The Purple Flame, Page 2

  CHAPTER II PATSY FROM KENTUCKY

  Some five miles from the old dredge Marian stopped her reindeer, gazedabout 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 sleduntil I unpack this one. After that I'll picket out the reindeer and getsupper."

  From the sled Marian dragged a sheet iron affair which she called a Yukonstove. With dry moss, dug from beneath the snow, and wood brought on thesled, she kindled a fire. They had no shelter, but the glow of the firecheered Patsy immeasurably. When the smell of frying bacon and warmingred 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 fromthe great war, and scraped away the snow from above the soft, dry tundramoss. Over this cleared space she spread a square of canvas. Then,untying a thong about a deerskin sleeping bag, she allowed the bag toslowly unroll itself along the canvas.

  "There," she announced, "the bed is made. No need to pull down theshades. We'll get off our outer garments and hop right in."

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

  "Now," said Marian as they reached the proper stage of disrobing, "you doit 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 bigenough for two. I had it made that way on purpose."

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

  "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 mightdisturb the household by speaking aloud. "You see, this bag is made ofthe long haired winter skins of reindeer. The hair is a solid mat morethan an inch thick. The skin keeps out the wind. With the foot and thesides of it sewed up tight, you can't possibly get cold, even if yousleep on the frozen ground."

  "How wonderful!" exclaimed Patsy. "It wouldn't be a bit of use writingthat 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 laythere in silence. Each, busy with her own thoughts, was not at allconscious of the bonds of human affection which the vast silence of thewhite wilderness was even now weaving about them. Bonds far stronger thantheir arms about one another's neck, these were to carry them togetherthrough many a wild and mysterious adventure.

  As if in anticipation of all this, Patsy snuggled a bit closer to Marianand 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, wehave three Eskimo herders with us, and Attatak, a girl who cooks forthem. They do most of the work. All we have to do is to finance the herdand sort of supervise it.

  "You see, the Eskimo people are really child-people. They have had manystrange customs in the past that don't fit now. In their old village lifeof hunting and fishing, it was an unwritten law that if one man had foodand 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 herdingground; that is summer. We freight it up the river and store it forwinter's use. That gives us a big supply of provisions in the fall. Thereare two Eskimo villages thirty miles away. If there were no white peopleabout, our good-hearted herders would share our supplies with thevillagers as often as they came around. Before the winter was halfthrough they would be out of supplies. They would then have to live onreindeer meat, and that would be hard on our herd. In fact, we would soonhave no herd. So that is the reason we are going to spend a winter on thetundra."

  "And will we live like this?" asked Patsy.

  "Oh, no!" laughed Marian. "We have tents for this time of year. In amonth we will move into the most interesting houses you ever saw. We'llreserve that as a surprise for you."

  "Oh! Oh!" sighed Patsy, as she suddenly became conscious of the aches inher legs. "I think it's going to be grand, if only I get so I can standthe 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 weexercise an awful lot. We swim and row, ride horseback, play tennis andbasket-ball, and go on hikes. But, after all, that was just play--sort ofskipping 'round. This--this is the real thing!"

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

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

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

  It had not been like anything Marian had seen before. "Almost likelightning," she mused, sleepily.

  Being a healthy girl with a clean mind, she did not long puzzle her brainabout the uncanny mystery of the weird light, but busied her mind withmore practical problems. If these makers of the purple flame were toremain 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 thenearest herd."

  The Sinrock herd had been moved some distance away. Marian's own herd wasnow the nearest one to the old dredge. "And when we move into winterquarters it will be five miles nearer. Oh, well!" she sighed, "there's nouse borrowing trouble. It's probably some miners going up the river to doassessment work."

  "But then," her busy mind questioned, "what about the purple flame? Whyhave they already stayed there three weeks? Why--"

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

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

  "You appear to have quite recovered," Marian laughed.

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

  "Whew!" she puffed. "That's invigorating; good as a cold plunge in thesea. What do we have for breakfast?"

  "Sour-dough flapjacks and maple syrup."

  "Um-um! Make me ten," exclaimed Patsy, redoubling her efforts to getherself dressed.

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

  As on the previous night, they had camped out upon the open tundra. Thisnight, however, they had found a sheltered spot besi
de a clump of willowsthat lined a stream. The stream ran between low, rolling hills. Overthose hills they had been passing when darkness fell. Now, as Mariancrept into the sleeping bag, she saw the nearer hills rising likecathedral domes above her. She heard the ceaseless rustle of willowleaves that, caught by an early frost, still clung to their branches.This rustle, together with the faint breeze that fanned her cheeks, hadall 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 theArctic, and on such a night as this. Twenty below zero and clear as abell! Not a cloud in sight."

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

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

  "That's not lightning. I don't know what it is, but in the name of allthat's good, I'm going to come nearer solving that mystery than ever Idid 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 herelbows 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 thesnow, it appeared to hang in midair like some ghost fire.

  Marian's heart beat wildly. Her nerves tingled, her knees trembled, andopen-mouthed, without the power to move, she stared at this strangeapparition.

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

  "Inside a tent," she said. "Tent was so like the snow and the sky that Icouldn't see it at first."

  As her eyes became accustomed to this version of her discovery she wasable to make out the outlines of the tent and even to recognize a dogsleeping beside it.

  Suddenly the shadow of a person began dancing on the wall of the tent. Sorapid were the flashes of the purple flame, so flickering and distortedwas this image, that it seemed more the shadow of a ghost than of a humanbeing. A second shadow joined the first. The two of them appeared to dosome wild dance. Then, of a sudden, all was dark. The purple flame hadvanished.

  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, fornow they cast no shadows. Are they all men? Or, are there some women? Howmany are there? Two, or more than two? They are following us. I'd swearto that. I wonder why?"

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

  "Perhaps," Marian mused, "they have heard that father's herd is to be runthis winter by two inexperienced girls. Perhaps they think we will beeasy. Perhaps--" she set her lips tight, "perhaps we will, and perhapsnot. We shall see."

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

  She slept very little that night. The camp of the mysterious strangerswas too close; the perplexing problems that lay before her too serious topermit of that. She was glad enough when she caught the first faint flushof 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 inthat. Let the future take care of itself."

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

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