For a moment she stood there rigid, scarcely breathing. Then she threw back her head and laughed.
“Reindeer,” she exclaimed. “I was frightened by some reindeer. Oh, well,” she said, after a moment’s reflection, “I might excuse myself for that. I’m tired out with marching over this soggy tundra. Besides, I guess that purple flame got on my nerves. All the same,” she avowed stoutly, “I’ll solve that mystery yet. See if I don’t.”
There for the time the subject was dismissed. The presence of these few reindeer before her told of more not far away, a whole herd of them. Where there were reindeer there would be herders, and herders lived in tents. Here there would be a warm, dry place to rest and sleep.
“Must be the Sinrock herd,” she concluded.
In this she was right. Soon, off in the distance, she caught the yellow glow of candlelight shining through a tent wall. Fifteen minutes later she was seated upon a rolled-up sleeping bag, chatting gayly with two black-eyed Eskimo girls who were keeping their brothers’ tents while those worthies were out looking for some stray fauns.
After her three reindeers had been relieved of their packs and set free to graze, Marian had dined on hardtack and juicy reindeer chops. Then she crawled deep down into her soft reindeer skin sleeping bag, to snatch a few hours of rest before resuming her journey to Nome.
Before her eyelids closed in sleep her tireless brain went over the problem before her and the purpose of her fatiguing journey. She had come all this way to meet a relative whom she had never seen—a cousin, Patsy Martin, from Louisville, Kentucky.
“Kentucky,” she whispered the word for the hundredth time. “Way down south. Imagine a girl who was brought up down there coming here for a winter to endure our cold, snow, and blizzards. She’s probably slim, willowy, and tender as a baby; dresses in thin silks, and all that. Why did father send her up here? Looks like it was bad enough to have four hundred reindeer to herd, without having a sixteen year old cousin from Ken-tuck-ie to look after.”
She yawned sleepily, yet her mind went on thinking of her reindeer herd and her problems. Though she had lived all but one year of her life in the far north, she had never, until two months before, spent a single night in a reindeer herder’s camp. But it was no longer a novel experience.
Until recently her father had been a prosperous merchant in Nome. Financial reverses had come and he had been obliged to sell his store. The reindeer herd, which he had taken as payment for a debt, was the only wealth he had saved from the crash. Following this, his doctor had ordered him to leave the rigorous climate of the North and to seek renewed health in the States. Much as he regretted it, he had been obliged to ask his daughter to give up her studies and to take charge of the herd until a favorable opportunity came for selling it.