Panther Eye

by Roy J. Snell

Thrusting the torch into Johnny’s hand, his companion leaped forward and, with a cat-like motion, dropped down beside the prostrate form. Tearing away at jacket and shirt, he bared the breast and placed his ear close down upon the cold flesh.

“Dead all right,” he sighed at last. “Wonder what killed him?”

He still crouched there, as a cat crouches beside its kill. As if he searched for the answer to his last question, his eyes roved about the floor.

This moment of silence gave Johnny time to study Pant, to recall what he really knew about him.

He was a strange chap, this Pant. He never bunked with the other laborers of the outfit, but had a private little pup-tent affair that he had made of long-haired deer skin and canvas. In this he slept. He was slight of build but wiry. Possessed of a peculiar supple strength and agility, he easily surpassed other men of greater weight in everything he undertook, both of labor and sport. One queer thing about him was that he always wore a pair of glasses with smoked lenses of such large proportions that they hid his eyes completely; he was never without them. One more thing, he always wore the Eskimo cut of garments; in cold weather, deer skin; in warm weather and at work, blue drill; but always that middy-styled cloak with the hood attached. And the hood was never off his head, at least not in waking hours. He had dressed that way even in Seattle, where Johnny had signed him up to join his outfit on this perilously uncertain search for gold in the Seven Mines which were supposed to exist in Arctic Siberia, at the mouth of the Anadir River across from Alaska.

And yet, with all this strange dress, the man was not an Eskimo. Johnny knew that from the looks of him and from his talk. Indeed, in a burst of frankness, the man had once told him that when very young he had been picked up in New York by some orphan asylum and sent west to be raised by a rancher; that he had soon run away from his foster home and had, since that time, lived by his wits, sometimes in western cities, sometimes in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains. He had made three trips to foreign countries and yet, as nearly as he himself could calculate, he was not now more than nineteen, a mere boy, but certainly a most mysterious one.

Johnny’s mind took up the problems of the new enterprise upon which he was entering. How would this tragedy affect his work and, most of all, the minds of his men?

Johnny, as you will remember from reading “Triple Spies,” the first book of his thrilling adventures, had been in this vast, silent, and mysterious land of snow before. He had traveled over three thousand miles of it and had experienced many a strange adventure. Not least of these was the rediscovery of the Seven Mines of Siberia. These mines had first been discovered by an American prospector who, having crossed Bering Strait one summer with natives in their skin boats, had explored the Arctic Siberian rivers. He believed that there was an abundance of the precious yellow metal on the Kamchatkan Peninsula, just as there was in its twin peninsula, Alaska. In this he had not been disappointed. But when it came to mining this gold, many problems arose. Chief among these was the fact that the land belonged to the Russian Czar, from whom a concession must be secured.

He had, at last, sold his secret to the Big Five of Chicago, five of the world’s richest men. These men had secured the needed concession and had shipped large quantities of mining machinery and coal to the mouth of the river when the Czar’s government suddenly went to smash. Everything was dropped for the time being and there matters stood when Johnny had come upon the mines. Some of them were well opened up for operation, but the machinery lay rusting in the sheds.

When he had made his way back to Chicago, about six months previous to the opening of our story, he had had serious matters to attend to, matters which were vital to the very foundations of his Government. After these had been settled and the Big Five, having learned that Hanada, Johnny’s Japanese friend and school mate, who had made the entire Siberian journey with him and had previously worked in the Seven Mines, had been killed by a mysterious shot, fired from the depths of Chicago River, they turned to Johnny, as the one who could best aid them in solving the knotty problem of working the Seven Mines.