_Mystery Stories for Boys_
Johnny Longbow
_By_
ROY J. SNELL
The Reilly & Lee Co.
Chicago New York
_Printed in the United States of America_
_Copyright, 1928_
by
The Reilly & Lee Co.
_All Rights Reserved_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Last Arrow 11
II Mysterious Fear 36
III The Knife in the Tree 54
IV Green Gold 64
V A Mad Moose 70
VI A Strange Meeting 80
VII A Look Beyond 95
VIII A Haven of Refuge 105
IX A Moving Island 121
X Treachery in the Night 135
XI The Dancing Shadow 148
XII The Great Banshee 153
XIII The Answered Challenge 164
XIV A Mysterious Visit in the Night 169
XV On the Trail of the Great Banshee 182
XVI Down with the Avalanche 188
XVII The Giant Hunchback 202
XVIII Saved by a Line 216
XIX Gordon Duncan’s Story 233
XX Adrift in the Night 243
XXI The Battle of the Bears 251
XXII The Hunchback Leads On 264
XXIII Three Bear Skins 271
XXIV Left Behind 279
XXV Adventure in Pantomime 285
XXVI Into the Ice Jamb 293
XXVII Green Gold at Last 304
CHAPTER I
THE LAST ARROW
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 homes and firesides. Echoes of laughter
sounded in his ears.
Yet in this wilderness there was no laughter save the boisterous roar of
an Arctic stream. There were no homes save those of the muskrat, the
beaver and the white owl. The nearest cabin was fifty miles or more back.
An all but impassable forest of scrub spruce, fir and pine lay between.
There was time for but a flash back before Johnny found himself fighting
for his life against the torrent that was dragging him over rocks and
sunken logs, splashing, ducking, pulling at him and threatening every
moment to make an end of him.
But Johnny Thompson was not one to be beaten at once by this rushing
torrent of northern Canada. Swimming strongly, warding off overhanging
branches here, dodging great protruding boulders there, he still watched
for a gently shelving bank that might offer him so much as a moment’s
rest. Since no such haven offered itself at once, he shot the rapids like
a salmon.
A long, slender oiled canvas sack hung at his back. Twice this threatened
to prove his undoing. It caught upon a tough willow branch and dragged
him beneath the surface. Hardly had he freed himself than this same sack
that apparently contained some stiff and stubborn affair of wood or steel
caught in a rocky crevice to throw him high and wide. This involuntary
pole vault left him with breath quite crushed out, but still struggling.
Suddenly, straight ahead, he caught sight of that which must prove his
salvation or his undoing. Undermined by the torrent a green spruce tree
lay squarely across his path.
Ten seconds to wonder. Would he be caught in the branches and drowned, or
would he mount those same branches to freedom?
Sixty seconds of terrific battle and the splendid muscles of the boy won
against relentless nature. Panting, triumphant, he sat astride the
branches.
He was saved. There remained but to climb back to land. He was cold and
wet. A roaring fire would remedy that. His blanket roll lay where he had
tossed it on this side of the stream before he attempted to ford the
treacherous tumult of water. The way back to his blankets would be rough
going. He’d manage that.
But suddenly the smile on his face faded. His eyes had fallen upon the
long sack that had hung at his back.
“Gone,” he muttered, “torn open by the same branch. And they’re gone, all
gone but one.”
After adjusting the torn fastenings as best he could, he worked his way
over the swaying tree trunk to solid earth. Then with sober face, he
began making his way back over the rocks to the spot where his blanket
roll lay. The situation was a serious one.
An hour later he sat before a roaring campfire of fir and balsam boughs.
Dressed in a change of clothing and wrapped in a blanket, with his
costume of an hour before sending clouds of steam toward the sky, he
might have seemed the picture of contentment. He was far from contented.
Presently he removed a small coffee pot from the fire and poured a cup of
dark brown liquid. The aroma of coffee seemed good. He smiled. Then,
without sugar or cream, he gulped it down black and hot. Nor did he eat
after that. There was nothing to eat.
Had you chanced to look into his pack you would have found there neither
firearms nor ammunition. The nearest cabin that he knew of in all that
vast northern wilderness was fifty miles back over an ill-defined trail.
That cabin was deserted. He had slept there four nights back.
So Johnny sat by the fire meditating, thinking on matters of greater or
less importance. And as he meditated, at a point somewhat more than a
mile downstream, as the crow flies, a figure appeared among the rocks
that kept the rushing stream in tumult.
A girl in her late teens, she moved out from among dark pines into a
patch of light. The touches of sunset, lighting up her dark brown hair
and adding a touch of gold to her ruddy freckled cheeks, transformed her
for the moment into a goddess of the forest.
Sensing the change, she stood motionless as a statue for a full moment.
Then, into that glory of the sunset she smiled, and the smile made her
seem more alive than any wild thing that had ever ventured to the brink
of that tumultuous stream.
In her hand she held a rustic bucket. Its handle, a thong of caribou
sinew, its bottom a circle of wood cut from some fallen spruce tree, its
sides white birchbark, this bucket seemed a part of the wilderness.
As she stooped to fill the rustic bucket, her eyes caught sight of some
unusual object bobbing up and down in the water.
One moment, a flash of red and gold, she saw it. The next it was lost in
a rush of foam. In a twinkling the bucket was dropped among the rocks and
she went racing downstream in hot pursuit.
A hundred yards, leaping from boulder to boulder, she plunged onward
until, red-cheeked, panting, she came upon an eddy, a still dark pool,
twenty feet across, and at its very center, moving serenely about, was
the coveted prize.
With the aid of the slow current and a long dry pole, she succeeded at
last in coaxing the thing ashore.
As she grasped it, a trio of bright feathers bound to a slender shaft
came to view. She caught her breath again. And as she pricked her hand on
the broad head sharp as a razor at the other end of the shaft, her face
lost some of its heightened color.
Turning, she raced back to the spot where the crude bucket still rested.
There, without pausing to complete her errand, she dashed up the slope to
a spot where a tumbled-down cabin rested among the trees.
A man, very tall, very straight and quite old, a bearded patriarch, rose
at her approach.
“Grandfather!” she exclaimed, almost in a whisper. “We must leave this
cabin at once.”
The old man threw her a questioning look. For answer she held up the
arrow she had found floating feather up in the stream.
Taking it from her, he examined it closely in the waning light.
“White man,” he pronounced at last, as if reading from a book. “Somewhat
new at the game, but possessed of a considerable knowledge of the art. A
very good arrow.
“We must go up,” he said after a moment of silence. “We will go up at
once.”
They entered the cabin together. Some twenty minutes later, with well
arranged packs on their backs, they emerged from the shadowy interior to
go marching briskly down toward the banks of the rushing stream. There
they began leaping from rock to rock. In this manner they traveled a
considerable distance without leaving a single tell-tale footprint
behind.
So they moved on into the twilight, a powerful old man and a short,
sturdy girl, marched on into a wilderness that is acquainted only with
the voice of the wolf, the caribou and the white owl.
Once as they paused for a moment’s rest beside a great flat rock, the
girl removed some object from her pack and held it up to the uncertain
light.
“It’s strange,” the old man rumbled. “An arrow, a well-shaped,
well-constructed arrow with a death-dealing steel point! Had it been a
shot gun shell, that would not have seemed strange. But an arrow!”
“But Grandfather, we——” The girl stroked a strong longbow that hung at
her side.
“Yes, I know.” The old man’s smile was good to see. “But we are of a
bygone race, at least I am. This is 1928. Except for such as we are, the
bow and arrow are of the past. But see!” He started up. “It is getting
dark.”
A few yards farther down the strange pair left the stream’s bank to go
clambering up a rocky run. Even here they avoided snow. And so, marching
sturdily forward, they faded into the gathering darkness and deep shadows
of pines.
You have perhaps guessed that the arrow found bobbing its way downstream
came from Johnny Thompson’s quiver. In fact at the very moment when the
old man and the girl left the cabin, he was engaged in the task of oiling
two stout bows and waxing their strings. Having done this, he looked
sorrowfully at the single broadhead arrow that remained in his quiver,
took one more long gulp of hot black coffee, then set to wondering what
lay before him.
To be facing a wilderness alone with bows and arrows as one’s sole means
of securing food might seem bad enough. To have but one arrow; what could
be worse? A missed shot, a shattering rattle against the rocks, and this
arrow might be gone forever.
And then? Blunt arrows, sent crashing into the side of resting rabbit or
sleeping ptarmigan would be as deadly as spear point when fired from
Johnny’s sixty-pound bow. There was wood all about for shafts. But what
of feathers and weights for the tips? One might come upon a sleeping owl.
Here would be feathers.
“And yet,” he told himself, “I have not seen a living thing for three
days. The country is deserted. But no, not quite. There was the caribou
track.”
Ah, yes, that very afternoon he had come upon the trail of a caribou. It
had been this very caribou that led him to disaster. The beast had
crossed the river. In attempting to follow he had come near losing his
life, and had lost all but one of his arrows.
“Ah, well,” he sighed, “to-morrow my luck will turn. A single arrow is
enough for a caribou and I am now on his side of the stream. I will take
up the trail in the morning.”
With that, after replenishing his fire, he rolled up in his blankets and
prepared for a night’s repose.
Was it the coffee? Was it hunger? Or was it the silence of the night in
that strange land that robbed him of coveted slumber? For long his eyes
remained closed. Yet sleep did not come.
At last, yielding to the inevitable, he opened his eyes wide to stare
upward through sighing pine branches to the infinite heavens above, where
a myriad stars twinkled and beamed as they appeared to leap across
tossing clusters of pine needles.
Like a story told by a poet, a picture thrown on the screen, his life of
the past few months moved before him.
Arriving from dreamy tropical seas and deep tangled swamps of Central
America, he had in late Autumn arrived at the mid-western city which was
inseparably linked with his childhood.
There, as he felt the crisp tang of autumn mornings and caught the gleams
of frost on the corn, he felt again the lure of the North.
Months of hot tropical sun lay behind him. He had come to loathe the soft
warmth that saps men’s energies, thins their blood and weakens their
wills. He yearned now for the long white trail, the screaming of sled
runners, the song of dogs that is an Arctic night.
But at this moment a fresh fancy seized him. Burton Bronson, an old-time
friend, had by chance shown him a hunting bow with which he had performed
marvelous feats. The wolf, the wild cat, mountain lion and bear had felt
the bite of his broadhead arrows.
Johnny had been skeptical. Bronson had demonstrated his power. Johnny had
come to believe. He was at once fascinated by this new form of sport. The
longbow, the arrow, and wide open spaces took him in hand.
Long weeks they led him over sand dunes, across broad prairies, through
silent forests.
When weather became too bleak for out-of-doors sport, he had retreated to
the cover of the North Shore Archery. There he had so perfected his form
that no small game was safe from his straight speeding arrow.
Then it was that his longing for the North returned. On top of this came
the resolve to stake his fortune for the immediate future on his recently
acquired skill. He would go into the North with no other weapon than the
bow and arrow. With these alone, as the savages had done before him, he
would make his way northward through Canada until, fortune attending him,
he should reach the headwaters of the mighty Yukon in time to witness
that greatest of nature’s panoramas, the Spring breakup on the river.
So here he was. Over many a long mile Fate had been kind to him. Indians
and white men alike had treated him well. They had laughed good-naturedly
at his weapons, but had admired the strength and skill he exhibited in
using them. The Indians of the first trading post had dubbed him “Johnny
Longbow.” Johnny Longbow he was after that. He was not ashamed of the
nickname, nor the things for which it stood.
Beside him now, there in the midst of the great white wilderness, lay his
two bows. One was of yew wood, backed with calfskin thin as parchment;
the other an affair of his own making. Carved from the hardest and
toughest of wood, osage orange, this bow was the pride of his life. He
loved and trusted it as a friend. It had never failed him.
“If only I had arrows for you!” he whispered now. “But we will have that
caribou to-morrow.”
With that he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Johnny Longbow’s breakfast next morning consisted of two cups of black
coffee and a handful of sour berries he found clinging to their stems
just as a premature winter had found them.
Placing his pack in the crotch of a tree and marking the spot well, he
slung his handmade osage bow across his back, thrust his lone arrow
sword-like through his belt, then marched forth into the crisp glory of
Arctic morning, to seek out the lost trail of that lone caribou.
It was late afternoon when, with heart pounding painfully against his
ribs, he stood neck deep among scrub spruce trees.
The scene before him was one to inspire an artist’s brush or lend fire to
a poet’s pen. A young buck caribou, a superb creature of shining brown
and glistening black, stood before him in a narrow circle of green.
Walled in on every side by dark young fir trees, the wild creature’s
miniature pasture seemed to have been planned by some famous director for
the setting of a scene in a wildwood drama.
The caribou was feeding toward him.
“Another minute, just one more,” he told himself.
His watch ticked loudly. It seemed certain that the wild creature must
hear. The snap of a twig off to the right came near spoiling it all. The
caribou lifted its head. Johnny’s unnerved hand all but lost its grip on
his bow.
The day’s trail had been long and tiresome. Over rocky slopes, down icy
streams, across treacherous snows, the caribou had led the way until the
boy, weak from lack of food, was near to the point where one gives up in
despair. Twice, as if to tempt him, a snowshoe rabbit leaped from his
path, only to pause among the rocks and stare at him. Twice he had strung
his bow, twice nocked his single arrow for a shot. Twice he had told
himself that a miss among those rocks meant a shattered shaft, that at
most the rabbit offered but a meal or two of indifferent food. Twice he
had slipped the arrow in his belt, had unstrung his bow to take up the
task of dogged tracking.
“It’s to be the caribou or nothing!” he had told himself. “A month’s
provision, or famine.”
And now, here, just before him, feeding peacefully, was the caribou. For
the moment he was well over at the far side of his narrow pasture. A few
moments more, and he would be close enough for a sure shot, and then! The
boy caught his breath as he thought what the speeding of that single
arrow meant to him.
Closing his eyes, he saw himself, a load of meat across his shoulders,
beating his way back to the last outpost of civilization where were
feathers, wood and steel for the making of many arrows. Then again the
picture went dark. He saw the shadow of his present self, struggling over
long lost trails, eagerly sucking bitter bark or grubbing into frozen
earth for some crude substance with which to allay his hunger.
“I must win!” he told himself stoutly. “I must not miss!”
And still, as the moments passed, as the caribou moved nearer and nearer,
the zero hour came closer to hand, he found his faith wavering.
“One arrow,” he thought over and over, “only one.”
But “Now! Now!” he breathed at last. “Can’t wait any longer.”
As the antlered monarch of the far north raised his head to stand there
silent, listening, still as a statue, Johnny’s bow twanged, his arrow
sped.
With a bound high and free the wild creature leaped away.
One, two, three bounds, and he had cleared the spot of light green.
Another, another and yet another, he went thrashing breast deep in the
young firs.
“Missed!” Johnny groaned. “Missed! And he carries into the forest my only
arrow!”
But what was this? Just as his head fell in dejection he saw the caribou
make one more leap, high and wide, then come to a sudden stand. Still
breast deep in darkest green, he appeared to view the scene before
another wild dash.
“Oh, for one more arrow!” the boy groaned.
“There is no other, so what’s the use?”
In the forlorn hope that his lone arrow might by chance have glanced and
fallen on the green, he moved toward the narrow circle of wild pasture.
Then suddenly he stood still. There had come to his sensitive ear a sound
of movement in the brush.
“Not the caribou either,” he told himself as his heart skipped a beat.
“Some wild beast of prey, a bear or a wolf.”
But no, a greater surprise awaited him. Before him, much closer to the
caribou than to him, a khaki clad back appeared. A boyish head, an old
cap, a pair of stout arms held high, a bow, a quiver of arrows. A
second’s suspense, and an arrow flew straight and fair at the statuesque
caribou.
“’Twon’t do,” Johnny told himself, rubbing his eyes. “This is Nineteen
Twenty-eight. Strange enough for me to be here. But a girl with only a
bow and arrow in these wilds? It can’t be!”
And yet it was. As he looked again the girl was still there. So too was
the caribou.
“Two arrows, and still he stands there motionless. That creature, this
place is bewitched. I’ll break the spell.”
He was about to lift his voice in a loud “hello” when the girl, turning
half about, fitted a second arrow to her bow and let fly.
“Straight to the mark, as I live!”
Johnny spoke his thought out loud. “And still he stands.”
The girl wheeled about to stare at him in blank surprise. Then, as
surprise and fear left her, she exclaimed:
“The beast is surely charmed! I’ve shot him, and yet he does not stir!”
Suddenly the shining black antlers sank low. The whole head of the
caribou disappeared in the brush. Still his body remained erect.
“Mystery here!” Johnny sprang forward.
The girl, as if in fear of losing the prize, started forward.
“It’s all right,” said Johnny. “He’s yours. I missed him fair enough.”
“You—you missed?” The girl’s tone showed surprise.
Johnny did not hear.
“Mystery solved!” he shouted back a moment later. “When he made that last
leap he landed so squarely on the tops of a half dozen young fir trees
that they did what his legs no longer could. They supported him.
“But say!” he called. “It’s queer. Come here, please.”
As the girl advanced he had time for a brief study of her fine, strong,
khaki clad figure.
“Eighteen or twenty. English or Scotch. An outdoor girl,” was his mental
comment.
“Question is,” he smiled as the girl came close, “Who’s caribou is it?
Three arrows, all quite near the heart. Two are yours, one mine.”
“You—yours?” The puzzled look of a moment before returned to the girl’s
face.
“Yes. I shot first. You did not see me. But there’s my arrow.
“But really,” his tone changed as the girl seemed suddenly crestfallen,
“there’s no need of mine and thine in the forest. I am glad as I can be
to know that there’s a fellow creature near. That was my last arrow.”
“And you are alone?”
“Quite alone.”
“You look hungry,” she said suddenly.
“I am, a little. Haven’t really eaten for—well, for some time. Luck went
against me. Couldn’t even get a fish.”
“We’ll take the caribou to camp,” she said. “It’s only a half mile, all
down grade. Grandfather—”
She broke off quite suddenly as one does who has found himself in danger
of saying too much.
“You—you have a camp of your own—” she hesitated, “perhaps—” Again she
paused.
As Johnny watched, he read in her face signs of conflicting emotions.
Native hospitality, a longing for companionship, youth calling to youth,
were battling with fear. This much he understood. But why the fear? She
had spoken of a grandfather. Surely then there could be no objection to
his joining them in a feast off the venison they had secured.
“Perhaps,” she began again. “Here,” extending her quiver filled with
arrows, “take these. We have others.”
“I’ll dress the deer and we’ll divide it,” said Johnny, exasperated by
what seemed to him cool effrontery. He did not so much as look at the
proffered arrows.
Hanging her quiver on a spruce bough, the girl assisted him in lifting
the caribou to a strong bough and stringing him up. It was then that
Johnny came to know of her superb strength.
“Like a man,” he told himself.
She sat watching in silence as he performed his task. When, however, he
had dressed the deer, severed its head from its body and was studying the
problem of a fair division without an axe or butcher’s cleaver, she spoke
again.
“Lift the fore parts to my shoulder,” she said quietly. “I think we can
carry it to camp.”
That she had arrived at some decision as he worked Johnny guessed. What
decision, and why? This he did not know.
The girl led the way. The going was rough. More than once she slipped and
all but fell. Yet each time her recovery was that of the perfect
woodsman, like the spring of a creature made of steel. Once she fell
forward, and the caribou dropped to earth. Before Johnny could come to
her aid she was up with a low laugh and lifted the burden to her shoulder
once more.
“She’s wonderful!” he told himself. “I hope——”
He was not quite sure what it was he hoped. He had been a long time in
the wilderness, had been facing starvation, too. He had not realized
until this moment how bleak and lonely it had been.
“But now—”
His thoughts were broken short off by the girl’s actions. She had come to
a sudden stop.
“Drop—drop it down here.” Her words came uncertainly.
Johnny obeyed. The next instant she had disappeared into the brush that
surrounded them on every side, nor had he seen which way she had taken.
“Gone,” he told himself.
Dismay overtook him. She might not return. There was something altogether
strange about the whole affair. But half a caribou in a wilderness! Yes,
she would return. So he sat down to wait, and as he waited, there came to
him, wafted along by a gentle breeze, faint odors of campfire smoke and
bacon frying.