s interview bother you,"
he said. "It's going into my paper straight, Mr. Banks, and in your own
words."

While he spoke, his vigilant glance rested lightly on one of the several
guests scattered about the lobby. He was a grave and thoughtful man and
had seemed deeply engrossed in a magazine, but he had changed his seat for
a chair within speaking distance, and Jimmie had not seen him turn a page.

"What I was going to say, then," resumed Banks, "was that afterwards, when
the orchards are in shape, I am going back to Alaska and take a bunch of
those abandoned claims, where the miners have quit turning up the earth,
and just seed 'em to oats and blue stem. Either would do mighty well. The
sun shines hot long summer days, and the ground keeps moist from the
melting snow on the mountains. I've seen little patches of grain up there
and hay ripening and standing high as my shoulder. But what they need most
in the interior is stock farms, horses and beeves, and I am going to take
in a fine bunch of both; they'll do fine; winter right along with the
caribou and reindeer."

"Well, that's a new idea to me," exclaimed Daniels. "Alaska to me has
always stood for blizzards, snow, glaciers, impregnable mountains, bleak
and barren plains like the steppes of Russia, and privation, privation of
the worst kind."

Banks nodded grimly. "That's because the first of us got caught by winter
unprepared. Why, men freeze to death every blizzard right here in the
States; sometimes it's in Dakota; sometimes old New York, with railroads
lacing back and forth close as shoestrings. And imagine that big,
unsettled Alaska interior without a single railroad and only one
wagon-road; men most of the time breaking their own trails. Not a town or
a house sometimes in hundreds of miles to shelter 'em, if a storm happens
to break. But you talk with any Swede miner from up there. He'll tell you
they could make a new Sweden out of Alaska. Let us use the timber for
building and fuel; let a man that's got the money to do it start a
lumber-mill or mine the coal. Give us the same land and mineral laws you
have here in the States, and homeseekers would flock in thick as birds in
springtime."

The stranger closed his magazine. "Pardon me," he said, taking advantage
of the pause, "but do you mean that Conservation is all that is keeping
home-seekers out of Alaska?"

Banks nodded this time with a kind of fierceness; his eyes scintillated a
white heat, but he su