“My room,” she went on as if speaking to herself, “looks out upon a field of red clover at the side, and at the back is a clump of forest. The squirrels are so tame that they come to perch on my window sill and beg for sweets and nuts.”
As she ceased speaking Johnny looked at her and realized as never before that she was, despite her rugged face and splendid untiring muscles, only a girl very far from the nest that she called home.
“But,” she exclaimed suddenly as if waking from a dream, “we must not turn back! We must go on! Go on for him!” She nodded toward the sleeping grandfather. “And for the little brown people who, but for us, may starve.”
Three days the storm raged on. Restful days these were, but not idle ones. Some of their arrows had gone downstream with their ill-fated cottonwood boat. Fortunately they found within the cabin two steel sled runners and a home-made feather duster. The dusters were made of wild goose feathers. No better for arrows can be found. With the aid of fire and such tools as were at hand, they succeeded in cutting the sled runners into bits and fashioning them into arrow heads. Dry fir furnished them shafts for the arrows. Long hours, working side by side over the table, the boy and girl, directed by the old man, worked at the task of making arrows. Cutting, scraping, shaping, pounding, forging, binding, with grimy hands but gleaming eyes they worked on and on until when the storm broke and the sun came out they found themselves better armed than ever before.
“So we may say the storm was a blessing in disguise,” said Gordon Duncan. “To-morrow we must be on our way,” he said as he gazed upon the fading tints of their first red sunset in the wilderness. “We must hurry. The caribou may come and pass to their northern feeding grounds before us. Then indeed our little brown friends will starve.”
“And we with them,” Johnny wanted to add, but did not.
That night, by the light of the fire, Johnny spent a full hour studying three maps he had spread out on the table. More than once a sudden exclamation escaped his lips. At last he rose and began pacing the floor. The old Scot was asleep in his chair. Faye Duncan had watched Johnny with keen interest. Now as she caught the light of a quizzical smile playing across his face, she said,
“What is it?”
“Why look!” he replied, leading her to the table. “See, here are three maps, the one done on white leather by your grandfather so many years ago, the roughly drawn one by the Corporal to guide us on this trip, and an old general map of the country which I found here in the cabin.
“It’s strange,” he said, straightening up, “but when you trace the two routes out, the one your grandfather proposed to follow in his search for that more or less mythical partner of his—”