The reporter finished his period.  “Don’t let this interview bother you,” he said.  “It’s going into my paper straight, Mr. Banks, and in your own words.”

While he spoke, his vigilant glance rested lightly on one of the several guests scattered about the lobby.  He was a grave and thoughtful man and had seemed deeply engrossed in a magazine, but he had changed his seat for a chair within speaking distance, and Jimmie had not seen him turn a page.

“What I was going to say, then,” resumed Banks, “was that afterwards, when the orchards are in shape, I am going back to Alaska and take a bunch of those abandoned claims, where the miners have quit turning up the earth, and just seed ’em to oats and blue stem.  Either would do mighty well.  The sun shines hot long summer days, and the ground keeps moist from the melting snow on the mountains.  I’ve seen little patches of grain up there and hay ripening and standing high as my shoulder.  But what they need most in the interior is stock farms, horses and beeves, and I am going to take in a fine bunch of both; they’ll do fine; winter right along with the caribou and reindeer.”

“Well, that’s a new idea to me,” exclaimed Daniels.  “Alaska to me has always stood for blizzards, snow, glaciers, impregnable mountains, bleak and barren plains like the steppes of Russia, and privation, privation of the worst kind.”

Banks nodded grimly.  “That’s because the first of us got caught by winter unprepared.  Why, men freeze to death every blizzard right here in the States; sometimes it’s in Dakota; sometimes old New York, with railroads lacing back and forth close as shoestrings.  And imagine that big, unsettled Alaska interior without a single railroad and only one wagon-road; men most of the time breaking their own trails.  Not a town or a house sometimes in hundreds of miles to shelter ’em, if a storm happens to break.  But you talk with any Swede miner from up there.  He’ll tell you they could make a new Sweden out of Alaska.  Let us use the timber for building and fuel; let a man that’s got the money to do it start a lumber-mill or mine the coal.  Give us the same land and mineral laws you have here in the States, and homeseekers would flock in thick as birds in springtime.”

The stranger closed his magazine.  “Pardon me,” he said, taking advantage of the pause, “but do you mean that Conservation is all that is keeping home-seekers out of Alaska?”

Banks nodded this time with a kind of fierceness; his eyes scintillated a white heat, but he suppressed the imminent explosion and began with forced mildness, “My, yes.  But you imagine a man trying to locate with ninety-five per cent. of the country reserved.  First you’ve got to consider the Coast Range.  The great wall of China’s nothing but a line of ninepins to the Chugach and St. Elias wall.  The Almighty builds strong, and he set that wall to hold the Pacific Ocean back.  Imagine peaks piled miles high and cemented together with glaciers; the