with letters for the Maiur,” (mai-oor’), was the reply; “three telegraph ships have been there, and I am sent with important letters from the American nachalnik [Footnote:  Commander.]; I have been thirty-nine days and nights on the road from Petropavlovsk.”  This was important news.  Colonel Bulkley had evidently touched at the southern end of Kamchatka on his return from Bering Sea, and the letters brought by the courier would undoubtedly explain why he had not landed the party at the mouth of the Anadyr River, as he had intended.  I felt a strong temptation to open the letters; but not thinking that they could have any bearing upon my movements, I finally concluded to send them on without a moment’s delay to Gizhiga, in the faint hope that the Major had not yet left there for Okhotsk.  In twenty minutes the Cossack was gone, and we were left to form all sorts of wild conjectures as to the contents of the letters, and the movements of the parties which Colonel Bulkley had carried up to Bering Strait.  I regretted a hundred times that I had not opened the letters, and found out to a certainty that the Anadyr River party had not been landed.  But it was too late now, and we could only hope that the courier would overtake the Major before he had started from Gizhiga, and that the latter would send somebody to us at Anadyrsk with the news.

[Illustration:  INTERIOR OF A YURT OF THE SETTLED KORAKS]

There were no signs yet of the Penzhina sledges, and we spent another night and another long dreary day in the smoky yurt at Shestakova, waiting for transportation.  Late in the evening of December 2d, Yagor, who acted in the capacity of sentinel, came down the chimney with another sensation.  He had heard the howling of dogs in the direction of Penzhina.  We went up on the roof of the yurt and listened for several minutes, but hearing nothing but the wind, we concluded that Yagor had either been mistaken, or that a pack of wolves had howled in the valley east of the settlement.  Yagor however was right; he had heard dogs on the Penzhina road, and in less than ten minutes the long-expected sledges drew up, amid general shouting and barking, before our yurt.  In the course of conversation with the new arrivals, I thought I understood one of the Penzhina men to say something about a party who had mysteriously appeared near the mouth of the Anadyr River, and who were building a house there as if with the intention of spending the winter.  I did not yet understand Russian very well, but I guessed at once that the long-talked-of Anadyr River party had been landed, and springing up in considerable excitement, I called Dodd to interpret.  It seemed from all the information which the Penzhina men could give us that a small party of Americans had mysteriously appeared, early in the winter, near the mouth of the Anadyr, and had commenced to build a house of driftwood and a few boards which had been landed from the vessel