"Guess he was looking for the brown boy, but became satisfied that he was not here," explained Marian next morning.
"Perhaps they'll let us alone after this," said Lucile.
This prophecy came to pass. After a few nights the vigil was dropped and the remaining days on the island were given over to the pleasures of camp life.
The discovery of a freshly abandoned fire on the beach some miles from camp proved that Lucile's belief that the brown boy could take care of himself was well founded. His footprints were all about in the sand. Feathers of a wild duck and the heads of three good-sized fishes showed that he had fared well.
"We'll meet him again 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.