umsy 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 crashing 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 flashing with the oars, they set the boat cutting the waves.

The beach and cliffs back of the bay in which the girls had been
fishing were part of the shore 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 Washington.

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, Washington. 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 fishing 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
vanishing race, the Eskimo.

So this month of camping, hunting and fishing was but a preparatory