James Oliver Curwood

“ For a space Alan was sorry he had called Sokwenna to his cabin. He was no longer the cheerful and gentle “old man” of his people; the old man who chortled with joy at the prettiness and play of Keok and Nawadlook, who loved birds and flowers and little children, and who had retained an impish boyhood along with his great age. He was changed. He stood before Alan an embodiment of fatalism, mumbling incoherent things in his breath, a spirit of evil omen lurking in his sunken eyes, and his thin hands gripping like bird-claws to his rifle. ”

“ No living thing could have stood up against what was happening in these moments. Bullets tore through the windows and between the moss-chinked logs, crashing against metal and glass and tinware; one of the candles sputtered and went out, and in this hell Alan heard a cry and saw Mary Standish coming out of the cellar-pit toward him. He had flung himself down quickly, and she thought he was hit! He shrieked at her, and his heart froze with horror as he saw a heavy tress of her hair drop to the floor as she stood there in that frightful moment, white and glorious in the face of the gun-fire. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Time had rolled back, and he was the old Stampede Smith. He saw under him lust and passion and murder, as in other days he had seen them, and between him and desire there was neither law nor conscience to bar the way, and his dream—a last great fight—was here to fill the final unwritten page of a life’s drama that was almost closed. And what a fight, if he could make that carpet of soft, white sand unheard and unseen. Six to one! Six men with guns at their sides and rifles in their hands. What a glorious end it would be, for a woman—and Alan Holt! ”

“ Stampede’s eyes glistened as his mind seized upon the possibilities of the new adventure. It was a vast land. An unknown country. And Alan was its first pioneer. The old thrill ran in Stampede’s blood, and its infectiousness caught Alan, so that he forgot Mary Standish, and all else but the miles that lay between them and the mighty tundras beyond the Seward Peninsula. It was midnight when Alan went to his cabin.
He was happy. Love of life swept in an irresistible surge through his body, and he breathed in deeply of the soft sea air that came in through his open port from the west. ”

“ The force of the old spirit surged uppermost in Alan again, and after that, for an hour or more, something lived for him in the glow of the fire which Olaf kept burning. It was the memory of Mary Standish, her quiet, beautiful eyes gazing at him, her pale face taking form in the lacy wisps of birch-smoke. His mind pictured her in the flame-glow as she had listened to him that day in Skagway, when he had told her of this fight that was ahead. And it pleased him to think she would have made this same fight for Alaska if she had lived. ”

“ Night! Alan laughed softly, the pale flush of the sun in his face. Bedtime! He looked at his watch.
It was nine o’clock. Nine o’clock, and the flowers still answering to the glow of the sun! And the people down there—in the States—called it a frozen land, a hell of ice and snow at the end of the earth, a place of the survival of the fittest! Well, to just such extremes had stupidity and ignorance gone through all the years of history, even though men called themselves super-creatures of intelligence and knowledge. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ A moment later the darker shadow of the cabin rose up in his face, and a flash of lightning showed him the door. In a moment of silence he could hear the patter of huge raindrops on the roof as he dropped his bags and began hammering with his fist to arouse the Swede. Then he flung open the unlocked door and entered, tossing his dunnage to the floor, and shouted the old greeting that Ericksen would not have forgotten, though nearly a quarter of a century had passed since he and Alan’s father had tramped the mountains together.
The long, black launch nosed its way out to sea. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The trail widened as they descended, and at the last they reached the bottom, with the gloom and shelter of a million-year-old crevasse hovering over them. Grim and monstrous rocks, black and slippery with age, lay about them, and among these they picked their way, while the trickle and drip of water and the flesh-like clamminess of the air sent a strange shiver of awe through Mary Standish. There was no life here—only an age-old whisper that seemed a part of death; and when voices came from above, where Graham’s men were gathering, they were ghostly and far away. ”

“ Every nerve in Alan’s body was concentrated for swift and terrible action, for the desperateness of their situation had surged upon him like a breath of fire, unbelievable, and yet true. Back at the willows they would have killed him. The hands at his throat had sought his life. Wolves and not men were about them on the plain; wolves headed by two monsters of the human pack, Graham and Rossland. Murder and lust and mad passion were hidden in the darkness; law and order and civilization were hundreds of miles away. ”

“ It was a thought which brought a painful thickening in his breath, for always these visions which Olaf could not see ended with Mary Standish as she had faced him in his cabin, her back against the door, her lips trembling, and her eyes softly radiant with tears in the broken pride of that last moment of her plea for life.
He could not have told how long he slept that night. Dreams came to him in his restless slumber, and always they awakened him, so that he was looking at the stars again and trying not to think. ”

“ Men like John Graham would have gone out of existence; Alaska would have received her birthright. For these women were of the kind who greeted the sun each day, and the gloom of winter, with something greater than hope in their hearts. They, too, were builders. Fear of God and love of land lay deep in their souls, and side by side with their men-folk they went on in this epic struggle for the building of a nation at the top of the world.
Many times during this week Alan felt it in his heart to speak of Mary Standish. But in the end, not even to Carl Lomen did word of her escape his lips. ”

“ Stampede blazed away with his forty-five, and Alan felt the thrill of it and emptied the magazine of his gun, the detonations of revolver and rifle drowning the chorus of sound that came from the range. A second rocket answered them. Two columns of flame leaped up from the earth as huge fires gained headway, and Alan could hear the shrill chorus of children’s voices mingling with the vocal tumult of men. All the people of his range were there. They had come in from the timber-naked plateaux and high ranges where the herds were feeding, and from the outlying shacks of the tundras to greet him. ”

“ That was twenty-five years ago last autumn, Alan. A long time, isn’t it? And when I look at Mary Standish and hear her voice—” He hesitated, as if betraying a secret, and then he added: “—I can’t help thinking of the girl Donald Hardwick fought for and won in that death-hole at White Horse. It’s too bad she had to die.”
“She isn’t dead,” said Alan. The hardness was gone from his voice. “She isn’t dead,” he repeated. “That’s the pity of it. She is as much a living thing to him today as she was twenty years ago.” ”

“ There was a thrill in this talk of a land so near, scarcely a night ride across the neck of Bering Sea, and yet as proscribed as the sacred plains of Tibet. It stirred old desires in Alan’s blood, for he knew that of all frontiers the Siberian would be the last and the greatest, and that not only men, but nations, would play their part in the breaking of it. He saw the red gleam of firelight in Olaf’s eyes. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Stampede Smith he had at last found the comradeship which he had missed, and the responsive note to the wild and half-savage desires always smoldering in his heart. He looked out at the stars and smiled up at them, and his soul was filled with an unspoken thankfulness that he was not born too late. Another generation and there would be no last frontier. Twenty-five years more and the world would lie utterly in the shackles of science and invention and what the human race called progress. ”

“ He was like a man who had found life after a period of something that was worse than death, and with his happiness he felt himself twisted upon an upheaval of conflicting sensations and half convictions out of which, in spite of his effort to hold it back, suspicion began to creep like a shadow. But it was not the sort of suspicion to cool the thrill in his blood or frighten him, for he was quite ready to concede that Mary Standish was a fugitive, and that her flight from Seattle had been in the face of a desperate necessity. ”

“ Mary could feel it as they picked their way through the chill and gloom that lay in the silent passages between the Gargantuan rocks. When her hands touched their naked sides an uncontrollable impulse made her shrink closer to Alan, even though she sensed the protection of their presence. They were like colossi, carved by hands long dead, and now guarded by spirits whose voices guttered low and secretly in the mysterious drip and trickle of unseen water. This was the haunted place. In this chasm death and vengeance had glutted themselves long before she was born ”

“ At the sound of that name Alan felt the blood in him run suddenly hot. Only one man on the face of the earth did he hate with undying hatred, and that man was John Graham. He would have followed, seeking the identity of the stranger whose words had temporarily stunned the young engineers, when he saw a slim figure standing between him and the light of the smoking-room windows. It was Mary Standish. He knew by her attitude that she had heard the words of the young engineer and the old graybeard, but she was looking at him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tonight it was probable that no woman in the world could have interested him, except as the always casual observer of humanity. Another and greater thing gripped him and had thrilled him since he first felt the throbbing pulse of the engines of the new steamship Nome under his feet at Seattle. He was going home. And home meant Alaska. It meant the mountains, the vast tundras, the immeasurable spaces into which civilization had not yet come with its clang and clamor. It meant friends, the stars he knew, his herds, everything he loved. ”

“ Over the breasts of the tundra and the hollows between they went, still hand in hand, and found themselves talking of the colorings in the sky, and the birds, and flowers, and the twilight creeping in about them, while Alan scanned the shortening horizons for a sign of human life. One mile, and then another, and after that a third, and they were looking into gray gloom far ahead, where lay the kloof. ”

“ And that is just what John Graham is doing to Alaska, Miss Standish. He’s the dog—a monster. Imagine a man with a colossal financial power behind him, setting out to strip the wealth from a new land and enslave it to his own desires and political ambitions. That is what John Graham is doing from his money-throne down there in the States. It’s the financial support he represents, curse him! Money—and a man without conscience. A man who would starve thousands or millions to achieve his ends. ”