Further thoughts were cut short by a head thrust in at the flap of the igloo.  It was Iyok-ok.

“Go soon,” he smiled.  “Mebby two hours.”

“North?”

“Eh-eh” (yes), he answered, lapsing into Eskimo.

“All right.”

The head disappeared.

“Well, anyway, my seal oil bath did some good,” Johnny remarked to himself.  “It jarred the old fox out of his lair and started him on his way.”

He wondered a little about the Jap girl.  Would she still travel with them?  These musings were cut short when he carried his bundle to the deer sled.  She was there to greet him with a broad smile.  And so once more they sped away over the tundra in the moonlight.

They had not gone five miles before Johnny had assured himself that once more the Russian and his dog team had preceded them.

CHAPTER VI

“Now I shall kill you”

Johnny Thompson was at peace with the world.  He was engaged in the most delightful of all occupations, gathering gold.  He had often dreamed of gathering gold.  He had dreamed, too, of finding money strewn upon the street.  But now, here he was, with one of these choice Russian knives, picking away at clumps of frozen earth and picking up, as they fell out, particles of gold.  Some were tiny; many were large as a pea, and one had been the size of a hickory nut.  Now and again he straightened up to swing a pick into the frozen gravel which lay within the circle of light made by his pocket flashlight.  After a few strokes he would throw down the pick and begin breaking up the lumps.  Every now and again, he would lift the small sack into which the lumps were dropped.  It grew heavier every moment.

It was quite dark all about him; indeed, Johnny was nearly a hundred feet straight into the heart of a cut bank, and, to start on this straight ahead drift, he had been obliged to lower himself into a shaft as into a well, a drop of fifteen feet or more.  That the mine had other drifts he knew, but this one suited him.  That it had another occupant he also knew, but this did not trouble him.  He was too much interested in the yellow glitter of real gold to think of danger.  And he was half dazed by the realization that there could be a gold mine like this in Siberia.  Alaska had gold, plenty of it, of course, and he was now less than two hundred miles from Alaska, but he had never dreamed that the dreary slopes of the Kamchatkan Peninsula could harbor such wealth.  Someone had been mining it, too, but that must have been months, perhaps years, ago.  The pick handles were rough with decay, the pans red with rust.

Curiosity had led Johnny to this spot, a half mile from the native village at the mouth of the Anadir River.  He had been marooned again in that village.  They had covered three hundred miles on their last journey, then had come another pause.  This time, though he did not even see his dogs about the village, Johnny felt sure that the Russian had once more taken to hiding.