Part 7 (1/2)
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 caasoline schooner,” said Marian
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 fro with a salute, when a strange thing happened Rover, the old dog-leader, who had been riding in the bow standing well forward, as if taking the place of a painted figurehead, suddenly began to bark furiously At the saht of a bearded face framed in a porthole
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 nized hi?”
”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”
Marian shi+vered
The incident was soon forgotten They were nearing the Siberian shore which was to be their su out over the sea, singing theirin a tent in thea people whose lives are as little known as were those of the natives in the heart of Africa before the days of Livingstone
As she thought of these things Marian's cheeks flushed with excitement
”What new thrill will come to us here?” her lips whispered
CHAPTER V
CAST ADRIFT
There was a shallow space beneath a tray of color-tubes in the very botto Cape Prince of Wales, she had stowed the blue envelope addressed to Phi Beta Ki She had not done this without hts had co to do? Was it safe? The latter question had corizzled miner's face framed in the porthole of that schooner
But fro, on the hts of the letter and the two claimants for its possession were completely crowded from her mind
Never in all her adventurous life had Marian experienced anything quite so thrilling as this life with the Chukches of the Arctic coast of Siberia
In Alaska the natives had hadthem for thirty years They had been Americanized and, in a sense, Christianized The develop centers to which they journeyed every su and barter had tended to rob them of the romantic wildness of their existence But here, here where no old gleaathered in the beds of the rivers, here the natives still dwelt in their dome-like houses of poles and skins Here they fared boldly forth in search of the dangerous walrus and white bear and the e fire to the spirits of the rave tones of the great spirit that had come down from the moon in the form of a raven with a beak of old ivory
It is little wonder that Marian forgot all thought of fear as, as she worked industriously at the sketches which were to furnish her with three years of wonderful study under great masters