She sat in a study for a long time. Finally she whispered to herself:
“If the message comes while she is gone; if the opportunity is sure to be lost unless the herd starts as soon as the message comes, I wonder if I’d dare to start on the race with the herd, with Terogloona and without Marian and Attatak. I wonder if I would?”
For a long time she sat staring at the fire. Perhaps she was attempting to read the answer in the flames.
At last, with cheeks a trifle flushed, she sprang to her feet, did three or four leaps across the floor, and throwing off her clothing, crept between the deer-skins in the strange little sleeping compartment.
CHAPTER XXI
FADING HOPES
Just at dawn of a wonderfully crisp morning, Marian found herself following her reindeer over a trail that had recently been travelled by a dog team. She was just approaching the Trading Station where the questions that haunted her tired brain would be answered.
Since leaving the cabin in the forest above the rapids, she and Attatak had travelled almost day and night. A half hour for a hasty lunch here and there, an hour or two for sleep and for permitting the deer to feed; that was all they had allowed themselves.
An hour earlier, Marian had felt that she could not travel another mile. Then they had come upon the trail of the dog team, and realizing that they were nearing their goal, her blood had quickened like a marathon racer’s at the end of his long race. No longer feeling fatigue, she urged her weary reindeer forward. Contrary to her usually cautious nature, she even cast discretion to the winds and drove her deer straight toward the settlement. That there were dogs which might attack her deer she knew right well. That they were not of the species that attacked deer, or that they were chained, was her hope.
So, with her heart throbbing, she rounded a sudden turn to find herself within sight of a group of low-lying cabins that at one time had been a small town.
Now, as her aged host had said, it was a town in name only. She knew this at a glance. One look at the chimneys told her the place was all but deserted.