"Does no one live there?" I asked the storekeeper's wife.
"Live there!" she repeated with a quick shudder. "No one could be hired at any price to live there."
The murdered man had purchased a young Aleutian girl, twelve years old, for ten dollars and some tobacco. When she grew older, he lived with her and called her his wife. He abused her shamefully. A Russian half-breed named Gerassenoff—the name fits the story—fell in love with the girl, loved her to desperation, and tried to persuade her to run away with him.
She dared not, for fear of the brutal white wretch who owned her, body and soul. Gerassenoff, seeing the cruelties and abuse to which she was daily subjected, brooded upon his troubles until he became partially insane. He entered the house when the man was asleep and murdered him—foully, horribly, cold-bloodedly.
Gerassenoff is now serving a life-sentence in the government penitentiary on McNeil's Island; the man he murdered lies in an unmarked grave; the girl—for the story has its touch of awful humor!—the girl married another man within a twelvemonth.
There is a persistent invitation at Sand Point to the swimmer. The temptation to sink down, down, through those translucent depths, and then to rise and float lazily with the jelly-fishes, is almost irresistible. There is a seductive, languorous charm in the slow curve of the waves, as though they reached soft arms and wet lips to caress. There are more beautiful waters along the Alaskan coast, but none in which the very spirit of the swimmer seems so surely to dwell.
CHAPTER XXXVI
Belkoffski! There was something in the name that attracted my attention the first time I heard it; and my interest increased with each mile that brought it nearer. It is situated on the green and sloping shores of Pavloff Bay, which rise gradually to hills of considerable height. Behind it smokes the active volcano, Mount Pavloff, with whose ashes the hills are in places gray, and whose fires frequently light the night with scarlet beauty.