Now that he was alone, he no longer made an effort to restrain the anxiety which the prospector’s unexpected revealment had aroused in him.  The other’s footsteps were scarcely gone when he again had the paper in his hand.  It was clearly the lower part of a letter sheet of ordinary business size and had been carelessly torn from the larger part of the page, so that nothing more than the signature and half a dozen lines of writing in a man’s heavy script remained.

What was left of the letter which Alan would have given much to have possessed, read as follows: 

“_—­If you work carefully and guard your real identity in securing facts and information, we should have the entire industry in our hands within a year_.”

Under these words was the strong and unmistakable signature of John Graham.

A score of times Alan had seen that signature, and the hatred he bore for its maker, and the desire for vengeance which had entwined itself like a fibrous plant through all his plans for the future, had made of it an unforgetable writing in his brain.  Now that he held in his hand words written by his enemy, and the man who had been his father’s enemy, all that he had kept away from Stampede’s sharp eyes blazed in a sudden fury in his face.  He dropped the paper as if it had been a thing unclean, and his hands clenched until his knuckles snapped in the stillness of the room, as he slowly faced the window through which a few moments ago he had looked in the direction of Mary Standish’s cabin.

So John Graham was keeping his promise, the deadly promise he had made in the one hour of his father’s triumph—­that hour in which the elder Holt might have rid the earth of a serpent if his hands had not revolted in the last of those terrific minutes which he as a youth had witnessed.  And Mary Standish was the instrument he had chosen to work his ends!

In these first minutes Alan could not find a doubt with which to fend the absoluteness of the convictions which were raging in his head, or still the tumult that was in his heart and blood.  He made no pretense to deny the fact that John Graham must have written this letter to Mary Standish; inadvertently she had kept it, had finally attempted to destroy it, and Stampede, by chance, had discovered a small but convincing remnant of it.  In a whirlwind of thought he pieced together things that had happened:  her efforts to interest him from the beginning, the determination with which she had held to her purpose, her boldness in following him to the Range, and her apparent endeavor to work herself into his confidence—­and with John Graham’s signature staring at him from the table these things seemed conclusive and irrefutable evidence.  The “industry” which Graham had referred to could mean only his own and Carl Lomen’s, the reindeer industry which they had built up and were fighting to perpetuate, and which Graham and his beef-baron friends were combining to handicap and destroy.  And in this game of destruction clever Mary Standish had come to play a part!