“And after that, Alan; after that—”
She did not know that she had spoken his name, and
he, hearing it, scarcely understood.
“John Graham kept his promise,” he answered
grimly. “The influence and money behind
him haunted us wherever we went. My father had
been successful, but one after another the properties
in which he was interested were made worthless.
A successful mine in which he was most heavily interested
was allowed to become abandoned. A hotel which
he partly owned in Dawson was bankrupted. One
after another things happened, and after each happening
my father would receive a polite note of regret from
Graham, written as if the word actually came from a
friend. But my father cared little for money losses
now. His heart was drying up and his life ebbing
away for the little cabin and the grave that were
gone from the foot of the mountain. It went on
this way for three years, and then, one morning, my
father was found on the beach at Nome, dead.”
“Dead!”
Alan heard only the gasping breath in which the word
came from Mary Standish, for he was facing the window,
looking steadily away from her.
“Yes—murdered. I know it was
the work of John Graham. He didn’t do it
personally, but it was his money that accomplished
the end. Of course nothing ever came of it.
I won’t tell you how his influence and power
have dogged me; how they destroyed the first herd of
reindeer I had, and how they filled the newspapers
with laughter and lies about me when I was down in
the States last winter in an effort to make your
people see a little something of the truth about Alaska.
I am waiting. I know the day is coming when I
shall have John Graham as my father had him under
our mountain twenty years ago. He must be fifty
now. But that won’t save him when the time
comes. No one will loosen my hands as I loosened
my father’s. And all Alaska will rejoice,
for his power and his money have become twin monsters
that are destroying Alaska just as he destroyed the
life of my father. Unless he dies, and his money-power
ends, he will make of this great land nothing more
than a shell out of which he and his kind have taken
all the meat. And the hour of deadliest danger
is now upon us.”
He looked at Mary Standish, and it was as if death
had come to her where she sat. She seemed not
to breathe, and her face was so white it frightened
him. And then, slowly, she turned her eyes upon
him, and never had he seen such living pools of torture
and of horror. He was amazed at the quietness
of her voice when she began to speak, and startled
by the almost deadly coldness of it.
“I think you can understand—now—why
I leaped into the sea, why I wanted the world to think
I was dead, and why I have feared to tell you the
truth,” she said. “I am John Graham’s
wife.”
