In his cool and causal way he admired Mary Standish.  She was very quiet, and he liked her because of that.  He could not, of course, escape the beauty of her eyes or the shimmering luster of the long lashes that darkened them.  But these were details which did not thrill him, but merely pleased him.  And her hair pleased him possibly even more than her gray eyes, though he was not sufficiently concerned to discuss the matter with himself.  But if he had pointed out any one thing, it would have been her hair—­not so much the color of it as the care she evidently gave it, and the manner in which she dressed it.  He noted that it was dark, with varying flashes of luster in it under the dinner lights.  But what he approved of most of all were the smooth, silky coils in which she fastened it to her pretty head.  It was an intense relief after looking on so many frowsy heads, bobbed and marcelled, during his six months’ visit in the States.  So he liked her, generally speaking, because there was not a thing about her that he might dislike.

He did not, of course, wonder what the girl might be thinking of him—­with his quiet, stern face, his cold indifference, his rather Indian-like litheness, and the single patch of gray that streaked his thick, blond hair.  His interest had not reached anywhere near that point.

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.  Such was his reaction after six months of exile, six months of loneliness and desolation in cities which he had learned to hate.

“I’ll not make the trip again—­not for a whole winter—­unless I’m sent at the point of a gun,” he said to Captain Rifle, a few moments after Mary Standish had left the deck.  “An Eskimo winter is long enough, but one in Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York is longer—­for me.”

“I understand they had you up before the Committee on Ways and Means at Washington.”

“Yes, along with Carl Lomen, of Nome.  But Lomen was the real man.  He has forty thousand head of reindeer in the Seward Peninsula, and they had to listen to him.  We may get action.”

“May!” Captain Rifle grunted his doubt.  “Alaska has been waiting ten years for a new deck and a new deal.  I doubt if you’ll get anything.  When politicians from Iowa and south Texas tell us what we can have and what we need north of Fifty-eight—­why, what’s the use?  Alaska might as well shut up shop!”

“But she isn’t going to do that,” said Alan Holt, his face grimly set in the moonlight.  “They’ve tried hard to get us, and they’ve made us shut up a lot of our doors.  In 1910 we were thirty-six thousand whites in the Territory.  Since then the politicians at Washington have driven out nine thousand, a quarter of the population.  But those that are left are hard-boiled.  We’re not going to quit, Captain.  A lot of us are Alaskans, and we are not afraid to fight.”