There was a certain bellicose twist to his mind as he went down to the dining salon, an obstinate determination to hold himself aloof from any increasing intimacy with Mary Standish.  No matter how pleasing his experience had been, he resented the idea of being commandeered at unexpected moments.  Had Mary Standish read his thoughts, her bearing toward him during the dinner hour could not have been more satisfying.  There was, in a way, something seductively provocative about it.  She greeted him with the slightest inclination of her head and a cool little smile.  Her attitude did not invite spoken words, either from him or from his neighbors, yet no one would have accused her of deliberate reserve.

Her demure unapproachableness was a growing revelation to him, and he found himself interested in spite of the new law of self-preservation he had set down for himself.  He could not keep his eyes from stealing glimpses at her hair when her head was bowed a little.  She had smoothed it tonight until it was like softest velvet, with rich glints in it, and the amazing thought came to him that it would be sweetly pleasant to touch with one’s hand.  The discovery was almost a shock.  Keok and Nawadlook had beautiful hair, but he had never thought of it in this way.  And he had never thought of Keok’s pretty mouth as he was thinking of the girl’s opposite him.  He shifted uneasily and was glad Mary Standish did not look at him in these moments of mental unbalance.

When he left the table, the girl scarcely noticed his going.  It was as if she had used him and then calmly shuttled him out of the way.  He tried to laugh as he hunted up Stampede Smith.  He found him, half an hour later, feeding a captive bear on the lower deck.  It was odd, he thought, that a captive bear should be going north.  Stampede explained.  The animal was a pet and belonged to the Thlinkit Indians.  There were seven, getting off at Cordova.  Alan observed that the two girls watched him closely and whispered together.  They were very pretty, with large, dark eyes and pink in their cheeks.  One of the men did not look at him at all, but sat cross-legged on the deck, with his face turned away.

With Stampede he went to the smoking-room, and until a late hour they discussed the big range up under the Endicott Mountains, and Alan’s plans for the future.  Once, early in the evening, Alan went to his cabin to get maps and photographs.  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.