d fight on Alan's part, and it was just the
way he had expected him to take the matter. It made him rather ashamed
of the weakness and uncertainty to which he had confessed. Of course
they could do nothing with a woman; it wasn't a shooting business--yet.
But there was a debatable future, if the gist of the note on the table
ran true to their unspoken analysis of it. Promise of something like
that was in Alan's eyes.

He opened the door. "I'll have Tautuk and Amuk Toolik here at eight.
Good night, Alan!"

"Good night!"

Alan watched Stampede's figure until it had disappeared before he closed
the door.

Now that he was alone, he no longer made an effort to restrain the
anxiety which the prospector's unexpected revealment had aroused in him.
The other's footsteps were scarcely gone when he again had the paper in
his hand. It was clearly the lower part of a letter sheet of ordinary
business size and had been carelessly torn from the larger part of the
page, so that nothing more than the signature and half a dozen lines of
writing in a man's heavy script remained.

What was left of the letter which Alan would have given much to have
possessed, read as follows:

"_--If you work carefully and guard your real identity in securing facts
and information, we should have the entire industry in our hands
within a year_."

Under these words was the strong and unmistakable signature of John
Graham.

A score of times Alan had seen that signature, and the hatred he bore
for its maker, and the desire for vengeance which had entwined itself
like a fibrous plant through all his plans for the future, had made of
it an unforgetable writing in his brain. Now that he held in his hand
words written by his enemy, and the man who had been his father's enemy,
all that he had kept away from Stampede's sharp eyes blazed in a sudden
fury in his face. He dropped the paper as if it had been a thing
unclean, and his hands clenched until his knuckles snapped in the
stillness of the room, as he slowly faced the window through which a few
moments ago he had looked in the direction of Mary Standish's cabin.

So John Graham was keeping his promise, the deadly promise he had made
in the one hour of his father's triumph--that hour in which the elder
Holt might have rid the earth of a serpent if his hands had not revolted
in the last of those terrific minutes which he as a youth had witnessed.
And Mary Standish was the instrument he had chosen to w