“I hope I may see you there some day,” said Johnny huskily. But as he recalled the way they had come, it seemed very, very far away.
CHAPTER XII
THE GREAT BANSHEE
Next day they marched straight away over the white expanse. A fog, hanging low over the tundra, hid all but a narrow circle from view. They traveled by the compass and the ancient map Johnny had found in the cabin by the river. That it was a long chance the boy admitted to himself. What if the map were wrong? Few maps of this country are accurate.
“Can’t turn back now,” he told himself. “Have to take a chance. Take a chance.” As he repeated the words, to his surprise he found that he was beginning to hate them. All his life, so it seemed as he looked back upon it, he had been taking chances. And what had he gotten out of it? Precious little.
He thought of the cozy cottage the girl had described to him so often. “That’s the life,” he told himself. “And yet they left it for this. They took a chance. And here they are.” For the hundredth time he wondered why.
The land became more rolling as they advanced. The tundra was left behind. This the boy took for a good sign. “Coming to the mountains,” he told himself. But were they?
As night fell the fog thickened. “Going to be dark as a dungeon,” Gordon Duncan mumbled. “Tough luck. No wood for a fire. No place to camp.”
What he said was true. For the first time Johnny felt regret for the course they had taken. All about them was rolling ground. Snow blanketed all. Cropping out here and there were bunches of last year’s grass, but these poor wisps of wind-shrouded straw would provide neither fire nor bed.
When darkness had fully come, they yielded to the inevitable. Having scooped away the snow as best they could from a narrow patch of turf, they spread out their blankets, sat upon them while they ate a cold and cheerless supper; then with Tico in their midst, huddling together as best they could, they prepared to defy the damp chill of a late winter night in the Arctic.
It must have been some time past midnight that Johnny, wakened by a low growl from Tico, sat up to peer into the inky darkness and listen.