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 coulée 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.
[Illustration: The man wore a gun ... within reach of his hand.]
“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.”