The Alaskan Part 7

She faced him, as if expecting the necessity of defending what she had done. "It isn't melodrama," she said. "I mean it. And I believe in it. I want something of mine to lie at the bottom of the sea in this gateway to Skagway, just as Belinda Mulrooney wanted her dollar to rest forever at the bottom of the Yukon."

She gave him the hand from which she had taken the ring, and for a moment the warm thrill of it lay in his own. "Thank you for the wonderful afternoon you have given me, Mr. Holt. I shall never forget it. It is dinner time. I must say good night."

He followed her slim figure with his eyes until she disappeared. In returning to his cabin he almost b.u.mped into Rossland. The incident was irritating. Neither of the men spoke or nodded, but Rossland met Alan's look squarely, his face rock-like in its repression of emotion. Alan's impression of the man was changing in spite of his prejudice. There was a growing something about him which commanded attention, a certainty of poise which could not be mistaken for sham. A scoundrel he might be, but a cool brain was at work inside his head--a brain not easily disturbed by unimportant things, he decided. He disliked the man. As an agent of John Graham Alan looked upon him as an enemy, and as an acquaintance of Mary Standish he was as much of a mystery as the girl herself. And only now, in his cabin, was Alan beginning to sense the presence of a real authority behind Rossland's att.i.tude.

He was not curious. All his life he had lived too near the raw edge of practical things to dissipate in gossipy conjecture. He cared nothing about the relations.h.i.+p between Mary Standish and Rossland except as it involved himself, and the situation had become a trifle too delicate to please him. He could see no sport in an adventure of the kind it suggested, and the possibility that he had been misjudged by both Rossland and Mary Standish sent a flush of anger into his cheeks. He cared nothing for Rossland, except that he would like to wipe him out of existence with all other Graham agents. And he persisted in the conviction that he thought of the girl only in a most casual sort of way. He had made no effort to discover her history. He had not questioned her. At no time had he intimated a desire to intrude upon her personal affairs, and at no time had she offered information about herself, or an explanation of the singular espionage which Rossland had presumed to take upon himself. He grimaced as he reflected how dangerously near that hazard he had been--and he admired her for the splendid judgment she had shown in the matter. She had saved him the possible alternative of apologizing to Rossland or throwing him overboard!

There was a certain bellicose twist to his mind as he went down to the dining salon, an obstinate determination to hold himself aloof from any increasing intimacy with Mary Standish. No matter how pleasing his experience had been, he resented the idea of being commandeered at unexpected moments. Had Mary Standish read his thoughts, her bearing toward him during the dinner hour could not have been more satisfying.

There was, in a way, something seductively provocative about it. She greeted him with the slightest inclination of her head and a cool little smile. Her att.i.tude did not invite spoken words, either from him or from his neighbors, yet no one would have accused her of deliberate reserve.

Her demure unapproachableness was a growing revelation to him, and he found himself interested in spite of the new law of self-preservation he had set down for himself. He could not keep his eyes from stealing glimpses at her hair when her head was bowed a little. She had smoothed it tonight until it was like softest velvet, with rich glints in it, and the amazing thought came to him that it would be sweetly pleasant to touch with one's hand. The discovery was almost a shock. Keok and Nawadlook had beautiful hair, but he had never thought of it in this way. And he had never thought of Keok's pretty mouth as he was thinking of the girl's opposite him. He s.h.i.+fted uneasily and was glad Mary Standish did not look at him in these moments of mental unbalance.

When he left the table, the girl scarcely noticed his going. It was as if she had used him and then calmly shuttled him out of the way. He tried to laugh as he hunted up Stampede Smith. He found him, half an hour later, feeding a captive bear on the lower deck. It was odd, he thought, that a captive bear should be going north. Stampede explained.

The animal was a pet and belonged to the Thlinkit Indians. There were seven, getting off at Cordova. Alan observed that the two girls watched him closely and whispered together. They were very pretty, with large, dark eyes and pink in their cheeks. One of the men did not look at him at all, but sat cross-legged on the deck, with his face turned away.

With Stampede he went to the smoking-room, and until a late hour they discussed the big range up under the Endicott Mountains, and Alan's plans for the future. Once, early in the evening, Alan went to his cabin to get maps and photographs. Stampede's eyes glistened as his mind seized upon the possibilities of the new adventure. It was a vast land.

An unknown country. And Alan was its first pioneer. The old thrill ran in Stampede's blood, and its infectiousness caught Alan, so that he forgot Mary Standish, and all else but the miles that lay between them and the mighty tundras beyond the Seward Peninsula. It was midnight when Alan went to his cabin.

He was happy. Love of life swept in an irresistible surge through his body, and he breathed in deeply of the soft sea air that came in through his open port from the west. In Stampede Smith he had at last found the comrades.h.i.+p which he had missed, and the responsive note to the wild and half-savage desires always smoldering in his heart. He looked out at the stars and smiled up at them, and his soul was filled with an unspoken thankfulness that he was not born too late. Another generation and there would be no last frontier. Twenty-five years more and the world would lie utterly in the shackles of science and invention and what the human race called progress.

So G.o.d had been good to him. He was helping to write the last page in that history which would go down through the eons of time, written in the red blood of men who had cut the first trails into the unknown.

After him, there would be no more frontiers. No more mysteries of unknown lands to solve. No more pioneering hazards to make. The earth would be tamed. And suddenly he thought of Mary Standish and of what she had said to him in the dusk of evening. Strange that it had been _her_ thought, too--that she would always love tents and old trails and nature's barriers, and hated to see cities and railroads and automobiles come to Alaska. He shrugged his shoulders. Probably she had guessed what was in his own mind, for she was clever, very clever.

A tap at his door drew his eyes from the open watch in his hand. It was a quarter after twelve o'clock, an unusual hour for someone to be tapping at his door.

It was repeated--a bit hesitatingly, he thought. Then it came again, quick and decisive. Replacing his watch in his pocket, he opened the door.

It was Mary Standish who stood facing him.

He saw only her eyes at first, wide-open, strange, frightened eyes. And then he saw the pallor of her face as she came slowly in, without waiting for him to speak or give her permission to enter. And it was Mary Standish herself who closed the door, while he stared at her in stupid wonderment--and stood there with her back against it, straight and slim and deathly pale.

"May I come in?" she asked.

"My G.o.d, you're in!" gasped Alan. "_You're in_."

CHAPTER VII

That it was past midnight, and Mary Standish had deliberately come to his room, entering it and closing the door without a word or a nod of invitation from him, seemed incredible to Alan. After his first explosion of astonishment he stood mute, while the girl looked at him steadily and her breath came a little quickly. But she was not excited.

Even in his amazement he could see that. What he had thought was fright had gone out of her eyes. But he had never seen her so white, and never had she appeared quite so slim and childish-looking as while she stood there in these astounding moments with her back against the door.

The pallor of her face accentuated the rich darkness of her hair. Even her lips were pale. But she was not embarra.s.sed. Her eyes were clear and unafraid now, and in the poise of her head and body was a sureness of purpose that staggered him. A feeling of anger, almost of personal resentment, began to possess him as he waited for her to speak. This, at last, was the cost of his courtesies to her, The advantage she was taking of him was an indignity and an outrage, and his mind flashed to the suspicion that Rossland was standing just outside the door.

In another moment he would have brushed her aside and opened it, but her quiet face held him. The tenseness was fading out of it. He saw her lips tremble, and then a miracle happened. In her wide-open, beautiful eyes tears were gathering. Even then she did not lower her glance or bury her face in her hands, but looked at him bravely while the tear-drops glistened like diamonds on her cheeks. He felt his heart give way. She read his thoughts, had guessed his suspicion, and he was wrong.

"You--you will have a seat, Miss Standish?" he asked lamely, inclining his head toward the cabin chair.

"No. Please let me stand." She drew in a deep breath. "It is late, Mr.

Holt?"

"Rather an irregular hour for a visit such as this," he a.s.sured her.

"Half an hour after midnight, to be exact. It must be very important business that has urged you to make such a hazard aboard s.h.i.+p, Miss Standish."

For a moment she did not answer him, and he saw the little heart-throb in her white throat.

"Would Belinda Mulrooney have considered this a very great hazard, Mr.

Holt? In a matter of life and death, do you not think she would have come to your cabin at midnight--even aboard s.h.i.+p? And it is that with me--a matter of life and death. Less than an hour ago I came to that decision. I could not wait until morning. I had to see you tonight."

"And why me?" he asked. "Why not Rossland, or Captain Rifle, or some other? Is it because--"

He did not finish. He saw the shadow of something gather in her eyes, as if for an instant she had felt a stab of humiliation or of pain, but it was gone as quickly as it came. And very quietly, almost without emotion, she answered him.

"I know how you feel. I have tried to place myself in your position. It is all very irregular, as you say. But I am not ashamed. I have come to you as I would want anyone to come to me under similar circ.u.mstances, if I were a man. If watching you, thinking about you, making up my mind about you is taking an advantage--then I have been unfair, Mr. Holt. But I am not sorry. I trust you. I know you will believe me good until I am proved bad. I have come to ask you to help me. Would you make it possible for another human being to avert a great tragedy if you found it in your power to do so?"

He felt his sense of judgment wavering. Had he been coolly a.n.a.lyzing such a situation in the detached environment of the smoking-room, he would have called any man a fool who hesitated to open his cabin door and show his visitor out. But such a thought did not occur to him now.

He was thinking of the handkerchief he had found the preceding midnight.

Twice she had come to his cabin at a late hour.

"It would be my inclination to make such a thing possible," he said, answering her question. "Tragedy is a nasty thing."

She caught the hint of irony in his voice. If anything, it added to her calmness. He was to suffer no weeping entreaties, no feminine play of helplessness and beauty. Her pretty mouth was a little firmer and the tilt of her dainty chin a bit higher.

"Of course, I can't pay you," she said. "You are the sort of man who would resent an offer of payment for what I am about to ask you to do.

But I must have help. If I don't have it, and quickly"--she shuddered slightly and tried to smile--"something very unpleasant will happen, Mr.

Holt," she finished.

"If you will permit me to take you to Captain Rifle--"

"No. Captain Rifle would question me. He would demand explanations. You will understand when I tell you what I want. And I will do that if I may have your word of honor to hold in confidence what I tell you, whether you help me or not. Will you give me that pledge?"

"Yes, if such a pledge will relieve your mind, Miss Standish."

He was almost brutally incurious. As he reached for a cigar, he did not see the sudden movement she made, as if about to fly from his room, or the quicker throb that came in her throat. When he turned, a faint flush was gathering in her cheeks.

"I want to leave the s.h.i.+p," she said.

The simplicity of her desire held him silent.

"And I must leave it tonight, or tomorrow night--before we reach Cordova."

"Is that--your problem?" he demanded, astonished.

"No. I must leave it in such a way that the world will believe I am dead. I can not reach Cordova alive."

At last she struck home and he stared at her, wondering if she were insane. Her quiet, beautiful eyes met his own with unflinching steadiness. His brain all at once was crowded with questioning, but no word of it came to his lips.

"You can help me," he heard her saying in the same quiet, calm voice, softened so that one could not have heard it beyond the cabin door. "I haven't a plan. But I know you can arrange one--if you will. It must appear to be an accident. I must disappear, fall overboard, anything, just so the world will believe I am dead. It is necessary. And I can not tell you why. I can not. Oh, I _can not_."