“That was before Col. Lindbergh made the air a place for Americans to fly in and while I hopped about, here, there and several other places I wasn’t exactly a bright and shining success. Then one day I answered an advertisement I read in a middle west paper and took off on a job that seemed too good to be true. As they told me I would be working for a chain of business firms, I swallowed it hook, line and sinker, with the pole and reel thrown in, and didn’t think anything of it when I carried males and females all over the map. I figured they were members of boards, big business stuff with headquarters scattered.” He paused again and frowned.
“I see,” the girl encouraged.
“I’d been with them a year, and had a real roll in the bank before I made my first trip to Alaska with any of them. It was six months after that before I went over to the Pribilof Islands—”
“Is that where we are?”
“Yes, but not the main ones. They are a bit further south, but these little fellows I guess are all on the same range, like an underseas chain of mountains,” he answered, then went on. “I carried mail, supplies and stuff back and forth between them and the mainland, sometimes down to the Aleutian Islands. The Indian woman you call Nomie is an Aleut.”
“I wondered.”
“That’s what she is. Her husband was a seal fisher and got killed when the kid was little. They had the dugout and lived where you’re being held so she stayed and worked for the gang, she nurses them when they get sick, and all that sort of thing.”
“She’s been mighty nice to me,” Roberta said quickly.
“She’s a darned good Indian and she had to make her living somehow, same as a lot of the rest of us.”
“Of course,” Roberta agreed.