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 Tin City, which was a city only in name. This lone miner
would claim one of the letters. Two, perhaps, would go to another
miner on Saw Tooth Mountain. Next week, an Eskimo happening down from
Shishmaref Island, seventy-five miles north, would take three letters
to Ben Norton and his sister, the government teachers for the Eskimos.
Two would go in a pigeon-hole, for Thompson, the teacher on Little
Diomede Island, twenty-two miles across the drifting ice. Later a
native would be paid ten sacks of flour for attempting to cross that
floe and deliver the contents of that box. There might be a scrawled
note for some Eskimo, a stray letter or two, and the rest would be for
Marian. At the present moment, she was the only white person at Cape
Prince of Wales, a little town of three hundred and fifty Eskimos.
"Pretty light this time," smiled the grizzled mail carrier as he
reached the cabin at the top of the hill; "mebby ten letters."
"Uncle Sam takes good care of his people," smiled Marian, "the teachers
of his native children and the miners who search for his hidden
treasures."
"I'll say he does! Must have cost all of ten dollars apiece to deliver
them letters," chuckled the carrier. "And the people that mailed 'em
stuck on a measly red two-cent stamp. I git fifty dollars for bringin'
'em the last sixty miles."
"And it's worth it, too."
"You're just right. Pretty tough trail. Pretty tough! Say!" he
exclaimed, suddenly remembering a bit of gossip, "did ye hear about
Tootsie Silock?"
"No." Marian was busy with the mail.
"Jist gossip, I reckon, but they say she's left her Eskimo husband--"
Marian did not answer. Gossip did not interest her. Besides, she had
found a letter that did interest her even more than those addressed to
her. A very careful penman had drawn the Greek letters, Phi Beta Ki,
on the outside of an envelope, and beneath it had written, "Cape Prince
of Wales, Alaska."
"Wha--"
She was on the point of sharing the mystery with the carrier, but
checked herself. Just some new gossip for him, was her mental comment.
"Here's the sack," she said, noting that he had finished drinking the
coffee she had prepared for him. "I hope there'll be more mail next
time. Letters mean so much to these people up at the top of the world.
Spring thaw'll be here pretty soon, then they can't get mail for two or
three months."
"That's right; it's fierce," said the carrier, taking the sack and
turning toward the door.
"Phi Beta Ki," Marian pronounced the letters softly to herself as the
door closed. "Now who could that be?"
She was still puzzling over the mysterious letter when, after a hasty
luncheon, she again took up her palette and brushes and wound her way
around the hill to a point where stood a cabinet, ten feet square and
made of fiber-board.
She returned to her painting. She was doing a mass of ice that was
piling some two hundred yards out to sea. The work was absorbing, yet,
eager as she was to work, her mind went back to that letter in the
pigeon-hole up in the cabin.
She was deep in the mystery of it when a voice startled her. It came
from back of the cabinet.
"I say," the voice sang cheerily, "have you any letters in your little
P. O. on the hill?"
The voice thrilled her. It was new and sounded young.
"Yes," she said, throwing open the back of the cabinet and standing up,
"we have, quite--quite a variety."
The visitor was young, not more than twenty, she thought.
"What color?" she said teasingly, as she stepped from her cabinet.
"Blue," he said seriously.
"Blue?" She started. The mysterious letter was blue; the only blue
one she had seen for months.
"What name?"
"Well, you see," the young man flushed, "not--not any real name; just
the Greek letters, Phi Beta Ki."
He stepped into the cabinet and, with deft fingers, drew with charcoal
the characters.
"Like that," he smiled.
"Yes," she smiled back, "there is one."
"Grand!" he exclaimed. "Let's get it at once, shall we?"
They hastened up the hill. Marian wondered at herself, as she handed
out the letter; wondered that she did not question him further to make
sure he was really the rightful owner. But there was something free
and frank about his bearing. It disarmed suspicion.
After he had read the letter, she thought she caught a look of
disappointment on his face. If she did, it quickly vanished.
While she was dispensing the accustomed hospitality of the Northland, a
steaming plate of "mulligan" and a cup of coffee, she felt his eyes
resting upon her many times.
When at last he had finished eating, he turned and spoke hesitatingly:
"I--I'd like to ask a favor of you."
"All right."
"If another letter like that comes to me here, you keep it for me, will
you?"
"Why, yes, only I won't be here much longer. I'm going to Nome after
the break-up."
"I'm going north. I'll be back before then. But if I'm not, you keep
it, will you?" There was a tense eagerness about him that stirred her
strongly.
"Why, yes--I--I--guess so. But what shall I do if you don't get back
before I leave?"
"Take it with you. Leave word where I can find you and take it."
"You see," he half-apologized, after a moment's thought, "these
northern P. O.'s change hands so much, so many people handle the mail,
that I--I'm afraid I might lose one of these letters, and--and--they're
mighty important; at least, one of them is going to be. Will you do
it? I--I think I'd trust you--though I don't just know why."
"Yes," Marian said slowly, "I'll do that."
Three minutes later she saw him skillfully disentangling his dogs and
sending them on their way:
"One of those college boys," she whispered to herself. "They come
North expecting to find gold shining in the sand of the beach. I've
seen so many come up here as he is, happy and hopeful, and in three or
four years I've seen them go 'outside,' old beyond their years,
half-blind with snow-blindness, or worse; broken in body and spirit. I
only hope it does not happen to him. But what's all the mystery, I'd
like to know?"
She gave a sudden start. For the first time she realized that he had
not given her his name.
"And I promised to personally conduct that mysterious mail of his!" she
exclaimed under her breath.