“Come!” he said to the Jap girl.

Taking her hand, he led her from house to house of the village.  Beyond two to three old women, too badly crippled to walk, the houses were found to contain no one.

“Well, one thing is sure,” Johnny observed, “the Chukche reindeer herders have not come.  It was not they who did it.”

“No,” answered the Jap girl.

“Say!” exclaimed Johnny, in a tone more severe than he had ever used with his companion, “why in thunder can’t we get out of this hole?  What are we sticking here for?”

“Can’t tell.”  The girl wrung her hands again.  “Can’t tell.  Can’t go, that’s all.  You go; all right, mebby.  Can’t go my.  That’s all.  Mebby go to-morrow; mebby next day.  Can’t tell.”

Johnny was half inclined to believe that she was in league with the treachery which hung over the place, and had shown itself in the form of loaded harpoons, but when he realized that she did not urge him to stay, he found it impossible to suspect her.

“Well, anyway, darn it!”

“What?” she smiled.

“Oh, nothing,” he growled, and turned away.

Two hours later Johnny was lying on the flat ledge of the rocky cliff from which the harpoon had been dropped.  He was, however, a hundred feet or more down toward the bay.  He was watching a certain igloo, and at the same time keeping an eye on the shore ice.  Iyok-ok had gone seal hunting.  When he returned over the ice, Johnny meant to have a final confab with him in regard to starting north.

As to the vigil he kept on the igloo, that was the result of certain suspicions regarding the occupants of that particular shelter.  There was a dog team which hung about the place.  These dogs were larger and sleeker than the other animals of the village.  Their fights with other dogs were more frequent and severe.  That would naturally mark them as strangers.  Johnny had made several journeys of a mile or two up and down the beach trail, and, as far as he could tell, the man of mystery whose trail they had followed to this village had not left the place.

“Of course,” he had told himself, “he might have been one of the villagers returning to his home.  But that doesn’t seem probable.”

From all this, Johnny had arrived at the conclusion that the watching of this house would yield interesting results.

It did.  He had not been lying on the cliff half an hour, when the figure of a man came backing out of the igloo’s entrance.  Johnny whistled.  He was sure he had seen that pair of shoulders before.  And the parka the man wore; it was not of the very far north.  There was a smoothness about the tan and something about the cut of it that marked it at once as coming from a Russian shop, such as Wo Cheng kept.

“And squirrel skin!” Johnny breathed.

He was not kept long in doubt as to the identity of the wearer.  As the man turned to look behind him, Johnny saw the sharp chin of the Russian, the man of the street fight and the many diamonds.  He had acquired something of a beard, but there was no mistaking those frowning brows, square shoulders and that chin.