“Yes. Almost nothing. And I took him up.”
His son leaned back, keenly interested for the first time. “Good Lord, why? You can’t go into business selling out-of-date women’s clothes!”
“Can’t, eh? Son, while he was talking to me, it occurred to me all at once that the least of those gowns, the poorest one in the lot, was worth at least a marten skin! Think of it! A marten skin, from Northern Canada and Alaska, returned the trapper around sixty dollars in 1920. Now let me get down to brass tacks.
“It’s true I don’t intend to sell any of those hairy old white trappers any women’s silk gowns. But this was what I was going to have you do: first you were to hire a good auxiliary schooner—a strong, sturdy, seaworthy two-masted craft such as is used in northern trading. You’d fit that craft out with a few weeks’ supplies and fill the hold with a couple of thousand of those gowns. You’d need two or three men to run the launch—I believe the usual crew is a pilot, a first and second engineer, and a cook—and you’d have to have a seamstress to do fitting and make minor alterations. Then you’d start up for Bering Sea.
“You may not know it, but along the coast of Alaska, and throughout the islands of Bering Sea there are hundreds of little, scattered tribes of Indians, all of them trappers of the finest, high-priced furs. Nor do their women dress in furs and skins altogether, either, as popular legend would have you believe. Through their hot, long summer days they wear dresses like American women, and the gayer and prettier the dresses, the better they like ’em. To my knowledge, no one has ever fed them silk—simply because silk was too high—but being women, red or white, they’d simply go crazy over it.
“The other factor in the combination is that the Intrepid, due to the unsettled fur market, failed to do any extensive buying on her last annual trading trip through the islands, and as a result practically all the Indians have their full catch on hand. The Intrepid is the only trader through the particular chain of islands I have in mind—the Skopin group, north and east of the Aleutian chain—and she’s not counting on going up again till spring. Then she’ll reap a rich harvest—unless you get there first.
“The Skopin Islands are charted—any that are inhabited at all—easy to find, easy to get to with a seaworthy launch. Every one of those Indians you’ll find there will buy a dress for his squaw or his daughter to show off in, during the summer, and pay for it with a fine piece of fur. For some of the brighter, richer gowns I haven’t any doubt but that you could get blue and silver fox. As I say, the worst of ’em is worth at least a single marten. Considering your lack of space, I’d limit you to marten, blue and silver fox, fisher and mink, and perhaps such other freak furs as would bring a high price—no white fox or muskrat or beaver, perhaps not even ermine and land otter. Ply along from island to island, starting north and working south and west clear out among the Aleuts, to keep out of the way of the winter, showing your dresses at the Indian villages and trading them for furs!
“This is August. I’m already arranging for a license. You’d have to get going in a week. Hit as far north as you want—the farther you go the better you will do—and then work south. Making a big chain that cuts off the currents and the tides, the Skopin group is surrounded by an unbroken ice sheet in midwinter, so you have to count on rounding the Aleutian Peninsula into Pacific waters some time in November. If you wait much longer you’re apt not to get out before spring.
“That’s the whole story. The cargo of furs you should bring out should be worth close to a hundred thousand. Expenses won’t be fifteen thousand in all. It would mean work; dealing with a bunch of crafty redskins isn’t play for boys! Maybe there’d be cold and rough weather, for Bering Sea deserves no man’s trust. But it would be the finest sport in the world, an opportunity to take Alaskan bear and tundra caribou—plenty of adventure and excitement and tremendous profits to boot. It would be a man’s job, Ned—but you’d get a kick out of it you never got out of a booze party in your life. And we split the profits seventy-five—twenty-five—the lion’s share to you.”
He waited, to watch Ned’s face. The young man seemed to be musing. “I could use fifty thousand, pretty neat,” he observed at last.