Produced by Al Haines
Adventure Stories for Girls
The Blue Envelope
By
Chicago
The Reilly & Lee Co.
Copyright, 1922
by
The Reilly & Lee Co.
All Rights Reserved
The Blue Envelope
When considering the manuscript of "The Blue Envelope" my publishers
wrote me asking that I offer some sort of proof that the experiences of
Marian and Lucile might really have happened to two girls so situated.
My answer ran somewhat as follows:
Alaska, at least the northern part of it, is so far removed from therest of this old earth that it is almost as distinct from it as is themoon. It's a good stiff nine-day trip to it by water and you sightland only once in all that nine days. For nine months of winter youare quite shut off from the rest of the world. Your mail comes once amonth, letters only, over an eighteen-hundred-mile dog trail; twomonths and a half for letters to come; the same for the reply to goback. Do you wonder, then, that the Alaskan, when going down toSeattle, does not speak of it as going to Seattle or going down to theStates but as "going outside"? Going outside seems to just exactlyexpress it. When you have spent a year in Alaska you feel as if youhad truly been inside something for twelve months.
People who live "inside" of Alaska do not live exactly as they mightwere they in New England. Conventions for the most part disappear.Life is a struggle for existence and a bit of pleasure now and again.If conventions and customs get in the way of these, away with them.And no one in his right senses can blame these people for living thatway.
One question we meet, and probably it should be answered. Would twolone girls do and dare the things that Lucile and Marian did? My onlyanswer must be that girls of their age—girls from "outside" atthat—have done them.
Helen C——, a sixteen-year-old girl, came to Cape Prince of Wales tokeep house for her father, who was superintendent of the reindeer herdat that point. She lived there with her father and the natives—nowhite woman about—for two years. During that time her father oftenwent to the herd, which was grazing some forty miles from the Cape, andstayed for a week or two at a time, marking deer or cutting them out tosend to market. Helen stayed at the Cape with the natives. At times,in the spring, unattended by her father, she went walrus hunting withthe natives in their thirty-foot, sailing skin-boat and stayed out withthem for thirty hours at a time, going ten or twelve miles from landand sailing into the very midst of a school of five hundred or more ofwalrus. This, of course, was not necessary;