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. 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.
So God had been good to him. He was helping to
write the last page in that history which would go
down through the eons of time, written in the red
blood of men who had cut the first trails into the
unknown. After him, there would be no more frontiers.
No more mysteries of unknown lands to solve.
No more pioneering hazards to make. The earth
would be tamed. And suddenly he thought of Mary
Standish and of what she had said to him in the dusk
of evening. Strange that it had been her
thought, too—that she would always love
tents and old trails and nature’s barriers,
and hated to see cities and railroads and automobiles
come to Alaska. He shrugged his shoulders.
Probably she had guessed what was in his own mind,
for she was clever, very clever.
A tap at his door drew his eyes from the open watch
in his hand. It was a quarter after twelve o’clock,
an unusual hour for someone to be tapping at his door.
It was repeated—a bit hesitatingly, he
thought. Then it came again, quick and decisive.
Replacing his watch in his pocket, he opened the door.
It was Mary Standish who stood facing him.
He saw only her eyes at first, wide-open, strange,
frightened eyes. And then he saw the pallor of
her face as she came slowly in, without waiting for
him to speak or give her permission to enter.
And it was Mary Standish herself who closed the door,
while he stared at her in stupid wonderment—and
stood there with her back against it, straight and
slim and deathly pale.
“May I come in?” she asked.
“My God, you’re in!” gasped Alan.
“You’re in.”
CHAPTER VII
That it was past midnight, and Mary Standish had deliberately
come to his room, entering it and closing the door
without a word or a nod of invitation from him, seemed
incredible to Alan. After his first explosion
of astonishment he stood mute, while the girl looked
at him steadily and her breath came a little quickly.
But she was not excited. Even in his amazement
he could see that. What he had thought was fright
had gone out of her eyes. But he had never seen
her so white, and never had she appeared quite so
slim and childish-looking as while she stood there
in these astounding moments with her back against the
door.
