"Quartz too?" asked Johnny.
"Plenty of quartz," grinned Iyok-ok. "Come out here, I will show you."
They stepped outside. The boy locked the door, then led his companion up a steep slope until they were on a low point commanding a view of the village below and a rocky cliff above.
"See that cliff?" asked Iyok-ok. "Plenty of gold there. Pick it out with your pen knife. Rich! Too rich."
"Then this Peninsula is as rich as Alaska?"
"Alaska?" Iyok-ok grinned. "Alaska? What shall I say? Alaska, it is a joke. Think of the great Lena River! Great as the Yukon. Who knows what gold is deposited in the beds and banks of that mighty stream? Who knows anything about this wonderful peninsula? The Czar, he has kept it locked. But now the Czar is dead. The key is lost. Who will find it? Sometime we will see."
The boy was interrupted by wild shouts coming from the village. As their eyes turned in that direction, Johnny and Iyok-ok beheld a strange sight. The entire village had apparently turned out to give chase to one man. And, down to the last child, they were armed. But such strange implements of warfare as they carried! All were relics of by-gone days; lances, walrus harpoons, bows and arrows, axes, hammers and many more.
As Johnny watched them, he remembered having been told by an old native that during and after the great war these people had been unable to procure a sufficient supply of ammunition and had been obliged to resort to ancient methods of hunting. These were the bow and arrow, the lance and the harpoon. Powerful bows, of some native wood, shot arrows tipped with cunningly tempered bits of steel. The drawn and tempered barrel of a discarded rifle formed a point for the long-shafted lance. The harpoon, most terrible of all weapons, both for man and beast, was a long wooden shaft with a loose point attached to a long skin rope. Once five or six of these had been thrown into the body of a great white bear or some offending human he was doomed to die a death of agonizing torture; his body being literally torn to pieces by the drag upon the strong skin ropes, fastened to the steel points imbedded in his flesh.
Now it seemed evident that for some misdeed one member of the tribe had been condemned to die. As Johnny stood there staring, the whole affair seemed so much like things he had seen done on the screen, that he found it difficult to realize that this was an actual tragedy, being enacted before his very eyes.
"They do it in the movies," he said.