answered grimly. "The influence and
money behind him haunted us wherever we went. My father had been
successful, but one after another the properties in which he was
interested were made worthless. A successful mine in which he was most
heavily interested was allowed to become abandoned. A hotel which he
partly owned in Dawson was bankrupted. One after another things
happened, and after each happening my father would receive a polite note
of regret from Graham, written as if the word actually came from a
friend. But my father cared little for money losses now. His heart was
drying up and his life ebbing away for the little cabin and the grave
that were gone from the foot of the mountain. It went on this way for
three years, and then, one morning, my father was found on the beach at
Nome, dead."
"_Dead_!"
Alan heard only the gasping breath in which the word came from Mary
Standish, for he was facing the window, looking steadily away from her.
"Yes--murdered. I know it was the work of John Graham. He didn't do it
personally, but it was _his money_ that accomplished the end. Of course
nothing ever came of it. I won't tell you how his influence and power
have dogged me; how they destroyed the first herd of reindeer I had, and
how they filled the newspapers with laughter and lies about me when I
was down in the States last winter in an effort to make _your_ people
see a little something of the truth about Alaska. I am waiting. I know
the day is coming when I shall have John Graham as my father had him
under our mountain twenty years ago. He must be fifty now. But that
won't save him when the time comes. No one will loosen my hands as I
loosened my father's. And all Alaska will rejoice, for his power and his
money have become twin monsters that are destroying Alaska just as he
destroyed the life of my father. Unless he dies, and his money-power
ends, he will make of this great land nothing more than a shell out of
which he and his kind have taken all the meat. And the hour of deadliest
danger is now upon us."
He looked at Mary Standish, and it was as if death had come to her where
she sat. She seemed not to breathe, and her face was so white it
frightened him. And then, slowly, she turned her eyes upon him, and
never had he seen such living pools of torture and of horror. He was
amazed at the quietness of her voice when she began to speak, and
startled by the almost deadly coldness of it.
"I think you can understan
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