She did such a wild dance in the snow that Gordon Duncan could well have believed they were home again and all their troubles over.
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime Johnny and his strange pilot had passed on into the fog. They traveled a good three miles before they came to the haven of refuge they sought, a quiet eddy by the bank of the stream.
With a sigh of relief Johnny unbent his cramped limbs and went ashore.
To his surprise he found the earth soggy with seeping water.
“Been a flood,” he thought.
This was true. The breaking of the ice jamb had momentarily clogged the stream. Water had risen rapidly. The bayou had been flooded. Sudden as it had come, so sudden it receded. Not, however, until something had happened. What this was, Johnny was soon to know.
As he climbed the slope in search of a dry spot, to his vast astonishment, stranded high and dry, he came upon a crude raft laden with strange packages bound up in skins. And clinging to the raft, as if it were still in motion, was a white haired old man.
Johnny wondered at the packages and the man, but he did not wonder long.
“This,” he told himself, “is Timmie, the recluse. And the packages on the raft!” His heart beat wildly.