“Never.”
Alan heard the other’s grunt of disgust.
“You’re reindeer-crazy,” he grumbled. “There’s gold in this canyon. Twice I’ve found it where there were dead men’s bones. They bring me good luck.”
“But these were Eskimos. They didn’t come for gold.”
“I know it. The Boss settled that for me. When she heard what was the matter with this place, she made me take her into it. Nerve? Say, I’m telling you there wasn’t any of it left out of her when she was born!” He was silent for a moment, and then added: “When we came to that dripping, slimy rock with the big yellow skull layin’ there like a poison toadstool, she didn’t screech and pull back, but just gave a little gasp and stared at it hard, and her fingers pinched my arm until it hurt. It was a devilish-looking thing, yellow as a sick orange and soppy with the drip of the wet moss over it. I wanted to blow it to pieces, and I guess I would if she hadn’t put a hand on my gun. An’ with a funny little smile she says: ‘Don’t do it, Stampede. It makes me think of someone I know—and I wouldn’t want you to shoot him.’ Darned funny thing to say, wasn’t it? Made her think of someone she knew! Now, who the devil could look like a rotten skull?”
Alan made no effort to reply, except to shrug his shoulders. They climbed up out of gloom into the light of the plain. Smoothness of the tundra was gone on this side of the crevasse. Ahead of them rolled up a low hill, and mountainward hills piled one upon another until they were lost in misty distance. From the crest of the ridge they looked out into a vast sweep of tundra which ran in among the out-guarding billows and hills of the Endicott Mountains in the form of a wide, semicircular bay. Beyond the next swell in the tundra lay the range, and scarcely had they reached this when Stampede drew his big gun from its holster. Twice he blazed in the air.
“Orders,” he said a little sheepishly. “Orders, Alan!”
Scarcely were the words out of his mouth when a yell came to them from beyond the light-mists that hovered like floating lace over the tundra. It was joined by another, and still another, until there was such a sound that Alan knew Tautuk and Amuk Toolik and Topkok and Tatpan and all the others were splitting their throats in welcome, and with it very soon came a series of explosions that set the earth athrill under their feet.
“Bums!” growled Stampede. “She’s got Chink lanterns hanging up all about, too. You should have seen her face, Alan, when she found there was sunlight all night up here on July Fourth!”
From the range a pale streak went sizzling into the air, mounting until it seemed to pause for a moment to look down upon the gray world, then burst into innumerable little balls of puffy smoke. Stampede blazed away with his forty-five, and Alan felt the thrill of it and emptied the magazine of his gun, the detonations of revolver and rifle drowning the chorus of sound that came from the range. A second rocket answered them. Two columns of flame leaped up from the earth as huge fires gained headway, and Alan could hear the shrill chorus of children’s voices mingling with the vocal tumult of men. All the people of his range were there. They had come in from the timber-naked plateaux and high ranges where the herds were feeding, and from the outlying shacks of the tundras to greet him. Never had there been such a concentration of effort on the part of his people. And Mary Standish was behind it all! He knew he was fighting against odds when he tried to keep that fact from choking up his heart a little.