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And the tundras would always be his home, because his heart was there. He had passed round the wheel-house and came suddenly upon an odd figure crumpled in a chair. It was Stampede Smith. In the clearer light that came with the dissolution of the sea-mist Alan saw that he was not asleep. He paused, unseen by the other. Stampede stretched himself, groaned, and stood up.
And when the expedition should reach the tundras of eastern Siberia, there was the double danger of the Chukchee tribes on the north, hostile as the American Indians, and of the Siberian exile population on the south, branded criminals, political malcontents, banditti of the wilderness, outcasts of nameless crimes beyond the pale of law.
It is temperature which causes the moss and lichens of the barren tundras in the far north to be replaced by orchids, twining vines, and mahogany trees near the equator. It is rainfall which determines that vigorous forests shall grow in the Appalachians in latitudes where grasslands prevail in the plains and deserts in the western cordillera.
He closed his eyes and visualized the home that was still thousands of miles away the endless tundras, the blue and purple foothills of the Endicott Mountains, and "Alan's Range" at the beginning of them. Spring was breaking up there, and it was warm on the tundras and the southern slopes, and the pussy-willow buds were popping out of their coats like corn from a hopper.
In this New World of ours, strange as it may seem, the almost uninhabited forest regions of the far north and of the equator are probably more than twice as large as the desert areas with equally sparse population. South of the tundras the grass-lands have a still greater advantage over the forests.
Through the blizzard Jolly Roger made his way a score of miles southward from the big dune on the Barren. For a day and a night he made his camp in the scrub timber which edged the vast treeless tundras reaching to the Arctic. He believed he was safe, for the unceasing wind and the blasts of shot-like snow filled his tracks a few moments after they were made.
The musk-tang of the tundras, coming to him through the thin timber of the river-courses, worked like an intoxicant in his blood. It was the tundra he wanted, before he lay down upon his back with his face to the stars. He was eager to get away from timber and to feel the immeasurable space of the big country, the open country, about him. What fool had given to it the name of Barren Lands?
It was late in the afternoon when he saw far ahead of him the clump of cottonwoods near the warm springs, very near his home. Often he had come to these old cottonwoods, an oasis of timber lost in the great tundras, and he had built himself a little camp among them. He loved the place. It had seemed to him that now and then he must visit the forlorn trees to give them cheer and comradeship.
The reindeer, which frequented the South Siberian highlands, and whose domain encroached on that of the camel, is now found only in the domestic state amongst the Soyotes of the Upper Yenisei and is met with in the wild state only in the dwarf forests and tundras of the far north.
By nine or ten the next morning he would be facing Rossland, and at about that same hour Tatpan's swift messengers would be closing in about Tautuk and Amuk Toolik. He knew the speed with which his herdsmen would sweep out of the mountains and over the tundras.
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