The Blue Envelope Part 20

With eager fingers Marian straightened out the twelve feet of double-strand leather thong.

"There! There! They're down!" whispered Lucile.

"You stay here. If they rise and fly away, call me."

Creeping around two piles of ice, Marian threw herself flat and began to crawl the remaining distance across a flat pan of ice. Her heart was beating wildly, for in her veins there flowed a strain of the hunter's blood of her Briton ancestors of many generations back.

Now she was forty feet away, now twenty, now ten, and the ducks had not flown. Stretching out the thong, she rose on an elbow and set the b.a.l.l.s whirling over her head. Once, twice, three times, then up she sprang and with one more whirl sent the string singing through the air.

The young ducks, craning their necks with curiosity, did not move until something came cras.h.i.+ng at them, and a wildly frantic girl sprang toward them.

To the duck about whose neck the string had encircled, this move was too late, for Marian was upon him. And a moment later, looking very much like the old woman who went to market, with a dead gray duck dangling from her right arm, Marian returned in triumph.

"Oh, Lucile," she cried, "I got him! I got him!"

"Fine! You shall have a medal," said Lucile.

"But how _will_ we cook him?"

"Well," said Lucile, after a moment's thought, "it's growing colder; going to freeze hard. They say freezing meat is almost as good as cooking it. I don't know--"

"Look!" cried Marian suddenly, balancing herself at the crest of a high pile of ice. "What's all that black a little way over there to the left? It's not like ice. Do you suppose it could be an island?"

"Is the ice piling there?" Lucile asked, clinging to her friend's side.

"No, it isn't, so it can't be an island, for the island would stop the ice as it flows and make it pile up."

"But what can it be?"

"We can't go over there, for we can't see our flag from there."

"Yes, we can," said Marian. "I'll take off my petticoat and put it on this ice-pile. We can see it from there, and when we get back here we can see the flag."

This new beacon was soon established. Then, with trembling and eager footsteps, the girls hastened to what appeared to be an oasis in a desert of ice.

CHAPTER XIII

STRANGE DISCOVERIES

It was a strange sight that met the eyes of the two girls as they paused halfway to the dark patch on the surface of the ice which loomed like a giant's shadow in the snow-fog. With eager feet they dashed on, leaping narrow chasms and stumbling over ice barriers in their mad rush.

The revelation which came as they rounded the last pile of ice was both a surprise and a disappointment. Great heaps of ashes, piles of bottles and tin cans, frozen ma.s.ses of garbage; junk of every description, from a rusty tin dipper to a discarded steel range, met their eyes.

"It's a graveyard," murmured Marian, "a graveyard of things people don't want."

"That some people didn't want!" corrected the more practical Lucile.

"Marian, we're rich!"

"Rich?" Marian stared.

"Why, yes! Don't you see? There's an old clothes wringer; that's got a lot of wood in it. And there's an old paper bucket. That'll burn.

There's a lot of things like that. It won't take any time at all to get enough wood to cook our duck!"

"A fire! A fire!" exclaimed Marian, jumping up and down in a wild dance. Then, seized with Lucile's spell of practical philosophy, she grasped a rusty tin kettle.

"We can cook it in this. There's a hole in it, but we can draw a cloth into that, and we can scour it up with ashes."

The next few minutes echoed with glad exclamations: "Here's an old fork!" "Here's half a sack of salt!" "Here are two rusty spoons!"

"Here's a broiler," and so it went on.

One would have believed they were in the greatest department store in the land, with the privilege of carrying away anything that would fit in their kitchen and that suited their fancy. Truth was, they were rummaging over the city of Nome's vast garbage pile. That garbage pile had been acc.u.mulated during the previous year, and was, at this time, several hundred miles from the city. During the long nine months of winter the water about Nome is frozen solid some two miles out to sea.

All garbage and junk is hauled out upon the ice with dog-teams and dumped there. When spring comes the ice loosens from the sh.o.r.e, and, laden with its great cargo of unwanted things, carries it through Bering Straits to haunt the Arctic Ocean, perhaps for years to come.

It is moved hither and yon until time and tide and many storms have at last ground it into oblivion.

The long Arctic twilight had begun to fall when the two girls, hungry and weary, but happily laden with many treasures which were to make life more possible on their floating palace of ice, made their way toward their camp.

Besides sc.r.a.ps of wood enough for two or three small fires, and cooking utensils of various sorts, they had found salt, a part of a box of pepper, and six cans of condensed milk which had doubtless been frozen several times but had never been opened.

"We could live a week," said Lucile exultantly, "even if we didn't have another bit of good luck."

"Yes-s," said Marian slowly, "but let's hope we don't have to; I'm afraid I'd get awful hungry."

They dined that night, quite happily, on a third of their duck, soup made of duck's broth and condensed milk, and half of a pilot biscuit.

"Oh, Marian," said Lucile, as she thought of sleep, "that kiak's so crowded when we sleep there."

"Yes-s," said Marian, thoughtfully, "it is. I wonder if we couldn't make a sleeping-bag?"

At once needles and some sinew thread found in the native's hunting bag were gotten out, the four deerskins were spread out, two on the bottom and two on top, with the fur side inside, and they went to work with a will to fas.h.i.+on a rude sleeping-bag.

Their fingers shook with the chill wind that swept across the ice and their eyelids drooped often in sleep, yet they persevered and at last the thing was complete.

"Are you sure it won't be cold?" said Lucile, who had never slept in a sleeping-bag.

"Oh, no, I know it won't," Marian a.s.sured her. "I've heard my father tell of spreading his on the frozen ground when it was thirty below zero, and sleeping snug as a 'possum in a hollow tree."

"All right; let's try it," and Lucile spread the bag on the sealskin square.

After removing their skirts and rolling them up for pillows, together they slid down into the soft, warm depths of their Arctic bed.

"Um-m," whispered Marian.

"Um-m," Lucile answered back. And the next moment they were both fast asleep.

All through the night they slept there with the Great Dipper circling around the North Star above them, and with the ice-floe carrying them, who could tell where?

The two following days were spent in fruitless hunting for wild duck and in making trips to the rubbish pile. These trips netted nothing of use save armfuls of wood which helped to add a cheery tone to their camp. Though the fog held on, the nights grew bitterly cold. They were glad enough to creep into their sleeping-bag as soon as it grew dark. There for hours they lay and talked of many things: Of the land to which the ice-floe might eventually bring them, the people who would be living there, and the things they would have to eat. Then, again, they would talk of school days, and the glad, good times that now seemed so far away. Of one subject they never spoke; never once did one wonder to the other what their families were doing in their far-away homes. They did not dare. It would have been like singing "Home Sweet Home" to the American soldiers on the fields of France.