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.