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?”