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.
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.