The Blue Envelop, St Nicholas, 1922/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
THE MYSTERIOUS PHI BETA CHI
A year and a half had passed, when, on the day of the beginning of our second mysterious episode, Marion found herself in a spot even more interesting than Mutineer's Island. From where she stood, brushes and palette in hand, she could see a broad 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 that 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.
Suddenly the spell was broken. Throwing up her hands in wild glee, she exclaimed, "The mail! The mail!"
The coming of the 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 arrival. 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 had come eighteen hundred miles by dog-team. Precious messages they were. To-morrow, 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 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 Eskimos. Two would go into a well-filled pigeonhole, which was consigned to Thompson, the teacher on the Little Diomede Island, twenty-two miles across the drifting ice. Later, a native would be paid ten sacks of flour for attempting to cross the floe and deliver the contents of that box. There might be the scrawled note of some Eskimo, a stray letter or two, and the rest would be for Marion. At the present moment, she was the only white person at Cape Prince of Wales, a little town of three hundred and fifty Eskimos.
Marion was substituting for the government school-teacher, her cousin Lucile, while the latter was away at Nome helping the natives dispose of their reindeer meat.
Both girls had finished high school, when strange open doors had appeared before them. Lucile, who had always felt a wild desire to spend a year in the Arctic, had been offered the teaching position at Wales; Marion, who, since very early childhood, had spent all her time with brushes and paints, had been given a wonderful commission. It came from that very anthropologist who had relieved them of their responsibility toward the strange boy who came swimming to them from the sea. She was to spend the winter with her cousin at Cape Prince of Wales and was to make sketches of the natives and of their homes—sketches which would be preserved for all time, to tell the story of a fast-vanishing race. And here she was at this moment, "painting her finger-tips off."
"Pretty light this time," smiled the grizzled mail-carrier, as he reached the cabin at the top of the hill, "mebby ten letters."
The carrier launched at once into a recital of coast gossip. Marion did not hear him. Gossip did not interest her. Besides, she had found a letter that interested her even more than those addressed to her. A very careful penman had drawn the Greek letters Phi Beta Chi on the outside of an envelop, and beneath it had written, 'Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska.'
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.
"Phi Beta Chi," Marion 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 a cabinet, perhaps ten feet square and made of fiber-board, stood.
Here, protected from the keen arctic wind, she had been making a sketch of the village. She resumed her work, yet, interested as she was in it, her curiosity kept dragging her back to that letter in the pigeonhole 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 post-office on the hill?"
The voice thrilled her. It was new and sounded young.
"WITH DEFT FINGERS, DREW WITH CHARCOAL THE CHARACTERS."
"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 Chi."
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. Marion 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. 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 the boy's 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 one 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 'breakup.'"
"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,—" Marion said slowly, "I'll do that."
Three minutes later she saw him skilfully disentangling his dogs and sending them on their way.
"What's all the mystery, I'd like to know?" she whispered to herself.
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.