The Purple Flame

shadows, smoking with the eternally drifting snows, had always held an all but irresistible lure for Marian. Even as a child of six, l

round faces and red noses; and now an Eskimo people who lived in enchanted caves that never were cold,

served as a belt to bind her parka close about her waist, "I have

stove at the back of her father's store; tales of privation, freezing, starvation and death; tales told by grizzled old prospectors who

unstrap her field glasses and look back over the way they had come. Then she threw back

her splendid whit

ian laughed. "Snow,

r reindeer, and ag

elt the old charm of the mountains come back to her. Again they were peopled by strange fairies and goblins. So real was the illusion that at times it see

was true, yet here and there some rocky promontory, towering higher than its fellows, reared itself above the surface, a pier of granite

right and farther up, she fancied sh

eem so real that she found herself expecting some strange Ri

wind swept up from below, all but fre

he mountain, nearing the crest. A storm is rising. It is colder here than in any

through, Attatak pointed

ze-t

!" Marian cried

eh"

top. Perhaps more. Somehow we must have sh

ot build them any

e rubbed snow on the white, frozen spo

ere frozen. Twice Attatak had been obliged to rub the frost from he

ian asked, "ca

't know.) The Eskimo gi

om below was increasing. Snow, stopping nowhere, race

caught sight of a dark spot on the mountain si

"we would camp there for the night and

e. I am going to try to climb up there." Sh

; never stop." She looked first up the hill, then down the dizzy

wn faster and faster to some awful, unknown end; a dash against a projecting rock; a burial beneath a

'll be careful," she gripped