He stared into the fire, watching the embers flare up and die.  “I’m not proud of the States,” he went on, as if speaking to something which he saw in the flames.  “I can’t be, after the ruin their unintelligent propaganda and legislation have brought upon Alaska.  But they’re our salvation and conditions are improving.  I concede we have factions in Alaska and we are not at all unanimous in what we want.  It’s going to be largely a matter of education.  We can’t take Alaska down to the States—­we’ve got to bring them up to us.  We must make a large part of a hundred and ten million Americans understand.  We must bring a million of them up here before that danger-flood we speak of comes beyond the Gulf of Anadyr.  It’s God’s own country we have north of Fifty-eight, Olaf.  And we have ten times the wealth of California.  We can care for a million people easily.  But bad politics and bad judgment both here in Alaska and at Washington won’t let them come.  With coal enough under our feet to last a thousand years, we are buying fuel from the States.  We’ve got billions in copper and oil, but can’t touch them.  We should have some of the world’s greatest manufacturing plants, but we can not, because everything up here is locked away from us.  I repeat that isn’t conservation.  If they had applied a little of it to the salmon industry—­but they didn’t.  And the salmon are going, like the buffalo of the plains.

“The destruction of the salmon shows what will happen to us if the bars are let down all at once to the financial banditti.  Understanding and common sense must guard the gates.  The fight we must win is to bring about an honest and reasonable adjustment, Olaf.  And that fight will take place right here—­in Alaska—­and not in Siberia.  And if we don’t win—­”

He raised his eyes from the fire and smiled grimly into Olaf’s bearded face.

“Then we can count on that thing coming across the neck of sea from the Gulf of Anadyr,” he finished.  “And if it ever does come, the people of the States will at last face the tragic realization of what Alaska could have meant to the nation.”

The force of the old spirit surged uppermost in Alan again, and after that, for an hour or more, something lived for him in the glow of the fire which Olaf kept burning.  It was the memory of Mary Standish, her quiet, beautiful eyes gazing at him, her pale face taking form in the lacy wisps of birch-smoke.  His mind pictured her in the flame-glow as she had listened to him that day in Skagway, when he had told her of this fight that was ahead.  And it pleased him to think she would have made this same fight for Alaska if she had lived.  It was a thought which brought a painful thickening in his breath, for always these visions which Olaf could not see ended with Mary Standish as she had faced him in his cabin, her back against the door, her lips trembling, and her eyes softly radiant with tears in the broken pride of that last moment of her plea for life.