Johnny Longbow

Johnny Thompson caught his breath as his feet shot from beneath him and he plunged into a rushing torrent of icy water. Thoughts flashed across his mind, mental pictures of home...

In spite of his great hunger and the maddening odors that came to him, filling his heart with a wild desire to break his promise, to wait no longer, but dash into the strange ca...

“Young man,” he began, “in the home of my childhood on the crags of the Scottish Highlands, the word stranger spelled welcome. Here we have no home worthy of the name. Even this...

“A long, long trail.” The old man’s words echoed in Johnny’s ears as half an hour later, he sat before the fire of great glowing logs. Chilled by the cold and the dark, warmed b...

Johnny Thompson was tired. He was hungry, and was feeling down on his luck. He had hunted the rugged hills since early morning, yet no game had gone into his bag save one great...

“That moose was very far north,” said Gordon Duncan, as they sat dreaming by the fire after their first meal of moose steak. “One seldom finds them here. He was alone. Moose and...

In his sleeping bag on a rude bunk in the corner Gordon Duncan still slept. Before the fire sat Faye Duncan. She had thrown fresh fuel on the fire. The flames were leaping up th...

“It is going to storm.” The old Scot dropped his paddle to the bottom of the dugout long enough to turn up the collar of his jacket, then he took up the mechanical swing of his...

They lay close together on the snow against a little rise of land. From this place they could see nothing before them. A faint crackling sound was all that told them that a movi...

As on that other occasion, the girl’s words were uttered in a low whisper, yet so tense were her feelings that her whispered words left in Johnny Thompson’s mind the impression...

Just as the Eskimo was creeping into Johnny’s tent, he felt himself seized from behind and dragged violently backward. The next instant a heavy body came crashing down upon him....

Next day they marched straight away over the white expanse. A fog, hanging low over the tundra, hid all but a narrow circle from view. They traveled by the compass and the ancie...

Had one chanced to have been passing over that vast white expanse over which the three, Johnny, Faye and Gordon Duncan, traveled next day; had his eye caught sight of the dark f...

Next morning they opened their eyes to a new world. The fog was gone, the sun shone bright. Up from the south had come a gentle wind that brought with it the breath of spring.

Mid-afternoon of that day found them at the crest of the mountain, caught in the grip of such a storm as one dreams of but seldom meets in real life.

The sun was setting over a wilderness of snow and winter-washed, bleak, bare land, as late next day the three travelers, rounding a towering granite crag, came at last into full...

Before she fell asleep that night Faye found herself wondering about many things. Why had her grandfather brought her so far into the white wilderness? Why had he not told her o...

Exactly a quarter of an hour, measured by Gordon Duncan’s large and ancient timepiece, elapsed before the natives on the island announced by a wild burst of shouting that they w...

“It was years back, so many I have fairly lost track.” Gordon Duncan’s tone was deep and vibrant with emotion as he began his story of a recluse companion and the treasure of gr...

The ways of the savage and the highly civilized man are vastly different. One is tempted to believe at times that the savage has the better end of the bargain. Civilized man, fr...

Much sooner than Johnny expected, the hunchback awoke. Perhaps the pangs of hunger were making themselves felt. Be that as it may, the night was not half gone when, each armed w...

Someone else saw the light of Faye’s fire against the sky. Sitting crosslegged on their deerskins, the two Indians squinted at it for a time in stolid silence. After that a few...

Early next morning, before Gordon Duncan was astir, and while the girl still slept the sleep of exhaustion, the Indians crept from beneath their caribou skins and journeyed fort...

That the hunchback was a great sleeper Johnny was soon enough to know. After their long journey he slept far into the day. Even after he awoke he appeared to be in a dull stupor...

On a river ever broadening as it made its way toward the far distant sea, rode a crude skin canoe. In the canoe rode Gordon Duncan, his granddaughter Faye and the two Indians. T...

“Ah!” sighed Gordon Duncan, as once more they caught sight of Timmie’s raft. “We shall be up with him soon. Once we are close, when he sees my face he will know it is I, his fri...

The story of the aged recluse, Timmie, was soon told. After his companion Gordon Duncan had left him, more than twenty years before, the caribou had come and a fresh supply of p...