1. The Meeting
DESOLATE and lone it rises there in the midst of one of the loneliest reaches in all the lonely Sea of Bering. Flang Island it is called, this mass of rock, black, rent, smashed and jagged—the summit, perhaps, of a mountain range sunk beneath the waters in some lost age of the earth. It is barely a half-mile in length, its greatest width is but half of that, the highest point only about two hundred feet above the sea.
Flang Island (soon to be a place of tragedy, the scene of what is perhaps the strangest dénouement to murder on record) lies very near the fifty-fifth parallel of north latitude. The time was the beginning of July; to be precise, the date was the 2nd. At this season (unless the sky be overcast) darkness never settles upon that black and desolate place—the abode of a few seals and fewer sea-birds. The sun, his declination 23° north, does not set till near 9 o'clock; at midnight he is only twelve degrees below the (northern) horizon, so that there is no darkness but twilight only; and at half-past 3 he once more has emerged from out the wastes of ocean. How great the contrast at the opposite season! For, at the winter solstice, the sun does not rise till
