He had left his camp early that morning, had Johnny. It was well into the afternoon when, as a sudden smile spread over his close-knit, winter-hardened face, he sighted the person he had hoped to meet.
A slim girl in her teens, this girl handled her dogs extremely well for a novice who had been in the North only three short weeks.
“Bravo!” Johnny fairly shouted, as she rushed ahead to seize her leader and throw him back on his haunches. “She picks things up quickly. Many a girl would have allowed her team to come straight on to mine. Then our teams would have mixed, her team against mine, like two football teams on a gridiron. Best team wins. What a rumpus that would have been! Bad business. Dogs all crippled up, like as not.”
Swinging his own dogs off the trail, he issued a sharp command which they instantly obeyed by throwing themselves upon the hard-packed snow in a position of repose. Dog teams in the North were not new to Johnny, though this was his first trip into the far northwest of Canada.
The girl, who stood silent and expectant beside her team, was Joyce Mills. Johnny had learned of her presence in the North quite by accident. For months he had not heard from her nor from her father, Newton Mills, the retired city detective. You will remember Joyce and her father well enough if you have read The Arrow of Fire and The Gray Shadow. A brave, resourceful, independent girl, this Joyce Mills. And her father, before a nervous breakdown, had been one of the most feared detectives on the New York force. Now, here they were in the North. Strange, do you say? In this day nothing is strange. “Foot loose and fancy free,” that’s the phrase. We go where we will, we Americans.
Joyce had not known Johnny was in the North. And now here they stood face to face.
“Jo—Johnny Thompson!” she breathed, her eyes widening as he approached.
“Johnny!” she cried aloud. “When did you get here?”
Johnny grinned broadly. “Three weeks ago to-day, same as you.”
“Three—three weeks. And you knew I was here!” Her eyes reproved him.