For one full moment she stood staring at the spot from which the little man had vanished. Here indeed was a strange situation. All her life she had believed her grandfather dead. From her mother’s lips she had heard vague stories of how he had gone into the north and never returned. Now here was a little Eskimo saying, “Tom Kennedy my friend. Yes, I know him. He is alive.”
“And he proved it too,” the girl whispered to herself.
Then, of a sudden, her thoughts came back to the present and to her immediate surroundings.
“What a jumble!” she said, looking at the heap of goods that, as moments passed, grew higher and higher. “How will they ever get them sorted out?”
Turning to her cousin, bright-eyed, eager Mary, she said: “‘A ticket to adventure,’ that’s what the man back there in San Francisco called it, ‘a ticket to adventure.’ Will it truly be an adventure? I wonder.”
“I hope so!” Mary’s eyes shone.
Turning, the two girls walked away toward a distant spot on the long dock where a boy, who had barely grown into a young man, was struggling at the task of setting up a small umbrella tent.
“See!” the big girl cried, “there’s Mark. He’s setting up our first home in a wilderness.”
CHAPTER II
THE INDIAN GIRL’S WARNING
Hours later Florence stirred uneasily in her sleep, then half-awake murmured dreamily: “A ticket to adventure. That’s what he said, a ticket—”