The sun was already up almost to its highest point, a little more than half-way between the horizon and the zenith, performing the apparent miracle of rising in the north and traveling east instead of west. Alan knew the men-folk of the village had departed hours ago for the distant herds. Always, when the reindeer drifted into the higher and cooler feeding-grounds of the foothills, there was this apparent abandonment, and after last night's celebration the women and children were not yet awake to the activities of the long day, where the rising and setting of the sun meant so little.

As he rose from the table, he glanced again toward Sokwenna's cabin. A solitary figure had climbed up out of the ravine and stood against the sun on the clough-top. Even at that distance, with the sun in his eyes, he knew it was Mary Standish.

He turned his back stoically to the window and lighted his pipe. For half an hour after that he sorted out his papers and range-books in preparation for the coming of Tautuk and Amuk Toolik, and when they arrived, the minute hand of his watch was at the hour of eight.

That the months of his absence had been prosperous ones he perceived by the smiling eagerness in the brown faces of his companions as they spread out the papers on which they had, in their own crude fashion, set down a record of the winter's happenings. Tautuk's voice, slow and very deliberate in its unfailing effort to master English without a slip, had in it a subdued note of satisfaction and triumph, while Amuk Toolik, who was quick and staccato in his manner of speech, using sentences seldom of greater length than three or four words, and who picked up slang and swear-words like a parrot, swelled with pride as he lighted his pipe, and then rubbed his hands with a rasping sound that always sent a chill up Alan's back.

"A ver' fine and prosper' year," said Tautuk in response to Alan's first question as to general conditions. "We bean ver' fortunate."

"One hell-good year," backed up Amuk Toolik with the quickness of a gun. "Plenty calf. Good hoof. Moss. Little wolf. Herds fat. This year—she peach!"

After this opening of the matter in hand Alan buried himself in the affairs of the range, and the old thrill, the glow which comes through achievement, and the pioneer's pride in marking a new frontier with the creative forces of success rose uppermost in him, and he forgot the passing of time. A hundred questions he had to ask, and the tongues of Tautuk and Amuk Toolik were crowded with the things they desired to tell him. Their voices filled the room with a paean of triumph. His herds had increased by a thousand head during the fawning months of April and May, and interbreeding of the Asiatic stock with wild, woodland caribou had produced a hundred calves of the super-animal whose flesh was bound to fill the markets of the States within a few years. Never had the moss been thicker under the winter snow; there had been no destructive fires; soft-hoof had escaped them; breeding records had been beaten, and dairying in the edge of the Arctic was no longer an experiment, but an established fact, for Tautuk now had seven deer giving a pint and a half of milk each twice a day, nearly as rich as the best of cream from cattle, and more than twenty that were delivering from a cupful to a pint at a milking. And to this Amuk Toolik added the amazing record of their running-deer, Kauk, the three-year-old, had drawn a sledge five miles over unbeaten snow in thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds; Kauk and Olo, in team, had drawn the same sledge ten miles in twenty-six minutes and forty seconds, and one day he had driven the two ninety-eight miles in a mighty endurance test; and with Eno and Sutka, the first of their inter-breed with the wild woodland caribou, and heavier beasts, he had drawn a load of eight hundred pounds for three consecutive days at the rate of forty miles a day. From Fairbanks, Tanana, and the ranges of the Seward Peninsula agents of the swiftly spreading industry had offered as high as a hundred and ten dollars a head for breeding stock with the blood of the woodland caribou, and of these native and larger caribou of the tundras and forests seven young bulls and nine female calves had been captured and added to their own propagative forces.

For Alan this was triumph. He saw nothing of what it all meant in the way of ultimate personal fortune. It was the earth under his feet, the vast expanse of unpeopled waste traduced and scorned in the blindness of a hundred million people, which he saw fighting itself on the glory and reward of the conqueror through such achievement as this; a land betrayed rising at last out of the slime of political greed and ignorance; a giant irresistible in its awakening, that was destined in his lifetime to rock the destiny of a continent. It was Alaska rising up slowly but inexorably out of its eternity of sleep, mountain-sealed forces of a great land that was once the cradle of the earth coming into possession of life and power again; and his own feeble efforts in that long and fighting process of planting the seeds which meant its ultimate ascendancy possessed in themselves their own reward.

Long after Tautuk and Amuk Toolik had gone, his heart was filled with the song of success.

He was surprised at the swiftness with which time had gone, when he looked at his watch. It was almost dinner hour when he had finished with his papers and books and went outside. He heard Wegaruk's voice coming from the dark mouth of the underground icebox dug into the frozen subsoil of the tundra, and pausing at the glimmer of his old housekeeper's candle, he turned aside, descended the few steps, and entered quietly into the big, square chamber eight feet under the surface, where the earth had remained steadfastly frozen for some hundreds of thousands of years. Wegaruk had a habit of talking when alone, but Alan thought it odd that she should be explaining to herself that the tundra-soil, in spite of its almost tropical summer richness and luxuriance, never thawed deeper than three or four feet, below which point remained the icy cold placed there so long ago that "even the spirits did not know." He smiled when he heard Wegaruk measuring time and faith in terms of "spirits," which she had never quite given up for the missionaries, and was about to make his presence known when a voice interrupted him, so close at his side that the speaker, concealed in the shadow of the wall, could have reached out a hand and touched him.

"Good morning, Mr. Holt!"

It was Mary Standish, and he stared rather foolishly to make her out in the gloom.

"Good morning," he replied. "I was on my way to your place when Wegaruk's voice brought me here. You see, even this icebox seems like a friend after my experience in the States. Are you after a steak, Mammy?" he called.

Wegaruk's strong, squat figure turned as she answered him, and the light from her candle, glowing brightly in a split tomato can, fell clearly upon Mary Standish as the old woman waddled toward them. It was as if a spotlight had been thrown upon the girl suddenly out of a pit of darkness, and something about her, which was not her prettiness or the beauty that was in her eyes and hair, sent a sudden and unaccountable thrill through Alan. It remained with him when they drew back out of gloom and chill into sunshine and warmth, leaving Wegaruk to snuff her tomato-can lantern and follow with the steak, and it did not leave him when they walked over the tundra together toward Sokwenna's cabin. It was a puzzling thrill, stirring an emotion which it was impossible for him to subdue or explain; something which he knew he should understand but could not. And it seemed to him that knowledge of this mystery was in the girl's face, glowing in a gentle embarrassment, as she told him she had been expecting him, and that Keok and Nawadlook had given up the cabin to them, so that he might question her uninterrupted. But with this soft flush of her uneasiness, revealing itself in her eyes and cheeks, he saw neither fear nor hesitation.

In the "big room" of Sokwenna's cabin, which was patterned after his own, he sat down amid the color and delicate fragrance of masses of flowers, and the girl seated herself near him and waited for him to speak.

"You love flowers," he said lamely. "I want to thank you for the flowers you placed in my cabin. And the other things."

"Flowers are a habit with me," she replied, "and I have never seen such flowers as these. Flowers—and birds. I never dreamed that there were so many up here."

"Nor the world," he added. "It is ignorant of Alaska."

He was looking at her, trying to understand the inexplicable something about her. She knew what was in his mind, because the strangely thrilling emotion that possessed him could not keep its betrayal from his eyes. The color was fading slowly out of her cheeks; her lips grew a little tense, yet in her attitude of suspense and of waiting there was no longer a suspicion of embarrassment, no trace of fear, and no sign that a moment was at hand when her confidence was on the ebb. In this moment Alan did not think of John Graham. It seemed to him that she was like a child again, the child who had come to him in his cabin, and who had stood with her back against his cabin door, entreating him to achieve the impossible; an angel, almost, with her smooth, shining hair, her clear, beautiful eyes, her white throat which waited with its little heart-throb for him to beat down the fragile defense which now lay in the greater power of his own hands. The inequality of it, and the pitilessness of what had been in his mind to say and do, together with an inundating sense of his own brute mastery, swept over him, and in sudden desperation he reached out his hands toward her and cried:

"Mary Standish, in God's name tell me the truth. Tell me why you have come up here!"

"I have come," she said, looking at him steadily, "because I know that a man like you, when he loves a woman, will fight for her and protect her even though he may not possess her."

"But you didn't know that—not until—the cottonwoods!" he protested.

"Yes, I did. I knew it in Ellen McCormick's cabin."

She rose slowly before him, and he, too, rose to his feet, staring at her like a man who had been struck, while intelligence—a dawning reason—an understanding of the strange mystery of her that morning, sent the still greater thrill of its shock through him. He gave an exclamation of amazement.

"You were at Ellen McCormick's! She gave you—that!"

She nodded. "Yes, the dress you brought from the ship. Please don't scold me, Mr. Holt. Be a little kind with me when you have heard what I am going to tell you. I was in the cabin that last day, when you returned from searching for me in the sea. Mr. McCormick didn't know. But she did. I lied a little, just a little, so that she, being a woman, would promise not to tell you I was there. You see, I had lost a great deal of my faith, and my courage was about gone, and I was afraid of you."

"Afraid of me?"

"Yes, afraid of everybody. I was in the room behind Ellen McCormick when she asked you—that question; and when you answered as you did, I was like stone. I was amazed and didn't believe, for I was certain that after what had happened on the ship you despised me, and only through a peculiar sense of honor were making the search for me. Not until two days later, when your letters came to Ellen McCormick, and we read them—"

"You opened both?"

"Of course. One was to be read immediately, the other when I was found—and I had found myself. Maybe it wasn't exactly fair, but you couldn't expect two women to resist a temptation like that. And—I wanted to know."

She did not lower her eyes or turn her head aside as she made the confession. Her gaze met Alan's with beautiful steadiness.

"And then I believed. I knew, because of what you said in that letter, that you were the one man in all the world who would help me and give me a fighting chance if I came to you. But it has taken all my courage—and in the end you will drive me away—"

Again he looked upon the miracle of tears in wide-open, unfaltering eyes, tears which she did not brush away, but through which, in a moment, she smiled at him as no woman had ever smiled at him before. And with the tears there seemed to possess her a pride which lifted her above all confusion, a living spirit of will and courage and womanhood that broke away the dark clouds of suspicion and fear that had gathered in his mind. He tried to speak, and his lips were thick.

"You have come—because you know I love you, and you—"

"Because, from the beginning, it must have been a great faith in you that inspired me, Alan Holt."

"There must have been more than that," he persisted. "Some other reason."

"Two," she acknowledged, and now he noticed that with the dissolution of tears a flush of color was returning into her cheeks.

"And those—"

"One it is impossible for you to know; the other, if I tell you, will make you despise me. I am sure of that."

"It has to do with John Graham?"

She bowed her head. "Yes, with John Graham."

For the first time long lashes hid her eyes from him, and for a moment it seemed that her resolution was gone and she stood stricken by the import of the thing that lay behind his question; yet her cheeks flamed red instead of paling, and when she looked at him again, her eyes burned with a lustrous fire.

"John Graham," she repeated. "The man you hate and want to kill."

Slowly he turned toward the door. "I am leaving immediately after dinner to inspect the herds up in the foothills," he said. "And you—are welcome here."

He caught the swift intake of her breath as he paused for an instant at the door, and saw the new light that leaped into her eyes.

"Thank you, Alan Holt," she cried softly, "Oh, I thank you!!"

And then, suddenly, she stopped him with a little cry, as if at last something had broken away from her control. He faced her, and for a moment they stood in silence.

"I'm sorry—sorry I said to you what I did that night on the Nome," she said. "I accused you of brutality, of unfairness, of—of even worse than that, and I want to take it all back. You are big and clean and splendid, for you would go away now, knowing I am poisoned by an association with the man who has injured you so terribly, and you say I am welcome! And I don't want you to go. You have made me want to tell you who I am, and why I have come to you, and I pray God you will think as kindly of me as you can when you have heard."



CHAPTER XVIII

It seemed to Alan that in an instant a sudden change had come over the world. There was silence in the cabin, except for the breath which came like a sob to the girl's lips as she turned to the window and looked out into the blaze of golden sunlight that filled the tundra. He heard Tautuk's voice, calling to Keok away over near the reindeer corral, and he heard clearly Keok's merry laughter as she answered him. A gray-cheeked thrush flew up to the roof of Sokwenna's cabin and began to sing. It was as if these things had come as a message to both of them, relieving a tension, and significant of the beauty and glory and undying hope of life. Mary Standish turned from the window with shining eyes.

"Every day the thrush comes and sings on our cabin roof," she said.

"It is—possibly—because you are here," he replied.

She regarded him seriously. "I have thought of that. You know, I have faith in a great many unbelievable things. I can think of nothing more beautiful than the spirit that lives in the heart of a bird. I am sure, if I were dying, I would like to have a bird singing near me. Hopelessness cannot be so deep that bird-song will not reach it."

He nodded, trying to answer in that way. He felt uncomfortable. She closed the door which he had left partly open, and made a little gesture for him to resume the chair which he had left a few moments before. She seated herself first and smiled at him wistfully, half regretfully, as she said:

"I have been very foolish. What I am going to tell you now I should have told you aboard the Nome. But I was afraid. Now I am not afraid, but ashamed, terribly ashamed, to let you know the truth. And yet I am not sorry it happened so, because otherwise I would not have come up here, and all this—your world, your people, and you—have meant a great deal to me. You will understand when I have made my confession."

"No, I don't want that," he protested almost roughly. "I don't want you to put it that way. If I can help you, and if you wish to tell me as a friend, that's different. I don't want a confession, which would imply that I have no faith in you."

"And you have faith in me?"

"Yes; so much that the sun will darken and bird-song never seem the same if I lose you again, as I thought I had lost you from the ship."

"Oh, you mean that!"

The words came from her in a strange, tense, little cry, and he seemed to see only her eyes as he looked at her face, pale as the petals of the tundra daises behind her. With the thrill of what he had dared to say tugging at his heart, he wondered why she was so white.

"You mean that," her lips repeated slowly, "after all that has happened—even after—that part of a letter—which Stampede brought to you last night—"

He was surprised. How had she discovered what he thought was a secret between himself and Stampede? His mind leaped to a conclusion, and she saw it written in his face.

"No, it wasn't Stampede," she said. "He didn't tell me. It—just happened. And after this letter—you still believe in me?"

"I must. I should be unhappy if I did not. And I am—most perversely hoping for happiness. I have told myself that what I saw over John Graham's signature was a lie."

"It wasn't that—quite. But it didn't refer to you, or to me. It was part of a letter written to Rossland. He sent me some books while I was on the ship, and inadvertently left a page of this letter in one of them as a marker. It was really quite unimportant, when one read the whole of it. The other half of the page is in the toe of the slipper which you did not return to Ellen McCormick. You know that is the conventional thing for a woman to do—to use paper for padding in a soft-toed slipper."

He wanted to shout; he wanted to throw up his arms and laugh as Tautuk and Amuk Toolik and a score of others had laughed to the beat of the tom-toms last night, not because he was amused, but out of sheer happiness. But Mary Standish's voice, continuing in its quiet and matter-of-fact way, held him speechless, though she could not fail to see the effect upon him of this simple explanation of the presence of Graham's letter.

"I was in Nawadlook's room when I saw Stampede pick up the wad of paper from the floor," she was saying. "I was looking at the slipper a few minutes before, regretting that you had left its mate in my cabin on the ship, and the paper must have dropped then. I saw Stampede read it, and the shock that came in his face. Then he placed it on the table and went out. I hurried to see what he had found and had scarcely read the few words when I heard him returning. I returned the paper where he had laid it, hid myself in Nawadlook's room, and saw Stampede when he carried it to you. I don't know why I allowed it to be done. I had no reason. Maybe it was just—intuition, and maybe it was because—just in that hour—I so hated myself that I wanted someone to flay me alive, and I thought that what Stampede had found would make you do it. And I deserve it! I deserve nothing better at your hands."

"But it isn't true," he protested. "The letter was to Rossland."

There was no responsive gladness in her eyes. "Better that it were true, and all that is true were false," she said in a quiet, hopeless voice. "I would almost give my life to be no more than what those words implied, dishonest, a spy, a criminal of a sort; almost any alternative would I accept in place of what I actually am. Do you begin to understand?"

"I am afraid—I can not." Even as he persisted in denial, the pain which had grown like velvety dew in her eyes clutched at his heart, and he felt dread of what lay behind it. "I understand—only—that I am glad you are here, more glad than yesterday, or this morning, or an hour ago."

She bowed her head, so that the bright light of day made a radiance of rich color in her hair, and he saw the sudden tremble of the shining lashes that lay against her cheeks; and then, quickly, she caught her breath, and her hands grew steady in her lap.

"Would you mind—if I asked you first—to tell me your story of John Graham?" she spoke softly. "I know it, a little, but I think it would make everything easier if I could hear it from you—now."

He stood up and looked down upon her where she sat, with the light playing in her hair; and then he moved to the window, and back, and she had not changed her position, but was waiting for him to speak. She raised her eyes, and the question her lips had formed was glowing in them as clearly as if she had voiced it again in words. A desire rose in him to speak to her as he had never spoken to another human being, and to reveal for her—and for her alone—the thing that had harbored itself in his soul for many years. Looking up at him, waiting, partial understanding softening her sweet face, a dusky glow in her eyes, she was so beautiful that he cried out softly and then laughed in a strange repressed sort of way as he half held out his arms toward her.

"I think I know how my father must have loved my mother," he said. "But I can't make you feel it. I can't hope for that. She died when I was so young that she remained only as a beautiful dream for me. But for my father she never died, and as I grew older she became more and more alive for me, so that in our journeys we would talk about her as if she were waiting for us back home and would welcome us when we returned. And never could my father remain away from the place where she was buried very long at a time. He called it home, that little cup at the foot of the mountain, with the waterfall singing in summer, and a paradise of birds and flowers keeping her company, and all the great, wild world she loved about her. There was the cabin, too; the little cabin where I was born, with its back to the big mountain, and filled with the handiwork of my mother as she had left it when she died. And my father too used to laugh and sing there—he had a clear voice that would roll half-way up the mountain; and as I grew older the miracle at times stirred me with a strange fear, so real to my father did my dead mother seem when he was home. But you look frightened, Miss Standish! Oh, it may seem weird and ghostly now, but it was true—so true that I have lain awake nights thinking of it and wishing that it had never been so!"

"Then you have wished a great sin," said the girl in a voice that seemed scarcely to whisper between her parted lips. "I hope someone will feel toward me—some day—like that."

"But it was this which brought the tragedy, the thing you have asked me to tell you about," he said, unclenching his hands slowly, and then tightening them again until the blood ebbed from their veins. "Interests were coming in; the tentacles of power and greed were reaching out, encroaching steadily a little nearer to our cup at the foot of the mountain. But my father did not dream of what might happen. It came in the spring of the year he took me on my first trip to the States, when I was eighteen. We were gone five months, and they were five months of hell for him. Day and night he grieved for my mother and the little home under the mountain. And when at last we came back—"

He turned again to the window, but he did not see the golden sun of the tundra or hear Tautuk calling from the corral.

"When we came back," he repeated in a cold, hard voice, "a construction camp of a hundred men had invaded my father's little paradise. The cabin was gone; a channel had been cut from the waterfall, and this channel ran where my mother's grave had been. They had treated it with that same desecration with which they have destroyed ten thousand Indian graves since then. Her bones were scattered in the sand and mud. And from the moment my father saw what had happened, never another sun rose in the heavens for him. His heart died, yet he went on living—for a time."

Mary Standish had bowed her face in her hands. He saw the tremor of her slim shoulders; and when he came back, and she looked up at him, it was as if he beheld the pallid beauty of one of the white tundra flowers.

"And the man who committed that crime—was John Graham," she said, in the strangely passionless voice of one who knew what his answer would be.

"Yes, John Graham. He was there, representing big interests in the States. The foreman had objected to what happened; many of the men had protested; a few of them, who knew my father, had thrown up their work rather than be partners to that crime. But Graham had the legal power; they say he laughed as if he thought it a great joke that a cabin and a grave should be considered obstacles in his way. And he laughed when my father and I went to see him; yes, laughed, in that noiseless, oily, inside way of his, as you might think of a snake laughing.

"We found him among the men. My God, you don't know how I hated him!—Big, loose, powerful, dangling the watch-fob that hung over his vest, and looking at my father in that way as he told him what a fool he was to think a worthless grave should interfere with his work. I wanted to kill him, but my father put a hand on my shoulder, a quiet, steady hand, and said: 'It is my duty, Alan. My duty.'

"And then—it happened. My father was older, much older than Graham, but God put such strength in him that day as I had never seen before, and with his naked hands he would have killed the brute if I had not unlocked them with my own. Before all his men Graham became a mass of helpless pulp, and from the ground, with the last of the breath that was in him, he cursed my father, and he cursed me. He said that all the days of his life he would follow us, until we paid a thousand times for what we had done. And then my father dragged him as he would have dragged a rat to the edge of a piece of bush, and there he tore his clothes from him until the brute was naked; and in that nakedness he scourged him with whips until his arms were weak, and John Graham was unconscious and like a great hulk of raw beef. When it was over, we went into the mountains."

During the terrible recital Mary Standish had not looked away from him, and now her hands were clenched like his own, and her eyes and face were aflame, as if she wanted to leap up and strike at something unseen between them.

"And after that, Alan; after that—"

She did not know that she had spoken his name, and he, hearing it, scarcely understood.

"John Graham kept his promise," he answered grimly. "The influence and money behind him haunted us wherever we went. My father had been successful, but one after another the properties in which he was interested were made worthless. A successful mine in which he was most heavily interested was allowed to become abandoned. A hotel which he partly owned in Dawson was bankrupted. One after another things happened, and after each happening my father would receive a polite note of regret from Graham, written as if the word actually came from a friend. But my father cared little for money losses now. His heart was drying up and his life ebbing away for the little cabin and the grave that were gone from the foot of the mountain. It went on this way for three years, and then, one morning, my father was found on the beach at Nome, dead."

"Dead!"

Alan heard only the gasping breath in which the word came from Mary Standish, for he was facing the window, looking steadily away from her.

"Yes—murdered. I know it was the work of John Graham. He didn't do it personally, but it was his money that accomplished the end. Of course nothing ever came of it. I won't tell you how his influence and power have dogged me; how they destroyed the first herd of reindeer I had, and how they filled the newspapers with laughter and lies about me when I was down in the States last winter in an effort to make your people see a little something of the truth about Alaska. I am waiting. I know the day is coming when I shall have John Graham as my father had him under our mountain twenty years ago. He must be fifty now. But that won't save him when the time comes. No one will loosen my hands as I loosened my father's. And all Alaska will rejoice, for his power and his money have become twin monsters that are destroying Alaska just as he destroyed the life of my father. Unless he dies, and his money-power ends, he will make of this great land nothing more than a shell out of which he and his kind have taken all the meat. And the hour of deadliest danger is now upon us."

He looked at Mary Standish, and it was as if death had come to her where she sat. She seemed not to breathe, and her face was so white it frightened him. And then, slowly, she turned her eyes upon him, and never had he seen such living pools of torture and of horror. He was amazed at the quietness of her voice when she began to speak, and startled by the almost deadly coldness of it.

"I think you can understand—now—why I leaped into the sea, why I wanted the world to think I was dead, and why I have feared to tell you the truth," she said. "I am John Graham's wife."



CHAPTER XIX

Alan's first thought was of the monstrous incongruity of the thing, the almost physical impossibility of a mesalliance of the sort Mary Standish had revealed to him. He saw her, young and beautiful, with face and eyes that from the beginning had made him feel all that was good and sweet in life, and behind her he saw the shadow-hulk of John Graham, the pitiless iron-man, without conscience and without soul, coarsened by power, fiendish in his iniquities, and old enough to be her father!

A slow smile twisted his lips, but he did not know he smiled. He pulled himself together without letting her see the physical part of the effort it was taking. And he tried to find something to say that would help clear her eyes of the agony that was in them.

"That—is a most unreasonable thing—to be true," he said.

It seemed to him his lips were making words out of wood, and that the words were fatuously inefficient compared with what he should have said, or acted, under the circumstances.

She nodded. "It is. But the world doesn't look at it in that way. Such things just happen."

She reached for a book which lay on the table where the tundra daisies were heaped. It was a book written around the early phases of pioneer life in Alaska, taken from his own library, a volume of statistical worth, dryly but carefully written—and she had been reading it. It struck him as a symbol of the fight she was making, of her courage, and of her desire to triumph in the face of tremendous odds that must have beset her. He still could not associate her completely with John Graham. Yet his face was cold and white.

Her hand trembled a little as she opened the book and took from it a newspaper clipping. She did not speak as she unfolded it and gave it to him.

At the top of two printed columns was the picture of a young and beautiful girl; in an oval, covering a small space over the girl's shoulder, was a picture of a man of fifty or so. Both were strangers to him. He read their names, and then the headlines. "A Hundred-Million-Dollar Love" was the caption, and after the word love was a dollar sign. Youth and age, beauty and the other thing, two great fortunes united. He caught the idea and looked at Mary Standish. It was impossible for him to think of her as Mary Graham.

"I tore that from a paper in Cordova," she said. "They have nothing to do with me. The girl lives in Texas. But don't you see something in her eyes? Can't you see it, even in the picture? She has on her wedding things. But it seemed to me—when I saw her face—that in her eyes were agony and despair and hopelessness, and that she was bravely trying to hide them from the world. It's just another proof, one of thousands, that such unreasonable things do happen."

He was beginning to feel a dull and painless sort of calm, the stoicism which came to possess him whenever he was confronted by the inevitable. He sat down, and with his head bowed over it took one of the limp, little hands that lay in Mary Standish's lap. The warmth had gone out of it. It was cold and lifeless. He caressed it gently and held it between his brown, muscular hands, staring at it, and yet seeing nothing in particular. It was only the ticking of Keok's clock that broke the silence for a time. Then he released the hand, and it dropped in the girl's lap again. She had been looking steadily at the streak of gray in his hair. And a light came into her eyes, a light which he did not see, and a little tremble of her lips, and an almost imperceptible inclination of her head toward him.

"I'm sorry I didn't know," he said. "I realize now how you must have felt back there in the cottonwoods."

"No, you don't realize—you don't!" she protested.

In an instant, it seemed to him, a vibrant, flaming life swept over her again. It was as if his words had touched fire to some secret thing, as if he had unlocked a door which grim hopelessness had closed. He was amazed at the swiftness with which color came into her cheeks.

"You don't understand, and I am determined that you shall," she went on. "I would die before I let you go away thinking what is now in your mind. You will despise me, but I would rather be hated for the truth than because of the horrible thing which you must believe if I remain silent." She forced a wan smile to her lips. "You know, Belinda Mulrooneys were very well in their day, but they don't fit in now, do they? If a woman makes a mistake and tries to remedy it in a fighting sort of way, as Belinda Mulrooney might have done back in the days when Alaska was young—"

She finished with a little gesture of despair.

"I have committed a great folly," she said, hesitating an instant in his silence. "I see very clearly now the course I should have taken. You will advise me that it is still not too late when you have heard what I am going to say. Your face is like—a rock."

"It is because your tragedy is mine," he said.

She turned her eyes from him. The color in her cheeks deepened. It was a vivid, feverish glow. "I was born rich, enormously, hatefully rich," she said in the low, unimpassioned voice of a confessional. "I don't remember father or mother. I lived always with my Grandfather Standish and my Uncle Peter Standish. Until I was thirteen I had my Uncle Peter, who was grandfather's brother, and lived with us. I worshiped Uncle Peter. He was a cripple. From young manhood he had lived in a wheel-chair, and he was nearly seventy-five when he died. As a baby that wheel-chair, and my rides in it with him about the great house in which we lived, were my delights. He was my father and mother, everything that was good and sweet in life. I remember thinking, as a child, that if God was as good as Uncle Peter, He was a wonderful God. It was Uncle Peter who told me, year after year, the old stories and legends of the Standishes. And he was always happy—always happy and glad and seeing nothing but sunshine though he hadn't stood on his feet for nearly sixty years. And my Uncle Peter died when I was thirteen, five days before my birthday came. I think he must have been to me what your father was to you."

He nodded. There was something that was not the hardness of rock in his face now, and John Graham seemed to have faded away.

"I was left, then, alone with my Grandfather Standish," she went on. "He didn't love me as my Uncle Peter loved me, and I don't think I loved him. But I was proud of him. I thought the whole world must have stood in awe of him, as I did. As I grew older I learned the world was afraid of him—bankers, presidents, even the strongest men in great financial interests; afraid of him, and of his partners, the Grahams, and of Sharpleigh, who my Uncle Peter had told me was the cleverest lawyer in the nation, and who had grown up in the business of the two families. My grandfather was sixty-eight when Uncle Peter died, so it was John Graham who was the actual working force behind the combined fortunes of the two families. Sometimes, as I now recall it, Uncle Peter was like a little child. I remember how he tried to make me understand just how big my grandfather's interests were by telling me that if two dollars were taken from every man, woman, and child in the United States, it would just about add up to what he and the Grahams possessed, and my Grandfather Standish's interests were three-quarters of the whole. I remember how a hunted look would come into my Uncle Peter's face at times when I asked him how all this money was used, and where it was. And he never answered me as I wanted to be answered, and I never understood. I didn't know why people feared my grandfather and John Graham. I didn't know of the stupendous power my grandfather's money had rolled up for them. I didn't know"—her voice sank to a shuddering whisper—"I didn't know how they were using it in Alaska, for instance. I didn't know it was feeding upon starvation and ruin and death. I don't think even Uncle Peter knew that."

She looked at Alan steadily, and her gray eyes seemed burning up with a slow fire.

"Why, even then, before Uncle Peter died, I had become one of the biggest factors in all their schemes. It was impossible for me to suspect that John Graham was anticipating a little girl of thirteen, and I didn't guess that my Grandfather Standish, so straight, so grandly white of beard and hair, so like a god of power when he stood among men, was even then planning that I should be given to him, so that a monumental combination of wealth might increase itself still more in that juggernaut of financial achievement for which he lived. And to bring about my sacrifice, to make sure it would not fail, they set Sharpleigh to the task, because Sharpleigh was sweet and good of face, and gentle like Uncle Peter, so that I loved him and had confidence in him, without a suspicion that under his white hair lay a brain which matched in cunning and mercilessness that of John Graham himself. And he did his work well, Alan."

A second time she had spoken his name, softly and without embarrassment. With her nervous fingers tying and untying the two corners of a little handkerchief in her lap, she went on, after a moment of silence in which the ticking of Keok's clock seemed tense and loud.

"When I was seventeen, Grandfather Standish died. I wish you could understand all that followed without my telling you: how I clung to Sharpleigh as a father, how I trusted him, and how cleverly and gently he educated me to the thought that it was right and just, and my greatest duty in life, to carry out the stipulation of my grandfather's will and marry John Graham. Otherwise, he told me—if that union was not brought about before I was twenty-two—not a dollar of the great fortune would go to the house of Standish; and because he was clever enough to know that money alone would not urge me, he showed me a letter which he said my Uncle Peter had written, and which I was to read on my seventeenth birthday, and in that letter Uncle Peter urged me to live up to the Standish name and join in that union of the two great fortunes which he and Grandfather Standish had always planned. I didn't dream the letter was a forgery. And in the end they won—and I promised."

She sat with bowed head, crumpling the bit of cambric between her fingers. "Do you despise me?" she asked.

"No," he replied in a tense, unimpassioned voice. "I love you."

She tried to look at him calmly and bravely. In his face again lay the immobility of rock, and in his eyes a sullen, slumbering fire.

"I promised," she repeated quickly, as if regretting the impulse that had made her ask him the question. "But it was to be business, a cold, unsentimental business. I disliked John Graham. Yet I would marry him. In the eyes of the law I would be his wife; in the eyes of the world I would remain his wife—but never more than that. They agreed, and I in my ignorance believed.

"I didn't see the trap. I didn't see the wicked triumph in John Graham's heart. No power could have made me believe then that he wanted to possess only me; that he was horrible enough to want me even without love; that he was a great monster of a spider, and I the fly lured into his web. And the agony of it was that in all the years since Uncle Peter died I had dreamed strange and beautiful dreams. I lived in a make-believe world of my own, and I read, read, read; and the thought grew stronger and stronger in me that I had lived another life somewhere, and that I belonged back in the years when the world was clean, and there was love, and vast reaches of land wherein money and power were little guessed of, and where romance and the glory of manhood and womanhood rose above all other things. Oh, I wanted these things, and yet because others had molded me, and because of my misguided Standish sense of pride and honor, I was shackling myself to John Graham.

"In the last months preceding my twenty-second birthday I learned more of the man than I had ever known before; rumors came to me; I investigated a little, and I began to find the hatred, and the reason for it, which has come to me so conclusively here in Alaska. I almost knew, at the last, that he was a monster, but the world had been told I was to marry him, and Sharpleigh with his fatherly hypocrisy was behind me, and John Graham treated me so courteously and so coolly that I did not suspect the terrible things in his heart and mind—and I went on with the bargain. I married him."

She drew a sudden, deep breath, as if she had passed through the ordeal of what she had most dreaded to say, and now, meeting the changeless expression of Alan's face with a fierce, little cry that leaped from her like a flash of gun-fire, she sprang to her feet and stood with her back crushed against the tundra flowers, her voice trembling as she continued, while he stood up and faced her.

"You needn't go on," he interrupted in a voice so low and terribly hard that she felt the menacing thrill of it. "You needn't. I will settle with John Graham, if God gives me the chance."

"You would have me stop now—before I have told you of the only shred of triumph to which I may lay claim!" she protested. "Oh, you may be sure that I realize the sickening folly and wickedness of it all, but I swear before my God that I didn't realize it then, until it was too late. To you, Alan, clean as the great mountains and plains that have been a part of you, I know how impossible this must seem—that I should marry a man I at first feared, then loathed, then came to hate with a deadly hatred; that I should sacrifice myself because I thought it was a duty; that I should be so weak, so ignorant, so like soft clay in the hands of those I trusted. Yet I tell you that at no time did I think or suspect that I was sacrificing myself; at no time, blind though you may call me, did I see a hint of that sickening danger into which I was voluntarily going. No, not even an hour before the wedding did I suspect that, for it had all been so coldly planned, like a great deal in finance—so carefully adjudged by us all as a business affair, that I felt no fear except that sickness of soul which comes of giving up one's life. And no hint of it came until the last of the few words were spoken which made us man and wife, and then I saw in John Graham's eyes something which I had never seen there before. And Sharpleigh—"

Her hands caught at her breast. Her gray eyes were pools of flame.

"I went to my room. I didn't lock my door, because never had it been necessary to do that. I didn't cry. No, I didn't cry. But something strange was happening to me which tears might have prevented. It seemed to me there were many walls to my room; I was faint; the windows seemed to appear and disappear, and in that sickness I reached my bed. Then I saw the door open, and John Graham came in, and closed the door behind him, and locked it. My room. He had come into my room! The unexpectedness of it—the horror—the insult roused me from my stupor. I sprang up to face him, and there he stood, within arm's reach of me, a look in his face which told me at last the truth which I had failed to suspect—or fear. His arms were reaching out—

"'You are my wife,' he said.

"Oh, I knew, then. 'You are my wife,' he repeated. I wanted to scream, but I couldn't; and then—then—his arms reached me; I felt them crushing around me like the coils of a great snake; the poison of his lips was at my face—and I believed that I was lost, and that no power could save me in this hour from the man who had come to my room—the man who was my husband. I think it was Uncle Peter who gave me voice, who put the right words in my brain, who made me laugh—yes, laugh, and almost caress him with my hands. The change in me amazed him, stunned him, and he freed me—while I told him that in these first few hours of wifehood I wanted to be alone, and that he should come to me that evening, and that I would be waiting for him. And I smiled at him as I said these things, smiled while I wanted to kill him, and he went, a great, gloating, triumphant beast, believing that the obedience of wifehood was about to give him what he had expected to find through dishonor—and I was left alone.

"I thought of only one thing then—escape. I saw the truth. It swept over me, inundated me, roared in my ears. All that I had ever lived with Uncle Peter came back to me. This was not his world; it had never been—and it was not mine. It was, all at once, a world of monsters. I wanted never to face it again, never to look into the eyes of those I had known. And even as these thoughts and desires swept upon me, I was filling a traveling bag in a fever of madness, and Uncle Peter was at my side, urging me to hurry, telling me I had no minutes to lose, for the man who had left me was clever and might guess the truth that lay hid behind my smiles and cajolery.

"I stole out through the back of the house, and as I went I heard Sharpleigh's low laughter in the library. It was a new kind of laughter, and with it I heard John Graham's voice. I was thinking only of the sea—to get away on the sea. A taxi took me to my bank, and I drew money. I went to the wharves, intent only on boarding a ship, any ship, and it seemed to me that Uncle Peter was leading me; and we came to a great ship that was leaving for Alaska—and you know—what happened then—Alan Holt."

With a sob she bowed her face in her hands, but only an instant it was there, and when she looked at Alan again, there were no tears in her eyes, but a soft glory of pride and exultation.

"I am clean of John Graham," she cried. "Clean!"

He stood twisting his hands, twisting them in a helpless, futile sort of way, and it was he, and not the girl, who felt like bowing his head that the tears might come unseen. For her eyes were bright and shining and clear as stars.

"Do you despise me now?"

"I love you," he said again, and made no movement toward her.

"I am glad," she whispered, and she did not look at him, but at the sunlit plain which lay beyond the window.

"And Rossland was on the Nome, and saw you, and sent word back to Graham," he said, fighting to keep himself from going nearer to her.

She nodded. "Yes; and so I came to you, and failing there, I leaped into the sea, for I wanted them to think I was dead."

"And Rossland was hurt."

"Yes. Strangely. I heard of it in Cordova. Men like Rossland frequently come to unexpected ends."

He went to the door which she had closed, and opened it, and stood looking toward the blue billows of the foothills with the white crests of the mountains behind them. She came, after a moment, and stood beside him.

"I understand," she said softly, and her hand lay in a gentle touch upon his arm. "You are trying to see some way out, and you can see only one. That is to go back, face the creatures I hate, regain my freedom in the old way. And I, too, can see no other way. I came on impulse; I must return with impulse and madness burned out of me. And I am sorry. I dread it. I—would rather die."

"And I—" he began, then caught himself and pointed to the distant hills and mountains. "The herds are there," he said. "I am going to them. I may be gone a week or more. Will you promise me to be here when I return?"

"Yes, if that is your desire."

"It is."

She was so near that his lips might have touched her shining hair.

"And when you return, I must go. That will be the only way."

"I think so."

"It will be hard. It may be, after all, that I am a coward. But to face all that—alone—"

"You won't be alone," he said quietly, still looking at the far-away hills. "If you go, I am going with you."

It seemed as if she had stopped breathing for a moment at his side, and then, with a little, sobbing cry she drew away from him and stood at the half-opened door of Nawadlook's room, and the glory in her eyes was the glory of his dreams as he had wandered with her hand in hand over the tundras in those days of grief and half-madness when he had thought she was dead.

"I am glad I was in Ellen McCormick's cabin the day you came," she was saying. "And I thank God for giving me the madness and courage to come to you. I am not afraid of anything in the world now—because—I love you, Alan!"

And as Nawadlook's door closed behind her, Alan stumbled out into the sunlight, a great drumming in his heart, and a tumult in his brain that twisted the world about him until for a little it held neither vision nor space nor sound.



CHAPTER XX

In that way, with the beautiful world swimming in sunshine and golden tundra haze until foothills and mountains were like castles in a dream, Alan Holt set off with Tautuk and Amuk Toolik, leaving Stampede and Keok and Nawadlook at the corral bars, with Stampede little regretting that he was left behind to guard the range. For a mighty resolution had taken root in the prospector's heart, and he felt himself thrilled and a bit trembling at the nearness of the greatest drama that had ever entered his life. Alan, looking back after the first few minutes, saw that Keok and Nawadlook stood alone. Stampede was gone.

The ridge beyond the coulee out of which Mary Standish had come with wild flowers soon closed like a door between him and Sokwenna's cabin, and the straight trail to the mountains lay ahead, and over this Alan set the pace, with Tautuk and Amuk Toolik and a caravan of seven pack-deer behind him, bearing supplies for the herdsmen.

Alan had scarcely spoken to the two men. He knew the driving force which was sending him to the mountains was not only an impulse, but almost an inspirational thing born of necessity. Each step that he took, with his head and heart in a swirl of intoxicating madness, was an effort behind which he was putting a sheer weight of physical will. He wanted to go back. The urge was upon him to surrender utterly to the weakness of forgetting that Mary Standish was a wife. He had almost fallen a victim to his selfishness and passion in the moment when she stood at Nawadlook's door, telling him that she loved him. An iron hand had drawn him out into the day, and it was the same iron hand that kept his face to the mountains now, while in his brain her voice repeated the words that had set his world on fire.

He knew what had happened this morning was not the merely important and essential incident of most human lives; it had been a cataclysmic thing with him. Probably it would be impossible for even the girl ever fully to understand. And he needed to be alone to gather strength and mental calmness for the meeting of the problem ahead of him, a complication so unexpected that the very foundation of that stoic equanimity which the mountains had bred in him had suffered a temporary upsetting. His happiness was almost an insanity. The dream wherein he had wandered with a spirit of the dead had come true; it was the old idyl in the flesh again, his father, his mother—and back in the cabin beyond the ridge such a love had cried out to him. And he was afraid to return. He laughed the fact aloud, happily and with an unrepressed exultation as he strode ahead of the pack-train, and with that exultation words came to his lips, words intended for himself alone, telling him that Mary Standish belonged to him, and that until the end of eternity he would fight for her and keep her. Yet he kept on, facing the mountains, and he walked so swiftly that Tautuk and Amuk Toolik fell steadily behind with the deer, so that in time long dips and swells of the tundra lay between them.

With grim persistence he kept at himself, and at last there swept over him in its ultimate triumph a compelling sense of the justice of what he had done—justice to Mary Standish. Even now he did not think of her as Mary Graham. But she was Graham's wife. And if he had gone to her in that moment of glorious confession when she had stood at Nawadlook's door, if he had violated her faith when, because of faith, she had laid the world at his feet, he would have fallen to the level of John Graham himself. Thought of the narrowness of his escape and of the first mad desire to call her back from Nawadlook's room, to hold her in his arms again as he had held her in the cottonwoods, brought a hot fire into his face. Something greater than his own fighting instinct had turned him to the open door of the cabin. It was Mary Standish—her courage, the-glory of faith and love shining in her eyes, her measurement of him as a man. She had not been afraid to say what was in her heart, because she knew what he would do.

Mid-afternoon found him waiting for Tautuk and Amuk Toolik at the edge of a slough where willows grew deep and green and the crested billows of sedge-cotton stood knee-high. The faces of the herdsmen were sweating. Thereafter Alan walked with them, until in that hour when the sun had sunk to its lowest plane they came to the first of the Endicott foothills. Here they rested until the coolness of deeper evening, when a golden twilight filled the land, and then resumed the journey toward the mountains.

Midsummer heat and the winged pests of the lower lands had driven the herds steadily into the cooler altitudes of the higher plateaux and valleys. Here they had split into telescoping columns which drifted in slowly moving streams wherever the doors of the hills and mountains opened into new grazing fields, until Alan's ten thousand reindeer were in three divisions, two of the greatest traveling westward, and one, of a thousand head, working north and east. The first and second days Alan remained with the nearest and southward herd. The third day he went on with Tautuk and two pack-deer through a break in the mountains and joined the herdsmen of the second and higher multitude of feeding animals. There began to possess him a curious disinclination to hurry, and this aversion grew in a direct ratio with the thought which was becoming stronger in him with each mile and hour of his progress. A multitude of emotions were buried under the conviction that Mary Standish must leave the range when he returned. He had a grim sense of honor, and a particularly devout one when it had to do with women, and though he conceded nothing of right and justice in the relationship which existed between the woman he loved and John Graham, he knew that she must go. To remain at the range was the one impossible thing for her to do. He would take her to Tanana. He would go with her to the States. The matter would be settled in a reasonable and intelligent way, and when he came back, he would bring her with him.

But beneath this undercurrent of decision fought the thing which his will held down, and yet never quite throttled completely—that something which urged him with an unconquerable persistence to hold with his own hands what a glorious fate had given him, and to finish with John Graham, if it ever came to that, in the madly desirable way he visioned for himself in those occasional moments when the fires of temptation blazed hottest.

The fourth night he said to Tautuk:

"If Keok should marry another man, what would you do?"

It was a moment before Tautuk looked at him, and in the herdsman's eyes was a wild, mute question, as if suddenly there had leaped into his stolid mind a suspicion which had never come to him before. Alan laid a reassuring hand upon his arm.

"I don't mean she's going to, Tautuk," he laughed. "She loves you. I know it. Only you are so stupid, and so slow, and so hopeless as a lover that she is punishing you while she has the right—before she marries you. But if she should marry someone else, what would you do?"

"My brother?" asked Tautuk.

"No."

"A relative?"

"No."

"A friend?"

"No. A stranger. Someone who had injured you, for instance; someone Keok hated, and who had cheated her into marrying him."

"I would kill him," said Tautuk quietly.

It was this night the temptation was strongest upon Alan. Why should Mary Standish go back, he asked himself. She had surrendered everything to escape from the horror down there. She had given up fortune and friends. She had scattered convention to the four winds, had gambled her life in the hazard, and in the end had come to him! Why should he not keep her? John Graham and the world believed she was dead. And he was master here. If—some day—Graham should happen to cross his path, he would settle the matter in Tautuk's way. Later, while Tautuk slept, and the world lay about him in a soft glow, and the valley below was filled with misty billows of twilight out of which came to him faintly the curious, crackling sound of reindeer hoofs and the grunting contentment of the feeding herd, the reaction came, as he had known it would come in the end.

The morning of the fifth day he set out alone for the eastward herd, and on the sixth overtook Tatpan and his herdsmen. Tatpan, like Sokwenna's foster-children, Keok and Nawadlook, had a quarter-strain of white in him, and when Alan came up to him in the edge of the valley where the deer were grazing, he was lying on a rock, playing Yankee Doodle on a mouth-organ. It was Tatpan who told him that an hour or two before an exhausted stranger had come into camp, looking for him, and that the man was asleep now, apparently more dead than alive, but had given instructions to be awakened at the end of two hours, and not a minute later. Together they had a look at him.

He was a small, ruddy-faced man with carroty blond hair and a peculiarly boyish appearance as he lay doubled up like a jack-knife, profoundly asleep. Tatpan looked at his big, silver watch and in a low voice described how the stranger had stumbled into camp, so tired he could scarcely put one foot ahead of the other; and that he had dropped down where he now lay when he learned Alan was with one of the other herds.

"He must have come a long distance," said Tatpan, "and he has traveled fast."

Something familiar about the man grew upon Alan. Yet he could not place him. He wore a gun, which he had unbelted and placed within reach of his hand on the grass. His chin was pugnaciously prominent, and in sleep the mysterious stranger had crooked a forefinger and thumb about his revolver in a way that spoke of caution and experience.

"If he is in such a hurry to see me, you might awaken him," said Alan.

He turned a little aside and knelt to drink at a tiny stream of water that ran down from the snowy summits, and he could hear Tatpan rousing the stranger. By the time he had finished drinking and faced about, the little man with the carroty-blond hair was on his feet. Alan stared, and the little man grinned. His ruddy cheeks grew pinker. His blue eyes twinkled, and in what seemed to be a moment of embarrassment he gave his gun a sudden snap that drew an exclamation of amazement from Alan. Only one man in the world had he ever seen throw a gun into its holster like that. A sickly grin began to spread over his own countenance, and all at once Tatpan's eyes began to bulge.

"Stampede!" he cried.

Stampede rubbed a hand over his smooth, prominent chin and nodded apologetically.

"It's me," he conceded. "I had to do it. It was give one or t'other up—my whiskers or her. They went hard, too. I flipped dice, an' the whiskers won. I cut cards, an' the whiskers won. I played Klondike ag'in' 'em, an' the whiskers busted the bank. Then I got mad an' shaved 'em. Do I look so bad, Alan?"

"You look twenty years younger," declared Alan, stifling his desire to laugh when he saw the other's seriousness.

Stampede was thoughtfully stroking his chin. "Then why the devil did they laugh!" he demanded. "Mary Standish didn't laugh. She cried. Just stood an' cried, an' then sat down an' cried, she thought I was that blamed funny! And Keok laughed until she was sick an' had to go to bed. That little devil of a Keok calls me Pinkey now, and Miss Standish says it wasn't because I was funny that she laughed, but that the change in me was so sudden she couldn't help it. Nawadlook says I've got a character-ful chin—"

Alan gripped his hand, and a swift change came over Stampede's face. A steely glitter shot into the blue of his eyes, and his chin hardened. Nature no longer disguised the Stampede Smith of other days, and Alan felt a new thrill and a new regard for the man whose hand he held. This, at last, was the man whose name had gone before him up and down the old trails; the man whose cool and calculating courage, whose fearlessness of death and quickness with the gun had written pages in Alaskan history which would never be forgotten. Where his first impulse had been to laugh, he now felt the grim thrill and admiration of men of other days, who, when in Stampede's presence, knew they were in the presence of a master. The old Stampede had come to life again. And Alan knew why. The grip of his hand tightened, and Stampede returned it.

"Some day, if we're lucky, there always comes a woman to make the world worth living in, Stampede," he said.

"There does," replied Stampede.

He looked steadily at Alan.

"And I take it you love Mary Standish," he added, "and that you'd fight for her if you had to."

"I would," said Alan.

"Then it's time you were traveling," advised Stampede significantly. "I've been twelve hours on the trail without a rest. She told me to move fast, and I've moved. I mean Mary Standish. She said it was almost a matter of life and death that I find you in a hurry. I wanted to stay, but she wouldn't let me. It's you she wants. Rossland is at the range."

"Rossland!"

"Yes, Rossland. And it's my guess John Graham isn't far away. I smell happenings, Alan. We'd better hurry."



CHAPTER XXI

Stampede had started with one of the two saddle-deer left at the range, but to ride deer-back successfully and with any degree of speed and specific direction was an accomplishment which he had neglected, and within the first half-dozen miles he had abandoned the adventure to continue his journey on foot. As Tatpan had no saddle-deer in his herd, and the swiftest messenger would require many hours in which to reach Amuk Toolik, Alan set out for his range within half an hour after his arrival at Tatpan's camp. Stampede, declaring himself a new man after his brief rest and the meal which followed it, would not listen to Alan's advice that he follow later, when he was more refreshed.

A fierce and reminiscent gleam smoldered in the little gun-fighter's eyes as he watched Alan during the first half-hour leg of their race through the foothills to the tundras. Alan did not observe it, or the grimness that had settled in the face behind him. His own mind was undergoing an upheaval of conjecture and wild questioning. That Rossland had discovered Mary Standish was not dead was the least astonishing factor in the new development. The information might easily have reached him through Sandy McCormick or his wife Ellen. The astonishing thing was that he had in some mysterious way picked up the trail of her flight a thousand miles northward, and the still more amazing fact that he had dared to follow her and reveal himself openly at his range. His heart pumped hard, for he knew Rossland must be directly under Graham's orders.

Then came the resolution to take Stampede into his confidence and to reveal all that had happened on the day of his departure for the mountains. He proceeded to do this without equivocation or hesitancy, for there now pressed upon him a grim anticipation of impending events ahead of them.

Stampede betrayed no astonishment at the other's disclosures. The smoldering fire remained in his eyes, the immobility of his face unchanged. Only when Alan repeated, in his own words, Mary Standish's confession of love at Nawadlook's door did the fighting lines soften about his comrade's eyes and mouth.

Stampede's lips responded with an oddly quizzical smile. "I knew that a long time ago," he said. "I guessed it that first night of storm in the coach up to Chitina. I knew it for certain before we left Tanana. She didn't tell me, but I wasn't blind. It was the note that puzzled and frightened me—the note she stuffed in her slipper. And Rossland told me, before I left, that going for you was a wild-goose chase, as he intended to take Mrs. John Graham back with him immediately."

"And you left her alone after that?"

Stampede shrugged his shoulders as he valiantly kept up with Alan's suddenly quickened pace.

"She insisted. Said it meant life and death for her. And she looked it. White as paper after her talk with Rossland. Besides—"

"What?"

"Sokwenna won't sleep until we get back. He knows. I told him. And he's watching from the garret window with a.303 Savage. I saw him pick off a duck the other day at two hundred yards."

They hurried on. After a little Alan said, with the fear which he could not name clutching at his heart, "Why did you say Graham might not be far away?"

"In my bones," replied Stampede, his face hard as rock again. "In my bones!"

"Is that all?"

"Not quite. I think Rossland told her. She was so white. And her hand cold as a lump of clay when she put it on mine. It was in her eyes, too. Besides, Rossland has taken possession of your cabin as though he owns it. I take it that means somebody behind him, a force, something big to reckon with. He asked me how many men we had. I told him, stretching it a little. He grinned. He couldn't keep back that grin. It was as if a devil in him slipped out from hiding for an instant."

Suddenly he caught Alan's arm and stopped him. His chin shot out. The sweat ran from his face. For a full quarter of a minute the two men stared at each other.

"Alan, we're short-sighted. I'm damned if I don't think we ought to call the herdsmen in, and every man with a loaded gun!"

"You think it's that bad?"

"Might be. If Graham's behind Rossland and has men with him—"

"We're two and a half hours from Tatpan," said Alan, in a cold, unemotional voice. "He has only half a dozen men with him, and it will take at least four to make quick work in finding Tautuk and Amuk Toolik. There are eighteen men with the southward herd, and twenty-two with the upper. I mean, counting the boys. Use your own judgment. All are armed. It may be foolish, but I'm following your hunch."

They gripped hands.

"It's more than a hunch, Alan," breathed Stampede softly. "And for God's sake keep off the music as long as you can!"

He was gone, and as his agile, boyish figure started in a half-run toward the foothills, Alan set his face southward, so that in a quarter of an hour they were lost to each other in the undulating distances of the tundra.

Never had Alan traveled as on the last of this sixth day of his absence from the range. He was comparatively fresh, as his trail to Tatpan's camp had not been an exhausting one, and his more intimate knowledge of the country gave him a decided advantage over Stampede. He believed he could make the distance in ten hours, but to this he would be compelled to add a rest of at least three or four hours during the night. It was now eight o'clock. By nine or ten the next morning he would be facing Rossland, and at about that same hour Tatpan's swift messengers would be closing in about Tautuk and Amuk Toolik. He knew the speed with which his herdsmen would sweep out of the mountains and over the tundras. Two years ago Amuk Toolik and a dozen of his Eskimo people had traveled fifty-two hours without rest or food, covering a hundred and nineteen miles in that time. His blood flushed hot with pride. He couldn't do that. But his people could—and would. He could see them sweeping in from the telescoping segments of the herds as the word went among them; he could see them streaking out of the foothills; and then, like wolves scattering for freer air and leg-room, he saw them dotting the tundra in their race for home—and war, if it was war that lay ahead of them.

Twilight began to creep in upon him, like veils of cool, dry mist out of the horizons. And hour after hour he went on, eating a strip of pemmican when he grew hungry, and drinking in the spring coulees when he came to them, where the water was cold and clear. Not until a telltale cramp began to bite warningly in his leg did he stop for the rest which he knew he must take. It was one o'clock. Counting his journey to Tatpan's camp, he had been traveling almost steadily for seventeen hours.

Not until he stretched himself out on his back in a grassy hollow where a little stream a foot wide rippled close to his ears did he realize how tired he had become. At first he tried not to sleep. Rest was all he wanted; he dared not close his eyes. But exhaustion overcame him at last, and he slept. When he awoke, bird-song and the sun were taunting him. He sat up with a jerk, then leaped to his feet in alarm. His watch told the story. He had slept soundly for six hours, instead of resting three or four with his eyes open.

After a little, as he hurried on his way, he did not altogether regret what had happened. He felt like a fighting man. He breathed deeply, ate a breakfast of pemmican as he walked, and proceeded to make up lost time. The interval between fifteen minutes of twelve and twelve he almost ran. That quarter of an hour brought him to the crest of the ridge from which he could look upon the buildings of the range. Nothing had happened that he could see. He gave a great gasp of relief, and in his joy he laughed. The strangeness of the laugh told him more than anything else the tension he had been under.

Another half-hour, and he came up out of the dip behind Sokwenna's cabin and tried the door. It was locked. A voice answered his knock, and he called out his name. The bolt shot back, the door opened, and he stepped in. Nawadlook stood at her bedroom door, a gun in her hands. Keok faced him, holding grimly to a long knife, and between them, staring white-faced at him as he entered, was Mary Standish. She came forward to meet him, and he heard a whisper from Nawadlook, and saw Keok follow her swiftly through the door into the other room.

Mary Standish held out her hands to him a little blindly, and the tremble in her throat and the look in her eyes betrayed the struggle she was making to keep from breaking down and crying out in gladness at his coming. It was that look that sent a flood of joy into his heart, even when he saw the torture and hopelessness behind it. He held her hands close, and into her eyes he smiled in such a way that he saw them widen, as if she almost disbelieved; and then she drew in a sudden quick breath, and her fingers clung to him. It was as if the hope that had deserted her came in an instant into her face again. He was not excited. He was not even perturbed, now that he saw that light in her eyes and knew she was safe. But his love was there. She saw it and felt the force of it behind the deadly calmness with which he was smiling at her. She gave a little sob, so low it was scarcely more than a broken breath; a little cry that came of wonder—understanding—and unspeakable faith in this man who was smiling at her so confidently in the face of the tragedy that had come to destroy her.

"Rossland is in your cabin," she whispered. "And John Graham is back there—somewhere—coming this way. Rossland says that if I don't go to him of my own free will—"

He felt the shudder that ran through her.

"I understand the rest," he said. They stood silent for a moment. The gray-cheeked thrush was singing on the roof. Then, as if she had been a child, he took her face between his hands and bent her head back a little, so that he was looking straight into her eyes, and so near that he could feel the sweet warmth of her breath.

"You didn't make a mistake the day I went away?" he asked. "You—love me?"

"Yes."

For a moment longer he looked into her eyes. Then he stood back from her. Even Keok and Nawadlook heard his laugh. It was strange, they thought—Keok with her knife, and Nawadlook with her gun—for the bird was singing, and Alan Holt was laughing, and Mary Standish was very still.

Another moment later, from where he sat cross-legged at the little window in the attic, keeping his unsleeping vigil with a rifle across his knees, old Sokwenna saw his master walk across the open, and something in the manner of his going brought back a vision of another day long ago when Ghost Kloof had rung with the cries of battle, and the hands now gnarled and twisted with age had played their part in the heroic stand of his people against the oppressors from the farther north.

Then he saw Alan go into the cabin where Rossland was, and softly his fingers drummed upon the ancient tom-tom which lay at his side. His eyes fixed themselves upon the distant mountains, and under his breath he mumbled the old chant of battle, dead and forgotten except in Sokwenna's brain, and after that his eyes closed, and again the vision grew out of darkness like a picture for him, a vision of twisting trails and of fighting men gathering with their faces set for war.



CHAPTER XXII

At the desk in Alan's living-room sat Rossland, when the door opened behind him and the master of the range came in. He was not disturbed when he saw who it was, and rose to meet him. His coat was off, his sleeves rolled up, and it was evident he was making no effort to conceal his freedom with Alan's books and papers.

He advanced, holding out a hand. This was not the same Rossland who had told Alan to attend to his own business on board the Nome. His attitude was that of one greeting a friend, smiling and affable even before he spoke. Something inspired Alan to return the smile. Behind that smile he was admiring the man's nerve. His hand met Rossland's casually, but there was no uncertainty in the warmth of the other's grip.

"How d' do, Paris, old boy?" he greeted good-humoredly. "Saw you going in to Helen a few minutes ago, so I've been waiting for you. She's a little frightened. And we can't blame her. Menelaus is mightily upset. But mind me, Holt, I'm not blaming you. I'm too good a sport. Clever, I call it—damned clever. She's enough to turn any man's head. I only wish I were in your boots right now. I'd have turned traitor myself aboard the Nome if she had shown an inclination."

He proffered a cigar, a big, fat cigar with a gold band. It was inspiration again that made Alan accept it and light it. His blood was racing. But Rossland saw nothing of that. He observed only the nod, the cool smile on Alan's lips, the apparent nonchalance with which he was meeting the situation. It pleased Graham's agent. He reseated himself in the desk-chair and motioned Alan to another chair near him.

"I thought you were badly hurt," said Alan. "Nasty knife wound you got."

Rossland shrugged his shoulders. "There you have it again, Holt—the hell of letting a pretty face run away with you. One of the Thlinkit girls down in the steerage, you know. Lovely little thing, wasn't she? Tricked her into my cabin all right, but she wasn't like some other Indian girls I've known. The next night a brother, or sweetheart, or whoever it was got me through the open port. It wasn't bad. I was out of the hospital within a week. Lucky I was put there, too. Otherwise I wouldn't have seen Mrs. Graham one morning—through the window. What a little our fortunes hang to at times, eh? If it hadn't been for the girl and the knife and the hospital, I wouldn't be here now, and Graham wouldn't be bleeding his heart out with impatience—and you, Holt, wouldn't be facing the biggest opportunity that will ever come into your life."

"I'm afraid I don't understand," said Alan, hiding his face in the smoke of his cigar and speaking with an apparent indifference which had its effect upon Rossland. "Your presence inclines me to believe that luck has rather turned against me. Where can my advantage be?"

A grim seriousness settled in Rossland's eyes, and his voice became cool and hard. "Holt, as two men who are not afraid to meet unusual situations, we may as well call a spade a spade in this matter, don't you think so?"

"Decidedly," said Alan.

"You know that Mary Standish is really Mary Standish Graham, John Graham's wife?"

"Yes."

"And you probably know—now—why she jumped into the sea, and why she ran away from Graham."

"I do."

"That saves a lot of talk. But there is another side to the story which you probably don't know, and I am here to tell it to you. John Graham doesn't care for a dollar of the Standish fortune. It's the girl he wants, and has always wanted. She has grown up under his eyes. From the day she was fourteen years old he has lived and planned with the thought of possessing her. You know how he got her to marry him, and you know what happened afterward. But it makes no difference to him whether she hates him or not. He wants her. And this"—he swept his arms out, "is the most beautiful place in the world in which to have her returned to him. I've been figuring from your books. Your property isn't worth over a hundred thousand dollars as it stands on hoof today. I'm here to offer you five times that for it. In other words, Graham is willing to forfeit all action he might have personally against you for stealing his wife, and in place of that will pay you five hundred thousand dollars for the privilege of having his honeymoon here, and making of this place a country estate where his wife may reside indefinitely, subject to her husband's visits when he is so inclined. There will be a stipulation, of course, requiring that the personal details of the deal be kept strictly confidential, and that you leave the country. Do I make myself clear?"

Alan rose to his feet and paced thoughtfully across the room. At least, Rossland measured his action as one of sudden, intensive reflection as he watched him, smiling complacently at the effect of his knock-out proposition upon the other. He had not minced matters. He had come to the point without an effort at bargaining, and he possessed sufficient dramatic sense to appreciate what the offer of half a million dollars meant to an individual who was struggling for existence at the edge of a raw frontier. Alan stood with his back toward him, facing a window. His voice was oddly strained when he answered. But that was quite natural, too, Rossland thought.

"I am wondering if I understand you," he said. "Do you mean that if I sell Graham the range, leave it bag and baggage, and agree to keep my mouth shut thereafter, he will give me half a million dollars?"

"That is the price. You are to take your people with you. Graham has his own."

Alan tried to laugh. "I think I see the point—now. He isn't paying five hundred thousand for Miss Standish—I mean Mrs. Graham. He's paying it for the isolation."

"Exactly. It was a last-minute hunch with him—to settle the matter peaceably. We started up here to get his wife. You understand, to get her, and settle the matter with you in a different way from the one we're using now. You hit the word when you said 'isolation.' What a damn fool a man can make of himself over a pretty face! Think of it—half a million dollars!"

"It sounds unreal," mused Alan, keeping his face to the window. "Why should he offer so much?"

"You must keep the stipulation in mind, Holt. That is an important part of the deal. You are to keep your mouth shut. Buying the range at a normal price wouldn't guarantee it. But when you accept a sum like that, you're a partner in the other end of the transaction, and your health depends upon keeping the matter quiet. Simple enough, isn't it?"

Alan turned back to the table. His face was pale. He tried to keep smoke in front of his eyes. "Of course, I don't suppose he'd allow Mrs. Graham to escape back to the States—where she might do a little upsetting on her own account?"

"He isn't throwing the money away," replied Rossland significantly.

"She would remain here indefinitely?"

"Indefinitely."

"Probably never would return."

"Strange how squarely you hit the nail on the head! Why should she return? The world believes she is dead. Papers were full of it. The little secret of her being alive is all our own. And this will be a beautiful summering place for Graham. Magnificent climate. Lovely flowers. Birds. And the girl he has watched grow up, and wanted, since she was fourteen."

"And who hates him."

"True."

"Who was tricked into marrying him, and who would rather die than live with him as his wife."

"But it's up to Graham to keep her alive, Holt. That's not our business. If she dies, I imagine you will have an opportunity to get your range back pretty cheap."

Rossland held a paper out to Alan.

"Here's partial payment—two hundred and fifty thousand. I have the papers here, on the desk, ready to sign. As soon as you give possession, I'll return to Tanana with you and make the remaining payment."