" Lucile
said slowly; then suddenly, "What do they call this island?"

"This? This one island?" The Eskimo pointed to the floor.

"Yes." The girls learned forward eagerly.

"This one white man call 'Little Diomede.'"

The two girls stared at one another for a moment. Then they laughed.
In the laugh there was both surprise and great joy. They were
surprised that in all the drifting of their ice-floe they had been
carried about in a circle, and at last landed only twenty-two miles
across-ocean from their home, on Little Diomede Island, the halfway
station between the mainland of America and Russia.

"We live at Cape Prince of Wales," said Lucile. "How can we go home?"

The Eskimo merely shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

"Whose is this house?" asked Marian.

"Government," the Eskimo replied. "Schoolhouse one time. Not now.
Not many children. I--I teach 'em a little, mine. Teach 'em in native
house, mine."

So there the mystery was solved. They were in a schoolhouse built by
the United States Government, but which was not now being used. The
natives, always very superstitious, having seen their faces through the
window, and not believing it possible that any white persons could come
to the island at such a time, had, at the suggestion of the old
witch-doctor, resolved to burn the house in the hopes of driving the
spirits away. When the lame boy had limped into their midst, and had
told how his wound had been dressed by these white women, and how he
had seen them eat fish, which no spirit can do, according to the
superstition of the Eskimo, they had been quite ready to put out the
fire and welcome the strangers, all the more so since the girls had
been kind to one in distress.

Phi's experience in the village of the island upon which he had been
cast was more happy than he could have dreamed of. It turned out that
the native who had attacked him was the only drunken person on the
island. That it was an island, the Big Diomede, he was immediately
informed by a young native who had learned English on a whaler.

So it turned out that the two parties, Lucile and Marian and Phi and
Rover, had been carried about on the ice-floe for three days at last to
be landed on twin islands.

Phi's first thought was for the safety of his former traveling
companions. When he learned that nothing had been seen of them on the
Big Diomede, without pausing to rest he pushed on across the now
solidly frozen mass of