The Alaskan

by James Oliver Curwood

“You don’t understand, and I am determined that you shall,” she went on. “I would die before I let you go away thinking what is now in your mind. You will despise me, but I would rather be hated for the truth than because of the horrible thing which you must believe if I remain silent.” She forced a wan smile to her lips. “You know, Belinda Mulrooneys were very well in their day, but they don’t fit in now, do they? If a woman makes a mistake and tries to remedy it in a fighting sort of way, as Belinda Mulrooney might have done back in the days when Alaska was young—”

She finished with a little gesture of despair.

“I have committed a great folly,” she said, hesitating an instant in his silence. “I see very clearly now the course I should have taken. You will advise me that it is still not too late when you have heard what I am going to say. Your face is like—a rock.”

“It is because your tragedy is mine,” he said.

She turned her eyes from him. The color in her cheeks deepened. It was a vivid, feverish glow. “I was born rich, enormously, hatefully rich,” she said in the low, unimpassioned voice of a confessional. “I don’t remember father or mother. I lived always with my Grandfather Standish and my Uncle Peter Standish. Until I was thirteen I had my Uncle Peter, who was grandfather’s brother, and lived with us. I worshiped Uncle Peter. He was a cripple. From young manhood he had lived in a wheel-chair, and he was nearly seventy-five when he died. As a baby that wheel-chair, and my rides in it with him about the great house in which we lived, were my delights. He was my father and mother, everything that was good and sweet in life. I remember thinking, as a child, that if God was as good as Uncle Peter, He was a wonderful God. It was Uncle Peter who told me, year after year, the old stories and legends of the Standishes. And he was always happy—always happy and glad and seeing nothing but sunshine though he hadn’t stood on his feet for nearly sixty years. And my Uncle Peter died when I was thirteen, five days before my birthday came. I think he must have been to me what your father was to you.”

He nodded. There was something that was not the hardness of rock in his face now, and John Graham seemed to have faded away.

“I was left, then, alone with my Grandfather Standish,” she went on. “He didn’t love me as my Uncle Peter loved me, and I don’t think I loved him. But I was proud of him. I thought the whole world must have stood in awe of him, as I did. As I grew older I learned the world was afraid of him—bankers, presidents, even the strongest men in great financial interests; afraid of him, and of his partners, the Grahams, and of Sharpleigh, who my Uncle Peter had told me was the cleverest lawyer in the nation, and who had grown up in the business of the two families. My grandfather was sixty-eight when Uncle Peter died, so it was John Graham who was the actual working force behind the combined fortunes of the two families. Sometimes, as I now recall it, Uncle Peter was like a little child. I remember how he tried to make me understand just how big my grandfather’s interests were by telling me that if two dollars were taken from every man, woman, and child in the United States, it would just about add up to what he and the Grahams possessed, and my Grandfather Standish’s interests were three-quarters of the whole. I remember how a hunted look would come into my Uncle Peter’s face at times when I asked him how all this money was used, and where it was. And he never answered me as I wanted to be answered, and I never understood. I didn’t know why people feared my grandfather and John Graham. I didn’t know of the stupendous power my grandfather’s money had rolled up for them. I didn’t know”—her voice sank to a shuddering whisper—“I didn’t know how they were using it in Alaska, for instance. I didn’t know it was feeding upon starvation and ruin and death. I don’t think even Uncle Peter knew that.”

She looked at Alan steadily, and her gray eyes seemed burning up with a slow fire.

“Why, even then, before Uncle Peter died, I had become one of the biggest factors in all their schemes. It was impossible for me to suspect that John Graham was anticipating a little girl of thirteen, and I didn’t guess that my Grandfather Standish, so straight, so grandly white of beard and hair, so like a god of power when he stood among men, was even then planning that I should be given to him, so that a monumental combination of wealth might increase itself still more in that juggernaut of financial achievement for which he lived. And to bring about my sacrifice, to make sure it would not fail, they set Sharpleigh to the task, because Sharpleigh was sweet and good of face, and gentle like Uncle Peter, so that I loved him and had confidence in him, without a suspicion that under his white hair lay a brain which matched in cunning and mercilessness that of John Graham himself. And he did his work well, Alan.”

A second time she had spoken his name, softly and without embarrassment. With her nervous fingers tying and untying the two corners of a little handkerchief in her lap, she went on, after a moment of silence in which the ticking of Keok’s clock seemed tense and loud.