The Blue Envelope | Page 9

somewhere, I am sure," said Lucile with conviction, "and until we do, I shall carry his little present as a sort of talisman."
The weeks passed all too quickly. One day, with many regrets, they packed their camp-kit in the motorboat and went pop-popping to Lucile's home.
Three weeks later saw them aboard the steamship Torentia bound for Cape Prince of Wales by way of Nome. They were entering upon a new and adventure-filled life. This journey, though they little guessed it, brought them some two thousand miles nearer the spot where, once again under the strangest of circumstances, they were to meet the brown boy who had come swimming to them from the ocean.
CHAPTER III
THE MYSTERIOUS PHI BETA KI
It was some months later that Marian stood looking down from a snow-clad hill. From where she stood, brushes and palette in hand, she could see the broad stretch of snow-covered beach, and beyond that the unbroken stretch of drifting ice which chained the restless Arctic Sea at Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska. She gloried in all the wealth of light and shadow which lay like a changing panorama before her. She thrilled at the thought of the mighty forces that shifted the massive ice-floes as they drifted from nowhere to nowhere. Now for the thousandth time she stood spellbound before it.
As she gazed out to sea, her mind went back over the year and a half that had passed since she and Lucile had spent that eventful month on Mutineer's Island. But her thoughts were cut short. Throwing up her hands in wild glee, she exclaimed:
"The mail! The mail!"
The coming of the mail carrier was, indeed, a great event in this out-of-the-way spot. Once a month he came whirling around the point, behind a swift-footed dog-team. He came unheralded. Conditions of snow and storm governed his time of travel, yet come he always did.
No throng greeted his coming. No eager crowd hovered about the latticed window waiting for the mail to be "made up." If a dozen letters were in the sack, that was what might be expected.
But these letters had come eighteen hundred miles by dog-team. Precious messages they were. Tomorrow, perhaps, a bearded miner would drop in from Tin City, which was a city only in name. This lone miner would claim one of the letters. Two, perhaps, would go to another miner on Saw Tooth Mountain. Next week, an Eskimo happening down from Shishmaref Island, seventy-five miles north, would take three letters to Ben Norton and his sister, the government teachers for the Eskimos. Two would go in a pigeon-hole, for Thompson, the teacher on Little Diomede Island, twenty-two miles across the drifting ice. Later a native would be paid ten sacks of flour for attempting to cross that floe and deliver the contents of that box. There might be a scrawled note for some Eskimo, a stray letter or two, and the rest would be for Marian. At the present moment, she was the only white person at Cape Prince of Wales, a little town of three hundred and fifty Eskimos.
"Pretty light this time," smiled the grizzled mail carrier as he reached the cabin at the top of the hill; "mebby ten letters."
"Uncle Sam takes good care of his people," smiled Marian, "the teachers of his native children and the miners who search for his hidden treasures."
"I'll say he does! Must have cost all of ten dollars apiece to deliver them letters," chuckled the carrier. "And the people that mailed 'em stuck on a measly red two-cent stamp. I git fifty dollars for bringin' 'em the last sixty miles."
"And it's worth it, too."
"You're just right. Pretty tough trail. Pretty tough! Say!" he exclaimed, suddenly remembering a bit of gossip, "did ye hear about Tootsie Silock?"
"No." Marian was busy with the mail.
"Jist gossip, I reckon, but they say she's left her Eskimo husband--"
Marian did not answer. Gossip did not interest her. Besides, she had found a letter that did interest her even more than those addressed to her. A very careful penman had drawn the Greek letters, Phi Beta Ki, on the outside of an envelope, and beneath it had written, "Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska."
"Wha--"
She was on the point of sharing the mystery with the carrier, but checked herself. Just some new gossip for him, was her mental comment.
"Here's the sack," she said, noting that he had finished drinking the coffee she had prepared for him. "I hope there'll be more mail next time. Letters mean so much to these people up at the top of the world. Spring thaw'll be here pretty soon, then they can't get mail for two or three months."
"That's right; it's fierce," said the carrier, taking the sack and turning toward the door.
"Phi Beta Ki," Marian pronounced the letters softly to herself as