Olaf felt resting upon him something of the responsibility of a doctor, and after supper he sat with his back to a tree and talked of the old days as if they were yesterday and the day before, with tomorrow always the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow which he had pursued for thirty years.  He was sixty just a week ago this evening, he said, and he was beginning to doubt if he would remain on the beach at Cordova much longer.  Siberia was dragging him—­that forbidden world of adventure and mystery and monumental opportunity which lay only a few miles across the strait from the Seward Peninsula.  In his enthusiasm he forgot Alan’s tragedy.  He cursed Cossack law and the prohibitory measures to keep Americans out.  More gold was over there than had ever been dreamed of in Alaska; even the mountains and rivers were unnamed; and he was going if he lived another year or two—­going to find his fortune or his end in the Stanovoi Mountains and among the Chukchi tribes.  Twice he had tried it since his old comrade had died, and twice he had been driven out.  The next time he would know how to go about it, and he invited Alan to go with him.

There was a thrill in this talk of a land so near, scarcely a night ride across the neck of Bering Sea, and yet as proscribed as the sacred plains of Tibet.  It stirred old desires in Alan’s blood, for he knew that of all frontiers the Siberian would be the last and the greatest, and that not only men, but nations, would play their part in the breaking of it.  He saw the red gleam of firelight in Olaf’s eyes.

“And if we don’t go in first from this side, Alan, the yellow fellows will come out some day from that," rumbled the old sour-dough, striking his pipe in the hollow of his hand.  “And when they do, they won’t come over to us in ones an’ twos an’ threes, but in millions.  That’s what the yellow fellows will do when they once get started, an’ it’s up to a few Alaska Jacks an’ Tough-Nut Bills to get their feet planted first on the other side.  Will you go?”

Alan shook his head.  “Some day—­but not now.”  The old flash was in his eyes and he was seeing the fight ahead of him again—­the fight to do his bit in striking the shackles of misgovernment from Alaska and rousing the world to an understanding of the menace which hung over her like a smoldering cloud.  “But you’re right about the danger,” he said.  “It won’t come from Japan to California.  It will pour like a flood through Siberia and jump to Alaska in a night.  It isn’t the danger of the yellow man alone, Olaf.  You’ve got to combine that with Bolshevism, the menace of blackest Russia.  A disease which, if it crosses the little neck of water and gets hold of Alaska, will shake the American continent to bed-rock.  It may be a generation from now, maybe a century, but it’s coming sure as God makes light—­if we let Alaska go down and out.  And my way of preventing it is different from yours.”