“It is your right to question me and send me back if I am not welcome. But not tonight. All this is too fine—just you—and your people—and their happiness.” He bent his head to catch her words, almost drowned by the hissing of a sky-rocket and the popping of firecrackers. She nodded toward the buildings beyond his cabin. “I am with Keok and Nawadlook. They have given me a home.” And then swiftly she added, “I don’t think you love your people more than I do, Alan Holt!”
Nawadlook was approaching, and with a lingering touch of her fingers on his arm she drew away from him. His face did not show his disappointment, nor did he make a movement to keep her with him.
“Your people are expecting things of you,” she said. “A little later, if you ask me, I may dance with you to the music of the tom-toms.”
He watched her as she went away with Nawadlook. She looked back at him and smiled, and there was something in her face which set his heart beating faster. She had been afraid aboard the ship, but she was not afraid of tomorrow. Thought of it and the questions he would ask did not frighten her, and a happiness which he had persistently held away from himself triumphed in a sudden, submerging flood. It was as if something in her eyes and voice had promised him that the dreams he had dreamed through weeks of torture and living death were coming true, and that possibly in her ride over the tundra that night she had come a little nearer to the truth of what those weeks had meant to him. Surely he would never quite be able to tell her. And what she said to him tomorrow would, in the end, make little difference. She was alive, and he could not let her go away from him again.
He joined the tom-tom beaters and the dancers. It rather amazed him to discover himself doing things which he had never done before. His nature was an aloof one, observing and sympathetic, but always more or less detached. At his people’s dances it was his habit to stand on the side-line, smiling and nodding encouragement, but never taking a part. His habit of reserve fell from him now, and he seemed possessed of a new sense of freedom and a new desire to give physical expression to something within him. Stampede was dancing. He was kicking his feet and howling with the men, while the women dancers went through the muscular movements of arms and bodies. A chorus of voices invited Alan. They had always invited him. And tonight he accepted, and took his place between Stampede and Amuk Toolik and the tom-tom beaters almost burst their instruments in their excitement. Not until he dropped out, half breathless, did he see Mary Standish and Keok in the outer circle. Keok was frankly amazed. Mary Standish’s eyes were shining, and she clapped her hands when she saw that he had observed her. He tried to laugh, and waved his hand, but he felt too foolish to go to her. And then the balloon went up, a big, six-foot balloon, and with all its fire made only a pale glow in the sky, and after another hour of hand-shaking, shoulder-clapping, and asking of questions about health and domestic matters, Alan went to his cabin.
He looked about the one big room that was his living-room, and it never had seemed quite so comforting as now. At first he thought it was as he had left it, for there was his desk where it should be, the big table in the middle of the room, the same pictures on the walls, his gun-rack filled with polished weapons, his pipes, the rugs on the floor—and then, one at a time, he began to observe things that were different. In place of dark shades there were soft curtains at his windows, and new covers on his table and the home-made couch in the corner. On his desk were two pictures in copper-colored frames, one of George Washington and the other of Abraham Lincoln, and behind them crisscrossed against the wall just over the top of the desk, were four tiny American flags. They recalled Alan’s mind to the evening aboard the Nome when Mary Standish had challenged his assertion that he was an Alaskan and not an American. Only she would have thought of those two pictures and the little flags. There were flowers in his room, and she had placed them there. She must have picked fresh flowers each day and kept them waiting the hour of his coming, and she had thought of him in Tanana, where she had purchased the cloth for the curtains and the covers. He went into his bedroom and found new curtains at the window, a new coverlet on his bed, and a pair of red morocco slippers that he had never seen before. He took them up in his hands and laughed when he saw how she had misjudged the size of his feet.
In the living-room he sat down and lighted his pipe, observing that Keok’s phonograph, which had been there earlier in the evening, was gone. Outside, the noise of the celebration died away, and the growing stillness drew him to the window from which he could see the cabin where lived Keok and Nawadlook with their foster-father, the old and shriveled Sokwenna. It was there Mary Standish had said she was staying. For a long time Alan watched it while the final sounds of the night drifted away into utter silence.
It was a knock at his door that turned him about at last, and in answer to his invitation Stampede came in. He nodded and sat down. Shiftingly his eyes traveled about the room.
“Been a fine night, Alan. Everybody glad to see you.”
“They seemed to be. I’m happy to be home again.”