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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.
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