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 The summer freckles had been replaced by ruddy brown, such as only Arctic winds and an occasional freeze can impart.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 allotted 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 fore
sts—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?”
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