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.”