first mad desire to call her back from Nawadlook’s room, to hold her in his arms again as he had held her in the cottonwoods, brought a hot fire into his face.  Something greater than his own fighting instinct had turned him to the open door of the cabin.  It was Mary Standish—­her courage, the-glory of faith and love shining in her eyes, her measurement of him as a man.  She had not been afraid to say what was in her heart, because she knew what he would do.

Mid-afternoon found him waiting for Tautuk and Amuk Toolik at the edge of a slough where willows grew deep and green and the crested billows of sedge-cotton stood knee-high.  The faces of the herdsmen were sweating.  Thereafter Alan walked with them, until in that hour when the sun had sunk to its lowest plane they came to the first of the Endicott foothills.  Here they rested until the coolness of deeper evening, when a golden twilight filled the land, and then resumed the journey toward the mountains.

Midsummer heat and the winged pests of the lower lands had driven the herds steadily into the cooler altitudes of the higher plateaux and valleys.  Here they had split into telescoping columns which drifted in slowly moving streams wherever the doors of the hills and mountains opened into new grazing fields, until Alan’s ten thousand reindeer were in three divisions, two of the greatest traveling westward, and one, of a thousand head, working north and east.  The first and second days Alan remained with the nearest and southward herd.  The third day he went on with Tautuk and two pack-deer through a break in the mountains and joined the herdsmen of the second and higher multitude of feeding animals.  There began to possess him a curious disinclination to hurry, and this aversion grew in a direct ratio with the thought which was becoming stronger in him with each mile and hour of his progress.  A multitude of emotions were buried under the conviction that Mary Standish must leave the range when he returned.  He had a grim sense of honor, and a particularly devout one when it had to do with women, and though he conceded nothing of right and justice in the relationship which existed between the woman he loved and John Graham, he knew that she must go.  To remain at the range was the one impossible thing for her to do.  He would take her to Tanana.  He would go with her to the States.  The matter would be settled in a reasonable and intelligent way, and when he came back, he would bring her with him.

But beneath this undercurrent of decision fought the thing which his will held down, and yet never quite throttled completely—­that something which urged him with an unconquerable persistence to hold with his own hands what a glorious fate had given him, and to finish with John Graham, if it ever came to that, in the madly desirable way he visioned for himself in those occasional moments when the fires of temptation blazed hottest.

The fourth night he said to Tautuk: