A Ticket to Adventure

Mary Hughes had walked the entire length of the long dock at Anchorage, Alaska. Now, having rounded a great pile of merchandise, tents, tractors, groceries, hammers, axes, and boxes of chocolate bars she came quite suddenly upon the oddest little man she had ever seen. Even for a girl in her late teens, Mary was short and slender. This man was no larger than she. "A Japanese," she thought as her surprised eyes took in his tight-fitting black suit, his stiff collar and bright tie. "But no, a Jap wouldn\'t look like that." She was puzzled and curious. At that particular moment, she had nothing to do but indulge her curiosity. Together with hundreds of other "home-seekers"--she smiled as she thought of herself as a home-seeker--she had been dumped into the bleak Arctic morning. Some of the goods that were being hoisted by a long steel crane from the depths of a ship, belonged to Mary, to Mark her brother, and to Florence Huyler her cousin. There was, for the time, nothing they could do about that. So--