As she thought of these things Marian's cheeks flushed with excitement.
"What new thrill will come to us here?" her lips whispered.
CHAPTER V
CAST ADRIFT
There was a shallow space beneath a tray of color-tubes in the very bottom of Marian's paint-box. There, on leaving Cape Prince of Wales, she had stowed the blue envelope addressed to Phi Beta Ki. She had not done this without misgivings. Disturbing thoughts had come to her. Was it the right thing to do? Was it safe? The latter question had come to her with great force when she saw the grizzled miner's face framed in the porthole of that schooner.
But from the day they landed at Whaling, on the mainland of Siberia, all thoughts of the letter and the two claimants for its possession were completely crowded from her mind.
Never in all her adventurous life had Marian experienced anything quite so thrilling as this life with the Chukches of the Arctic coast of Siberia.
In Alaska the natives had had missionaries and teachers among them for thirty years. They had been Americanized and, in a sense, Christianized. The development of large mining centers to which they journeyed every summer to beg and barter had tended to rob them of the romantic wildness of their existence. But here, here where no missionaries had been allowed nor teachers been sent, where gold gleamed still ungathered in the beds of the rivers, here the natives still dwelt in their dome-like houses of poles and skins. Here they fared boldly forth in search of the dangerous walrus and white bear and the monstrous whale. Here they made strange fire to the spirits of the monsters they had slaughtered, and spoke in grave tones of the great spirit that had come down from the moon in the form of a raven with a beak of old ivory.
It is little wonder that Marian forgot all thought of fear amid such surroundings, as she worked industriously at the sketches which were to furnish her with three years of wonderful study under great masters.
But one day, after six weeks of veritable dream life, as she lifted the tray to her paint-box her eyes fell on that blue envelope. Instantly a flood of remembrance rushed through her mind; the frank-faced college boy, the angry miner, old Rover, the dog, who, sleek and fat on whale meat, lay curled up beside her, then again the grizzled face of the miner framed in a port-hole; all these passed before her mind's vision and left her chilled.