallowed memory to him than a thing of flesh and blood. And there had been no sisters or brothers. Often he had regretted this lack of brotherhood. But a sister.... He grunted his disapprobation of the thought. A sister would have meant enchainment to civilization. Cities, probably. Even the States. And slavery to a life he detested. He appreciated the immensity of his freedom. A Mary Standish, even though she were his sister, would be a catastrophe. He could not conceive of her, or any other woman like her, living with Keok and Nawadlook and the rest of his people in the heart of the tundras. And the tundras would always be his home, because his heart was there.
He had passed round the wheel-house and came suddenly upon an odd figure crumpled in a chair. It was Stampede Smith. In the clearer light that came with the dissolution of the sea-mist Alan saw that he was not asleep. He paused, unseen by the other. Stampede stretched himself, groaned, and stood up. He was a little man, and his fiercely bristling red whiskers, wet with dew, were luxuriant enough for a giant. His head of tawny hair, bristling like his whiskers, added to the piratical effect of him above the neck, but below that part of his anatomy there was little to strike fear into the hearts of humanity. Some people smiled when they looked at him. Others, not knowing their man, laughed outright. Whiskers could be funny. And they were undoubtedly funny on Stampede Smith. But Alan neither smiled nor laughed, for in his heart was something very near to the missing love of brotherhood for this little man who had written his name across so many pages of Alaskan history.
This morning, as Alan saw him, Stampede Smith was no longer the swiftest gunman between White Horse and Dawson City. He was a pathetic reminder of the old days when, single-handed, he had run down Soapy Smith and his gang--days when the going of Stampede Smith to new fields meant a stampede behind him, and when his name was mentioned in the same breath with those of George Carmack, and Alex McDonald, and Jerome Chute, and a hundred men like Curley Monroe and Joe Barret set their compasses by his. To Alan there was tragedy in his aloneness as he stood in the gray of the morning. Twenty times a millionaire, he knew that Stampede Smith was broke again.
"Good morning," he said so unexpectedly that the little man jerked himself round like the lash of a whip, a trick of the old gun days. "Why so much loneliness, Stampede?"
Stampede grinned wryly. He had humorous, blue eyes, buried like an Airedale's under brows which bristled even more fiercely than his whiskers. "I'm thinkin'," said he, "what a fool thing is money. Good mornin', Alan!"
He nodded and chuckled, and continued to chuckle in the face of the lifting fog, and Alan saw the old humor which had always been Stampede's last asset when in trouble. He drew nearer and stood beside him, so that their shoulders touched as they leaned over the rail.
"Alan," said Stampede, "it ain't often I have a big thought, but I've been having one all night. Ain't forgot Bonanza, have you?"
Alan shook his head. "As long as there is an Alaska, we won't forget Bonanza, Stampede."
"I took a million out of it, next to Carmack's Discovery--an' went busted afterward, didn't I?"
Alan nodded without speaking.
"But that wasn't a circumstance to Gold Run Creek, over the Divide," Stampede continued ruminatively. "Ain't forgot old Aleck McDonald, the Scotchman, have you, Alan? In the 'wash' of Ninety-eight we took up seventy sacks to bring our gold back in and we lacked thirty of doin' the job. Nine hundred thousand dollars in a single clean-up, and that was only the beginning. Well, I went busted again. And old Aleck went busted later on. But he had a pretty wife left. A girl from Seattle. I had to grub-stake."
He was silent for a moment, caressing his damp whiskers, as he noted the first rose-flush of the sun breaking through the mist between them and the unseen mountain tops.
"Five times after that I made strikes and went busted," he said a little proudly. "And I'm busted again!"
"I know it," sympathized Alan.
"They took every cent away from me down in Seattle an' Frisco," chuckled Stampede, rubbing his hands together cheerfully, "an' then bought me a ticket to Nome. Mighty fine of them, don't you think? Couldn't have been more decent. I knew that fellow Kopf had a heart. That's why I trusted him with my money. It wasn't his fault he lost it."
"Of course not," agreed Alan.
"And I'm sort of sorry I shot him up for it. I am, for a fact."
"You killed him?"
"Not quite. I clipped one ear off as a reminder, down in Chink Holleran's place. Mighty sorry. Didn't think then how decent it was of him to buy me a ticket to Nome. I just let go in the heat of the moment. He did me a favor in cleanin' me, Alan. He did, so help me! You don't realize how free an' easy an' beautiful everything is until you're busted."
Smiling, his odd face almost boyish behind its ambush of hair, he saw the grim look in Alan's eyes and about his jaws. He caught hold of the other's arm and shook it.
"Alan, I mean it!" he declared. "That's why I think money is a fool thing. It ain't spendin' money that makes me happy. It's findin' it--the gold in the mountains--that makes the blood run fast through my gizzard. After I've found it, I can't find any use for it in particular. I want to go broke. If I didn't, I'd get lazy and fat, an' some newfangled doctor would operate on me, and I'd die. They're doing a lot of that operatin' down in Frisco, Alan. One day I had a pain, and they wanted to cut out something from inside me. Think what can happen to a man when he's got money!"
"You mean all that, Stampede?"
"On my life, I do. I'm just aching for the open skies, Alan. The mountains. And the yellow stuff that's going to be my playmate till I die. Somebody'll grub-stake me in Nome."
"They won't," said Alan suddenly. "Not if I can help it. Stampede, I want you. I want you with me up under the Endicott Mountains. I've got ten thousand reindeer up there. It's No Man's Land, and we can do as we please in it. I'm not after gold. I want another sort of thing. But I've fancied the Endicott ranges are full of that yellow playmate of yours. It's a new country. You've never seen it. God only knows what you may find. Will you come?"
The humorous twinkle had gone out of Stampede's eyes. He was staring at Alan.
"Will I come? Alan, will a cub nurse its mother? Try me. Ask me. Say it all over ag'in."
The two men gripped hands. Smiling, Alan nodded to the east. The last of the fog was clearing swiftly. The tips of the cragged Alaskan ranges rose up against the blue of a cloudless sky, and the morning sun was flashing in rose and gold at their snowy peaks. Stampede also nodded. Speech was unnecessary. They both understood, and the thrill of the life they loved passed from one to the other in the grip of their hands.
For half an hour Alan sat smoking his cigar. Mentally he was not at ease. Mary Standish had come to him like a soldier, and she had left him like a soldier. But in that last glimpse of her face he had caught for an instant something which she had not betrayed in his cabin--a stab of what he thought was pain in her tear-wet eyes as she smiled, a proud regret, possibly a shadow of humiliation at last--or it may have been a pity for him. He was not sure. But it was not despair. Not once had she whimpered in look or word, even when the tears were in her eyes, and the thought was beginning to impress itself upon him that it was he--and not Mary Standish--who had shown a yellow streak this night. A half shame fell upon him as he smoked. For it was clear he had not come up to her judgment of him, or else he was not so big a fool as she had hoped he might be. In his own mind, for a time, he was at a loss to decide.
It was possibly the first time he had ever deeply absorbed himself in the analysis of a woman. It was outside his business. But, born and bred of the open country, it was as natural for him to recognize courage as it was for him to breathe. And the girl's courage was unusual, now that he had time to think about it. It was this thought of her coolness and her calm refusal to impose her case upon him with greater warmth that comforted him after a little. A young and beautiful woman who was actually facing death would have urged her necessity with more enthusiasm, it seemed to him. Her threat, when he debated it intelligently, was merely thrown in, possibly on the spur of the moment, to give impetus to his decision. She had not meant it. The idea of a girl like Mary Standish committing suicide was stupendously impossible. Her quiet and wonderful eyes, her beauty and the exquisite care which she gave to herself emphasized the absurdity of such a supposition. She had come to him bravely. There was no doubt of that. She had merely exaggerated the importance of her visit.
Even after he had turned many things over in his mind to bolster up this conclusion, he was still not at ease. Against his will he recalled certain unpleasant things which had happened within his knowledge under sudden and unexpected stress of emotion. He tried to laugh the absurd stuff out of his thoughts and to the end that he might add a new color to his visionings he exchanged his half-burned cigar for a black-bowled pipe, which he filled and lighted. Then he began walking back and forth in his cabin, like a big animal in a small cage, until at last he stood with his head half out of the open port, looking at the clear stars and setting the perfume of his tobacco adrift with the soft sea wind.
He felt himself growing comforted. Reason seated itself within him again, with sentiment shuttled under his feet. If he had been a little harsh with Miss Standish tonight, he would make up for it by apologizing tomorrow. She would probably have recovered her balance by that time, and they would laugh over her excitement and their little adventure. That is, he would. "I'm not at all curious in the matter," some persistent voice kept telling him, "and I haven't any interest in knowing what irrational whim drove her to my cabin." But he smoked viciously and smiled grimly as the voice kept at him. He would have liked to obliterate Rossland from his mind. But Rossland persisted in bobbing up, and with him Mary Standish's words, "If I should make an explanation, you would hate me," or something to that effect. He couldn't remember exactly. And he didn't want to remember exactly, for it was none of his business.
In this humor, with half of his thoughts on one side of the fence and half on the other, he put out his light and went to bed. And he began thinking of the Range. That was pleasanter. For the tenth time he figured out how long it would be before the glacial-twisted ramparts of the Endicott Mountains rose up in first welcome to his home-coming. Carl Lomen, following on the next ship, would join him at Unalaska. They would go on to Nome together. After that he would spend a week or so in the Peninsula, then go up the Kobuk, across the big portage to the Koyukuk and the far headwaters of the north, and still farther--beyond the last trails of civilized men--to his herds and his people. And Stampede Smith would be with him. After a long winter of homesickness it was all a comforting inducement to sleep and pleasant dreams. But somewhere there was a wrong note in his anticipations tonight. Stampede Smith slipped away from him, and Rossland took his place. And Keok, laughing, changed into Mary Standish with tantalizing deviltry. It was like Keok, Alan thought drowsily--she was always tormenting someone.
He felt better in the morning. The sun was up, flooding the wall of his cabin, when he awoke, and under him he could feel the roll of the open sea. Eastward the Alaskan coast was a deep blue haze, but the white peaks of the St. Elias Range flung themselves high up against the sun-filled sky behind it, like snowy banners. The Nome was pounding ahead at full speed, and Alan's blood responded suddenly to the impelling thrill of her engines, beating like twin hearts with the mighty force that was speeding them on. This was business. It meant miles foaming away behind them and a swift biting off of space between him and Unalaska, midway of the Aleutians. He was sorry they were losing time by making the swing up the coast to Cordova. And with Cordova he thought of Mary Standish.
He dressed and shaved and went down to breakfast, still thinking of her. The thought of meeting her again was rather discomforting, now that the time of that possibility was actually at hand, for he dreaded moments of embarrassment even when he was not directly accountable for them. But Mary Standish saved him any qualms of conscience which he might have had because of his lack of chivalry the preceding night. She was at the table. And she was not at all disturbed when he seated himself opposite her. There was color in her cheeks, a fragile touch of that warm glow in the heart of the wild rose of the tundras. And it seemed to him there was a deeper, more beautiful light in her eyes than he had ever seen before.
She nodded, smiled at him, and resumed a conversation which she had evidently broken for a moment with a lady who sat next to her. It was the first time Alan had seen her interested in this way. He had no intention of listening, but something perverse and compelling overcame his will. He discovered the lady was going up to teach in a native school at Noorvik, on the Kobuk River, and that for many years she had taught in Dawson and knew well the story of Belinda Mulrooney. He gathered that Mary Standish had shown a great interest, for Miss Robson, the teacher, was offering to send her a photograph she possessed of Belinda Mulrooney; if Miss Standish would give her an address. The girl hesitated, then said she was not certain of her destination, but would write Miss Robson at Noorvik.
"You will surely keep your promise?" urged Miss Robson.
"Yes, I will keep my promise."
A sense of relief swept over Alan. The words were spoken so softly that he thought she had not wanted him to hear. It was evident that a few hours' sleep and the beauty of the morning had completely changed her mental attitude, and he no longer felt the suspicion of responsibility which had persisted in attaching itself to him. Only a fool, he assured himself, could possibly see a note of tragedy in her appearance now. Nor was she different at luncheon or at dinner. During the day he saw nothing of her, and he was growing conscious of the fact that she was purposely avoiding contact with him. This did not displease him. It allowed him to pick up the threads of other interests in a normal sort of way. He discussed Alaskan politics in the smoking-room, smoked his black pipe without fear of giving offense, and listened to the talk of the ship with a freedom of mind which he had not experienced since his first meeting with Miss Standish. Yet, as night drew on, and he walked his two-mile promenade about the deck, he felt gathering about him a peculiar impression of aloneness. Something was missing. He did not acknowledge to himself what it was until, as if to convict him, he saw Mary Standish come out of the door leading from her cabin passageway, and stand alone at the rail of the ship. For a moment he hesitated, then quietly he came up beside her.
"It has been a wonderful day, Miss Standish," he said, "and Cordova is only a few hours ahead of us."
She scarcely turned her face and continued to look off into the shrouding darkness of the sea. "Yes, a wonderful day, Mr. Holt," she repeated after him, "and Cordova is only a few hours ahead." Then, in the same soft, unemotional voice, she added: "I want to thank you for last night. You brought me to a great decision."
"I fear I did not help you."
It may have been fancy of the gathering dusk, that made him believe he caught a shuddering movement of her slim shoulders.
"I thought there were two ways," she said, "but you made me see there was only one." She emphasized that word. It seemed to come with a little tremble in her voice. "I was foolish. But please let us forget. I want to think of pleasanter things. I am about to make a great experiment, and it takes all my courage."
"You will win, Miss Standish," he said in a sure voice. "In whatever you undertake you will win. I know it. If this experiment you speak of is the adventure of coming to Alaska--seeking your fortune--finding your life here--it will be glorious. I can assure you of that."
She was quiet for a moment, and then said:
"The unknown has always held a fascination for me. When we were under the mountains in Skagway yesterday, I almost told you of an odd faith which I have. I believe I have lived before, a long time ago, when America was very young. At times the feeling is so strong that I must have faith in it. Possibly I am foolish. But when the mountain swung back, like a great door, and we saw Skagway, I knew that sometime--somewhere--I had seen a thing like that before. And I have had strange visions of it. Maybe it is a touch of madness in me. But it is that faith which gives me courage to go on with my experiment. That--and you!"
Suddenly she faced him, her eyes flaming.
"You--and your suspicions and your brutality," she went on, her voice trembling a little as she drew herself up straight and tense before him. "I wasn't going to tell you, Mr. Holt. But you have given me the opportunity, and it may do you good--after tomorrow. I came to you because I foolishly misjudged you. I thought you were different, like your mountains. I made a great gamble, and set you up on a pedestal as clean and unafraid and believing all things good until you found them bad--and I lost. I was terribly mistaken. Your first thoughts of me when I came to your cabin were suspicious. You were angry and afraid. Yes, afraid--fearful of something happening which you didn't want to happen. You thought, almost, that I was unclean. And you believed I was a liar, and told me so. It wasn't fair, Mr. Holt. It wasn't fair. There were things which I couldn't explain to you, but I told you Rossland knew. I didn't keep everything back. And I believed you were big enough to think that I was not dishonoring you with my--friendship, even though I came to your cabin. Oh, I had that much faith in myself--I didn't think I would be mistaken for something unclean and lying!"
"Good God!" he cried. "Listen to me--Miss Standish--"
She was gone, so suddenly that his movement to intercept her was futile, and she passed through the door before he could reach her. Again he called her name, but her footsteps were almost running up the passageway. He dropped back, his blood cold, his hands clenched in the darkness, and his face as white as the girl's had been. Her words had held him stunned and mute. He saw himself stripped naked, as she believed him to be, and the thing gripped him with a sort of horror. And she was wrong. He had followed what he believed to be good judgment and common sense. If, in doing that, he had been an accursed fool--
Determinedly he started for her cabin, his mind set upon correcting her malformed judgment of him. There was no light coming under her door. When he knocked, there was no answer from within. He waited, and tried again, listening for a sound of movement. And each moment he waited he was readjusting himself. He was half glad, in the end, that the door did not open. He believed Miss Standish was inside, and she would undoubtedly accept the reason for his coming without an apology in words.
He went to his cabin, and his mind became increasingly persistent in its disapproval of the wrong viewpoint she had taken of him. He was not comfortable, no matter how he looked at the thing. For her clear eyes, her smoothly glorious hair, and the pride and courage with which she had faced him remained with him overpoweringly. He could not get away from the vision of her as she had stood against the door with tears like diamonds on her cheeks. Somewhere he had missed fire. He knew it. Something had escaped him which he could not understand. And she was holding him accountable.
The talk of the smoking-room did not interest him tonight. His efforts to become a part of it were forced. A jazzy concert of piano and string music in the social hall annoyed him, and a little later he watched the dancing with such grimness that someone remarked about it. He saw Rossland whirling round the floor with a handsome, young blonde in his arms. The girl was looking up into his eyes, smiling, and her cheek lay unashamed against his shoulder, while Rossland's face rested against her fluffy hair when they mingled closely with the other dancers. Alan turned away, an unpleasant thought of Rossland's association with Mary Standish in his mind. He strolled down into the steerage. The Thlinkit people had shut themselves in with a curtain of blankets, and from the stillness he judged they were asleep. The evening passed slowly for him after that, until at last he went to his cabin and tried to interest himself in a book. It was something he had anticipated reading, but after a little he wondered if the writing was stupid, or if it was himself. The thrill he had always experienced with this particular writer was missing. There was no inspiration. The words were dead. Even the tobacco in his pipe seemed to lack something, and he changed it for a cigar--and chose another book. The result was the same. His mind refused to function, and there was no comfort in his cigar.
He knew he was fighting against a new thing, even as he subconsciously lied to himself. And he was obstinately determined to win. It was a fight between himself and Mary Standish as she had stood against his door. Mary Standish--the slim beauty of her--her courage--a score of things that had never touched his life before. He undressed and put on his smoking-gown and slippers, repudiating the honesty of the emotions that were struggling for acknowledgment within him. He was a bit mad and entirely a fool, he told himself. But the assurance did him no good.
He went to bed, propped himself up against his pillows, and made another effort to read. He half-heartedly succeeded. At ten o'clock music and dancing ceased, and stillness fell over the ship. After that he found himself becoming more interested in the first book he had started to read. His old satisfaction slowly returned to him. He relighted his cigar and enjoyed it. Distantly he heard the ship's bells, eleven o'clock, and after that the half-hour and midnight. The printed pages were growing dim, and drowsily he marked his book, placed it on the table, and yawned. They must be nearing Cordova. He could feel the slackened speed of the Nome and the softer throb of her engines. Probably they had passed Cape St. Elias and were drawing inshore.
And then, sudden and thrilling, came a woman's scream. A piercing cry of terror, of agony--and of something else that froze the blood in his veins as he sprang from his berth. Twice it came, the second time ending in a moaning wail and a man's husky shout. Feet ran swiftly past his window. He heard another shout and then a voice of command. He could not distinguish the words, but the ship herself seemed to respond. There came the sudden smoothness of dead engines, followed by the pounding shock of reverse and the clanging alarm of a bell calling boats' crews to quarters.
Alan faced his cabin door. He knew what had happened. Someone was overboard. And in this moment all life and strength were gone out of his body, for the pale face of Mary Standish seemed to rise for an instant before him, and in her quiet voice she was telling him again that this was the other way. His face went white as he caught up his smoking-gown, flung open his door, and ran down the dimly lighted corridor.
This first night and dawn in the heard of his wilderness, with the new import of life gleaming down at him from the mighty peaks of the Chugach and Kenai ranges, marked the beginning of that uplift which drew Alan out of the pit into which he had fallen. He understood, now, how it was that through many long years his father had worshiped the memory of a woman who had died, it seemed to him, an infinity ago. Unnumbered times he had seen the miracle of her presence in his father's eyes, and once, when they had stood overlooking a sun-filled valley back in the mountains, the elder Holt had said:
"Twenty-seven years ago the twelfth day of last month, mother went with me through this valley, Alan. Do you see the little bend in the creek, with the great rock in the sun? We rested there--before you were born!"
He had spoken of that day as if it had been but yesterday. And Alan recalled the strange happiness in his father's face as he had looked down upon something in the valley which no other but himself could see.
And it was happiness, the same strange, soul-aching happiness, that began to build itself a house close up against the grief in Alan's heart. It would never be a house quite empty. Never again would he be alone. He knew at last it was an undying part of him, as it had been a part of his father, clinging to him in sweet pain, encouraging him, pressing gently upon him the beginning of a great faith that somewhere beyond was a place to meet again. In the many days that followed, it grew in him, but in a way no man or woman could see. It was a secret about which he built a wall, setting it apart from that stoical placidity of his nature which some people called indifference. Olaf could see farther than others, because he had known Alan's father as a brother. It had always been that way with the elder Holt--straight, clean, deep-breathing, and with a smile on his lips in times of hurt. Olaf had seen him face death like that. He had seen him rise up with awesome courage from the beautiful form that had turned to clay under his eyes, and fight forth again into a world burned to ashes. Something of that look which he had seen in the eyes of the father he saw in Alan's, in these days when they nosed their way up the Alaskan coast together. Only to himself did Alan speak the name of Mary Standish, just as his father had kept Elizabeth Holt's name sacred in his own heart. Olaf, with mildly casual eyes and strong in the possession of memories, observed how much alike they were, but discretion held his tongue, and he said nothing to Alan of many things that ran in his mind.
He talked of Siberia--always of Siberia, and did not hurry on the way to Seward. Alan himself felt no great urge to make haste. The days were soft with the premature breath of summer. The nights were cold, and filled with stars. Day after day mountains hung about them like mighty castles whose battlements reached up into the cloud-draperies of the sky. They kept close to the mainland and among the islands, camping early each evening. Birds were coming northward by the thousand, and each night Olaf's camp-fire sent up the delicious aroma of flesh-pots and roasts. When at last they reached Seward, and the time came for Olaf to turn back, there was an odd blinking in the old Swede's eyes, and as a final comfort Alan told him again that the day would probably come when he would go to Siberia with him. After that, he watched the Norden until the little boat was lost in the distance of the sea.
Alone, Alan felt once more a greater desire to reach his own country. And he was fortunate. Two days after his arrival at Seward the steamer which carried mail and the necessities of life to the string of settlements reaching a thousand miles out into the Pacific left Resurrection Bay, and he was given passage. Thereafter the countless islands of the North Pacific drifted behind, while always northward were the gray cliffs of the Alaskan Peninsula, with the ramparted ranges beyond, glistening with glaciers, smoking with occasional volcanoes, and at times so high their snowy peaks were lost in the clouds. First touching the hatchery at Karluk and then the canneries at Uyak and Chignik, the mail boat visited the settlements on the Island of Unga, and thence covered swiftly the three hundred miles to Dutch Harbor and Unalaska. Again he was fortunate. Within a week he was berthed on a freighter, and on the twelfth day of June set foot in Nome.
His home-coming was unheralded, but the little, gray town, with its peculiar, black shadowings, its sea of stove-pipes, and its two solitary brick chimneys, brought a lump of joy into his throat as he watched its growing outlines from the small boat that brought him ashore. He could see one of the only two brick chimneys in northern Alaska gleaming in the sun; beyond it, fifty miles away, were the ragged peaks of the Saw-Tooth Range, looking as if one might walk to them in half an hour, and over all the world between seemed to hover a misty gloom. But it was where he had lived, where happiness and tragedy and unforgetable memories had come to him, and the welcoming of its frame buildings, its crooked streets, and what to others might have been ugliness, was a warm and thrilling thing. For here were his people. Here were the men and women who were guarding the northern door of the world, an epic place, filled with strong hearts, courage, and a love of country as inextinguishable as one's love of life. From this drab little place, shut out from all the world for half the year, young men and women went down to southern universities, to big cities, to the glamor and lure of "outside." But they always came back. Nome called them. Its loneliness in winter. Its gray gloom in springtime. Its glory in summer and autumn. It was the breeding-place of a new race of men, and they loved it as Alan loved it. To him the black wireless tower meant more than the Statue of Liberty, the three weather-beaten church spires more than the architectural colossi of New York and Washington. Beside one of the churches he had played as a boy. He had seen the steeples painted. He had helped make the crooked streets. And his mother had laughed and lived and died here, and his father's footprints had been in the white sands of the beach when tents dotted the shore like gulls.
When he stepped ashore, people stared at him and then greeted him. He was unexpected. And the surprise of his arrival added strength to the grip which men's hands gave him. He had not heard voices like theirs down in the States, with a gladness in them that was almost excitement. Small boys ran up to his side, and with white men came the Eskimo, grinning and shaking his hands. Word traveled swiftly that Alan Holt had come back from the States. Before the day was over, it was on its way to Shelton and Candle and Keewalik and Kotzebue Sound. Such was the beginning of his home-coming. But ahead of the news of his arrival Alan walked up Front Street, stopped at Bahlke's restaurant for a cup of coffee, and then dropped casually into Lomen's offices in the Tin Bank Building.
For a week Alan remained in Nome. Carl Lomen had arrived a few days before, and his brothers were "in" from the big ranges over on the Choris Peninsula. It had been a good winter and promised to be a tremendously successful summer. The Lomen herds would exceed forty thousand head, when the final figures were in. A hundred other herds were prospering, and the Eskimo and Lapps were full-cheeked and plump with good feeding and prosperity. A third of a million reindeer were on the hoof in Alaska, and the breeders were exultant. Pretty good, when compared with the fact that in 1902 there were less than five thousand! In another twenty years there would be ten million.