No matter what she was, or had been, there was something
tenaciously admirable about her, a quality which had
risen even above her feminine loveliness. She
had proved herself not only clever; she was inspired
by courage—a courage which he would have
been compelled to respect even in a man like John
Graham, and in this slim and fragile girl it appealed
to him as a virtue to be laid up apart and aside from
any of the motives which might be directing it.
From the beginning it had been a bewildering part
of her—a clean, swift, unhesitating courage
that had leaped bounds where his own volition and
judgment would have hung waveringly; that one courage
in all the world—a woman’s courage—which
finds in the effort of its achievement no obstacle
too high and no abyss too wide though death waits
with outreaching arms on the other side. And,
surely, where there had been all this, there must also
have been some deeper and finer impulse than one of
destruction, of physical gain, or of mere duty in
the weaving of a human scheme.
The thought and the desire to believe brought words
half aloud from Alan’s lips, as he looked up
again at the flags beating softly above his cabin.
Mary Standish was not what Stampede’s discovery
had proclaimed her to be; there was some mistake,
a monumental stupidity of reasoning on their part,
and tomorrow would reveal the littleness and the injustice
of their suspicions. He tried to force the conviction
upon himself, and reentering the cabin he went to
bed, still telling himself that a great lie had built
itself up out of nothing, and that the God of all
things was good to him because Mary Standish was alive,
and not dead.
CHAPTER XVII
Alan slept soundly for several hours, but the long
strain of the preceding day did not make him overreach
the time he had set for himself, and he was up at
six o’clock. Wegaruk had not forgotten her
old habits, and a tub filled with cold water was waiting
for him. He bathed, shaved himself, put on fresh
clothes, and promptly at seven was at breakfast.
The table at which he ordinarily sat alone was in a
little room with double windows, through which, as
he enjoyed his meals, he could see most of the habitations
of the range. Unlike the average Eskimo dwellings
they were neatly built of small timber brought down
from the mountains, and were arranged in orderly fashion
like the cottages of a village, strung out prettily
on a single street. A sea of flowers lay in front
of them, and at the end of the row, built on a little
knoll that looked down into one of the watered hollows
of the tundra, was Sokwenna’s cabin. Because
Sokwenna was the “old man” of the community
and therefore the wisest—and because with
him lived his foster-daughters, Keok and Nawadlook,
the loveliest of Alan’s tribal colony—Sokwenna’s
cabin was next to Alan’s in size. And Alan,
looking at it now and then as he ate his breakfast,
saw a thin spiral of smoke rising from the chimney,
but no other sign of life.
