“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.