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.