in what we want. It's going to be
largely a matter of education. We can't take Alaska down to the
States--we've got to bring them up to us. We must make a large part of a
hundred and ten million Americans understand. We must bring a million
of them up here before that danger-flood we speak of comes beyond the
Gulf of Anadyr. It's God's own country we have north of Fifty-eight,
Olaf. And we have ten times the wealth of California. We can care for a
million people easily. But bad politics and bad judgment both here in
Alaska and at Washington won't let them come. With coal enough under our
feet to last a thousand years, we are buying fuel from the States. We've
got billions in copper and oil, but can't touch them. We should have
some of the world's greatest manufacturing plants, but we can not,
because everything up here is locked away from us. I repeat that isn't
conservation. If they had applied a little of it to the salmon
industry--but they didn't. And the salmon are going, like the buffalo of
the plains.

"The destruction of the salmon shows what will happen to us if the bars
are let down all at once to the financial banditti. Understanding and
common sense must guard the gates. The fight we must win is to bring
about an honest and reasonable adjustment, Olaf. And that fight will
take place right here--in Alaska--and not in Siberia. And if we
don't win--"

He raised his eyes from the fire and smiled grimly into Olaf's bearded
face.

"Then we can count on that thing coming across the neck of sea from the
Gulf of Anadyr," he finished. "And if it ever does come, the people of
the States will at last face the tragic realization of what Alaska
could have meant to the nation."

The force of the old spirit surged uppermost in Alan again, and after
that, for an hour or more, something lived for him in the glow of the
fire which Olaf kept burning. It was the memory of Mary Standish, her
quiet, beautiful eyes gazing at him, her pale face taking form in the
lacy wisps of birch-smoke. His mind pictured her in the flame-glow as
she had listened to him that day in Skagway, when he had told her of
this fight that was ahead. And it pleased him to think she would have
made this same fight for Alaska if she had lived. It was a thought which
brought a painful thickening in his breath, for always these visions
which Olaf could not see ended with Mary Standish as she had faced him
in his cabin, her back against the door, her lips t