By the last flickering flames of the grand spree that had burned, Johnny figured out his approximate location and began once more his three miles east, one mile south journey to Cape Prince of Wales.  Some hours later, having landed safely at the Cape, and having displayed the postmarked one dollar bill to the post mistress and given it to her in exchange for a sumptuous meal of reindeer meat, hot biscuits and doughnuts, he started sleeping the clock round in a room that had been arranged for the benefit of weary travelers.

CHAPTER XII

“Get that man”

The trip from Cape Prince of Wales to Nome was fraught with many dangers.  Already the spring thaw had begun.  Had not the Eskimo whom Johnny employed to take him to the Arctic metropolis with his dog team been a marvel at skirting rotten ice and water holes in Port Clarence Bay, at swimming the floods on Tissure River, and at canoeing across the flooded Sinrock, Johnny might never have reached his journey’s end.

As it was, two weeks from the time he left East Cape in Siberia, he stood on the sand spit at Nome, Alaska.  By his side stood Hanada, who was still acting the part of an Eskimo and who had come down a few days ahead of him.

They were viewing a rare sight, the passing out to sea of the two miles of shore ice.  The spring thaw had been followed by an off-shore wind which was carrying the loosened ice away.  Johnny’s interest was evenly divided between this rare spectacle and the recollection of the events that had recently transpired.

“Look!” said Hanada.  “I believe the ice will carry the farther end of the cable tramway out to sea.”

Johnny looked.  It did seem that what the boy said was true.  Already the cable appeared to be as tight as a fiddle string.

The tramway was a cable which stretched from a wooden tower set upon a stone pillar jutting from the sea to a similar tower built upon the land.  This tramway, during the busy summer months of open sea, is used in lieu of a harbor and docks to bring freight and passengers ashore.  This is done by drawing a swinging platform over the cable from tower to tower and back again.  The platform at the present moment swung idly at the shore end of the cable.  The beach had been fast locked in ice for eight months and more.

“Looks like it might go,” said Johnny absentmindedly.

Neither he nor the Jap had seen or heard anything of the Russian.  Two things would seem to indicate that that mysterious fugitive was in town; three times Johnny had found himself being closely watched by certain rough-looking Russian laborers, and once he had narrowly averted being attacked in a dark street at night by a gang of the same general character.

Hanada had not yet chosen to reveal his identity, and Johnny had not questioned him.

Only the day before a placard in the post office had given him a start.  It was an advertisement offering a thousand dollars reward for knowledge which would lead to the arrest of a certain Russian Radical of much importance.  This man was reported to have made his way through the Allied front near Vladivostok, and to have started north, apparently with the intention of crossing to America.  To capture him, the placard declared, would be an act of practical patriotism.