because he had traveled their way.

At times they had come upon his camp. Located at the edge of some bank
or beside some willow clump, where there was shelter from the wind,
these camps told little or nothing of the man who had made them.
Everything which might tell tales had been carried on or burned. Once
only Johnny had found a scrap of paper. Nothing had been written on it.
From it Johnny had learned one thing only: it had originally come from
some Russian town, for it had the texture of Russian bond. But this was
little news.

Who was this stranger who traveled so far? Johnny had a feeling that he
was at the moment hiding in this native village, and that this was the
reason his two companions did not wish to proceed. There had grown up
between these two, the Eskimo boy and the Japanese girl, a strange
friendship. At times Johnny had suspicions that this friendship had
existed before they had met on the tundra. However that might have been,
they seemed now to be working in unison. Only the day before he had
happened to overhear them conversing in low tones, and the language, he
would have sworn, was neither Eskimo, English, nor Pidgen. Yet he did
not question the boy's statement that he was an American Eskimo. Indeed
there were times when the flash of his honest smile made Johnny believe
that they had met somewhere in America. On his trip to Nome and
Fairbanks before the war, Johnny had met many Eskimos, and had boxed and
wrestled with some of the best of them.

"Oh, well," he sighed, and stretched himself, "'tain't that I've got a
string on 'em, nor them on me. I'll have to wait or go on alone, that's
all."