“You like mine?”

“Very much.”

He was amazed at the admission, so much so that he puffed out a huge cloud of smoke from his cigar in mental protest.

They had come to the smoking-room again.  This was an innovation aboard the Nome.  There was no other like it in the Alaskan service, with its luxurious space, its comfortable hospitality, and the observation parlor built at one end for those ladies who cared to sit with their husbands while they smoked their after-dinner cigars.

“If you want to hear about Alaska and see some of its human make-up, let’s go in,” he suggested.  “I know; of no better place.  Are you afraid of smoke?”

“No.  If I were a man, I would smoke.”

“Perhaps you do?”

“I do not.  When I begin that, if you please, I shall bob my hair.”

“Which would be a crime,” he replied so earnestly that again he was surprised at himself.

Two or three ladies, with their escorts, were in the parlor when they entered.  The huge main room, covering a third of the aft deck, was blue with smoke.  A score of men were playing cards at round tables.  Twice as many were gathered in groups, talking, while others walked aimlessly up and down the carpeted floor.  Here and there were men who sat alone.  A few were asleep, which made Alan look at his watch.  Then he observed Mary Standish studying the innumerable bundles of neatly rolled blankets that lay about.  One of them was at her feet.  She touched it with her toe.

“What do they mean?” she asked.

“We are overloaded,” he explained.  “Alaskan steam-ships have no steerage passengers as we generally know them.  It isn’t poverty that rides steerage when you go north.  You can always find a millionaire or two on the lower deck.  When they get sleepy, most of the men you see in there will unroll blankets and sleep on the floor.  Did you ever see an earl?”

He felt it his duty to make explanations now that he had brought her in, and directed her attention to the third table on their left.  Three men were seated at this table.

“The man facing us, the one with a flabby face and pale mustache, is an earl—­I forget his name,” he said.  “He doesn’t look it, but he is a real sport.  He is going up to shoot Kadiak bears, and sleeps on the floor.  The group beyond them, at the fifth table, are Treadwell mining men, and that fellow you see slouched against the wall, half asleep, with whiskers nearly to his waist, is Stampede Smith, an old-time partner of George Carmack, who discovered gold on Bonanza Creek in Ninety-six.  The thud of Carmack’s spade, as it hit first pay, was the ’sound heard round the world,’ Miss Standish.  And the gentleman with crumpled whiskers was the second-best man at Bonanza, excepting Skookum Jim and Taglish Charlie, two Siwah Indians who were with Carmack when the strike was made.  Also, if you care for the romantic, he was in love with Belinda Mulrooney, the most courageous woman who ever came into the north.”