th to Bering Strait the same way. I can take care of myself."

"All right," said Dave, a trifle anxiously. "I'll do just as you say. Good
luck, and may you come back."

They gripped hands for a second, then parted.

In the meantime, over in the corner, with a discarded shirt thrust into
the horn of the phonograph as a muffler, Pant was playing that newly-found
record over and over. A puzzled frown wrinkled his forehead above the
goggles.

Presently he sat up straight, and, tearing the muffler away, started the
machine. His hands trembled as he sank back in his chair, limp with
excitement. He allowed the record to grind its way out to the very end,
then he nodded his head and murmured:

"Yes, that's it, 'money in the rock.' _Money_, plenty of it."

When Johnny started out at four o'clock the next morning, he set his dogs
zig-zagging back and forth to the land side of their cabin. He was hunting
the invisible trail of the Reindeer Chukche who had come from the interior
the day before. When once the dog-leader had come upon the scent of it,
the team bounded straight away over the tundra.

The cabin soon faded from view. First came the frozen bed of the river,
then a chain of low-lying hills, then broad stretches of tundra again,
with, here and there, a narrow willow-lined stream twisting in and out
between snow-banks. The steady pat-pat of his "mucklucks" (skin boots)
carried him far that day, but brought him no sight of the reported
Russians.

After a brief sleep, he was away again. He had traveled for eight hours
more, when, upon skirting the edge of a long line of willows by a river's
brink, he imagined he caught sight of a skulking figure on the further
bank. He could not be sure of it. He pressed on, his dogs still trailing
the reindeer sled. If they had come near the Russian camp, the trail would
doubtless have made a direct turn to right or left of it to escape passing
too closely. The Chukches avoided these Russians as merchant ships of old
avoided a pirate bark. Contact with them meant loss of their reindeer,
perhaps death as well.

So, confident in his false security, Johnny pushed on. But just as he was
about to emerge from the river-bed, a dozen armed ruffians of the most
vicious-looking type sprang from the willows.

"Whoa!"

Resistance was useless; Johnny stopped his team. He looked back and, to
his disgust, he saw that their camp was pitched on the other side of that
long row of willows. These s