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, and she looked up at him, it was
as if he beheld the pallid beauty of one of the white tundra flowers.
"And the man who committed that crime--was John Graham," she said, in
the strangely passionless voice of one who knew what his answer
would be.
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