CHAPTER I
THE MYSTERY OF THE OLD DREDGE
Marian Norton started, took one step backward, then stood staring. Startled by this sudden action, the spotted reindeer behind her lunged backward to blunder into the brown one that followed him, and this one was in turn thrown against a white one that followed the two. This set all three of them into such a general mix-up that it was a full minute before the girl could get them quieted and could again allow her eyes to seek the object of her alarm.
As she stood there her pulse quickened, her cheeks flushed and she felt an all but irresistible desire to turn and flee. Yet she held her ground. Had she seen a flash of purple flame? She had thought so. It had appeared to shoot out from the side of the dark bulk that lay just before her.
“Might have been my nerves,” she told herself. “Perhaps my eyes are seeing things. T’wouldn’t be strange. I came a long way to-day.”
She had come a long way over the Arctic tundra that day. Starting but two mornings before from her reindeer herd, close to a hundred miles from Nome, Alaska, she had covered fully two-thirds of that distance in two days.
Her way had lead over low hills, across streams whose waters ran clear and cold toward the sea, down broad stretches of tundra whose soft mosses had oozed moisture at her every step. Here a young widgeon duck, ready to begin his southward flight—for this was the Arctic’s autumn time—had stretched his long neck to stare at her. Here a mother white fox had yap-yaped at her, insolently and unafraid. Here she had paused to pick a handful of pink salmon berries or to admire a particularly brilliant array of wild flowers, which, but for her passing, might have been “Born to blush unseen and waste their fragrance on the desert air.” Yet always with the three reindeers at her heels, she had pressed onward toward Nome, the port and metropolis of all that vast north country.
The black bulk that loomed out of the darkness before her was a deserted dredging scow, grounded on a sand bar of the Sinrock River. At least she had thought the scow deserted. Until now she had believed and hoped that here she might spend the night, completing her journey on the morrow.
“But now,” she breathed. “Yes! Yes! There can be no mistake. There it is again.”
Sinking wearily down upon the damp grass, she buried her face in her hands. She was so tired she could cry, yet she must “mush” on through the dark, over the soft, oozing tundra, for fifteen more weary miles. Fifteen miles further down the river was the Sinrock Mission. Here she might hope to find a corral for her deer, and food and rest for herself.
Marian did not cry. Born and bred in the Arctic, she was made of such stern stuff as the Arctic wilderness and the Arctic blizzard alone can mould.