th his own
hands what a glorious fate had given him, and to finish with John
Graham, if it ever came to that, in the madly desirable way he visioned
for himself in those occasional moments when the fires of temptation
blazed hottest.

The fourth night he said to Tautuk:

"If Keok should marry another man, what would you do?"

It was a moment before Tautuk looked at him, and in the herdsman's eyes
was a wild, mute question, as if suddenly there had leaped into his
stolid mind a suspicion which had never come to him before. Alan laid a
reassuring hand upon his arm.

"I don't mean she's going to, Tautuk," he laughed. "She loves you. I
know it. Only you are so stupid, and so slow, and so hopeless as a lover
that she is punishing you while she has the right--before she marries
you. But if she _should_ marry someone else, what would you do?"

"My brother?" asked Tautuk.

"No."

"A relative?"

"No."

"A friend?"

"No. A stranger. Someone who had injured you, for instance; someone Keok
hated, and who had cheated her into marrying him."

"I would kill him," said Tautuk quietly.

It was this night the temptation was strongest upon Alan. Why should
Mary Standish go back, he asked himself. She had surrendered everything
to escape from the horror down there. She had given up fortune and
friends. She had scattered convention to the four winds, had gambled her
life in the hazard, and in the end had come to him! Why should he not
keep her? John Graham and the world believed she was dead. And he was
master here. If--some day--Graham should happen to cross his path, he
would settle the matter in Tautuk's way. Later, while Tautuk slept, and
the world lay about him in a soft glow, and the valley below was filled
with misty billows of twilight out of which came to him faintly the
curious, crackling sound of reindeer hoofs and the grunting contentment
of the feeding herd, the reaction came, as he had known it would come
in the end.

The morning of the fifth day he set out alone for the eastward herd, and
on the sixth overtook Tatpan and his herdsmen. Tatpan, like Sokwenna's
foster-children, Keok and Nawadlook, had a quarter-strain of white in
him, and when Alan came up to him in the edge of the valley where the
deer were grazing, he was lying on a rock, playing Yankee Doodle on a
mouth-organ. It was Tatpan who told him that an hour or two before an
exhausted stranger had come into camp, looking for him, and that the man
wa