so that a ship traveling the inner waters
felt its way like a child creeping in darkness.

Alan loved this idiosyncrasy of the Alaskan coast. The phantom mystery
of it was stimulating, and in the peril of it was a challenging lure. He
could feel the care with which the _Nome_ was picking her way northward.
Her engines were thrumming softly, and her movement was a slow and
cautious glide, catlike and slightly trembling, as if every pound of
steel in her were a living nerve widely alert. He knew Captain Rifle
would not be asleep and that straining eyes were peering into the white
gloom from the wheel-house. Somewhere west of them, hazardously near,
must lie the rocks of Admiralty Island; eastward were the still more
pitiless glacial sandstones and granites of the coast, with that deadly
finger of sea-washed reef between, along the lip of which they must
creep to Juneau. And Juneau could not be far ahead.

He leaned over the rail, puffing at the stub of his cigar. He was eager
for his work. Juneau, Skagway, and Cordova meant nothing to him, except
that they were Alaska. He yearned for the still farther north, the wide
tundras, and the mighty achievement that lay ahead of him there. His
blood sang to the surety of it now, and for that reason he was not sorry
he had spent seven months of loneliness in the States. He had proved
with his own eyes that the day was near when Alaska would come into her
own. Gold! He laughed. Gold had its lure, its romance, its thrill, but
what was all the gold the mountains might possess compared with this
greater thing he was helping to build! It seemed to him the people he
had met in the south had thought only of gold when they learned he was
from Alaska. Always gold--that first, and then ice, snow, endless
nights, desolate barrens, and craggy mountains frowning everlastingly
upon a blasted land in which men fought against odds and only the
fittest survived. It was gold that had been Alaska's doom. When people
thought of it, they visioned nothing beyond the old stampede days, the
Chilkoot, White Horse, Dawson, and Circle City. Romance and glamor and
the tragedies of dead men clung to their ribs. But they were beginning
to believe now. Their eyes were opening. Even the Government was waking
up, after proving there was something besides graft in railroad building
north of Mount St. Elias. Senators and Congressmen at Washington had
listened to him seriously, and especially to Carl Lomen. And the