Alan made no effort to reply, except to shrug his shoulders.  They climbed up out of gloom into the light of the plain.  Smoothness of the tundra was gone on this side of the crevasse.  Ahead of them rolled up a low hill, and mountainward hills piled one upon another until they were lost in misty distance.  From the crest of the ridge they looked out into a vast sweep of tundra which ran in among the out-guarding billows and hills of the Endicott Mountains in the form of a wide, semicircular bay.  Beyond the next swell in the tundra lay the range, and scarcely had they reached this when Stampede drew his big gun from its holster.  Twice he blazed in the air.

“Orders,” he said a little sheepishly.  “Orders, Alan!”

Scarcely were the words out of his mouth when a yell came to them from beyond the light-mists that hovered like floating lace over the tundra.  It was joined by another, and still another, until there was such a sound that Alan knew Tautuk and Amuk Toolik and Topkok and Tatpan and all the others were splitting their throats in welcome, and with it very soon came a series of explosions that set the earth athrill under their feet.

“Bums!” growled Stampede.  “She’s got Chink lanterns hanging up all about, too.  You should have seen her face, Alan, when she found there was sunlight all night up here on July Fourth!”

From the range a pale streak went sizzling into the air, mounting until it seemed to pause for a moment to look down upon the gray world, then burst into innumerable little balls of puffy smoke.  Stampede blazed away with his forty-five, and Alan felt the thrill of it and emptied the magazine of his gun, the detonations of revolver and rifle drowning the chorus of sound that came from the range.  A second rocket answered them.  Two columns of flame leaped up from the earth as huge fires gained headway, and Alan could hear the shrill chorus of children’s voices mingling with the vocal tumult of men.  All the people of his range were there.  They had come in from the timber-naked plateaux and high ranges where the herds were feeding, and from the outlying shacks of the tundras to greet him.  Never had there been such a concentration of effort on the part of his people.  And Mary Standish was behind it all!  He knew he was fighting against odds when he tried to keep that fact from choking up his heart a little.

He had not heard what Stampede was saying—­that he and Amuk Toolik and forty kids had labored a week gathering dry moss and timber fuel for the big fires.  There were three of these fires now, and the tom-toms were booming their hollow notes over the tundra as Alan quickened his steps.  Over a little knoll, and he was looking at the buildings of the range, wildly excited figures running about, women and children flinging moss on the fires, the tom-tom beaters squatted in a half-circle facing the direction from which he would come, and fifty Chinese lanterns swinging in the soft night-breeze.