She did not mean to take chances with the occupants of the old dredge. There was something mysterious and uncanny about that purple flame which she now saw shoot straight out, a full two feet, to instantly disappear. She had seen nothing like it before in the Arctic. As she studied the outlines of the dredge, she realized that the light was within it; that it flashed across a small square window in the side of the old scow.
“No,” she reasoned, “I can’t afford to take chances with them. I must go on down the river. I can make Sinrock.”
Speaking to her reindeer, she tugged at their lead straps. One at a time they started forward until at last they again took up the weary swish-swish across the tundra.
Once Marian turned to look back. Again she caught the flash of a purple flame.
Had she known how this purple flame was to be mixed up with her own destiny, she might have paused to look longer. As it was, she gave herself over to wondering what sort of people would take up their habitation in that half tumbled-down dredge, and what their weird light might signify.
She had heard of the strange rites performed by those interesting child-people, the Eskimos, in the worship of the spirits of dead animals. For one of these, the “Bladder Festival,” they saved all the bladders of polar bears, walrus and seals which they had killed, and at last, after four days of ceremony, committed them again to the waters of the ocean.
“They burn wild parsnip stalks in that festival,” Marian mused, “but that purple flame was not made by burning weeds. It was the brilliant flame of a blue-hot furnace flaring up, or something like that. Probably wasn’t Eskimo at all. Probably—well, it may be some Orientals who have stolen away up here to worship their idols by burning strange fires.”
She thought of all the foreign people who had crossed the Pacific to take up their homes in the far north city of Nome, which was just forty miles away.
“Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Russians, and members of nameless tribes,” she whispered to herself, as if half afraid they might hear her. “Might be any of these. Might—”
Suddenly she broke off her thinking and stopped short. Just before her a form loomed out of the dark. Another and yet another appeared.