beef
barons, wisest of all, had tried to buy him off and had offered a
fortune for Lomen's forty thousand head of reindeer in the Seward
Peninsula! That was proof of the awakening. Absolute proof.

He lighted a fresh cigar, and his mind shot through the dissolving mist
into the vast land ahead of him. Some Alaskans had cursed Theodore
Roosevelt for putting what they called "the conservation shackles" on
their country. But he, for one, did not. Roosevelt's far-sightedness had
kept the body-snatchers at bay, and because he had foreseen what
money-power and greed would do, Alaska was not entirely stripped today,
but lay ready to serve with all her mighty resources the mother who had
neglected her for a generation. But it was going to be a struggle, this
opening up of a great land. It must be done resourcefully and with
intelligence. Once the bars were down, Roosevelt's shadow-hand could not
hold back such desecrating forces as John Graham and the syndicate he
represented.

Thought of Graham was an unpleasant reminder, and his face grew hard in
the sea-mist. Alaskans themselves must fight against the licensed
plunderers. And it would be a hard fight. He had seen the pillaging work
of these financial brigands in a dozen states during the past
winter--states raped of their forests, their lakes and streams robbed
and polluted, their resources hewn down to naked skeletons. He had been
horrified and a little frightened when he looked over the desolation of
Michigan, once the richest timber state in America. What if the
Government at Washington made it possible for such a thing to happen in
Alaska? Politics--and money--were already fighting for just that thing.

He no longer heard the throb of the ship under his feet. It was _his_
fight, and brain and muscle reacted to it almost as if it had been a
physical thing. And his end of that fight he was determined to win, if
it took every year of his life. He, with a few others, would prove to
the world that the millions of acres of treeless tundras of the north
were not the cast-off ends of the earth. They would populate them, and
the so-called "barrens" would thunder to the innumerable hoofs of
reindeer herds as the American plains had never thundered to the beat of
cattle. He was not thinking of the treasure he would find at the end of
this rainbow of success which he visioned. Money, simply as money, he
hated. It was the achievement of the thing that gripped him; the passion
to h