“Oh!” Her eyes shone.
“You know,” she said after some time, “we are quite poor and we—Grandfather might need money badly to—to defend—”
Johnny waited long for the rest of that sentence. It never came.
“Well,” he said at last, “to-morrow it’s the long, long trail once more.”
CHAPTER IX
A MOVING ISLAND
“They’re coming!”
Johnny Thompson thought he heard the beating of Faye Duncan’s heart as she whispered these words in his ears.
They lay close together on the snow against a little rise of land. From this place they could see nothing before them. A faint crackling sound was all that told them that a moving island of brown, a great herd of caribou, was moving up the narrow valley and would, within the space of a quarter of an hour, be abreast of them and within easy bow shot.
Their position was not without its element of danger. Johnny’s heart missed a beat at the thought. The caribou, when they had last seen them, were moving with the steady precision of an army. There were thousands of them.
“But if a mother wolf and her pack appears to the right of them, then what?” Johnny asked himself. He knew how broad and sharp were the hoofs of the caribou. It was these very hoofs that made the steady click and crash as of a thousand batons beating on wooden rails. Visions of that vast herd stampeding and rushing down upon them like a relentless sea passed before his mind’s eye.