Adventure Stories for Girls

The Purple Flame

By
ROY J. SNELL

The Reilly & Lee Co.
Chicago

Printed in the United States of America

Copyright, 1924
by
The Reilly & Lee Co.
All Rights Reserved

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE [I The Mystery of the Old Dredge] 7 [II Patsy From Kentucky] 21 [III Marian Faces a Problem] 35 [IV The Range Robber] 46 [V Planning a Perilous Journey] 55 [VI A Journey Well Begun] 60 [VII The Enchanted Mountain] 65 [VIII Trouble for Patsy] 71 [IX Patsy Solves a Problem] 81 [X A Startling Discovery] 87 [XI The Girl of the Purple Flame] 95 [XII Ancient Treasure] 104 [XIII The Long Trail] 112 [XIV Mysterious Music] 117 [XV An Old Man of the North] 125 [XVI The Barrier] 131 [XVII Age Serves Youth] 139 [XVIII The Trail of Blood] 146 [XIX Passing the Rapids] 153 [XX A Message From the Air] 165 [XXI Fading Hopes] 172 [XXII A Fruitless Journey] 177 [XXIII Planning the Long Drive] 186 [XXIV Camp Followers] 196 [XXV The Mirage] 209 [XXVI The Mysterious Deliverer] 223 [XXVII The End of the Trail] 237

The Purple Flame

CHAPTER I
THE MYSTERY OF THE OLD DREDGE

Marian Norton started, took one step backward, then stood staring. Startled by this sudden action, the spotted reindeer behind her lunged backward to blunder into the brown one that followed him, and this one was in turn thrown against a white one that followed the two. This set all three of them into such a general mix-up that it was a full minute before the girl could get them quieted and could again allow her eyes to seek the object of her alarm.

As she stood there her pulse quickened, her cheeks flushed and she felt an all but irresistible desire to turn and flee. Yet she held her ground. Had she seen a flash of purple flame? She had thought so. It had appeared to shoot out from the side of the dark bulk that lay just before her.

“Might have been my nerves,” she told herself. “Perhaps my eyes are seeing things. T’wouldn’t be strange. I came a long way to-day.”

She had come a long way over the Arctic tundra that day. Starting but two mornings before from her reindeer herd, close to a hundred miles from Nome, Alaska, she had covered fully two-thirds of that distance in two days.

Her way had lead over low hills, across streams whose waters ran clear and cold toward the sea, down broad stretches of tundra whose soft mosses had oozed moisture at her every step. Here a young widgeon duck, ready to begin his southward flight—for this was the Arctic’s autumn time—had stretched his long neck to stare at her. Here a mother white fox had yap-yaped at her, insolently and unafraid. Here she had paused to pick a handful of pink salmon berries or to admire a particularly brilliant array of wild flowers, which, but for her passing, might have been “Born to blush unseen and waste their fragrance on the desert air.” Yet always with the three reindeers at her heels, she had pressed onward toward Nome, the port and metropolis of all that vast north country.

The black bulk that loomed out of the darkness before her was a deserted dredging scow, grounded on a sand bar of the Sinrock River. At least she had thought the scow deserted. Until now she had believed and hoped that here she might spend the night, completing her journey on the morrow.

“But now,” she breathed. “Yes! Yes! There can be no mistake. There it is again.”

Sinking wearily down upon the damp grass, she buried her face in her hands. She was so tired she could cry, yet she must “mush” on through the dark, over the soft, oozing tundra, for fifteen more weary miles. Fifteen miles further down the river was the Sinrock Mission. Here she might hope to find a corral for her deer, and food and rest for herself.

Marian did not cry. Born and bred in the Arctic, she was made of such stern stuff as the Arctic wilderness and the Arctic blizzard alone can mould.

She did not mean to take chances with the occupants of the old dredge. There was something mysterious and uncanny about that purple flame which she now saw shoot straight out, a full two feet, to instantly disappear. She had seen nothing like it before in the Arctic. As she studied the outlines of the dredge, she realized that the light was within it; that it flashed across a small square window in the side of the old scow.

“No,” she reasoned, “I can’t afford to take chances with them. I must go on down the river. I can make Sinrock.”

Speaking to her reindeer, she tugged at their lead straps. One at a time they started forward until at last they again took up the weary swish-swish across the tundra.

Once Marian turned to look back. Again she caught the flash of a purple flame.

Had she known how this purple flame was to be mixed up with her own destiny, she might have paused to look longer. As it was, she gave herself over to wondering what sort of people would take up their habitation in that half tumbled-down dredge, and what their weird light might signify.

She had heard of the strange rites performed by those interesting child-people, the Eskimos, in the worship of the spirits of dead animals. For one of these, the “Bladder Festival,” they saved all the bladders of polar bears, walrus and seals which they had killed, and at last, after four days of ceremony, committed them again to the waters of the ocean.

“They burn wild parsnip stalks in that festival,” Marian mused, “but that purple flame was not made by burning weeds. It was the brilliant flame of a blue-hot furnace flaring up, or something like that. Probably wasn’t Eskimo at all. Probably—well, it may be some Orientals who have stolen away up here to worship their idols by burning strange fires.”

She thought of all the foreign people who had crossed the Pacific to take up their homes in the far north city of Nome, which was just forty miles away.

“Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Russians, and members of nameless tribes,” she whispered to herself, as if half afraid they might hear her. “Might be any of these. Might—”

Suddenly she broke off her thinking and stopped short. Just before her a form loomed out of the dark. Another and yet another appeared.

For a moment she stood there rigid, scarcely breathing. Then she threw back her head and laughed.

“Reindeer,” she exclaimed. “I was frightened by some reindeer. Oh, well,” she said, after a moment’s reflection, “I might excuse myself for that. I’m tired out with marching over this soggy tundra. Besides, I guess that purple flame got on my nerves. All the same,” she avowed stoutly, “I’ll solve that mystery yet. See if I don’t.”

There for the time the subject was dismissed. The presence of these few reindeer before her told of more not far away, a whole herd of them. Where there were reindeer there would be herders, and herders lived in tents. Here there would be a warm, dry place to rest and sleep.

“Must be the Sinrock herd,” she concluded.

In this she was right. Soon, off in the distance, she caught the yellow glow of candlelight shining through a tent wall. Fifteen minutes later she was seated upon a rolled-up sleeping bag, chatting gayly with two black-eyed Eskimo girls who were keeping their brothers’ tents while those worthies were out looking for some stray fauns.

After her three reindeers had been relieved of their packs and set free to graze, Marian had dined on hardtack and juicy reindeer chops. Then she crawled deep down into her soft reindeer skin sleeping bag, to snatch a few hours of rest before resuming her journey to Nome.

Before her eyelids closed in sleep her tireless brain went over the problem before her and the purpose of her fatiguing journey. She had come all this way to meet a relative whom she had never seen—a cousin, Patsy Martin, from Louisville, Kentucky.

“Kentucky,” she whispered the word for the hundredth time. “Way down south. Imagine a girl who was brought up down there coming here for a winter to endure our cold, snow, and blizzards. She’s probably slim, willowy, and tender as a baby; dresses in thin silks, and all that. Why did father send her up here? Looks like it was bad enough to have four hundred reindeer to herd, without having a sixteen year old cousin from Ken-tuck-ie to look after.”

She yawned sleepily, yet her mind went on thinking of her reindeer herd and her problems. Though she had lived all but one year of her life in the far north, she had never, until two months before, spent a single night in a reindeer herder’s camp. But it was no longer a novel experience.

Until recently her father had been a prosperous merchant in Nome. Financial reverses had come and he had been obliged to sell his store. The reindeer herd, which he had taken as payment for a debt, was the only wealth he had saved from the crash. Following this, his doctor had ordered him to leave the rigorous climate of the North and to seek renewed health in the States. Much as he regretted it, he had been obliged to ask his daughter to give up her studies and to take charge of the herd until a favorable opportunity came for selling it.

“And that won’t be soon, I guess,” Marian sighed. “Reindeer herds are a drug on the market. Trouble is, it’s too hard to dispose of the meat. And if you can’t sell reindeer meat you can’t make any money. Now, added to this, comes this cousin, Patsy Martin.”

Her father had written that Patsy was given to over-study, and that Mr. Martin, her uncle, thinking that a year in the northern wilds would do her good, had asked permission to send her up to be with Marian. Marian’s father had consented, and Patsy was due on the next boat.

“She’ll be company for you,” her father had written.

“I do wonder if she will?” Marian sighed again. “Oh, well, no use to be a pessimist,” and at that she turned over and fell asleep.

It was a surprised Marian who three days later found herself caught in the firm embrace of her cousin, Patsy. Patsy was two years younger than Marian. There could be no missing the fact that she was much slimmer and more graceful, and that there was strength in her slender arms was testified to by her warm embrace.

When at last Marian got a look at Patsy’s face, she found it almost as brown as her own. And as for freckles, there could scarcely have been a greater number on one person’s face. Her mouth, too, had lines that Marian liked. It was a firm, determined little mouth that said: “When I have a hill to climb I run up it.”

Never had Marian beheld such a wealth of color as was displayed in Patsy’s winter wardrobe. Orange and red sweaters; great, broad scarfs of mixed grays; gay tams; short plaid skirts; heavy brown corduroy knickers; these and many other garments of exquisite workmanship and design were spread out before her.

“And the fun of it all is,” giggled Patsy, “we’re going to play we’re twins and wear one another’s clothes. You’ve got a spotted fawnskin parka, I know you have. I’m going to wear that, right away—this afternoon. Going to have my picture taken in it and send it back to my school friends.”

“All right,” agreed Marian. “You can have anything I own. I’m heavier than you are, but arctic clothing doesn’t fit very tight, so I guess it will be all right.”

As if to clinch the bargain, she wound an orange colored scarf about her neck and went strutting across the room.

A half hour later, while Patsy was out having her picture taken, Marian walked slowly up and down the room. She was thinking, and her thoughts were long, long thoughts.

“I like her,” she said at last. “I’m going to like her more and more. But it’s going to be hard for her sometimes, fearfully hard. When the blizzards sweep in from the north and we’re all shut in; when no one comes and no one goes, and the nights are twenty hours long; when the dogs howl their lonesome song—it’s going to be hard for her then. But I’ll do the best I can for her. Her father was right—it will do her a world of good. It will teach her the slow and steady patience of those who live in the North, and that’s a good thing to know.”

Three weeks later the two girls, toiling wearily along after two reindeer sleds, approached the black bulk of the old scow in the river, the one in which Marian had seen the mysterious purple flame. Again it was night. They were on their way north to the reindeer herd. Traveling over the first soft snow of winter, they had made twenty miles that day. For the last hour Patsy had not uttered a single word. She had tramped doggedly after the sled. Only her drooping shoulders told how weary she was. Marian had hoped against hope that they would this time find the old dredge deserted.

“It would make a nice dry place to camp,” she said to herself, as she brought her reindeer to a halt and stood studying the dark bulk. Patsy dropped wearily down upon a loaded sled.

Just as Marian was about to give the word to go forward, there flashed across the square window a jet of purple flame.

“Oh!” exclaimed Marian.

“What is it?” asked Patsy.

“The purple flame!”

“The purple flame? What’s that?”

“You know as much as I do; only I know it’s there in that old dredge. And since it’s there, we can’t stop here for the night. We must go on.”

“Oh, but—but I can’t!” Patsy half sobbed. “You don’t know, you can’t know how tired I am.”

“Yes, I know,” said Marian softly. “I’ve been just that way; but we dare not stop here. The people in the old scow might have dogs and they would attack our reindeer. We must go on; five miles more.”

“And then—”

“Camp beneath the stars.”

“All right,” said Patsy, with a burst of determination. “Let’s get it over quick.”

Again they moved slowly forward, but neither of them forgot the purple flame. Three times they saw it flash across the window.

“That place must be haunted,” Marian sighed as she turned to give her full attention to the lagging reindeer.

CHAPTER II
PATSY FROM KENTUCKY

Some five miles from the old dredge Marian stopped her reindeer, gazed about her for a moment, then said quietly:

“We’ll camp here.”

“Here?” cried Patsy. “Won’t we freeze?”

“Freeze? No, we’ll be safe as a bug in a rug. Just you sit down on a sled until I unpack this one. After that I’ll picket out the reindeer and get supper.”

From the sled Marian dragged a sheet iron affair which she called a Yukon stove. With dry moss, dug from beneath the snow, and wood brought on the sled, she kindled a fire. They had no shelter, but the glow of the fire cheered Patsy immeasurably. When the smell of frying bacon and warming red beans reached her she was ready to execute a little dance of joy.

Supper over, Marian took a small trench shovel, salvaged by a friend from the great war, and scraped away the snow from above the soft, dry tundra moss. Over this cleared space she spread a square of canvas. Then, untying a thong about a deerskin sleeping bag, she allowed the bag to slowly unroll itself along the canvas.

“There,” she announced, “the bed is made. No need to pull down the shades. We’ll get off our outer garments and hop right in.”

Patsy looked at her in astonishment. Then, seeing her take off first her mackinaw, then her sweater, she followed suit.

“Now,” said Marian as they reached the proper stage of disrobing, “you do it like this.”

Sitting down upon the canvas, she thrust her feet into the sleeping bag, then began to work her way into it.

“Come on,” she directed, “we can do it best together. It’s just big enough for two. I had it made that way on purpose.”

Patsy dropped to the place beside her. Then together they burrowed their way into the depths of the bag until only their eyes and noses were uncovered.

“How soft!” murmured Patsy as she wound an arm about her cousin’s neck, then lay staring up at the stars.

“How warm!” she whispered again five minutes later.

“Yes,” Marian whispered, as though they were sleeping at home and might disturb the household by speaking aloud. “You see, this bag is made of the long haired winter skins of reindeer. The hair is a solid mat more than an inch thick. The skin keeps out the wind. With the foot and the sides of it sewed up tight, you can’t possibly get cold, even if you sleep on the frozen ground.”

“How wonderful!” exclaimed Patsy. “It wouldn’t be a bit of use writing that to my friends. They simply wouldn’t believe it.”

“No, they wouldn’t.”

For a little time, with arms twined about one another, the cousins lay there in silence. Each, busy with her own thoughts, was not at all conscious of the bonds of human affection which the vast silence of the white wilderness was even now weaving about them. Bonds far stronger than their arms about one another’s neck, these were to carry them together through many a wild and mysterious adventure.

As if in anticipation of all this, Patsy snuggled a bit closer to Marian and said:

“I think this is going to be great!”

“Let’s hope so,” Marian answered.

“And will we really herd the reindeer?”

“No,” laughed Marian, “at least not any more than we wish to. You see, we have three Eskimo herders with us, and Attatak, a girl who cooks for them. They do most of the work. All we have to do is to finance the herd and sort of supervise it.

“You see, the Eskimo people are really child-people. They have had many strange customs in the past that don’t fit now. In their old village life of hunting and fishing, it was an unwritten law that if one man had food and another had none, it must be shared. That won’t work now.

“There is only one time of year that we can get food into this herding ground; that is summer. We freight it up the river and store it for winter’s use. That gives us a big supply of provisions in the fall. There are two Eskimo villages thirty miles away. If there were no white people about, our good-hearted herders would share our supplies with the villagers as often as they came around. Before the winter was half through they would be out of supplies. They would then have to live on reindeer meat, and that would be hard on our herd. In fact, we would soon have no herd. So that is the reason we are going to spend a winter on the tundra.”

“And will we live like this?” asked Patsy.

“Oh, no!” laughed Marian. “We have tents for this time of year. In a month we will move into the most interesting houses you ever saw. We’ll reserve that as a surprise for you.”

“Oh! Oh!” sighed Patsy, as she suddenly became conscious of the aches in her legs. “I think it’s going to be grand, if only I get so I can stand the travel as you do. Do you think I ever will?”

“Of course you will—in less than a week.”

“You know,” said Patsy thoughtfully, “down where I came from we think we exercise an awful lot. We swim and row, ride horseback, play tennis and basket-ball, and go on hikes. But, after all, that was just play—sort of skipping ’round. This—this is the real thing!”

Giving her cousin an energetic good-night hug, she closed her eyes and was soon fast asleep.

Marian did not fall asleep at once. Her mind was working over the mystery of the purple flame. What was it? What had caused it? Who were the persons back there in the old dredge, and why had they come there? Such were some of the problems that crowded her mind.

The old dredge had been there for years. It was but one of the many monuments to men’s folly in their greedy search for gold. These monuments—dredges, derricks, sluice-boxes, crushers, smelters, and who knows what others—lined the beaches and rivers about Nome. The bed of the Sinrock River was known to run fairly rich in gold. Someone had imagined that he might become rich by dredging the mud at the bottom of the river and washing it for gold. The scheme had failed. Doubtless the owner of the dredge had gone into bankruptcy. At any rate, here was the old dredge with its long beams and gaping iron bucket still dangling in air, rotting to decay. And here within this tomblike wreck had appeared the purple flame.

It had not been like anything Marian had seen before. “Almost like lightning,” she mused, sleepily.

Being a healthy girl with a clean mind, she did not long puzzle her brain about the uncanny mystery of the weird light, but busied her mind with more practical problems. If these makers of the purple flame were to remain long at the dredge, how were they to live? Too often in the past, the answer to such a question had been, “By secretly preying upon the nearest herd.”

The Sinrock herd had been moved some distance away. Marian’s own herd was now the nearest one to the old dredge. “And when we move into winter quarters it will be five miles nearer. Oh, well!” she sighed, “there’s no use borrowing trouble. It’s probably some miners going up the river to do assessment work.”

“But then,” her busy mind questioned, “what about the purple flame? Why have they already stayed there three weeks? Why—”

At this juncture she fell asleep, to awake when the first streaks of dawn were casting fingers of light across the snowy tundra.

She crept softly from her sleeping bag, jumped into her clothes, and was in the act of lighting the fire when a faint sound of heavy breathing caused her to turn her head. To her surprise she saw Patsy, clothed only in those garments that had served as her sleeping gown, doing a strange, whirling, bare-footed fling of calisthenics, with the sleeping bag as her mat.

“You appear to have quite recovered,” Marian laughed.

“Just seeing if I was all here,” Patsy laughed in turn, as she dropped down upon the bag and began drawing on her stockings.

“Whew!” she puffed. “That’s invigorating; good as a cold plunge in the sea. What do we have for breakfast?”

“Sour-dough flapjacks and maple syrup.”

“Um-um! Make me ten,” exclaimed Patsy, redoubling her efforts to get herself dressed.

That night Marian made a discovery that set her nerves a-tremble to the very roots of her hair and, in spite of the Arctic chill, brought beads of perspiration out on the tip of her nose.

As on the previous night, they had camped out upon the open tundra. This night, however, they had found a sheltered spot beside a clump of willows that lined a stream. The stream ran between low, rolling hills. Over those hills they had been passing when darkness fell. Now, as Marian crept into the sleeping bag, she saw the nearer hills rising like cathedral domes above her. She heard the ceaseless rustle of willow leaves that, caught by an early frost, still clung to their branches. This rustle, together with the faint breeze that fanned her cheeks, had all but lulled her to sleep. Suddenly she sat upright.

“It couldn’t be!” she exclaimed. Then, a moment later, she added:

“But, yes—there it is again. Who would believe it? Lightning in the Arctic, and on such a night as this. Twenty below zero and clear as a bell! Not a cloud in sight.”

Rubbing her brow to clear her mind from the cobweb of dreams that had been forming there, she stared again at the crest of the hill.

Then, swiftly, silently, that she might not waken her cousin, she crept from the sleeping bag. Donning her fur parka and drawing on knickers and deerskin boots, she hurried away from camp and up the hill, thinking as she did so:

“That’s not lightning. I don’t know what it is, but in the name of all that’s good, I’m going to come nearer solving that mystery than ever I did before.”

Half way up the hill she found a snow blown gully, and up this she crept, half hidden by the shadows. Nearing the crest, a half mile from her camp, she dropped on hands and knees and crawled forward a hundred yards. Then, like some hunter who has stolen upon his game, she propped herself on her elbows and stared straight ahead.

In spite of her expectations, she gasped at what she saw. A purple flame, now six inches in length, now a foot, now two feet, darted out of space, then receded, then flared up again. Three feet above the surface of the snow, it appeared to hang in midair like some ghost fire.

Marian’s heart beat wildly. Her nerves tingled, her knees trembled, and open-mouthed, without the power to move, she stared at this strange apparition.

This spell lasted for a moment. Then, with a half audible exclamation of disgust, she dropped limply to the snow.

“Inside a tent,” she said. “Tent was so like the snow and the sky that I couldn’t see it at first.”

As her eyes became accustomed to this version of her discovery she was able to make out the outlines of the tent and even to recognize a dog sleeping beside it.

Suddenly the shadow of a person began dancing on the wall of the tent. So rapid were the flashes of the purple flame, so flickering and distorted was this image, that it seemed more the shadow of a ghost than of a human being. A second shadow joined the first. The two of them appeared to do some wild dance. Then, of a sudden, all was dark. The purple flame had vanished.

A moment later a yellow light flared up. Then a steady light gleamed.

“Lighted a candle,” was Marian’s comment. “It’s on this side of them, for now they cast no shadows. Are they all men? Or, are there some women? How many are there? Two, or more than two? They are following us. I’d swear to that. I wonder why?”

Again she thought of the stories she had heard of ne’er-do-wells who dogged the tracks of reindeer herds like camp followers, and lived upon the deer that had strayed too far from the main herd.

“Perhaps,” Marian mused, “they have heard that father’s herd is to be run this winter by two inexperienced girls. Perhaps they think we will be easy. Perhaps—” she set her lips tight, “perhaps we will, and perhaps not. We shall see.”

Then she went stealing back to her camp and crept shivering into the sleeping bag.

She slept very little that night. The camp of the mysterious strangers was too close; the perplexing problems that lay before her too serious to permit of that. She was glad enough when she caught the first faint flush of dawn in the east and knew that a new day was dawning.

“This day,” she told herself, “we make our own camp. There is comfort in that. Let the future take care of itself.”

She cast one glance toward the hill, but seeing no movement there, she began to search the ground for dry moss for kindling a fire.

Soon she had a little yellow flame glowing in her Yukon stove. The feeble flame soon grew to a bright red, and in a little while the coffee pot was singing its song of merry defiance to the Arctic chill.

CHAPTER III
MARIAN FACES A PROBLEM

Marian buried her hand in the thick warm coat of the spotted reindeer that stood by her side and, shading her eyes, gazed away at the distant hills. A brown spot had appeared at the crest of the third hill to her right.

“There’s another and another,” she said. “Reindeer or caribou? I wonder. If it’s caribou, perhaps Terogloona can get one of them with his rifle. It would help out our food supply. But if it’s reindeer—” her brow wrinkled at the thought, “reindeer might mean trouble.”

At that instant something happened that brought her hand to her side. Quickly unstrapping her field glasses, she put them to her eyes.

A fourth object had appeared on the crest. Even with the naked eye one might tell that this one was not like the other three. He was lighter in color and lacked the lace-like suggestion against the sky which meant broad spreading antlers.

“Reindeer!” she groaned. “All of them reindeer, and the last one’s a sled deer. His antlers have been cut off so he’ll travel better. And that means—”

She pursed her lips in deep thought as the furrows in her brow deepened.

“Oh, well!” she exclaimed at last. “Perhaps it doesn’t mean anything after all. Perhaps they’re just a bunch of strays. Who knows? But a sled reindeer?” she argued with herself. “They don’t often stray away.”

For a moment she stood staring at the distant hillcrest. Then, seizing her drive line, she spoke to her deer. As he bounded away she leaped nimbly upon the sled and went skimming along after him.

“We’ll see about that,” she said. “They’re not our deer, that’s sure. Whose are they? That’s what we’re about to find out. A circle across that long valley, then a stiff climb up a gully, will just about bring us to their position.”

Fifteen minutes later she found herself atop the first elevation. For the time, out of sight of the strange reindeer, she had an opportunity to glance back down the valley where her own herd was peacefully feeding. Her eyes lighted up as she looked. It was indeed a beautiful sight. Winter had come, for she and Patsy Martin had now been following the herd for three months. Winter, having buried deep beneath the snow every trace of the browns and greens of summer, had left only deep purple shadows and pale yellow lights over mountain, hill and tundra. In the midst of these lights and shadows, such as are not seen save upon a sun-scorched desert or the winter-charmed Arctic, her little herd of some four hundred deer stood out as if painted on a canvas or done in bas-relief with wood or stone.

“It’s not like anything in the world,” said Marian, “and I love it. Oh, how I do love it! How I wish I could paint it as it really is!”

As she rode on up the valley her mind went over the months that had passed and the problems she and Patsy now faced.

Great as was her love for the Arctic, fond as she was of its wild, free life, her father had made other plans for her; plans that could not be carried out so long as they were in possession of the herd. This seemed to make the sale of the herd an urgent necessity. Every letter from her father that came to her over hundreds of miles of dog-sled and reindeer trail, suggested some possible means of disposing of the herd.

“We must sell by spring,” his last letter had said. “Not that I am in immediate need of money, but you must get back to school. One year out there in the wilderness, with Patsy for your companion, will do no harm, but it must not go on. The doctor says I cannot return to the North for four or five years at the least. So, somehow, we must sell.”

“Sell! Sell!” Marian repeated, almost savagely. It seemed to her that there could be no selling the herd. There was only a limited market for reindeer meat. Miners here and there bought it. The mining cities bought it, but of late the increase to one hundred thousand reindeer in Alaska had overloaded the market. A little meat could be shipped to the States, there to be served at great club luncheons and in palatial hotels, but the demand was not large.

“Sell?” she questioned, “how can we sell?”

Little she knew how soon a possible answer to that question would come. Not knowing, she visioned herself following the herd year after year, while all those beautiful, wonderful months she had had a taste of, and now dreamed of by day and night, faded from her thoughts.

She had spent one year under the shadows of a great university. Marvelous new thoughts had come to her that year. Friendships had been made, such friendships as she in her northern wilds had never dreamed of. The stately towers of the university even now appeared to loom before her, and again she seemed to hear the melodious chimes of the bells.

“Oh!” she cried, “I must go back. I must! I must!”

And yet Marian was not unhappy. For the present she would not be any other place than where she was. It was a charming life, this wandering life of the reindeer herder. During the short summer, and even into the frosts of fall and winter, they lived in tents, and like nomads of the desert, wandered from place to place, always seeking the freshest water, the greenest grass, the tallest willow bushes. But when winter truly came swooping down upon them, they went to a spot chosen months before, the center of rich feeding grounds where the ground beneath the snow was green-white with “reindeer moss.” Here they made a more permanent camp. After that there remained but the task of defending the herd from wolves and other marauders, and of driving the herd to camp each day, that they might not wander too far away.

As for Patsy, she had fairly revelled in it all. Reared in a city apartment where a chirping sparrow gave the only touch of nature, she had come to this wilderness with a great thirst for knowledge of the out-of-doors. Each day brought some new revelation to her. The snow buntings, ptarmigans and ravens; the foxes, caribou and reindeer; even the occasional prowling wolves, all were her teachers. From them she learned many secrets of wild nature.

Of course there had been long, shut-in days, when the wind swept the tundra, and the snow, appearing to rest nowhere, whirled on and on. Such days were lonely ones. Letters were weeks in coming and arrived but seldom. All these things gave the energetic city lass some blue days, but even then she never complained.

Her health was greatly improved. Gone was the nervous twitch of eyelids that told of too many hours spent pouring over books. The summer freckles had been replaced by ruddy brown, such as only Arctic winds and an occasional freeze can impart. As for her muscles, they were like iron bands. Never in the longest day’s tramp did she complain of weariness. With the quick adaptability of a bright and cheerful girl, she had become a part of the wild world which surrounded her. The expression of her lips, too, was somehow changed. Firmness and determination were still written there, but certain lines had been added; lines of patience that said louder than words: “I have learned one great lesson; that one may run uphill, but that mountains must be climbed slowly, patiently, circle by circle, till the summit is reached.”

They were in winter camp now. As Marian thought of it she smiled. At no other spot in all Alaska was there another such camp as hers. Marian, as you know if you have read our other book, “The Blue Envelope,” had, some two years before, spent the short summer months of the Arctic in Siberia, across from Alaska. Much against her own wishes, she had spent a part of the winter there. Someone has said “there is no great loss without some small gain”; and while Marian had endured hardships and known moments of peril in Siberia, from the strange and interesting tribes there she had learned some lessons of real value regarding winter camps in the Arctic. Upon making her own camp she had put this knowledge into practice.

They were now in winter camp. As Marian thought of this, then thought of the four strange reindeer on the ridge above, her brow again showed wrinkles of anxiety.

“If it’s Bill Scarberry’s herd,” she said fiercely, clenching her fists, “if it is!” In her words there was a world of feeling.

In the early stages of the reindeer industry in Alaska, the problem of feed grounds for the deer had been exceedingly simple. There were the broad stretches of tundra, a hundred square miles for every reindeer. Help yourself. Every mile of it was matted deep with rich moss; every stream lined in summer with tender willow leaves. If you chanced to sight another small herd in your wandering, you went to right or left, and so avoided them. There was room for all.

Now things were vastly changed. One hundred thousand deer ranged the tundra. Reindeer moss, eaten away in a single season, requires four or five years to grow again in abundance. Back, back, farther and farther back from shore and river the herds had been pushed, until now it was difficult indeed to transport food to the herders.

With these conditions arising, the rivalry between owners for good feeding ground grew intense. Many and bitter were the feuds that had arisen between owners. There was not the best of feeling between Bill Scarberry, another owner, and her father; Marian knew that all too well.

“And now maybe his herd is coming into our feeding ground,” she sighed.

It was true that the Government Agent attempted to allot feeding grounds. The valley her deer were feeding upon had been written down in his book as her winter range; but when one is many days’ travel from even the fringe of civilization, when one is the herder of but four hundred deer, and only a girl at that, when an overriding owner of ten thousand deer comes driving in his vast herd to lick up one’s little pasture in a week or two, what is there to do?

These were the bitter thoughts that ran through the girl’s mind as she rode up the valley.

The pasture to the right and left of them, and to the north, had been alloted for so many miles that it was out of the question to think of breaking winter camp and freighting supplies to some new range.

“No,” she said firmly, “we are here, and here we stay!”

Had she known the strange circumstances that would cause her to alter this decision, she might have been startled at the grim humor of it.

CHAPTER IV
THE RANGE ROBBER

Just as Marian finished thinking these things through, her reindeer gave a final leap which brought him squarely upon the crest of the highest ridge. From this point, so it seemed to her, she could view the whole world.

As her eyes automatically sought the spot where the four reindeer had first appeared, a stifled cry escaped her lips. The valley at the foot of that slope was a moving sea of brown and white.

“The great herd!” she exclaimed. “Scarberry’s herd!”

The presence of this great herd at that spot meant almost certain disaster to her own little herd. Even if the herds were kept apart—which seemed extremely unlikely—her pasture would be ruined, and she had no other place to go. If the herds did mix, it would take weeks of patient toil to separate them—toil on the part of all. Knowing Scarberry as she did, she felt certain that little of the work would be done by either his herders or himself. All up and down the coast and far back into the interior, Scarberry was known for the selfishness, the brutality and injustice of his actions.

“Such men should not be allowed upon the Alaskan range,” she hissed through tightly set teeth. “But here he is. Alaska is young. It’s a new and thrilling little world all of itself. He who comes here must take his chance. Some day, the dishonest men will be controlled or driven out. For the present it’s a fight. And we must fight. Girls though we are, we must fight. And we will! We will!” she stamped the snow savagely. “Bill Scarberry shall not have our pasture without a struggle.”

Had she been a heroine in a modern novel of the North, she would have leaped upon her saddle-deer, put the spurs to his side, and gone racing to the camp of the savage Bill Scarberry, then and there to tell him exactly what her rights were and to dare him to trespass against them. Since, so far as we know, there are no saddle-deer in Alaska, and no deer-saddles to be purchased anywhere; and since Marian was an ordinary American girl, with a good degree of common sense and caution, and not a heroine at all in the vulgar sense of the word, she stood exactly where she was and proceeded to examine the herd through her field glass.

If she had hoped against hope that this was not Scarberry’s herd at all, but some other herd that was passing to winter quarters, this hope was soon dispelled. The four deer upon the ridge, having strayed some distance from the main herd, were now only a few hundred yards away. She at once made out their markings. Two notches, one circular and one triangular, had been cut from the gristly portion of the right ear of each deer. This brutal manner of marking, so common a few years earlier, had been kept up by Scarberry, who had as little thought for the suffering of his deer as he had for the rights of others. The deer owned by the Government, and Marian’s own deer, were marked by aluminum tags attached to their ears.

“They’re Scarberry’s all right,” Marian concluded. “It’s his herd, and he brought them here. If they had strayed away by accident and his herders had come after them, they would be driving them back. Now they’re just wandering along the edge of the herd, keeping them together. There comes one of them after the four strays. No good seeing him now. It wouldn’t accomplish anything, and I might say too much. I’ll wait and think.”

Turning her deer, for a time she drove along the crest of the ridge.

“I shouldn’t wonder,” she said to herself, “if he’s already taken up quarters in the old miner’s cabin down there in the willows on the bank of the Little Soquina River. Yes,” she added, “there’s the smoke of his fire.

“To think,” she stormed, enraged at the cool complacency of the thing, “to think that any man could be so mean. He has thousands of deer, and a broad, rich range. He’s afraid the range may be scant in the spring and his deer become poor for the spring shipping market, so he saves it by driving his herd over here for a month or two, that it may eat all the moss we have and leave us to make a perilous or even fatal drive to distant pastures. That, or to see our deer starve before our very eyes. It’s unfair! It’s brutally inhuman!

“And yet,” she sighed a moment later, “I suppose the men up here are not all to blame. Seems like there is something about the cold and darkness, the terrible lonesomeness of it all, that makes men like wolves that prowl in the scrub forests—fierce, bloodthirsty and savage. But that will do for sentiment. Scarberry must not have his way. He must not feed down our pasture if there is a way to prevent it. And I think there is! I’m almost sure. I must talk to Patsy about it. It would mean something rather hard for her, but she’s a brave little soul, God bless her!”

Then she spoke to her reindeer and went racing away down the slope toward the camp.

It was a strange looking camp that awaited Marian’s coming. Two dome shaped affairs of canvas were all but hidden in a clump of willows, surrounded by deer sleds and a small canvas tent for supplies—surely a strange camp for Alaskan reindeer herders.

But how comfortable were those dome shaped igloos! Marian had learned to make them during that eventful journey with the reindeer Chukches in Siberia.

Winter skins of reindeer are cheap, very cheap in Alaska. Being light, portable and warm, Marian had used many of them in the construction of this winter camp. Her heart warmed with the prospect of perfect comfort, and drawing the harness from her reindeer, she turned it loose to graze. Then she parted the flap to the igloo which she and Patsy shared.

Something of the suppressed excitement which came to her from the discovery of the rival herd must still have shown in her face, for as Patsy turned from her work of preparing a meal to look at Marian she noticed the look on her face and exclaimed:

“Oh! Did you see it, too?”

“I’m not sure that I know what you mean,” said Marian, puzzled by her question. Where had Patsy been? Surely the herd could not be seen from the camp, and she had not said she was going far from it; in fact, she had been left to watch camp.

“I’ve seen enough,” continued Marian, “to make me dreadfully angry. Something’s got to be done about it. Right away, too. As soon as we have a bite to eat we’ll talk it over.”

“I knew you’d feel that way about it,” said Patsy. “I think it’s a shame that they should hang about this way.”

“See here, Patsy,” exclaimed Marian, seizing her by the shoulder and turning her about, “what are we—what are you talking about?”

“Why, I—you—” Patsy stammered, mystified, “you just come out here and I’ll show you.”

Dragging her cousin out of the igloo and around the end of the willows, she pointed toward a hillcrest.

There, atop the hill, stood a newly erected tent, and at that very moment its interior was lighted by a strange purple light.

“The purple flame!” exclaimed Marian. “More trouble. Or is it all one? Is it Bill Scarberry who lights that mysterious flame? Does he think that by doing that he can frighten us from our range?”

“Bill Scarberry?” questioned Patsy, “who is he, and what has he to do with it?”

“Come on into the igloo and I’ll tell you,” said Marian, shivering as a gust of wind swept down from the hill.

As they turned to go back Patsy said:

“Terogloona came in a few minutes ago. He said to tell you that another deer was gone. This time it is a spotted two-year-old.”

“That makes seven that have disappeared in the last six weeks. If that keeps up we won’t need to sell our herd; it will vanish like snow in the spring. It can’t be wolves. They leave the bones behind. You can always tell when they’re about. I wonder if those strange people of the purple flame are living off our deer? I’ve a good mind to go right up there and accuse them of it. But no, I can’t now; there are other more important things before us.”

“What could be more important?” asked Patsy in astonishment.

“Wait, I’ll tell you,” said Marian, as she parted the flap of the igloo and disappeared within.

A half hour later they were munching biscuits and drinking steaming coffee. Marian had said not a single word about the problems and adventures that lay just before them. Patsy asked no questions. She knew that the great moment of confiding came when they were snugly tucked in beneath blankets and deerskins in the strangest little sleeping room in all the world. Knowing this, she was content to wait until night for Marian to tell her all about this important matter.

CHAPTER V
PLANNING A PERILOUS JOURNEY

The house in which the girls lived was a cunningly built affair. Eight long poles, brought from the distant river, had been lashed together at one end. Then they had all been raised to an upright position and spread apart like the pole of an Indian’s tepee. Canvas was spread over this circle of poles. That there might be more room in the tent, curved willow branches were lashed to the poles. These held the canvas away in a circle. After this had been accomplished the whole inside was lined with deerskins. Only an opening at the top was left for the passing of smoke from the Yukon stove. The stove stood in the front center of the house. Back of it was a platform six by eight feet. This platform was surrounded on all four sides and above by a second lining of deerskin. This platform formed the floor and the deerskins the walls of a little room within the skin house. This was the sleeping room of Marian and Patsy.

A more cozy place could scarcely be imagined. Even with the thermometer at forty below, and the wind howling about the igloo, this room was warm as toast. With the sleeping bag for a bed, and with a heavy deerskin rug and blankets piled upon them, the girls could sleep in perfect comfort.

In this cozy spot, with one arm thrown loosely about her cousin’s neck, Marian lay that night for a full five minutes in perfect silent repose.

“Patsy,” she said, as her arm suddenly tightened about her cousin’s neck in an affectionate hug, “would you be terribly afraid to stay here all by yourself with the Eskimos?”

“How—how long?” Patsy faltered.

“I don’t know exactly. Perhaps a week, perhaps three. In the Arctic one never knows. Things happen. There are blizzards; rivers can not be crossed; there is no food to be had; who knows what may happen?”

“Why, no,” said Patsy slowly, “with Attatak here I think I shouldn’t mind.”

“I think,” said Marian with evident reluctance, “that I should take Attatak with me. I’d like to take old Terogloona. He’d be more help; but at a time like this he can’t leave the herd. He’s absolutely faithful—would give his life for us. Father once saved him from drowning when a skin boat was run down by a motor launch. An Eskimo never forgets.”

“How strangely you talk,” said Patsy suddenly. “Is—is the purple flame as serious an affair as that?”

“Oh, no!” answered Marian. “That may become serious. They may be killing our deer, but we haven’t caught them at it. That, for the present, is just an interesting mystery.”

“But what are you—where are you going?”

“Listen, Patsy,” said Marian thoughtfully; “do you remember the radio message we picked up three days ago—the one from the Government Agent, sent from Nome to Fairbanks?”

Patsy did remember. She had spent many interesting hours listening in on the compact but powerful radio set her father had presented to her as a parting gift.

“Yes,” she said, “I remember.”

“When did he say he was leaving Nome?”

“The 5th.”

“That means he’ll be at the Siman’s trading station on about the 12th. And Siman’s is the spot on the Nome-Fairbanks trail that is nearest to us. By fast driving and good luck I can get there before him.”

“But why should you?” persisted Patsy.

Then Marian confided to her cousin the new trouble they were facing, the almost certain loss of their range, with all the calamities that would follow.

“If only I can see the Agent before he passes on to Fairbanks I am sure he would deputize someone to come over here and compel Scarberry to take his herd from our range. If I can’t do that, then I don’t see that we have a single chance. We might as well—as well—” there was a catch in her voice—“as well make Scarberry a present of our herd and go on our way back to Nome. We’d be flat broke; not a penny in the world! And father—father would not have a single chance for a fresh start. But we will be ruined soon enough if we try to put up a fight all by ourselves, for Scarberry’s too strong; he’s got three herders to our one. The Agent is our only chance.”

For a long time after this speech all was silence, and Marian was beginning to think that Patsy had gone to sleep. Then she felt her soft warm hand steal into hers as she whispered:

“No, I’m not afraid. I—I’ll stay, and I’ll do all I can to keep that thief and his deer off our range until you get back. I’ll do it, too! See if I don’t!”

Patsy’s southern fighting blood was up. At such a time she felt equal to anything.

“All right, old dear; only be careful.” Marian gave her a rousing hug, then whispered as she drew the deerskins about her:

“Go to sleep now. I must be away before dawn.”

CHAPTER VI
A JOURNEY WELL BEGUN

Two hours before the tardy dawn, Marian and Attatak were away. With three tried and trusted reindeer—Spot, Whitie, and Brownie—they were to attempt a journey of some hundreds of miles. Across trackless wilderness they must lay their course by the stars until the Little Kalikumf River was reached. After this it was a straight course down a well marked trail to the trading station, providing the river was fully frozen over.

This river was one of the many problems they must face. There were others. Stray dogs might attack their deer; they might cross the track of a mother wolf and her hungry pack of half grown cubs; a blizzard might overtake them and, lacking the guiding light of the stars, they might become lost and wander aimlessly on the tundra until cold and hunger claimed them for their own. But of all these, Marian thought most of the river. Would it be frozen over, or would they be forced to turn back after covering all those weary miles and enduring the hardships?

“Attatak,” she said to the native girl, “they say the Little Kalikumf River has rapids in it by the end of a glacier and that no man dares shoot those rapids. Is that true?”

“Eh-eh,” (yes) answered Attatak. “Spirit of water angry at ice cut away far below. Want to shoot rapids; boats and man run beneath that ice. Soon smashed boat, killed man. That’s all.”

It was quite enough, Marian thought; but somehow they must pass these rapids whether they were frozen over or not.

“Ah, well,” she sighed, “that’s still far away. First comes the fight with tundra, hills and sweeping winds.”

Patting her reindeer on the side, she sent him flying up the valley while she raced along beside him.

These reindeer were wonderful steeds. No food need be carried for them. They found their own food beneath the snow when day was done. A hundred miles in a day, over a smooth trail, was not too much for them. Soft snow—the wind-blown, blizzard-sifted snow that was like granulated sugar—did not trouble them. They trotted straight on. There was no need to search out a water hole that they might slake their thirst; they scooped up mouthfuls of snow as they raced along.

“Wonderful old friends,” murmured Marian as she reached out a hand to touch her spotted leader. “There are those who say a dog team is better. Bill Scarberry, they say, never drives reindeer; always drives dogs. But on a long journey, a great marathon race, reindeer would win, I do believe they would. I—”

She was suddenly startled from her reflections by the appearance of a brown-hooded head not twenty rods away. Their course had led them closer to Scarberry’s camp than she thought. As she came out upon the ridge she saw an Eskimo scout disappearing into the willows from which a camp smoke was rising.

Marian was greatly disturbed by the thought that Scarberry’s camp would soon know of her departure. She had hoped that they might not learn of her errand, that they might not miss her from the camp. For Patsy’s sake she was tempted to turn back, but after a moment’s indecision, she determined to push forward. There was no other way to win, and win she must!

An hour later she halted the deer at a fork in the trail. Directly before her stood a bold range of mountains, and their peaks seemed to be smoking with drifting snow. Blizzards were there, the perpetual blizzards of Arctic peaks. She had never crossed those mountains, perhaps no person ever had. She had intended skirting them to the north. This would require at least one added day of travel. As she thought of the perils that awaited Patsy while alone with the herd, and as she thought of the great necessity of making every hour count, she was tempted to try the mountain pass. Here was a time for decision; when all might be gained by a bold stroke.

Rising suddenly on tip-toe, as if thus to emphasize a great resolve, she pointed away to the mountains and said with all the dignity of a Jean d’Arc:

“Attatak, we go that way.”

Wide-eyed with amazement, Attatak stared at Marian for a full minute; then with the cheerful smile of a born explorer—which any member of her race always is—she said:

“Na-goo-va-ruk-tuck.” (That will be very good.)

CHAPTER VII
THE ENCHANTED MOUNTAIN

Since the time she had been able to remember anything, these mountains of the far north, standing away in bleak triangles of lights and shadows, smoking with the eternally drifting snows, had always held an all but irresistible lure for Marian. Even as a child of six, listening to the weird folk-stories of the Eskimo, she had peopled those treeless, wind swept mountains with all manner of strange folks. Now they were fairies, white and drifting as the snow itself; now they were strange black goblins with round faces and red noses; and now an Eskimo people who lived in enchanted caves that never were cold, no matter how bitterly the wind and cold assailed the fortresses of rocks that offered them protection.

“All my life,” she murmured as she tightened the rawhide thong that served as a belt to bind her parka close about her waist, “I have wanted to go to the crest of that range, and now I am to attempt it.”

She shivered a little at thought of the perils that awaited her. Many were the strange, wild tales she had heard told round the glowing stove at the back of her father’s store; tales of privation, freezing, starvation and death; tales told by grizzled old prospectors who had lost their pals in a bold struggle with the elements. She thought of these stories and again she shivered, but she did not turn back.

Once only, after an hour of travel up steep ravines and steeper foothills, she paused to unstrap her field glasses and look back over the way they had come. Then she threw back her head and laughed. It was the wild, free laugh of a daring soul that defies failure.

Attatak showed all her splendid white teeth in a grin.

“Who is afraid?” Marian laughed. “Snow, cold, wind—who cares?”

Marian spoke to her reindeer, and again they were away.

As they left the foothills and began to circle one of the lesser peaks—a slow, gradually rising spiral circle that brought them higher and higher—Marian felt the old charm of the mountains come back to her. Again they were peopled by strange fairies and goblins. So real was the illusion that at times it seemed to her that if worst came to worst and they found themselves lost in a storm at the mountain top, they might call upon these phantom people for shelter.

The mountain was not exactly as she had expected to find it. She had supposed that it was one vast cone of gleaming snow. In the main this was true, yet here and there some rocky promontory, towering higher than its fellows, reared itself above the surface, a pier of granite standing out black against the whiteness about it, mute monument to all those daring climbers who have lost their lives on mountain peaks.

Once, too, off some distance to her right and farther up, she fancied she saw the yawning mouth of a cavern.

“Doesn’t seem possible,” she told herself. And yet, it did seem so real that she found herself expecting some strange Rip Van Winkle-like people to come swarming out of the cavern.

She shook herself as a rude blast of wind swept up from below, all but freezing her cheek at a single wild whirl.

“I must stop dreaming,” she told herself stoutly. “Night is falling. We are on the mountain, nearing the crest. A storm is rising. It is colder here than in any place I have ever been. Perhaps we have been foolhardy, but now we must go on!”

Even as she thought this through, Attatak pointed to her cheek and exclaimed:

“Froze-tuck.”

“My cheek frozen!” Marian cried in consternation.

“Eh-eh” (yes.)

“And we have an hour’s climb to reach the top. Perhaps more. Somehow we must have shelter. Attatak, can you build a snow house?”

“Not very good. Not build them any more, my people.”

“Then—then,” said Marian slowly, as she rubbed snow on the white, frozen spots of her cheek, “then we must go on.”

Five times in the next twenty minutes Attatak told her her cheeks were frozen. Twice Attatak had been obliged to rub the frost from her own cheeks. Each time the intervals between freezings were shorter.

“Attatak,” Marian asked, “can we make it?”

“Canok-ti-ma-na” (I don’t know.) The Eskimo girl’s face was very grave.

As Marian turned about she realized that the storm from below was increasing. Snow, stopping nowhere, raced past them to go smoking out over the mountain peak.

She was about to start forward when again she caught sight of a dark spot on the mountain side above. It looked like the mouth of a cavern.

“If only it were,” she said wistfully, “we would camp there for the night and wait for the worst of the storm to pass.”

“Attatak,” she said suddenly, “you wait here. I am going to try to climb up there.” She pointed to the dark spot on the hillside.

“All right,” said Attatak. “Be careful. Foot slip, start to slide; never stop.” She looked first up the hill, then down the dizzy white slope that extended for a half mile to unknown depths below.

As Marian’s gaze followed Attatak’s she saw herself gliding down the slope, gaining speed, shooting down faster and faster to some awful, unknown end; a dash against a projecting rock; a burial beneath a hundred feet of snow. Little wonder that her knees trembled as she turned to go. Yet she did not falter.

With a cheerful “All right, I’ll be careful,” she gripped her staff and began to climb.

CHAPTER VIII
TROUBLE FOR PATSY

Hardly had Marian left camp when troubles began to pile up for Patsy. Dawn had not yet come when she heard a strange ki-yi-ing that certainly did not come from the herd collies, and she looked out and saw approaching the most disreputable group of Eskimos she had ever seen. Dressed in ragged parkas of rabbit skins, and driving the gauntest, most vicious looking pack of wolf dogs, these people appeared to come from a new and more savage world than hers. A rapid count told her there were seven adults and five children.

“Enough of them to eat us out of everything, even to skin boots and rawhide harness,” she groaned. “If they are determined to camp here, who’s to prevent them?”

For a moment she stood there staring; then with a sudden resolve that she must meet the situation, she exclaimed:

“I must send them on. Some way, I must. I can’t let them starve. They must have food, but they must be sent on to some spot where they have relatives who are able to feed them. The safety of the herd depends upon that. With food gone we cannot hold our herders. With no herders we cannot hold the deer. Marian explained that to me yesterday.”

Walking with all the dignity her sixteen years would permit, she approached the spot where the strangers had halted their dogs and were talking to old Terogloona. The dogs were acting strangely. Sawing at the strong rawhide bonds that held them to the sleds, they reared up on their haunches, ki-yi-ing for all they were worth.

“They smell our deer,” Patsy said to herself. “It’s a good thing our herd is at the upper end of the range!” She remembered hearing Marian tell how a whole herd of five thousand deer had been hopelessly stampeded by the lusty ki-yi-ing of one wolf dog.

“The reindeer is their natural food,” Marian had explained. “If even one of them gets loose when there is a reindeer about he will rush straight at him and leap for his throat.”

“That’s one more reason why I must get these people to move on at once,” Patsy whispered to herself.

To Terogloona she said: “What do they want?”

Terogloona turned to them with a simple: “Suna-go-pezuk-peet?” he asked, “What do you want?”

With many guttural expressions and much waving of hands, the leader explained their wishes.

“He say,” smiled Terogloona, “that in the hills about here are many foxes, black fox, red fox, white, blue and cross fox. He say, that one, want to camp here; want to set traps; want to catch foxes.”

“But what will they eat?” asked Patsy.

Terogloona, having interpreted the question, smiled again at their answer:

“They will eat foxes,” he answered quietly and modestly.

For a moment Patsy looked into their staring, hungry, questioning eyes. They were lying, and she knew it, but remembering a bit of advice of her father’s: “Never quarrel with a hungry person—feed him,” she smiled as she said to Terogloona:

“You tell them that this morning they shall eat breakfast with me; that we will have pancakes and reindeer steak, and tea with plenty of sugar in it.”

“Capseta! Ali-ne-ca! Capseta!” exclaimed one of the strangers who had understood the word sugar and was passing it on in the native word, Capseta, to his companions.

It was a busy morning for Patsy. There seemed no end to the appetites of these half starved natives. Even Terogloona grumbled at the amount they ate, but Patsy silenced him with the words: