After adjusting the torn fastenings as best he could, he worked his way over the swaying tree trunk to solid earth. Then with sober face, he began making his way back over the rocks to the spot where his blanket roll lay. The situation was a serious one.
An hour later he sat before a roaring campfire of fir and balsam boughs. Dressed in a change of clothing and wrapped in a blanket, with his costume of an hour before sending clouds of steam toward the sky, he might have seemed the picture of contentment. He was far from contented. Presently he removed a small coffee pot from the fire and poured a cup of dark brown liquid. The aroma of coffee seemed good. He smiled. Then, without sugar or cream, he gulped it down black and hot. Nor did he eat after that. There was nothing to eat.
Had you chanced to look into his pack you would have found there neither firearms nor ammunition. The nearest cabin that he knew of in all that vast northern wilderness was fifty miles back over an ill-defined trail. That cabin was deserted. He had slept there four nights back.
So Johnny sat by the fire meditating, thinking on matters of greater or less importance. And as he meditated, at a point somewhat more than a mile downstream, as the crow flies, a figure appeared among the rocks that kept the rushing stream in tumult.
A girl in her late teens, she moved out from among dark pines into a patch of light. The touches of sunset, lighting up her dark brown hair and adding a touch of gold to her ruddy freckled cheeks, transformed her for the moment into a goddess of the forest.
Sensing the change, she stood motionless as a statue for a full moment. Then, into that glory of the sunset she smiled, and the smile made her seem more alive than any wild thing that had ever ventured to the brink of that tumultuous stream.
In her hand she held a rustic bucket. Its handle, a thong of caribou sinew, its bottom a circle of wood cut from some fallen spruce tree, its sides white birchbark, this bucket seemed a part of the wilderness.
As she stooped to fill the rustic bucket, her eyes caught sight of some unusual object bobbing up and down in the water.
One moment, a flash of red and gold, she saw it. The next it was lost in a rush of foam. In a twinkling the bucket was dropped among the rocks and she went racing downstream in hot pursuit.
A hundred yards, leaping from boulder to boulder, she plunged onward until, red-cheeked, panting, she came upon an eddy, a still dark pool, twenty feet across, and at its very center, moving serenely about, was the coveted prize.