The Alaskan

by James Oliver Curwood

Mary heard the names of the men called who were to stay. The others hurried away. The firing in the kloof was steady now. But there were no cries, no shouts—nothing but the ominous crack of the rifles.

Graham’s arms closed about her again. Then he picked her up and carried her back into the cavern, and in a place where the rock wall sagged inward, making a pocket of gloom which was shut out from the light of day, he laid her upon the carpet of sand.

Where the erosion of many centuries of dripping water had eaten its first step in the making of the ragged fissure a fairy had begun to climb down from the edge of the tundra. He was a swift and agile fairy, very red in the face, breathing fast from hard running, but making not a sound as he came like a gopher where it seemed no living thing could find a hold. And the fairy was Stampede Smith.

From the lips of the kloof he had seen the last few seconds of the tragedy below, and where death would have claimed him in a more reasonable moment he came down in safety now. In his finger-ends was the old tingling of years ago, and in his blood the thrill which he had thought was long dead—the thrill of looking over leveled guns into the eyes of other men. Time had rolled back, and he was the old Stampede Smith. He saw under him lust and passion and murder, as in other days he had seen them, and between him and desire there was neither law nor conscience to bar the way, and his dream—a last great fight—was here to fill the final unwritten page of a life’s drama that was almost closed. And what a fight, if he could make that carpet of soft, white sand unheard and unseen. Six to one! Six men with guns at their sides and rifles in their hands. What a glorious end it would be, for a woman—and Alan Holt!

He blessed the firing up the kloof which kept the men’s faces turned that way; he thanked God for the sound of combat, which made the scraping of rock and the rattle of stones under his feet unheard. He was almost down when a larger rock broke loose, and fell to the ledge. Two of the men turned, but in that same instant came a more thrilling interruption. A cry, a shrill scream, a woman’s voice filled with madness and despair, came from the depth of the cavern, and the five men stared in the direction of its agony. Close upon the cries came Mary Standish, with Graham behind her, reaching out his hands for her. The girl’s hair was flying, her face the color of the white sand, and Graham’s eyes were the eyes of a demon forgetful of all else but her. He caught her. The slim body crumpled in his arms again while pitifully weak hands beat futilely in his face.

And then came a cry such as no man had ever heard in Ghost Kloof before.

It was Stampede Smith. A sheer twenty feet he had leaped to the carpet of sand, and as he jumped his hands whipped out his two guns, and scarcely had his feet touched the floor of the soft pocket in the ledge when death crashed from them swift as lightning flashes, and three of the five were tottering or falling before the other two could draw or swing a rifle. Only one of them had fired a shot. The other went down as if his legs had been knocked from under him by a club, and the one who fired bent forward then, as if making a bow to death, and pitched on his face.

And then Stampede Smith whirled upon John Graham.

During these few swift seconds Graham had stood stunned, with the girl crushed against his breast. He was behind her, sheltered by her body, her head protecting his heart, and as Stampede turned he was drawing a gun, his dark face blazing with the fiendish knowledge that the other could not shoot without killing the girl. The horror of the situation gripped Stampede. He saw Graham’s pistol rise slowly and deliberately. He watched it, fascinated. And the look in Graham’s face was the cold and unexcited triumph of a devil. Stampede saw only that face. It was four inches—perhaps five—away from the girl’s. There was only that—and the extending arm, the crooking finger, the black mouth of the automatic seeking his heart. And then, in that last second, straight into the girl’s staring eyes blazed Stampede’s gun, and the four inches of leering face behind her was suddenly blotted out. It was Stampede, and not the girl, who closed his eyes then; and when he opened them and saw Mary Standish sobbing over Alan’s body, and Graham lying face down in the sand, he reverently raised the gun from which he had fired the last shot, and pressed its hot barrel to his thin lips.

Then he went to Alan. He raised the limp head, while Mary bowed her face in her hands. In her anguish she prayed that she, too, might die, for in this hour of triumph over Graham there was no hope or joy for her. Alan was gone. Only death could have come with that terrible red blot on his forehead, just under the gray streak in his hair. And without him there was no longer a reason for her to live.