“Not Bill neither,” the stranger disagreed. “They call me Smokey Joe.”
“Smokey Joe!” Johnny peered into the darkness, trying to get a look at the man’s face. “Smokey Joe. I’ve heard of you.”
And he surely had. Smokey was a well-known character in the valley. The old-timers told how he came and went. Always in search of gold, he would disappear for months.
“Then,” one of the motherly women added, “just when we think he’s gone for good, up he pops again. We feed him up and patch his clothes. Then, like some boy, he’s off again.
“But he’s no boy,” she added. “He came to Alaska in the gold rush of ’97.”
“Eighteen-ninety-seven!” Johnny had exclaimed. “More than forty years ago!”
“He never left,” the gray-haired lady had added. “He came from the Cumberland Mountains somewhere and he still speaks in their queer way.
“They say,” she added with a lowered voice, “that he struck it rich once, had nearly half a million dollars, and that he’s got some of it hid away in the hills somewhere. But, then,” she sighed, “you can’t believe anything you hear and only half you see in Alaska. Alaska is a place of wild dreams.”
Johnny was recalling all this as he made haste to split dry wood into fine pieces, whittle some shavings, then light a blaze in their out-of-doors fireplace.
“It’s about morning,” he said, at last looking into Smokey Joe’s seamed face. “Did you come far?”