The Alaskan

by James Oliver Curwood

“—If you work carefully and guard your real identity in securing facts and information, we should have the entire industry in our hands within a year.”

Under these words was the strong and unmistakable signature of John Graham.

A score of times Alan had seen that signature, and the hatred he bore for its maker, and the desire for vengeance which had entwined itself like a fibrous plant through all his plans for the future, had made of it an unforgetable writing in his brain. Now that he held in his hand words written by his enemy, and the man who had been his father’s enemy, all that he had kept away from Stampede’s sharp eyes blazed in a sudden fury in his face. He dropped the paper as if it had been a thing unclean, and his hands clenched until his knuckles snapped in the stillness of the room, as he slowly faced the window through which a few moments ago he had looked in the direction of Mary Standish’s cabin.

So John Graham was keeping his promise, the deadly promise he had made in the one hour of his father’s triumph—that hour in which the elder Holt might have rid the earth of a serpent if his hands had not revolted in the last of those terrific minutes which he as a youth had witnessed. And Mary Standish was the instrument he had chosen to work his ends!

In these first minutes Alan could not find a doubt with which to fend the absoluteness of the convictions which were raging in his head, or still the tumult that was in his heart and blood. He made no pretense to deny the fact that John Graham must have written this letter to Mary Standish; inadvertently she had kept it, had finally attempted to destroy it, and Stampede, by chance, had discovered a small but convincing remnant of it. In a whirlwind of thought he pieced together things that had happened: her efforts to interest him from the beginning, the determination with which she had held to her purpose, her boldness in following him to the Range, and her apparent endeavor to work herself into his confidence—and with John Graham’s signature staring at him from the table these things seemed conclusive and irrefutable evidence. The “industry” which Graham had referred to could mean only his own and Carl Lomen’s, the reindeer industry which they had built up and were fighting to perpetuate, and which Graham and his beef-baron friends were combining to handicap and destroy. And in this game of destruction clever Mary Standish had come to play a part!

But why had she leaped into the sea?

It was as if a new voice had made itself heard in Alan’s brain, a voice that rose insistently over a vast tumult of things, crying out against his arguments and demanding order and reason in place of the mad convictions that possessed him. If Mary Standish’s mission was to pave the way for his ruin, and if she was John Graham’s agent sent for that purpose, what reason could she have had for so dramatically attempting to give the world the impression that she had ended her life at sea? Surely such an act could in no way have been related with any plot which she might have had against him! In building up this structure of her defense he made no effort to sever her relationship with John Graham; that, he knew, was impossible. The note, her actions, and many of the things she had said were links inevitably associating her with his enemy, but these same things, now that they came pressing one upon another in his memory, gave to their collusion a new significance.

Was it conceivable that Mary Standish, instead of working for John Graham, was working against him? Could some conflict between them have been the reason for her flight aboard the Nome, and was it because she discovered Rossland there—John Graham’s most trusted servant—that she formed her desperate scheme of leaping into the sea?

Between the two oppositions of his thought a sickening burden of what he knew to be true settled upon him. Mary Standish, even if she hated John Graham now, had at one time—and not very long ago—been an instrument of his trust; the letter he had written to her was positive proof of that. What it was that had caused a possible split between them and had inspired her flight from Seattle, and, later, her effort to bury a past under the fraud of a make-believe death, he might never learn, and just now he had no very great desire to look entirely into the whole truth of the matter. It was enough to know that of the past, and of the things that happened, she had been afraid, and it was in the desperation of this fear, with Graham’s cleverest agent at her heels, that she had appealed to him in his cabin, and, failing to win him to her assistance, had taken the matter so dramatically into her own hands. And within that same hour a nearly successful attempt had been made upon Rossland’s life. Of course the facts had shown that she could not have been directly responsible for his injury, but it was a haunting thing to remember as happening almost simultaneously with her disappearance into the sea.

He drew away from the window and, opening the door, went out into the night. Cool breaths of air gave a crinkly rattle to the swinging paper lanterns, and he could hear the soft whipping of the flags which Mary Standish had placed over his cabin. There was something comforting in the sound, a solace to the dishevelment of nerves he had suffered, a reminder of their day in Skagway when she had walked at his side with her hand resting warmly in his arm and her eyes and face filled with the inspiration of the mountains.