The Blue Envelope Part 1

The Blue Envelope.

by Roy J. Snell.

FOREWORD

When considering the ma.n.u.script of "The Blue Envelope" my publishers wrote me asking that I offer some sort of proof that the experiences of Marian and Lucile might really have happened to two girls so situated.

My answer ran somewhat as follows:

Alaska, at least the northern part of it, is so far removed from the rest of this old earth that it is almost as distinct from it as is the moon. It's a good stiff nine-day trip to it by water and you sight land only once in all that nine days. For nine months of winter you are quite shut off from the rest of the world. Your mail comes once a month, letters only, over an eighteen-hundred-mile dog trail; two months and a half for letters to come; the same for the reply to go back. Do you wonder, then, that the Alaskan, when going down to Seattle, does not speak of it as going to Seattle or going down to the States but as "going outside"? Going outside seems to just exactly express it. When you have spent a year in Alaska you feel as if you had truly been inside something for twelve months.

People who live "inside" of Alaska do not live exactly as they might were they in New England. Conventions for the most part disappear.

Life is a struggle for existence and a bit of pleasure now and again.

If conventions and customs get in the way of these, away with them.

And no one in his right senses can blame these people for living that way.

One question we meet, and probably it should be answered. Would two lone girls do and dare the things that Lucile and Marian did? My only answer must be that girls of their age--girls from "outside" at that--have done them.

Helen C----, a sixteen-year-old girl, came to Cape Prince of Wales to keep house for her father, who was superintendent of the reindeer herd at that point. She lived there with her father and the natives--no white woman about--for two years. During that time her father often went to the herd, which was grazing some forty miles from the Cape, and stayed for a week or two at a time, marking deer or cutting them out to send to market. Helen stayed at the Cape with the natives. At times, in the spring, unattended by her father, she went walrus hunting with the natives in their thirty-foot, sailing skin-boat and stayed out with them for thirty hours at a time, going ten or twelve miles from land and sailing into the very midst of a school of five hundred or more of walrus. This, of course, was not necessary; just a part of the fun a healthy girl has when she lives in an Eskimo village.

Beth N----, a girl of nineteen, came to keep house for her brother, the government teacher on s.h.i.+shmaref Island--a small, sandy island off the sh.o.r.e of Alaska, some seventy-five miles above Cape Prince of Wales.

She had not been with her brother long when a sailing schooner anch.o.r.ed off sh.o.r.e. This schooner had on board their winter supply of food.

Her brother went on board to superintend the unloading. The work had scarcely begun when a sudden storm tore the schooner from her moorings and sent her whirling southward through the straits.

For some ten or twelve days Beth was on that barren, sandy island entirely alone. The natives were, at this time of the year, off fis.h.i.+ng up one of the rivers of the mainland. She did not have as much as a match to light a fire. She had no sort of notion as to how or when her brother would return. The fact of the matter was that had not her brother had in his possession a note from the captain asking him to come aboard, and had he not known the penalty for not returning a landsman to his port under such conditions, the unprincipled seaman would have carried him to Seattle, leaving Beth to s.h.i.+ft for herself.

He reached home on a gasoline schooner some ten days after his departure.

This same Beth, when spring came and she wished to go "outside,"

engaged a white guide to take her by dog team to Cape Prince of Wales, where the mail steamer might be caught. It was late in the spring and the ice was soft. They had been traveling for some time on the rough sh.o.r.e ice when they discovered, much to their horror, that their ice pan had broken loose from the sh.o.r.e and was drifting out to sea. They hurried along the edge of it for some distance in the hope of finding a bridge to sh.o.r.e. In this they were disappointed. Beth could not swim.

Fortunately the guide could. Leaping into the stinging water he swam from one cake to the next one, leading the dogs. Beth clung to the back of the sled and was thus brought ash.o.r.e. After wading many swollen torrents, they at last reached Cape Prince of Wales in safety.

This sounds very much like fiction but is fact and can be verified.

As to crossing Bering Straits and living with the Chukches in Siberia.

I did that very thing myself--went with a crew of Chukches I had never seen, too. I was over there for only three days but might have stayed the summer through in perfect safety. While there I saw a character known as the French Kid, a white man who had crossed the Straits with the natives late in the year and had wintered there.

Crossing twenty or more miles of floe ice might seem a trifle improbable but here, too, actual performance bears me out. I sent the mail to Thompson, the government teacher on the Little Diomede Island, across 22 miles of floe ice by an Eskimo. This man had made the trip many times before. It is my opinion that what an Eskimo can do, any white man or hearty young woman can do.

Well, there you have it. I don't wish to make my fiction story seem tame, or I might tell you more. As it is I hope I may have convinced you that all the adventures of Lucile and Marian are probable and that the author knows something about the wonderland in which the story is set.

THE AUTHOR.

THE BLUE ENVELOPE

CHAPTER I

A MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE

At the center of a circular bay, forming a perfect horseshoe with a sandy beach at its center and a rocky cliff on either side, two girls were fis.h.i.+ng for shrimps. The taller of the two, a curly-haired, red-cheeked girl of eighteen, was rowing. The other, short and rather chubby, now and again lifted a pocket net of wire-screening, and, shaking a score or more of slimy, snapping creatures into one corner of it, gave a dexterous twist and neatly dropped the squirming ma.s.s into a tin bucket.

Both girls had the clear, ruddy complexion which comes from clean living and frequent sallies into the out-of-doors. Lucile Tucker, the tall one of curly hair, was by nature a student; her cousin, Marian Norton, had been born for action and adventure, and was something of an artist as well.

"Look!" exclaimed Lucile suddenly. "What's that out at the entrance of the bay--a bit of drift or a seal?"

"Might be a seal. Watch it bob. It moves, I'd say."

Without further comment Lucile lifted a light rifle from the bow and pa.s.sed it to her cousin.

Marian stood with one knee braced on the seat and steadied herself for a shot at the object which continued to rise and fall with the low roll of the sea.

Born and reared at Nome on the barren tundra of Alaska, Marian had hunted rabbits, ptarmigan and even caribou and white wolves with her father in her early teens. She was as steady and sure a shot as most boys of her age.

"Boat rocks so," she grumbled. "More waves out there, too. Watch the thing bob!"

"It's gone under!"

"No, there it is!"

"Try it now."

Catching her breath, Marian put her finger to the trigger. For a second the boat was quiet. The brown spot hung on the crest of a wavelet. It was a beautiful target; Marian was sure of her aim.

Just as her finger touched the trigger, a strange thing happened; a something which sent the rifle clattering from nerveless fingers and set the cold perspiration springing to her forehead.

A flash of white had suddenly appeared close to the brown spot, a slim white line against the blue-green of the sea. It was a human arm.

"Who--who--where'd you suppose he came from?" she was at last able to sputter.

"Don't ask me," said Lucile, scanning the sea. Never a mist nor a cloud obscured the vision, yet not a sail nor coil of smoke spoke of near-by craft. "What's more important is, we must help him," she said, seizing the oars and rowing vigorously. Marian, having hung the shrimp trap across the bow, drew a second pair of oars from beneath the seats and joined her in sending the clumsy craft toward the brown spot still bobbing in the water, and which, as they drew nearer, they easily recognized as the head of a man or boy. Lucky for him that he had chanced to throw a white forearm high out of the water just as Marian was prepared unwittingly to send a bullet cras.h.i.+ng into his skull.

Realizing that this person, whoever he might be, must have drifted in the water for hours and was doubtless exhausted, the two girls now gave all their strength to the task of rowing. With faces tense and forearms flas.h.i.+ng with the oars, they set the boat cutting the waves.

The beach and cliffs back of the bay in which the girls had been fis.h.i.+ng were part of the sh.o.r.e line of a small island which on this side faced the open Pacific Ocean and on the other the waters of Puget Sound, off the coast of the state of Was.h.i.+ngton.

Nestling among a group of giant yellow pines on a ridge well up from the beach, two white tents gleamed. This was the camp of Marian and Lucile. The rock-ribbed and heavily wooded island belonged to Lucile's father, a fish canner of Anacortes, Was.h.i.+ngton. There was, so far as they knew, not another person on the island. They had expected a maiden aunt to join them in their outing. She was to have come down from the north in a fis.h.i.+ng smack, but up to this time had not arrived.

Not that the girls were much concerned about this; they had lived much in the open and rather welcomed the opportunity to be alone in the wilds. It was good preparation for the future. They had pledged themselves to spend the following winter in a far more isolated spot, Cape Prince of Wales, on Bering Straits in Alaska. Lucile, who, though barely eighteen years of age, had finished high school and had spent one year in normal school, was to teach the native school and to superintend the reindeer herd at that point. Marian had lived the greater part of her life in Nome, Alaska, but even from childhood she had shown a marked talent for drawing and painting and had now just finished a two-year course in a Chicago art school. Her drawings of Alaskan life and the natives had been exhibited and had attracted the attention of a society of ethnology. In fact, so greatly had they been impressed that they had asked Marian to accompany her cousin to Cape Prince of Wales to spend the winter sketching the village life of that vanis.h.i.+ng race, the Eskimo.

So this month of camping, hunting and fis.h.i.+ng was but a preparatory one to fit them the more perfectly for the more important adventure.

When they reached the mysterious swimmer they were surprised to find him a mere boy, some fourteen years of age.

"What a strange face!" whispered Marian, when they had a.s.sisted the dripping stranger into the boat.

They studied him for a moment in silence. His hair and eyes were black, his face brown. He wore a single garment, cleverly pieced together till it seemed one skin, but made of many bird skins, eiderduck, perhaps. This garment left his arms and legs free for swimming.