She had come upon James while on the way from the cloak room. She would have to wait a full half hour before Lucile would have finished her work, and she felt that she just must tell some one of her thrilling adventure with Dick and the policeman.
Seated on the edge of a table, feet dangling and fingers beating time to the music of her story, she told James of this thrilling adventure.
“You came out well enough at that,” he chuckled when she had finished. “Lots better’n I did the last time I mixed into things.”
Cordie wondered if this remark had reference to his chase after the hawk-eyed young man who had followed her to the furnace room that night. But asking no questions, she just waited.
“Funny trip, that last sea voyage I took,” James mused at last, his eyes half closed. “It wouldn’t have been half bad if it hadn’t been for one vile crook.
“You see,” he went on, “sometimes of a summer I run up to Nome. I’ve always had a few hundred dollars, that is up until now. I’d go up there in the north and sort of wander round on gasoline schooners and river boats, buyin’ up skins; red, white, cross fox, and maybe a silver gray or two. Minks and martin too, and ermine and Siberian squirrel.
“Always had a love for real furs; you know what I mean, the genuine stuff that stands up straight and fluffy and can’t be got anywhere far south of the Arctic Circle—things like the fox skin that’s on that cape your pal Lucile wears sometimes. When I see all these pretty girls wearin’ rabbit skin coats, it makes me feel sort of bad. Why, even the Eskimos do better than that! They dress their women in fawn skin; mighty pretty they are, too, sometimes.
“Well, last summer I went up to Nome, that’s in Alaska, you know, and from there I took a sort of pirate schooner that ranges up and down the coast of Alaska and into Russian waters.”
“Pirate,” breathed Cordie, but James didn’t hear her.
“We touched at a point or two,” he went on, “then went over into Russian waters for walrus hunting—ivory and skins.