When at last, by signs and such native words as she knew, she indicated to her native friends that she was ready to return to East Cape, they stared at her in astonishment and indicated by a diagram on the snow that they were now at a point three days' journey from that town and that none of them expected to return before the moon was again full.
No amount of gesturing and jabbering could make them understand that it was necessary for the girls to return at once.
"We'll never get back," Marian mourned in despair, "and it's all my fault."
"Oh, we'll make it still," encouraged Lucile, cheerfully. "Probably the Straits are not fully frozen over yet anyway."
However, after a week of inaction, even Lucile lost her cheerful smile.
One morning, after they had reached what appeared to be the final depths of despair, they heard a cry of, "Tomai! Tomai! Tomai," rise in a chorus from among the tents. By this they knew that visitors had arrived. They hurried out to find the villagers grouped about three fur-clad figures standing beside three reindeer hitched to sleds of a strange design.
By a few words and by signs they were made to understand that these people came from a point some two hundred miles farther north, a village on the north coast of Russia.
As ever, eager to look upon some new type, Marian crowded through the throng when, to her immense surprise, the smaller of the three, in reality only a boy, sprang forward, and, kneeling at her feet, kissed the fur fringe of her parka.
This action, so unusual among these natives, struck her dumb. But once he had looked up into her face, she understood all; he was none other than the strange brown boy who had come swimming to them from the sea off the coast of Washington.
She was so surprised and startled at first sight of him that she found herself incapable of action. It seemed to her that she must be seeing a ghost. It appeared entirely incredible that he should be in this out of the way place when they had left him, months before, on a deserted island of Puget Sound.