Wonderful days had followed the addition of Iyok-ok to their party.  From that hour they had wanted nothing of food or shelter.  Reared as he apparently had been in such wilds as these, the native skillfully had sought out the best of game, the driest, most sheltered of camping spots, in fact, had done everything that tended to make life easy in such a land.

Johnny’s reveries were cut short and he started suddenly to his feet.  A pebble had dropped squarely upon the deer skin spread out before him.  It had come through the hole in the peak of the igloo.  He glanced quickly up, but saw nothing.

Then he grinned.  “Just a case of nerves, I guess.  Some kids playing on the cliff.  Anyway, I’ll investigate,” he said to himself.

Throwing back the deerskin flap, he stepped outside.  Did he see a boot disappear around the point of the cliff above the igloo?  He could not tell.  At any rate, there was no use wasting more time on the question.  To see farther around the cliff, one must climb up its rough face, and by that time any mischief maker might have disappeared.

Yet Johnny stood there worried and puzzled.  Twice in the last hour pebbles had rattled down upon the igloo, and now one had dropped inside.  An old grievance stirred him:  Why were not he and his strange companions on their way?  With only four hundred miles to travel to East Cape, with a splendid trail, with reindeer well fed and rested, it seemed folly to linger in this native village.  The reindeer Chukches, whose sled deer they had borrowed, might be upon them at any moment, and that, Johnny felt sure, would result in an unpleasant mixup.  Yet he had been utterly unable to get the little Oriental girl and Iyok-ok to go on.  Why?  He could only guess.  There were a great many other things he could only guess at.  The little Oriental girl’s reason for going so far into the wilderness was as much a secret as ever.  He could only guess that it had to do with the following of that mysterious driver of a dog team.  With unerring precision this man had pushed straight on northward toward East Cape and Behring Strait.  And they had followed, not, so far as Johnny was concerned, because they were interested in him, but because he had traveled their way.

At times they had come upon his camp.  Located at the edge of some bank or beside some willow clump, where there was shelter from the wind, these camps told little 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.