his own responsibility and set himself right in his own eyes.
In self-defense he would have given Rossland an opportunity to break
down with cold facts the disturbing something which his mind had
unconsciously built up. But the new Alan revolted. He wanted to carry
the thing away with him, he wanted it to live, and so it went with him,
uncontaminated by any truths or lies which Rossland might have told him.

They left Cordova early in the afternoon, and at sunset that evening
camped on the tip of a wooded island a mile or two from the mainland.
Olaf knew the island and had chosen it for reasons of his own. It was
primitive and alive with birds. Olaf loved the birds, and the cheer of
their vesper song and bedtime twitter comforted Alan. He seized an ax,
and for the first time in seven months his muscles responded to the
swing of it. And Ericksen, old as his years in the way of the north,
whistled loudly and rumbled a bit of crude song through his beard as he
lighted a fire, knowing the medicine of the big open was getting its
hold on Alan again. To Alan it was like coming to the edge of home once
more. It seemed an age, an infinity, since he had heard the sputtering
of bacon in an open skillet and the bubbling of coffee over a bed of
coals with the mysterious darkness of the timber gathering in about him.
He loaded his pipe after his chopping, and sat watching Olaf as he
mothered the half-baked bannock loaf. It made him think of his father. A
thousand times the two must have camped like this in the days when
Alaska was new and there were no maps to tell them what lay beyond the
next range.

Olaf felt resting upon him something of the responsibility of a doctor,
and after supper he sat with his back to a tree and talked of the old
days as if they were yesterday and the day before, with tomorrow always
the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow which he had pursued for
thirty years. He was sixty just a week ago this evening, he said, and he
was beginning to doubt if he would remain on the beach at Cordova much
longer. Siberia was dragging him--that forbidden world of adventure and
mystery and monumental opportunity which lay only a few miles across the
strait from the Seward Peninsula. In his enthusiasm he forgot Alan's
tragedy. He cursed Cossack law and the prohibitory measures to keep
Americans out. More gold was over there than had ever been dreamed of in
Alaska; even the mountains and rivers were unnamed; and he was goi