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,