uild but wiry. Possessed of a peculiar supple strength and agility, he
easily surpassed other men of greater weight in everything he undertook,
both of labor and sport. One queer thing about him was that he always wore
a pair of glasses with smoked lenses of such large proportions that they
hid his eyes completely; he was never without them. One more thing, he
always wore the Eskimo cut of garments; in cold weather, deer skin; in
warm weather and at work, blue drill; but always that middy-styled cloak
with the hood attached. And the hood was never off his head, at least not
in waking hours. He had dressed that way even in Seattle, where Johnny had
signed him up to join his outfit on this perilously uncertain search for
gold in the Seven Mines which were supposed to exist in Arctic Siberia, at
the mouth of the Anadir River across from Alaska.

And yet, with all this strange dress, the man was not an Eskimo. Johnny
knew that from the looks of him and from his talk. Indeed, in a burst of
frankness, the man had once told him that when very young he had been
picked up in New York by some orphan asylum and sent west to be raised by
a rancher; that he had soon run away from his foster home and had, since
that time, lived by his wits, sometimes in western cities, sometimes in
the wilds of the Rocky Mountains. He had made three trips to foreign
countries and yet, as nearly as he himself could calculate, he was not now
more than nineteen, a mere boy, but certainly a most mysterious one.

Johnny's mind took up the problems of the new enterprise upon which he was
entering. How would this tragedy affect his work and, most of all, the
minds of his men?

Johnny, as you will remember from reading "Triple Spies," the first book
of his thrilling adventures, had been in this vast, silent, and mysterious
land of snow before. He had traveled over three thousand miles of it and
had experienced many a strange adventure. Not least of these was the
rediscovery of the Seven Mines of Siberia. These mines had first been
discovered by an American prospector who, having crossed Bering Strait one
summer with natives in their skin boats, had explored the Arctic Siberian
rivers. He believed that there was an abundance of the precious yellow
metal on the Kamchatkan Peninsula, just as there was in its twin
peninsula, Alaska. In this he had not been disappointed. But when it came
to mining this gold, many problems arose. Chief among these was the fact
th