But with this prosperity of the present and still greater promise for the future Alan sensed the undercurrent of unrest and suspicion in Nome.  After waiting and hoping through another long winter, with their best men fighting for Alaska’s salvation at Washington, word was traveling from mouth to mouth, from settlement to settlement, and from range to range, that the Bureaucracy which misgoverned them from thousands of miles away was not lifting a hand to relieve them.  Federal office-holders refused to surrender their deadly power, and their strangling methods were to continue.  Coal, which should cost ten dollars a ton if dug from Alaskan mines, would continue to cost forty dollars; cold storage from Nome would continue to be fifty-two dollars a ton, when it should be twenty.  Commercial brigandage was still given letters of marque.  Bureaus were fighting among themselves for greater power, and in the turmoil Alaska was still chained like a starving man just outside the reach of all the milk and honey in a wonderful land.  Pauperizing, degrading, actually killing, the political misrule that had already driven 25 per cent of Alaska’s population from their homes was to continue indefinitely.  A President of the United States had promised to visit the mighty land of the north and see with his own eyes.  But would he come?  There had been other promises, many of them, and promises had always been futile.  But it was a hope that crept through Alaska, and upon this hope men whose courage never died began to build.  Freedom was on its way, even if slowly.  Justice must triumph ultimately, as it always triumphed.  Rusty keys would at last be turned in the locks which had kept from Alaskans all the riches and resources of their country, and these men were determined to go on building against odds that they might be better prepared for that freedom of human endeavor when it came.

In these days, when the fires of achievement needed to be encouraged, and not smothered, neither Alan nor Carl Lomen emphasized the menace of gigantic financial interests like that controlled by John Graham—­interests fighting to do away with the best friend Alaska ever had, the Biological Survey, and backing with all their power the ruinous legislation to put Alaska in the control of a group of five men that an aggrandizement even more deadly than a suffocating policy of conservation might be more easily accomplished.  Instead, they spread the optimism of men possessed of inextinguishable faith.  The blackest days were gone.  Rifts were breaking in the clouds.  Intelligence was creeping through, like rays of sunshine.  The end of Alaska’s serfdom was near at hand.  So they preached, and knew they were preaching truth, for what remained of Alaska’s men after years of hopelessness and distress were fighting men.  And the women who had remained with them were the mothers and wives of a new nation in the making.