Olaf had seen him face death like that.  He had seen him rise up with awesome courage from the beautiful form that had turned to clay under his eyes, and fight forth again into a world burned to ashes.  Something of that look which he had seen in the eyes of the father he saw in Alan’s, in these days when they nosed their way up the Alaskan coast together.  Only to himself did Alan speak the name of Mary Standish, just as his father had kept Elizabeth Holt’s name sacred in his own heart.  Olaf, with mildly casual eyes and strong in the possession of memories, observed how much alike they were, but discretion held his tongue, and he said nothing to Alan of many things that ran in his mind.

He talked of Siberia—­always of Siberia, and did not hurry on the way to Seward.  Alan himself felt no great urge to make haste.  The days were soft with the premature breath of summer.  The nights were cold, and filled with stars.  Day after day mountains hung about them like mighty castles whose battlements reached up into the cloud-draperies of the sky.  They kept close to the mainland and among the islands, camping early each evening.  Birds were coming northward by the thousand, and each night Olaf’s camp-fire sent up the delicious aroma of flesh-pots and roasts.  When at last they reached Seward, and the time came for Olaf to turn back, there was an odd blinking in the old Swede’s eyes, and as a final comfort Alan told him again that the day would probably come when he would go to Siberia with him.  After that, he watched the Norden until the little boat was lost in the distance of the sea.

Alone, Alan felt once more a greater desire to reach his own country.  And he was fortunate.  Two days after his arrival at Seward the steamer which carried mail and the necessities of life to the string of settlements reaching a thousand miles out into the Pacific left Resurrection Bay, and he was given passage.  Thereafter the countless islands of the North Pacific drifted behind, while always northward were the gray cliffs of the Alaskan Peninsula, with the ramparted ranges beyond, glistening with glaciers, smoking with occasional volcanoes, and at times so high their snowy peaks were lost in the clouds.  First touching the hatchery at Karluk and then the canneries at Uyak and Chignik, the mail boat visited the settlements on the Island of Unga, and thence covered swiftly the three hundred miles to Dutch Harbor and Unalaska.  Again he was fortunate.  Within a week he was berthed on a freighter, and on the twelfth day of June set foot in Nome.

His home-coming was unheralded, but the little, gray town, with its peculiar, black shadowings, its sea of stove-pipes, and its two solitary brick chimneys, brought a lump of joy into his throat as he watched its growing outlines from the small boat that brought him ashore.  He could see one of the only two brick chimneys in northern Alaska gleaming in the sun; beyond it, fifty miles away, were the ragged peaks