of the Saw-Tooth Range, looking as if one might walk to them in half an hour, and over all the world between seemed to hover a misty gloom.  But it was where he had lived, where happiness and tragedy and unforgetable memories had come to him, and the welcoming of its frame buildings, its crooked streets, and what to others might have been ugliness, was a warm and thrilling thing.  For here were his people.  Here were the men and women who were guarding the northern door of the world, an epic place, filled with strong hearts, courage, and a love of country as inextinguishable as one’s love of life.  From this drab little place, shut out from all the world for half the year, young men and women went down to southern universities, to big cities, to the glamor and lure of “outside.”  But they always came back.  Nome called them.  Its loneliness in winter.  Its gray gloom in springtime.  Its glory in summer and autumn.  It was the breeding-place of a new race of men, and they loved it as Alan loved it.  To him the black wireless tower meant more than the Statue of Liberty, the three weather-beaten church spires more than the architectural colossi of New York and Washington.  Beside one of the churches he had played as a boy.  He had seen the steeples painted.  He had helped make the crooked streets.  And his mother had laughed and lived and died here, and his father’s footprints had been in the white sands of the beach when tents dotted the shore like gulls.

When he stepped ashore, people stared at him and then greeted him.  He was unexpected.  And the surprise of his arrival added strength to the grip which men’s hands gave him.  He had not heard voices like theirs down in the States, with a gladness in them that was almost excitement.  Small boys ran up to his side, and with white men came the Eskimo, grinning and shaking his hands.  Word traveled swiftly that Alan Holt had come back from the States.  Before the day was over, it was on its way to Shelton and Candle and Keewalik and Kotzebue Sound.  Such was the beginning of his home-coming.  But ahead of the news of his arrival Alan walked up Front Street, stopped at Bahlke’s restaurant for a cup of coffee, and then dropped casually into Lomen’s offices in the Tin Bank Building.

For a week Alan remained in Nome.  Carl Lomen had arrived a few days before, and his brothers were “in” from the big ranges over on the Choris Peninsula.  It had been a good winter and promised to be a tremendously successful summer.  The Lomen herds would exceed forty thousand head, when the final figures were in.  A hundred other herds were prospering, and the Eskimo and Lapps were full-cheeked and plump with good feeding and prosperity.  A third of a million reindeer were on the hoof in Alaska, and the breeders were exultant.  Pretty good, when compared with the fact that in 1902 there were less than five thousand!  In another twenty years there would be ten million.