or nothing of the man who had made them.
Everything which might tell tales had been carried on or burned. Once
only Johnny had found a scrap of paper. Nothing had been written on it.
From it Johnny had learned one thing only: it had originally come from
some Russian town, for it had the texture of Russian bond. But this was
little news.

Who was this stranger who traveled so far? Johnny had a feeling that he
was at the moment hiding in this native village, and that this was the
reason his two companions did not wish to proceed. There had grown up
between these two, the Eskimo boy and the Japanese girl, a strange
friendship. At times Johnny had suspicions that this friendship had
existed before they had met on the tundra. However that might have been,
they seemed now to be working in unison. Only the day before he had
happened to overhear them conversing in low tones, and the language, he
would have sworn, was neither Eskimo, English, nor Pidgen. Yet he did
not question the boy's statement that he was an American Eskimo. Indeed
there were times when the flash of his honest smile made Johnny believe
that they had met somewhere in America. On his trip to Nome and
Fairbanks before the war, Johnny had met many Eskimos, and had boxed and
wrestled with some of the best of them.

"Oh, well," he sighed, and stretched himself, "'tain't that I've got a
string on 'em, nor them on me. I'll have to wait or go on alone, that's
all."

He entered the igloo, and tried again to become interested in his book,
but his mind kept returning to the strange friendship which had grown up
between the three of them, Iyok-ok, the Jap girl and himself. The Jap
girl had proved a good sport indeed. She might have ridden all the time,
but she walked as far in a day as they did. She cooked their meals
cheerfully, and laughed over every mishap.

So they had traveled northward. Three happy children in a great white
wilderness, they pitched their igloos at night, a small one for the
girl, a larger one for the two men, and, burying themselves beneath the
deer skins, had slept the dreamless sleep of children, wearied from
play.

The Jap girl had appeared to be quite content to be going into an
unknown wilderness. Only once she had seemed concerned. That was when a
long detour had taken them from the track of the unknown traveler, but
her cheerfulness had returned once they had come upon his track again.
This had set Johnny speculating once more. Who was