Chapter IV: The Range Robber

Just as Marian finished thinking these things through, her reindeer gave a final leap which brought him squarely upon the crest of the highest ridge. From this point, so it seemed to her, she could view the whole world.

As her eyes automatically sought the spot where the four reindeer had first appeared, a stifled cry escaped her lips. The valley at the foot of that slope was a moving sea of brown and white.

“The great herd!” she exclaimed. “Scarberry’s herd!”

The presence of this great herd at that spot meant almost certain disaster to her own little herd. Even if the herds were kept apart—which seemed extremely unlikely—her pasture would be ruined, and she had no other place to go. If the herds did mix, it would take weeks of patient toil to separate them—toil on the part of all. Knowing Scarberry as she did, she felt certain that little of the work would be done by either his herders or himself. All up and down the coast and far back into the interior, Scarberry was known for the selfishness, the brutality and injustice of his actions.

“Such men should not be allowed upon the Alaskan range,” she hissed through tightly set teeth. “But here he is. Alaska is young. It’s a new and thrilling little world all of itself. He who comes here must take his chance. Some day, the dishonest men will be controlled or driven out. For the present it’s a fight. And we must fight. Girls though we are, we _must_ fight. And we will! We will!” she stamped the snow savagely. “Bill Scarberry shall not have our pasture without a struggle.”

Had she been a heroine in a modern novel of the North, she would have leaped upon her saddle-deer, put the spurs to his side, and gone racing to the camp of the savage Bill Scarberry, then and there to tell him exactly what her rights were and to dare him to trespass against them. Since, so far as we know, there are no saddle-deer in Alaska, and no deer-saddles to be purchased anywhere; and since Marian was an ordinary American girl, with a good degree of common sense and caution, and not a heroine at all in the vulgar sense of the word, she stood exactly where she was and proceeded to examine the herd through her field glass.

If she had hoped against hope that this was not Scarberry’s herd at all, but some other herd that was passing to winter quarters, this hope was soon dispelled. The four deer upon the ridge, having strayed some distance from the main herd, were now only a few hundred yards away. She at once made out their markings. Two notches, one circular and one triangular, had been cut from the gristly portion of the right ear of each deer. This brutal manner of marking, so common a few years earlier, had been kept up by Scarberry, who had as little thought for the suffering of his deer as he had for the rights of others. The deer owned by the Government, and Marian’s own deer, were marked by aluminum tags attached to their ears.

“They’re Scarberry’s all right,” Marian concluded. “It’s his herd, and he brought them here. If they had strayed away by accident and his herders had come after them, they would be driving them back. Now they’re just wandering along the edge of the herd, keeping them together. There comes one of them after the four strays. No good seeing him now. It wouldn’t accomplish anything, and I might say too much. I’ll wait and think.”

Turning her deer, for a time she drove along the crest of the ridge.

“I shouldn’t wonder,” she said to herself, “if he’s already taken up quarters in the old miner’s cabin down there in the willows on the bank of the Little Soquina River. Yes,” she added, “there’s the smoke of his fire.

“To think,” she stormed, enraged at the cool complacency of the thing, “to think that any man could be so mean. He has thousands of deer, and a broad, rich range. He’s afraid the range may be scant in the spring and his deer become poor for the spring shipping market, so he saves it by driving his herd over here for a month or two, that it may eat all the moss we have and leave us to make a perilous or even fatal drive to distant pastures. That, or to see our deer starve before our very eyes. It’s unfair! It’s brutally inhuman!

“And yet,” she sighed a moment later, “I suppose the men up here are not all to blame. Seems like there is something about the cold and darkness, the terrible lonesomeness of it all, that makes men like wolves that prowl in the scrub forests—fierce, bloodthirsty and savage. But that will do for sentiment. Scarberry must not have his way. He must not feed down our pasture if there is a way to prevent it. And I think there is! I’m almost sure. I must talk to Patsy about it. It would mean something rather hard for her, but she’s a brave little soul, God bless her!”

Then she spoke to her reindeer and went racing away down the slope toward the camp.

It was a strange looking camp that awaited Marian’s coming. Two dome shaped affairs of canvas were all but hidden in a clump of willows, surrounded by deer sleds and a small canvas tent for supplies—surely a strange camp for Alaskan reindeer herders.

But how comfortable were those dome shaped igloos! Marian had learned to make them during that eventful journey with the reindeer Chukches in Siberia.

Winter skins of reindeer are cheap, very cheap in Alaska. Being light, portable and warm, Marian had used many of them in the construction of this winter camp. Her heart warmed with the prospect of perfect comfort, and drawing the harness from her reindeer, she turned it loose to graze. Then she parted the flap to the igloo which she and Patsy shared.

Something of the suppressed excitement which came to her from the discovery of the rival herd must still have shown in her face, for as Patsy turned from her work of preparing a meal to look at Marian she noticed the look on her face and exclaimed:

“Oh! Did you see it, too?”

“I’m not sure that I know what you mean,” said Marian, puzzled by her question. Where had Patsy been? Surely the herd could not be seen from the camp, and she had not said she was going far from it; in fact, she had been left to watch camp.

“I’ve seen enough,” continued Marian, “to make me dreadfully angry. Something’s got to be done about it. Right away, too. As soon as we have a bite to eat we’ll talk it over.”

“I knew you’d feel that way about it,” said Patsy. “I think it’s a shame that they should hang about this way.”

“See here, Patsy,” exclaimed Marian, seizing her by the shoulder and turning her about, “what are we—what are _you_ talking about?”

“Why, I—you—” Patsy stammered, mystified, “you just come out here and I’ll show you.”

Dragging her cousin out of the igloo and around the end of the willows, she pointed toward a hillcrest.

There, atop the hill, stood a newly erected tent, and at that very moment its interior was lighted by a strange purple light.

“The purple flame!” exclaimed Marian. “More trouble. Or is it all one? Is it Bill Scarberry who lights that mysterious flame? Does he think that by doing that he can frighten us from our range?”

“Bill Scarberry?” questioned Patsy, “who is he, and what has he to do with it?”

“Come on into the igloo and I’ll tell you,” said Marian, shivering as a gust of wind swept down from the hill.

As they turned to go back Patsy said:

“Terogloona came in a few minutes ago. He said to tell you that another deer was gone. This time it is a spotted two-year-old.”

“That makes seven that have disappeared in the last six weeks. If that keeps up we won’t need to sell our herd; it will vanish like snow in the spring. It can’t be wolves. They leave the bones behind. You can always tell when they’re about. I wonder if those strange people of the purple flame are living off our deer? I’ve a good mind to go right up there and accuse them of it. But no, I can’t now; there are other more important things before us.”

“What could be more important?” asked Patsy in astonishment.

“Wait, I’ll tell you,” said Marian, as she parted the flap of the igloo and disappeared within.

A half hour later they were munching biscuits and drinking steaming coffee. Marian had said not a single word about the problems and adventures that lay just before them. Patsy asked no questions. She knew that the great moment of confiding came when they were snugly tucked in beneath blankets and deerskins in the strangest little sleeping room in all the world. Knowing this, she was content to wait until night for Marian to tell her all about this important matter.