and the responsive note to the wild and
half-savage desires always smoldering in his heart. He looked out at the
stars and smiled up at them, and his soul was filled with an unspoken
thankfulness that he was not born too late. Another generation and there
would be no last frontier. Twenty-five years more and the world would
lie utterly in the shackles of science and invention and what the human
race called progress.

So God had been good to him. He was helping to write the last page in
that history which would go down through the eons of time, written in
the red blood of men who had cut the first trails into the unknown.
After him, there would be no more frontiers. No more mysteries of
unknown lands to solve. No more pioneering hazards to make. The earth
would be tamed. And suddenly he thought of Mary Standish and of what
she had said to him in the dusk of evening. Strange that it had been
_her_ thought, too--that she would always love tents and old trails and
nature's barriers, and hated to see cities and railroads and automobiles
come to Alaska. He shrugged his shoulders. Probably she had guessed what
was in his own mind, for she was clever, very clever.

A tap at his door drew his eyes from the open watch in his hand. It was
a quarter after twelve o'clock, an unusual hour for someone to be
tapping at his door.

It was repeated--a bit hesitatingly, he thought. Then it came again,
quick and decisive. Replacing his watch in his pocket, he opened
the door.

It was Mary Standish who stood facing him.

He saw only her eyes at first, wide-open, strange, frightened eyes. And
then he saw the pallor of her face as she came slowly in, without
waiting for him to speak or give her permission to enter. And it was
Mary Standish herself who closed the door, while he stared at her in
stupid wonderment--and stood there with her back against it, straight
and slim and deathly pale.

"May I come in?" she asked.

"My God, you're in!" gasped Alan. "_You're in_."

CHAPTER VII

That it was past midnight, and Mary Standish had deliberately come to
his room, entering it and closing the door without a word or a nod of
invitation from him, seemed incredible to Alan. After his first
explosion of astonishment he stood mute, while the girl looked at him
steadily and her breath came a little quickly. But she was not excited.
Even in his amazement he could see that. What he had thought was fright
had gone out of her eyes. But he had n