ork his ends!

In these first minutes Alan could not find a doubt with which to fend
the absoluteness of the convictions which were raging in his head, or
still the tumult that was in his heart and blood. He made no pretense to
deny the fact that John Graham must have written this letter to Mary
Standish; inadvertently she had kept it, had finally attempted to
destroy it, and Stampede, by chance, had discovered a small but
convincing remnant of it. In a whirlwind of thought he pieced together
things that had happened: her efforts to interest him from the
beginning, the determination with which she had held to her purpose, her
boldness in following him to the Range, and her apparent endeavor to
work herself into his confidence--and with John Graham's signature
staring at him from the table these things seemed conclusive and
irrefutable evidence. The "industry" which Graham had referred to could
mean only his own and Carl Lomen's, the reindeer industry which they had
built up and were fighting to perpetuate, and which Graham and his
beef-baron friends were combining to handicap and destroy. And in this
game of destruction clever Mary Standish had come to play a part!

_But why had she leaped into the sea?_

It was as if a new voice had made itself heard in Alan's brain, a voice
that rose insistently over a vast tumult of things, crying out against
his arguments and demanding order and reason in place of the mad
convictions that possessed him. If Mary Standish's mission was to pave
the way for his ruin, and if she was John Graham's agent sent for that
purpose, what reason could she have had for so dramatically attempting
to give the world the impression that she had ended her life at sea?
Surely such an act could in no way have been related with any plot which
she might have had against him! In building up this structure of her
defense he made no effort to sever her relationship with John Graham;
that, he knew, was impossible. The note, her actions, and many of the
things she had said were links inevitably associating her with his
enemy, but these same things, now that they came pressing one upon
another in his memory, gave to their collusion a new significance.

Was it conceivable that Mary Standish, instead of working for John
Graham, was working _against_ him? Could some conflict between them have
been the reason for her flight aboard the _Nome_, and was it because she
discovered Rossland there--John Graham's most tr