The Girl Detective Megapack: 25 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls

by Mildred A. Wirt

  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 risin
g 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 reveled 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.