So John Graham was keeping his promise, the deadly promise he had made in the one hour of his father's triumph--that hour in which the elder Holt might have rid the earth of a serpent if his hands had not revolted in the last of those terrific minutes which he as a youth had witnessed.

And Mary Standish was the instrument he had chosen to work his ends!

In these first minutes Alan could not find a doubt with which to fend the absoluteness of the convictions which were raging in his head, or still the tumult that was in his heart and blood. He made no pretense to deny the fact that John Graham must have written this letter to Mary Standish; inadvertently she had kept it, had finally attempted to destroy it, and Stampede, by chance, had discovered a small but convincing remnant of it. In a whirlwind of thought he pieced together things that had happened: her efforts to interest him from the beginning, the determination with which she had held to her purpose, her boldness in following him to the Range, and her apparent endeavor to work herself into his confidence--and with John Graham's signature staring at him from the table these things seemed conclusive and irrefutable evidence. The "industry" which Graham had referred to could mean only his own and Carl Lomen's, the reindeer industry which they had built up and were fighting to perpetuate, and which Graham and his beef-baron friends were combining to handicap and destroy. And in this game of destruction clever Mary Standish had come to play a part!

_But why had she leaped into the sea?_

It was as if a new voice had made itself heard in Alan's brain, a voice that rose insistently over a vast tumult of things, crying out against his arguments and demanding order and reason in place of the mad convictions that possessed him. If Mary Standish's mission was to pave the way for his ruin, and if she was John Graham's agent sent for that purpose, what reason could she have had for so dramatically attempting to give the world the impression that she had ended her life at sea?

Surely such an act could in no way have been related with any plot which she might have had against him! In building up this structure of her defense he made no effort to sever her relationship with John Graham; that, he knew, was impossible. The note, her actions, and many of the things she had said were links inevitably a.s.sociating her with his enemy, but these same things, now that they came pressing one upon another in his memory, gave to their collusion a new significance.

Was it conceivable that Mary Standish, instead of working for John Graham, was working _against_ him? Could some conflict between them have been the reason for her flight aboard the _Nome_, and was it because she discovered Rossland there--John Graham's most trusted servant--that she formed her desperate scheme of leaping into the sea?

Between the two oppositions of his thought a sickening burden of what he knew to be true settled upon him. Mary Standish, even if she hated John Graham now, had at one time--and not very long ago--been an instrument of his trust; the letter he had written to her was positive proof of that. What it was that had caused a possible split between them and had inspired her flight from Seattle, and, later, her effort to bury a past under the fraud of a make-believe death, he might never learn, and just now he had no very great desire to look entirely into the whole truth of the matter. It was enough to know that of the past, and of the things that happened, she had been afraid, and it was in the desperation of this fear, with Graham's cleverest agent at her heels, that she had appealed to him in his cabin, and, failing to win him to her a.s.sistance, had taken the matter so dramatically into her own hands. And within that same hour a nearly successful attempt had been made upon Rossland's life. Of course the facts had shown that she could not have been directly responsible for his injury, but it was a haunting thing to remember as happening almost simultaneously with her disappearance into the sea.

He drew away from the window and, opening the door, went out into the night. Cool breaths of air gave a crinkly rattle to the swinging paper lanterns, and he could hear the soft whipping of the flags which Mary Standish had placed over his cabin. There was something comforting in the sound, a solace to the dishevelment of nerves he had suffered, a reminder of their day in Skagway when she had walked at his side with her hand resting warmly in his arm and her eyes and face filled with the inspiration of the mountains.

No matter what she was, or had been, there was something tenaciously admirable about her, a quality which had risen even above her feminine loveliness. She had proved herself not only clever; she was inspired by courage--a courage which he would have been compelled to respect even in a man like John Graham, and in this slim and fragile girl it appealed to him as a virtue to be laid up apart and aside from any of the motives which might be directing it. From the beginning it had been a bewildering part of her--a clean, swift, unhesitating courage that had leaped bounds where his own volition and judgment would have hung waveringly; that one courage in all the world--a woman's courage--which finds in the effort of its achievement no obstacle too high and no abyss too wide though death waits with outreaching arms on the other side.

And, surely, where there had been all this, there must also have been some deeper and finer impulse than one of destruction, of physical gain, or of mere duty in the weaving of a human scheme.

The thought and the desire to believe brought words half aloud from Alan's lips, as he looked up again at the flags beating softly above his cabin. Mary Standish was not what Stampede's discovery had proclaimed her to be; there was some mistake, a monumental stupidity of reasoning on their part, and tomorrow would reveal the littleness and the injustice of their suspicions. He tried to force the conviction upon himself, and reentering the cabin he went to bed, still telling himself that a great lie had built itself up out of nothing, and that the G.o.d of all things was good to him because Mary Standish was alive, and not dead.

CHAPTER XVII

Alan slept soundly for several hours, but the long strain of the preceding day did not make him overreach the time he had set for himself, and he was up at six o'clock. Wegaruk had not forgotten her old habits, and a tub filled with cold water was waiting for him. He bathed, shaved himself, put on fresh clothes, and promptly at seven was at breakfast. The table at which he ordinarily sat alone was in a little room with double windows, through which, as he enjoyed his meals, he could see most of the habitations of the range. Unlike the average Eskimo dwellings they were neatly built of small timber brought down from the mountains, and were arranged in orderly fashion like the cottages of a village, strung out prettily on a single street. A sea of flowers lay in front of them, and at the end of the row, built on a little knoll that looked down into one of the watered hollows of the tundra, was Sokwenna's cabin. Because Sokwenna was the "old man" of the community and therefore the wisest--and because with him lived his foster-daughters, Keok and Nawadlook, the loveliest of Alan's tribal colony--Sokwenna's cabin was next to Alan's in size. And Alan, looking at it now and then as he ate his breakfast, saw a thin spiral of smoke rising from the chimney, but no other sign of life.

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 h.e.l.l-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 pa.s.sing 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 embarra.s.sment, 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 ma.s.ses 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 att.i.tude of suspense and of waiting there was no longer a suspicion of embarra.s.sment, 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 G.o.d'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."