He turned again to the window, but he did not see the golden sun of the tundra or hear Tautuk calling from the corral.

“When we came back,” he repeated in a cold, hard voice, “a construction camp of a hundred men had invaded my father’s little paradise.  The cabin was gone; a channel had been cut from the waterfall, and this channel ran where my mother’s grave had been.  They had treated it with that same desecration with which they have destroyed ten thousand Indian graves since then.  Her bones were scattered in the sand and mud.  And from the moment my father saw what had happened, never another sun rose in the heavens for him.  His heart died, yet he went on living—­for a time.”

Mary Standish had bowed her face in her hands.  He saw the tremor of her slim shoulders; and when he came back, and she looked up at him, it was as if he beheld the pallid beauty of one of the white tundra flowers.

“And the man who committed that crime—­was John Graham,” she said, in the strangely passionless voice of one who knew what his answer would be.

“Yes, John Graham.  He was there, representing big interests in the States.  The foreman had objected to what happened; many of the men had protested; a few of them, who knew my father, had thrown up their work rather than be partners to that crime.  But Graham had the legal power; they say he laughed as if he thought it a great joke that a cabin and a grave should be considered obstacles in his way.  And he laughed when my father and I went to see him; yes, laughed, in that noiseless, oily, inside way of his, as you might think of a snake laughing.

“We found him among the men.  My God, you don’t know how I hated him!—­Big, loose, powerful, dangling the watch-fob that hung over his vest, and looking at my father in that way as he told him what a fool he was to think a worthless grave should interfere with his work.  I wanted to kill him, but my father put a hand on my shoulder, a quiet, steady hand, and said:  ‘It is my duty, Alan. My duty.’

“And then—­it happened.  My father was older, much older than Graham, but God put such strength in him that day as I had never seen before, and with his naked hands he would have killed the brute if I had not unlocked them with my own.  Before all his men Graham became a mass of helpless pulp, and from the ground, with the last of the breath that was in him, he cursed my father, and he cursed me.  He said that all the days of his life he would follow us, until we paid a thousand times for what we had done.  And then my father dragged him as he would have dragged a rat to the edge of a piece of bush, and there he tore his clothes from him until the brute was naked; and in that nakedness he scourged him with whips until his arms were weak, and John Graham was unconscious and like a great hulk of raw beef.  When it was over, we went into the mountains.”

During the terrible recital Mary Standish had not looked away from him, and now her hands were clenched like his own, and her eyes and face were aflame, as if she wanted to leap up and strike at something unseen between them.