herds, and his people.  There, he had told her, a new world was in the making, and the glow in her eyes and the thrilling something in her voice had urged him on until he forgot that Rossland was waiting at the ship’s gangway to see when they returned.  He had built up for her his castles in the air, and the miracle of it was that she had helped him to build them.  He had described for her the change that was creeping slowly over Alaska, the replacement of mountain trails by stage and automobile highways, the building of railroads, the growth of cities where tents had stood a few years before.  It was then, when he had pictured progress and civilization and the breaking down of nature’s last barriers before science and invention, that he had seen a cloud of doubt in her gray eyes.

And now, as they stood on the deck of the Nome looking at the white peaks of the mountains dissolving into the lavender mist of twilight, doubt and perplexity were still deeper in her eyes, and she said: 

“I would always love tents and old trails and nature’s barriers.  I envy Belinda Mulrooney, whom you told me about this afternoon.  I hate cities and railroads and automobiles, and all that goes with them, and I am sorry to see those things come to Alaska.  And I, too, hate this man—­John Graham!”

Her words startled him.

“And I want you to tell me what he is doing—­with his money—­now.”  Her voice was cold, and one little hand, he noticed, was clenched at the edge of the rail.

“He has stripped Alaskan waters of fish resources which will never be replaced, Miss Standish.  But that is not all.  I believe I state the case well within fact when I say he has killed many women and little children by robbing the inland waters of the food supplies upon which the natives have subsisted for centuries.  I know.  I have seen them die.”

It seemed to him that she swayed against him for an instant.

“And that—­is all?”

He laughed grimly.  “Possibly some people would think it enough, Miss Standish.  But the tentacles of his power are reaching everywhere in Alaska.  His agents swarm throughout the territory, and Soapy Smith was a gentleman outlaw compared with these men and their master.  If men like John Graham are allowed to have their way, in ten years greed and graft will despoil what two hundred years of Rooseveltian conservation would not be able to replace.”

She raised her head, and in the dusk her pale face looked up at the ghost-peaks of the mountains still visible through the thickening gloom of evening.  “I am glad you told me about Belinda Mulrooney,” she said.  “I am beginning to understand, and it gives me courage to think of a woman like her.  She could fight, couldn’t she?  She could make a man’s fight?”

“Yes, and did make it.”

“And she had no money to give her power.  Her last dollar, you told me, she flung into the Yukon for luck.”