“Thirty-eight,” she said, so quickly that for a moment he was astonished.

Then he chuckled.  “You are very good at figures.”

He felt an almost imperceptible tightening of her fingers on his arm.

“This evening, just after dinner, old Donald found me sitting alone.  He said he was lonely and wanted to talk with someone—­like me.  He almost frightened me, with his great, gray beard and shaggy hair.  I thought of ghosts as we talked there in the dusk.”

“Old Donald belongs to the days when the Chilkoot and the White Horse ate up men’s lives, and a trail of living dead led from the Summit to Klondike, Miss Standish,” said Captain Rifle.  “You will meet many like him in Alaska.  And they remember.  You can see it in their faces—­always the memory of those days that are gone.”

She bowed her head a little, looking to the sea.  “And Alan Holt?  You know him well?”

“Few men know him well.  He is a part of Alaska itself, and I have sometimes thought him more aloof than the mountains.  But I know him.  All northern Alaska knows Alan Holt.  He has a reindeer range up beyond the Endicott Mountains and is always seeking the last frontier.”

“He must be very brave.”

“Alaska breeds heroic men, Miss Standish.”

“And honorable men—­men you can trust and believe in?”

“Yes.”

“It is odd,” she said, with a trembling little laugh that was like a bird-note in her throat.  “I have never seen Alaska before, and yet something about these mountains makes me feel that I have known them a long time ago.  I seem to feel they are welcoming me and that I am going home.  Alan Holt is a fortunate man.  I should like to be an Alaskan.”

“And you are—­”

“An American,” she finished for him, a sudden, swift irony in her voice.  “A poor product out of the melting-pot, Captain Rifle.  I am going north—­to learn.”

“Only that, Miss Standish?”

His question, quietly spoken and without emphasis, demanded an answer.  His kindly face, seamed by the suns and winds of many years at sea, was filled with honest anxiety as she turned to look straight into his eyes.

“I must press the question,” he said.  “As the captain of this ship, and as a father, it is my duty.  Is there not something you would like to tell me—­in confidence, if you will have it so?”

For an instant she hesitated, then slowly she shook her head.  “There is nothing, Captain Rifle.”

“And yet—­you came aboard very strangely,” he urged.  “You will recall that it was most unusual—­without reservation, without baggage—­”

“You forget the hand-bag,” she reminded him.

“Yes, but one does not start for northern Alaska with only a hand-bag scarcely large enough to contain a change of linen, Miss Standish.”

“But I did, Captain Rifle.”

“True.  And I saw you fighting past the guards like a little wildcat.  It was without precedent.”