As she gazed out to sea, her mind went back over the year and a half that had passed since she and Lucile had spent that eventful month on Mutineer's Island. But her thoughts were cut short. Throwing up her hands in wild glee, she exclaimed:
"The mail! The mail!"
The coming of the mail carrier was, indeed, a great event in this out-of-the-way spot. Once a month he came whirling around the point, behind a swift-footed dog-team. He came unheralded. Conditions of snow and storm governed his time of travel, yet come he always did.
No throng greeted his coming. No eager crowd hovered about the latticed window waiting for the mail to be "made up." If a dozen letters were in the sack, that was what might be expected.
But these letters had come eighteen hundred miles by dog-team. Precious messages they were. Tomorrow, perhaps, a bearded miner would drop in from Tin City, which was a city only in name. This lone miner would claim one of the letters. Two, perhaps, would go to another miner on Saw Tooth Mountain. Next week, an Eskimo happening down from Shishmaref Island, seventy-five miles north, would take three letters to Ben Norton and his sister, the government teachers for the Eskimos. Two would go in a pigeon-hole, for Thompson, the teacher on Little Diomede Island, twenty-two miles across the drifting ice. Later a native would be paid ten sacks of flour for attempting to cross that floe and deliver the contents of that box. There might be a scrawled note for some Eskimo, a stray letter or two, and the rest would be for Marian. At the present moment, she was the only white person at Cape Prince of Wales, a little town of three hundred and fifty Eskimos.
"Pretty light this time," smiled the grizzled mail carrier as he reached the cabin at the top of the hill; "mebby ten letters."
"Uncle Sam takes good care of his people," smiled Marian, "the teachers of his native children and the miners who search for his hidden treasures."
"I'll say he does! Must have cost all of ten dollars apiece to deliver them letters," chuckled the carrier. "And the people that mailed 'em stuck on a measly red two-cent stamp. I git fifty dollars for bringin' 'em the last sixty miles."
"And it's worth it, too."
"You're just right. Pretty tough trail. Pretty tough! Say!" he exclaimed, suddenly remembering a bit of gossip, "did ye hear about Tootsie Silock?"