The Purple Flame

Marian Norton started, took one step backward, then stood staring.
Startled by this sudden action, the spotted reindeer behind her lunged
backward to blunder into the brown one that followed him, and this one
was in turn thrown against a white one that followed the two. This set
all three of them into such a general mix-up that it was a full minute
before the girl could get them quieted and could again allow her eyes to
seek the object of her alarm.

As she stood there her pulse quickened, her cheeks flushed and she felt
an all but irresistible desire to turn and flee. Yet she held her ground.
Had she seen a flash of purple flame? She had thought so. It had appeared
to shoot out from the side of the dark bulk that lay just before her.

“Might have been my nerves,” she told herself. “Perhaps my eyes are
seeing things. T’wouldn’t be strange. I came a long way to-day.”

She _had_ come a long way over the Arctic tundra that day. Starting but
two mornings before from her reindeer herd, close to a hundred miles from
Nome, Alaska, she had covered fully two-thirds of that distance in two
days.

Her way had lead over low hills, across streams whose waters ran clear
and cold toward the sea, down broad stretches of tundra whose soft mosses
had oozed moisture at her every step. Here a young widgeon duck, ready to
begin his southward flight—for this was the Arctic’s autumn time—had
stretched his long neck to stare at her. Here a mother white fox had
yap-yaped at her, insolently and unafraid. Here she had paused to pick a
handful of pink salmon berries or to admire a particularly brilliant
array of wild flowers, which, but for her passing, might have been “Born
to blush unseen and waste their fragrance on the desert air.” Yet always
with the three reindeers at her heels, she had pressed onward toward
Nome, the port and metropolis of all that vast north country.