A hush settled over the mountain and something whispered to the girl that all would be well. So, once more in perfect calm, she settled back to await Gordon Duncan’s story.
In the meantime, in a far away cabin, still weak from his terrible experience, Johnny Longbow lay upon a bed of skins and watched a creature of prodigious strength and surpassing ugliness boil a pot of broth over a fire in a crude hearth set up in one corner of the cabin.
“Where am I?” he asked himself. “What has happened to me? Where are my friends? What is to become of me?”
To none of these questions did he find a satisfactory answer, so once more he gave himself over to thoughts of his strange host.
“This,” he told himself, “is the being we have called the great banshee.” A thrill coursed up his spine at the thought. Had other evidence been lacking, the size and shape of the man’s feet would be proof enough.
“They’d fit those tracks we have been seeing to perfection,” he told himself.
Truth was, the creature’s feet were so deformed and long as to suggest that a second foreleg which bent forward had taken the place of a foot.
Long and anxiously Johnny studied this strange being. That he was human there could be no question. Was he Eskimo, Indian or white man? There was something of all these in him. His skin was the brownish copper of an Indian. He dressed like an Eskimo. Yet he was a giant of a man in spite of his deformity.
“Were he able to stand erect as other men do, he would measure six feet six,” Johnny said to himself. “Who ever heard of an Eskimo that size?”
Once more he took to studying the man, his face, his actions.