It had been a good winter and promised to be a tremendously successful summer.

The Lomen herds would exceed forty thousand head, when the final figures were in.

A hundred other herds were prospering, and the Eskimo and Lapps were full-cheeked and plump with good feeding and prosperity.

A third of a million reindeer were on the hoof in Alaska, and the breeders were exultant.

Pretty good, when compared with the fact that in 1902 there were less than five thousand! In another twenty years there would be ten million.
But with this prosperity of the present and still greater promise for the future Alan sensed the undercurrent of unrest and suspicion in Nome.
After waiting and hoping through another long winter, with their best men fighting for Alaska's salvation at Washington, word was traveling from mouth to mouth, from settlement to settlement, and from range to range, that the Bureaucracy which misgoverned them from thousands of miles away was not lifting a hand to relieve them.