Triple Spies Part 13

He produced the borrowed cigaret. A sigh of hope escaped from the group of natives and a match was thrust upon him.

"Thanks."

The match was of the sulphur kind, the sort that never blow out.

Nonchalantly Johnny lighted the cigaret, then, all too carelessly, he flipped the match. Though it seemed a careless act, it was deftly done.

There came a sudden cry of alarm. But too late; the match dropped squarely into the keg of alcohol. The next instant the place was all alight with the blaze of the liquor, which flamed up like oil.

"This way out," exclaimed Johnny leading the procession for the door.

Lightly he bounded down the hill. He caught one glimpse of the young woman as he pa.s.sed, but this was no time for lingering farewells. The owner of the still was on his trail.

Dodging this way and that, sliding over a wide expanse of ice, Johnny at last eluded his pursuers in the wildly tumbled ice piles of the sea. As he paused to catch his breath he heard the soft pat-pat of a footstep and glancing up, caught a face peering at him round an ice pile.

"The Russian," he exclaimed.

When the j.a.p girl awoke after several hours of delicious sleep in her ice palace bedroom, she looked upon a world unknown. The sun was s.h.i.+ning brightly. The air was clear. In a general way she knew the outline of East Cape and the Diomede Islands. She knew, too, where they should be located. It took her some time to discover them and when she did it was with a gasp of astonishment. They were behind her.

Realizing at once what had happened, she stood up and held her face to the air. The wind was off sh.o.r.e. There was not the least bit of use in trying to make the land. A stretch of black waters yawned between sh.o.r.e and ice floe by now.

Shrugging her shoulders, she climbed a pile of ice for a better view, then hurrying down again, she picked up the harpoon and began puzzling over it. She coiled and uncoiled the skin rope attached to it. She worked the rope up and down through the many b.u.t.tons which held it to the shaft. She examined the sharp steel point of the shaft which was fastened to the skin rope.

After that she sat down to think. Over to the left of her she had seen something that lay near a pool of water. She had never hunted anything, did not fancy she'd like it, but she was hungry.

There was a level pan of ice by the pool. The creature lay on the ice pan. Suddenly she sprang up and made her way across the ice piles to the edge of that broad pan. The brown creature, a seal, still some distance away, did not move.

Searching the ice piles she at last found a regularly formed cake some eight inches thick and two feet square. With some difficulty she pried this out and stood it on edge. The edge was uneven, the cake tippy.

Rolling it on its side she chipped it smooth with the point of the harpoon.

The second trial found the cake standing erect and solid. Gripping her harpoon, she threw herself flat on her stomach and pus.h.i.+ng the cake before her, began to wriggle her way toward the sleeping seal.

Once she paused long enough to bore a peep hole through the cake with her dagger. From time to time the seal wakened, and raised his head to look about. Then he sank down again. Now she was but three rods away, now two, now one. Now she was within ten feet of the still motionless quarry.

Stretching every muscle for a spring like a cat, she suddenly darted forward. At the next instant she hurled the harpoon deep into the seal's side. She had him! Through her body pulsated thrills of wild triumph which harkened back to the days of her primitive ancestry. Then for a second she wavered. She was a woman. But she was hungry. Tomorrow she might be starving.

Her knife flashed. A stream of red began dyeing the ice. A moment later, the creature's muscles relaxed.

The j.a.panese girl, Cio-Cio-San, sat up and began to think. Here was food, but how was it to be prepared? To think of eating raw seal meat was revolting, yet here on the floe there was neither stove nor fuel.

Slowly and carefully she stripped the skin from the carca.s.s. Beneath this she found a two-inch layer of blubber, which must be more than ninety per cent oil. Under this was a compact ma.s.s of dark meat. This would be good if it was cooked. She sat down to think again. The fat seemed to offer a solution. It would burn if she had matches. She felt over the parka for pockets, and, with a little cry of joy, she found in one several matches wrapped in a bit of oiled seal skin. Every native carried them.

Hastily she stripped off a bit of fat and having lighted it, watched it flare up and burn rapidly. She laughed and clapped her hands.

But before she could cut off a bit of meat to roast over its flames, the soft ice began melting beneath it and the flames flickered out with a snapping flutter.

This would not do. There must be some other way found. Rising, she drove her harpoon into the snow at the crest of an ice pile. To this she fastened her deer skin, that it might act as a beacon to guide her back to her food supply. Then she turned about the ice pile and began wandering in search of she hardly knew what.

She at last came upon some old ice, with cakes ground round and discolored with age and then with a little cry of joy she started forward. The thing she saw had been discarded as worthless long ago; some gasoline schooner's crew had thrown it overboard. It was an empty five-gallon can which had once held gasoline. It was red with rust, but she pounced upon it and hurried away.

Once safely back at her lodge she used the harpoon to cut out a door in the upper end of the can. After cutting several holes in one side, she placed it on the ice with the perforated side up and put a strip of blubber within. This she lighted. It gave forth a smoky fire, with little heat, but much oil collected in the can. Seeing this, she began fraying out the silk ribbon of her pajamas. When she had secured a sufficient amount of fine fuzz she dropped it along the edge of the oil which saturated it at once. She lighted this, which had formed itself into a sort of wick, and at once she had a clear and steady flame.

She had solved the problem. In her seal oil oven, meat toasted beautifully. In half an hour she was enjoying a bountiful repast. After the feast, she sat down to think. She was fed for the moment and apparently safe enough, but where was she and whither was she being carried by this drifting ice floe?

For a second, after seeing the face of the Russian on the ice, Johnny Thompson stood motionless. Then he turned and ran, ran madly out among the ice piles. Heedless of direction he ran until he was out of breath and exhausted, until he had lost himself and the Russian completely.

No, Johnny was not running from the Russian. He was running from himself. When he saw the Russian's face, lit up as it was by the flare of the flames that had burst forth from that abandoned igloo, there had been something so crafty, so cruel, so remorselessly terrible about it that he had been seized with a mad desire to kill the man where he stood.

But Johnny felt, rather than knew, that there were very special reasons why the Russian must not be killed, at least not at that particular moment. Perhaps some dark secret was locked in his crafty brain, a secret which the world should know and which would die if he died.

Johnny could only guess this, but whatever might be the reason he must not at this moment kill the man whom he suspected of twice attempting his life. So he fled.

By the last flickering flames of the grand spree that had burned, Johnny figured out his approximate location and began once more his three miles east, one mile south journey to Cape Prince of Wales. Some hours later, having landed safely at the Cape, and having displayed the postmarked one dollar bill to the post mistress and given it to her in exchange for a sumptuous meal of reindeer meat, hot biscuits and doughnuts, he started sleeping the clock round in a room that had been arranged for the benefit of weary travelers.

CHAPTER XII

"GET THAT MAN"

The trip from Cape Prince of Wales to Nome was fraught with many dangers. Already the spring thaw had begun. Had not the Eskimo whom Johnny employed to take him to the Arctic metropolis with his dog team been a marvel at skirting rotten ice and water holes in Port Clarence Bay, at swimming the floods on Tissure River, and at canoeing across the flooded Sinrock, Johnny might never have reached his journey's end.

As it was, two weeks from the time he left East Cape in Siberia, he stood on the sand spit at Nome, Alaska. By his side stood Hanada, who was still acting the part of an Eskimo and who had come down a few days ahead of him.

They were viewing a rare sight, the pa.s.sing out to sea of the two miles of sh.o.r.e ice. The spring thaw had been followed by an off-sh.o.r.e wind which was carrying the loosened ice away. Johnny's interest was evenly divided between this rare spectacle and the recollection of the events that had recently transpired.

"Look!" said Hanada. "I believe the ice will carry the farther end of the cable tramway out to sea."

Johnny looked. It did seem that what the boy said was true. Already the cable appeared to be as tight as a fiddle string.

The tramway was a cable which stretched from a wooden tower set upon a stone pillar jutting from the sea to a similar tower built upon the land. This tramway, during the busy summer months of open sea, is used in lieu of a harbor and docks to bring freight and pa.s.sengers ash.o.r.e.

This is done by drawing a swinging platform over the cable from tower to tower and back again. The platform at the present moment swung idly at the sh.o.r.e end of the cable. The beach had been fast locked in ice for eight months and more.

"Looks like it might go," said Johnny absentmindedly.

Neither he nor the j.a.p had seen or heard anything of the Russian. Two things would seem to indicate that that mysterious fugitive was in town; three times Johnny had found himself being closely watched by certain rough-looking Russian laborers, and once he had narrowly averted being attacked in a dark street at night by a gang of the same general character.

Hanada had not yet chosen to reveal his ident.i.ty, and Johnny had not questioned him.

Only the day before a placard in the post office had given him a start.

It was an advertis.e.m.e.nt offering a thousand dollars reward for knowledge which would lead to the arrest of a certain Russian Radical of much importance. This man was reported to have made his way through the Allied front near Vladivostok, and to have started north, apparently with the intention of crossing to America. To capture him, the placard declared, would be an act of practical patriotism.

Johnny had stared in wonder at the photograph attached. It was the likeness of a man much younger than the Russian they had followed so far, but there could be no mistaking that sharp chin and frowning brow.

They had doubtless followed that very man for hundreds of miles only to lose him at this critical moment.