endless nights, desolate barrens, and craggy mountains frowning everlastingly upon a blasted land in which men fought against odds and only the fittest survived.  It was gold that had been Alaska’s doom.  When people thought of it, they visioned nothing beyond the old stampede days, the Chilkoot, White Horse, Dawson, and Circle City.  Romance and glamor and the tragedies of dead men clung to their ribs.  But they were beginning to believe now.  Their eyes were opening.  Even the Government was waking up, after proving there was something besides graft in railroad building north of Mount St. Elias.  Senators and Congressmen at Washington had listened to him seriously, and especially to Carl Lomen.  And the beef barons, wisest of all, had tried to buy him off and had offered a fortune for Lomen’s forty thousand head of reindeer in the Seward Peninsula!  That was proof of the awakening.  Absolute proof.

He lighted a fresh cigar, and his mind shot through the dissolving mist into the vast land ahead of him.  Some Alaskans had cursed Theodore Roosevelt for putting what they called “the conservation shackles” on their country.  But he, for one, did not.  Roosevelt’s far-sightedness had kept the body-snatchers at bay, and because he had foreseen what money-power and greed would do, Alaska was not entirely stripped today, but lay ready to serve with all her mighty resources the mother who had neglected her for a generation.  But it was going to be a struggle, this opening up of a great land.  It must be done resourcefully and with intelligence.  Once the bars were down, Roosevelt’s shadow-hand could not hold back such desecrating forces as John Graham and the syndicate he represented.

Thought of Graham was an unpleasant reminder, and his face grew hard in the sea-mist.  Alaskans themselves must fight against the licensed plunderers.  And it would be a hard fight.  He had seen the pillaging work of these financial brigands in a dozen states during the past winter—­states raped of their forests, their lakes and streams robbed and polluted, their resources hewn down to naked skeletons.  He had been horrified and a little frightened when he looked over the desolation of Michigan, once the richest timber state in America.  What if the Government at Washington made it possible for such a thing to happen in Alaska?  Politics—­and money—­were already fighting for just that thing.

He no longer heard the throb of the ship under his feet.  It was his fight, and brain and muscle reacted to it almost as if it had been a physical thing.  And his end of that fight he was determined to win, if it took every year of his life.  He, with a few others, would prove to the world that the millions of acres of treeless tundras of the north were not the cast-off ends of the earth.  They would populate them, and the so-called “barrens” would thunder to the innumerable hoofs of reindeer herds as the American plains had never thundered to the beat of cattle.  He was not thinking of the treasure he would find at the end of this rainbow of success which he visioned.  Money, simply as money, he hated.  It was the achievement of the thing that gripped him; the passion to hew a trail through which his beloved land might come into its own, and the desire to see it achieve a final triumph by feeding a half of that America which had laughed at it and kicked it when it was down.