e cup at the foot of
the mountain, with the waterfall singing in summer, and a paradise of
birds and flowers keeping her company, and all the great, wild world she
loved about her. There was the cabin, too; the little cabin where I was
born, with its back to the big mountain, and filled with the handiwork
of my mother as she had left it when she died. And my father too used to
laugh and sing there--he had a clear voice that would roll half-way up
the mountain; and as I grew older the miracle at times stirred me with a
strange fear, so real to my father did my dead mother seem when he was
home. But you look frightened, Miss Standish! Oh, it may seem weird and
ghostly now, but it was _true_--so true that I have lain awake nights
thinking of it and wishing that it had never been so!"

"Then you have wished a great sin," said the girl in a voice that seemed
scarcely to whisper between her parted lips. "I hope someone will feel
toward me--some day--like that."

"But it was this which brought the tragedy, the thing you have asked me
to tell you about," he said, unclenching his hands slowly, and then
tightening them again until the blood ebbed from their veins. "Interests
were coming in; the tentacles of power and greed were reaching out,
encroaching steadily a little nearer to our cup at the foot of the
mountain. But my father did not dream of what might happen. It came in
the spring of the year he took me on my first trip to the States, when I
was eighteen. We were gone five months, and they were five months of
hell for him. Day and night he grieved for my mother and the little home
under the mountain. And when at last we came back--"

He turned again to the window, but he did not see the golden sun of the
tundra or hear Tautuk calling from the corral.

"When we came back," he repeated in a cold, hard voice, "a construction
camp of a hundred men had invaded my father's little paradise. The cabin
was gone; a channel had been cut from the waterfall, and this channel
ran where my mother's grave had been. They had treated it with that
same desecration with which they have destroyed ten thousand Indian
graves since then. Her bones were scattered in the sand and mud. And
from the moment my father saw what had happened, never another sun rose
in the heavens for him. His heart died, yet he went on living--for
a time."

Mary Standish had bowed her face in her hands. He saw the tremor of her
slim shoulders; and when he came back,