As he closed his eyes now he seemed to see the girl, Joyce Mills, as he had seen her on that day when, after their final battle with a great city’s crime, she had asked:
“When do we go back?”
They had stood then on a rickety little dock before a deserted cabin on the shore of Lake Huron.
How well he recalled his own answer: “We don’t go back. We go on into the silent North, perhaps. It may be that we shall find a land where men are just and merciful and kind.”
“I said that,” he told himself. As he looked back upon it now, that remark seemed near to prophecy, for were they not now in the far North?
“There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them though we may,” he thought to himself.
Ah, yes, they were in the North. Yet, how different it all was from what he had dreamed! He had dreamed of working by her father’s side, of sharing with him and with the girl who held a central place in both their hearts the joys and the privations of a strange new land.
“And now this!” he thought grimly.
But the Voice spoke once more. “See girl. See dog team. See much danger.”
Once more Johnny leaned forward.