ed that Lucile's belief that the brown boy could take care of
himself was well founded. His footprints were all about in the sand.
Feathers of a wild duck and the heads of three good-sized fishes showed
that he had fared well.

"We'll meet him again somewhere, I am sure," said Lucile with
conviction, "and until we do, I shall carry his little present as a
sort of talisman."

The weeks passed all too quickly. One day, with many regrets, they
packed their camp-kit in the motorboat and went pop-popping to Lucile's
home.

Three weeks later saw them aboard the steamship _Torentia_ bound for
Cape Prince of Wales by way of Nome. They were entering upon a new and
adventure-filled life. This journey, though they little guessed it,
brought them some two thousand miles nearer the spot where, once again
under the strangest of circumstances, they were to meet the brown boy
who had come swimming to them from the ocean.

CHAPTER III

THE MYSTERIOUS PHI BETA KI

It was some months later that Marian stood looking down from a
snow-clad hill. From where she stood, brushes and palette in hand, she
could see the broad stretch of snow-covered beach, and beyond that the
unbroken stretch of drifting ice which chained the restless Arctic Sea
at Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska. She gloried in all the wealth of
light and shadow which lay like a changing panorama before her. She
thrilled at the thought of the mighty forces that shifted the massive
ice-floes as they drifted from nowhere to nowhere. Now for the
thousandth time she stood spellbound before it.

As she gazed out to sea, her mind went back over the year and a half
that had passed since she and Lucile had spent that eventful month on
Mutineer's Island. But her thoughts were cut short. Throwing up her
hands in wild glee, she exclaimed:

"The mail! The mail!"

The coming of the mail carrier was, indeed, a great event in this
out-of-the-way spot. Once a month he came whirling around the point,
behind a swift-footed dog-team. He came unheralded. Conditions of
snow and storm governed his time of travel, yet come he always did.

No throng greeted his coming. No eager crowd hovered about the
latticed window waiting for the mail to be "made up." If a dozen
letters were in the sack, that was what might be expected.

But these letters had come eighteen hundred miles by dog-team.
Precious messages they were. Tomorrow, perhaps, a bearded miner would
drop in from Ti