nd he was given passage. Thereafter the countless
islands of the North Pacific drifted behind, while always northward were
the gray cliffs of the Alaskan Peninsula, with the ramparted ranges
beyond, glistening with glaciers, smoking with occasional volcanoes, and
at times so high their snowy peaks were lost in the clouds. First
touching the hatchery at Karluk and then the canneries at Uyak and
Chignik, the mail boat visited the settlements on the Island of Unga,
and thence covered swiftly the three hundred miles to Dutch Harbor and
Unalaska. Again he was fortunate. Within a week he was berthed on a
freighter, and on the twelfth day of June set foot in Nome.

His home-coming was unheralded, but the little, gray town, with its
peculiar, black shadowings, its sea of stove-pipes, and its two solitary
brick chimneys, brought a lump of joy into his throat as he watched its
growing outlines from the small boat that brought him ashore. He could
see one of the only two brick chimneys in northern Alaska gleaming in
the sun; beyond it, fifty miles away, were the ragged peaks of the
Saw-Tooth Range, looking as if one might walk to them in half an hour,
and over all the world between seemed to hover a misty gloom. But it was
where he had lived, where happiness and tragedy and unforgetable
memories had come to him, and the welcoming of its frame buildings, its
crooked streets, and what to others might have been ugliness, was a warm
and thrilling thing. For here were his _people_. Here were the men and
women who were guarding the northern door of the world, an epic place,
filled with strong hearts, courage, and a love of country as
inextinguishable as one's love of life. From this drab little place,
shut out from all the world for half the year, young men and women went
down to southern universities, to big cities, to the glamor and lure of
"outside." But they always came back. Nome called them. Its loneliness
in winter. Its gray gloom in springtime. Its glory in summer and autumn.
It was the breeding-place of a new race of men, and they loved it as
Alan loved it. To him the black wireless tower meant more than the
Statue of Liberty, the three weather-beaten church spires more than the
architectural colossi of New York and Washington. Beside one of the
churches he had played as a boy. He had seen the steeples painted. He
had helped make the crooked streets. And his mother had laughed and
lived and died here, and his father's footprints