CHAPTER III
"FOR HE IS A WHITE MAN'S DOG"
Two months had elapsed since the mysterious college-boy had passed on north with his dog-team.
Many things could have happened to him in those months. As Marion sat looking away at the vast expanse of drifting ice which had been restless in its movements of late, telling of the coming of the spring break-up, she wondered what had happened to the frank-eyed, friendly boy. He had not returned. Had a blizzard caught him and snatched his life away? The rivers were overflowing their banks now, though thick and rotten ice was still beneath the milky water. Had he completed his mission North, and was he now struggling to make his way southward? Or was he securely housed in some out-of-the-way cabin waiting for open water and a schooner?
A letter had come—a letter in a blue envelop and addressed, as was the other, to Phi Beta Chi. That was after Lucile's return. Lucile had been back for a month now. The two girls had laughed and wondered about that letter. They had put it in the pigeonhole, and there it now was. But Marion had not forgotten her promise to take it with her in case the boy did not return before she left the cape.
As she sat dreaming there in the spring sunshine she started suddenly. Something had touched her foot.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, then laughed.
The most forlorn-looking dog she had ever seen had touched her shoe with his nose. His hair was ragged and matted, and his bones protruded at every possible point. His mouth was set awry, one side hanging half open.
"So!" she said, "it's you; you're looking worse than common."
The dog opened his mouth, allowing his long tongue to loll out.
"I suppose that means you're hungry. Well, for once you are in luck. The natives caught a hundred or more salmon through the ice. I have some of them. Fish, old top! Fish! What say?"
The dog stood on his hind legs and barked for joy. He read the sign in her eyes, if he did not understand her lip message. In an other moment he was gulping down a fat, four-pound salmon, while Marion eyed him, a curious questioning look on her face.
"Now," she said, as the dog finished, "the question is, what are we going to do with you? You're an old dog. You're no good in a team—too old; bad feet. No, sir, you can't be any good, or you wouldn't be back here in five days. We gave you to Tommy Illayok to lead his team. You were a leader in your day, all right, and you'd lead 'em yet if you could, poor old soul!" There was a catch in her voice. To her, dogs were next to humans. In the North they were necessary servants as well as friends.
"The thing that makes it hard to turn you out," she went on huskily, "is the fact that you're a white man's dog. Yes, sir! A white man's dog. And that means an awful lot—means you'd stick till death to any white person who'd feed you and call you friend. Jack London has written a book about a white man's dog that turned wild and joined a wolf-pack. It's a wonderful book, but I don't believe it. A white man's dog wants a white man for a friend; and if he loses one, he'll keep traveling until he finds another. That's the way a white man's dog is, and that's why you come back to us." She stooped and patted the shaggy head.
"THAT'S HIM! THAT'S HIM!" THE MAN ALMOST RAVED. "HONEST LOOKIN', YES, HONEST-LOOKIN'! THAT'S HIM!"
"I'll tell you what," she murmured, after a moment's reflection; "if the fish keep running, if the wild ducks come north, or the walrus come barking in from Bering Sea, then you can stay with us and get sleek and fat. You can sleep by our door in the hallway every night; and if any one comes prowling around, you can ask them what they want. How's that?"
The dog howled his approval.
Marion smiled, and, turning, went into the cabin. The dog, evidently an old and decrepit leader, deserted by a faithless master, had adopted their cabin as his foster home.
She had hardly entered the small building when she heard a growl from the dog, followed by the voice of a stranger.
"Down, Rover!" she shouted, as she sprang to the door.
The man who stood before her was badly dressed and unshaven. His eyes bore a shifty gleam.
"Get out, you cur!" He kicked at the dog with his heavy boot.
Marion's eyes flashed, but she said nothing.
"This the post-office?"
"Yes."
"'s there a letter here for me?"
"1 don't know," she smiled. "Won't you come in?"
The man came inside.
"Now," she said, "I'll see. What is your name?"
"Ben—" he hesitated; "oh—that don't matter. Won't be addressed to my name. Addressed like that."
He drew from his pocket a closely folded, dirt-begrimed envelop.
Marion's heart stopped beating. The envelop was blue—yes, the very shade of blue of that other in the pigeonhole. And her eyes did not deceive her; it was addressed with the characters Phi Beta Chi, Nome, Alaska.
"Is there a letter here like that?" The man demanded, squinting at her through bloodshot eyes.
It was a tense moment. What should she say? She loathed the man; feared him, as well. Yet he had asked for the letter and had offered better proof than the mysterious college boy had. What should she say?
"Yes—" she hesitated, "yes—" Her heart beat violently. His searching eyes were upon her. "Yes, there was one. It came two months ago. A young man called for it and took it away."
"You—you gave it to him?"
The man lifted a hand as if to strike her.
There came a growl from the door. Looking quickly, Marion caught the questioning gleam in the old leader's eye.
The man's arm fell.
"Yes," she said stoutly. "I gave it to him. Why should I not? He offered no real proof that he was the right person—"
"Then why—"
"But neither have you," Marion hurried on. "You might have picked that envelop up in the street, or taken it from a waste-paper basket. How do I know?"
"What—what sort of a boy was it?" The man asked more steadily.
"A good-looking, strapping young fellow, with blue eyes and an honest face."
"That's him! That's him!" The man almost raved. "Honest lookin', yes, honest-lookin'! That 'shim! They ain't all honest that looks that way."
Again came the growl from the door.
Marion's eyes glanced uneasily toward the pigeonhole where the latest blue envelop rested. She caught an easy breath. A large white legal envelop quite hid the blue one. "Well, if another one comes, remember it's mine! Mine!" growled the man, as he went stamping out of the room.
"Old Rover," Marion said, taking the dog's head between her hands, "I'm glad you're here. When there are such men as that about, we need you."
And yet, as she spoke, her heart was full of misgivings. What if this man was poor and a bit "crusty," but honest; and what if her good-looking college-boy were a rascal? There in the pigeonhole was the blue envelop. What was her duty?
Pulling on her calico parka, she went for a stroll on the beach. The cool, damp air of arctic twilight by the sea was balm to her perplexed brain. She came back to the cabin with a deep-seated conviction that she was right.
She was not given many days to decide whether she should take the letter with her or leave it. A sudden gale from the south sent the ice-floes rushing through the straits. They hastened away to ports unknown, not to return for months. The little mail-steamer came hooting its way around the point. It brought a letter of the utmost importance to Marion.
While in Nome the summer before, she had made some hasty sketches of the Chukches, natives of the arctic coast of Siberia, while they camped on the beach there on a trading voyage in a thirty-foot skin-boat. These sketches had come to the notice of the ethnological society. They now wrote to her asking that she spend a summer on the arctic coast of Siberia, making sketches of these natives, who, so like the Eskimos, are yet so unlike them in many ways. The pay, they assured her, would be ample; in fact, the figures fairly staggered her. Should she complete this task in safety and to the satisfaction of the society, she would then be prepared to pay her way through a three years' course in one of the best art schools of America. This had long been a cherished dream.
When she had read the letter through, she went for a five-mile walk down the beach. Upon returning, she burst in on her companion.
"Lucile!" she exclaimed, "how would you like to spend the summer in Siberia?"
"Fine! Salt-mine, I suppose?" laughed Lucile. "But I thought all political prisoners had been released by the new Russian Government?"
"I'm not joking," said Marion.
"Explain then."
Marion did explain. At the end of her explanation Lucile had agreed to go. In two weeks her school work would be finished. She would go as Marion's traveling companion and tent-keeper.
"But how'll we go over?" exclaimed Lucile, suddenly.
"Native skin-boat."
"That would be rather thrilling; to cross from the New World to the Old in a skin-boat."
"And safe enough, too," said Marion. "Did you ever hear of a native boat being lost at sea?"
"One. But that one turned up at King's Island, a hundred and fifty miles off its course."
"I guess we could risk it."
"All right; let's go."
Marion sprang to her feet, threw back the blankets to her couch, and fifteen minutes later was dreaming of a tossing skin-boat on a wild sea of walrus monsters and huge white bears.
Her wild dreams did not come true. When the time came to cross the thirty-five miles of water which separates the Old World from the New, they sailed and paddled over a sea as placid as a mill-pond. Here a brown seal bobbed his head out of the water; here a spectacled eider-duck rode up and down on the tiny waves; and here a great mass of tubular seaweed drifted by to remind them that they were really on the bosom of the briny ocean.
Only one incident of the voyage caused them a feeling of vague unrest. A fog had settled down over the sea. They were drifting and paddling slowly forward, when the faint scream of a siren struck their ears. It came nearer and nearer.
"A gasolene schooner," said Marion.
The natives began shouting to avert a possible collision.
Presently the schooner appeared, a dark bulk in the fog.
It took shape. Men were seen on the deck. It came in close by. The waves from it reached the skin-boat.
They were passing with a salute, when a strange thing happened. Rover, the old dog-leader, who had been riding in the prow, standing well forward, as if taking the place of a painted figure-head, suddenly began to bark furiously. At the same time, Marion caught sight of a bearded face framed in a port-hole.
Involuntarily she shrank back out of sight. The next instant the schooner had faded away into the fog. The dog ceased barking.
"What was it?" asked Lucile, anxiously.
"Only a face."
"Who?"
"The man who wanted the blue envelop. Rover recognized him first."
"You don't suppose he knew, and is following?"
"How could he know?"
"But what is he going to Siberia for?"
"Perhaps to trade. They do that a great deal. Let's not talk of it." Marion shivered.
The incident was soon forgotten. They were nearing the Siberian shore which was to be their summer home. A million nesting birds came skimming out over the sea, singing their merry song as if to greet them. They would soon be living in a tent in the midst of a young city of tents. They would be studying a people whose lives are as little known as were the natives in the heart of Africa before the days of Livingstone.
As she thought of these things, Marion's cheeks flushed with excitement.
"What new thrill will come to us here?" her lips whispered.
Had she known, she might have been tempted to turn back.