A Wild-Goose Chase (Balmer) Part Two

​

CHAPTER XII

"MUTINY"

IN fair weather and with a following wind and sea they sailed south over the Arctic water. When they went north, fighting their way through the fog, with the ice that had floated down from the polar sea ever threatening and withdrawing before the bows of the little boat, Margaret and Geoff had not appreciated the isolation of the island. If Latham had failed to realise that before he gave no sign; but every mile now that they sailed, with the ocean, except for the icebergs, boundless about them, seemed to add greater and greater strength to his doubt of ever finding further trace of Hedon. Margaret saw, too, that the first enthusiasm which had been inspired by finding Eric's record was wearing away from the others as they thought it over.

"It isn't as if Hedon could have stayed on Mason Island, if he wanted to," Latham said ​to Margaret on the second day that they sailed south. "He had no food to stay. He and Thomas before he died had used almost all the supplies left in the cabin. Hedon couldn't count on getting enough game to see him through another winter; and he wouldn't have had time to reach a game country if he waited till the freeze-up in the fall. He was practically driven to go over the ice when he did, no matter how he found it."

"I have been realising that," Margaret admitted.

"I think after he crossed the island for the last time he shot that bear and saw the ice was in such bad shape that he waited there on the chance that the bear might mean there was enough more game to carry him through. Then he got nothing more; knew that he had to go on, though the ice was getting worse, so built his cairns and went on."

"I think that may be so," she again agreed quietly, and moved away. That afternoon there came into sight the first of the islands which they must search for proof of whether Eric, driven south by hunger over the ​breaking-up ice, again had reached land. That afternoon began the first of a series of vain journeys ashore to examine headlands, capes and promontories where cairns, if cairns were to be found, surely ought to be. Now the sun disappeared for longer and longer hours each night, and circled closer to the horizon in the shortening periods of light. Snow swirled from over-clouded skies when the gale blew from the north. The Viborg skirted the shores of other islands; the landing parties, which now sometimes included Margaret herself, tramped up and down the rocks in vain. Again and again piles of stones sighted from the ship brought a boat hurrying to the beach; but each time the piles proved natural heaps. Bones found gave no evidence that any man, with a rifle or without, had hunted in any of those lands.

By the chart with which the Aurora party had been provided and by which the Viborg also sailed, there were but two routes which any man travelling south over the ice would have followed or tried to follow. The first, taken by the four who got away from Mason ​Island early in the spring, had been expressly eliminated by Hedon in his report. There could be no doubt that at the time when he left Mason Island it was the more dangerous of the two. Moreover, if later he had changed his mind and tried it, some sign of his cairns would have been found by the Viborg on the way north. The Viborg now was following the other route; and after leaving Mason Island found absolutely no trace of any man.

Geoff, coming on deck the day after the last land likely to hold hint of Hedon's fate had been searched, found the water freezing as it dashed up on the Viborg's side. Yet the search pressed on. They had worked past the first islands which Hedon must have reached if he got across the sea south of Mason Land, and now they skirted other Arctic shores. The men no longer expressed to Margaret their expectation of finding some cairn or other trace as they left the ship. She could see that all who had had experience in the Arctic—McNeal, Koehler, Brunton, Michaelis, even Linn—had been gradually abandoning any anticipations of finding Hedon; but, strangely, with the ​decreasing chance of success came a more dogged determination to drive themselves to their task. If they rowed through icy surf to rocky shores and, half soaked, tramped hours on end in their useless search, they did it with even greater cheerfulness the harder and more vain their work grew.

By common consent Margaret and Latham had ceased to discuss chances; yet to her each glance from him now inquired: "Have you given him up?" Each tone of his voice, no matter what the words were, said to her: "You know no one'll ever find him. I've won you now; you have to give up."

And in her tones, though her words did not relate to the matter at all, she said: "Not yet. Not yet. Not yet."

Yet as her soul said that she trembled. It was not because she had given up Eric—she knew now that she never could do that; but it was because she knew that by the terms of her pledge to Price he soon might claim her and she could not deny his right.

The evidence which they had found at Mason Land, which told them Eric had ​reached there alive and had left there, had become the best proof that he later was lost. Men from the Viborg now had searched every shore he might have reached had he survived the long, lonely journey over the breaking-up ice; and they found no trace of him. Eric's own record of his plan, and his promise to build cairns if he again reached land, certified to his disappearance forever.

When would Latham announce to Margaret that she could show no proof that Eric lived? When would he demand of her to redeem her word? So she waited, while slowly the Viborg worked its way south in the continuance of its hopeless search. Geoff was alternating with Latham again in the engine room when the ship was proceeding. While the vessel had been anchored, awaiting the return of Latham, Brunton and Koehler from a search on shore, Geoff had been cleaning the cylinders. He came on deck and found a snowstorm blowing up. There was a greater chill and penetration in the north wind than there had been before, and he saw, as he looked at the water, that the snow drifting into it was not immediately ​melting, but mingling and forming a slush which spread over the surface.

Margaret was below in her cabin and Linn was getting dinner. McNeal and Michaelis were busy together with the stiffening ropes and freezing gear about the mast. The seven remaining dogs were curled up and sleeping comfortably on the ice-clad deck. The boat from the shore came out, struggling and half swamped in the surf. The three on deck watched the three in the boat silently, with ropes ready to aid them as they came alongside. Days before they had stopped shouting for news of any kind.

The men from shore got aboard, and with great difficulty all six together drew up the light sea boat. Latham stamped on the deck beside McNeal. The moment before his clothes had been soaked; now they were stiffening on him.

"The sea's slush!"

"It won't be long," McNeal returned.

"You mean?"

"It'll be ice. Wait till the wind goes down. Yon slush is the beginning of sea ice."

​"Damn! You mean the freeze-up?"

"The winter freeze-up."

"Then get us out of here," Latham ordered; "and get us out of here quick."

McNeal, stung at the tone, spun upon him belligerently. "Get us out of here?" he returned. "How—by tramcar? You think this is Chicago, with the first cold snap at Christmas just in time for Santa Claus?"

"You're insolent!" Latham returned.

"Insolent?" cried McNeal. Koehler caught him by the shoulder to check him. At that moment Margaret appeared from below, and McNeal's words, which just had begun to flow, were stopped.

Latham turned to her. "McNeal was just saying the freeze-up is coming, so I ordered him to get us as far south as he can before it."

This was not the way, Margaret knew, in which Price had meant to claim her. But as she faced him she was aware that since the matter had come up he was going to put it through. The others—McNeal and the doctor, even Brunton and Michaelis—understood vaguely that the abandoning of further search ​for Eric involved, in some way, her turning to Latham. She knew that Geoff had guessed much more. And now as she looked quickly to Koehler she saw that more complete comprehension was coming to him; and McNeal, slower witted but with quicker feelings, was clenching his big hands at his sides.

"You mean you are ordering the end of the search?" Margaret asked Latham.

"Do you believe there is any use in keeping it up?"

"A little longer at least," she said tremblingly.

"How far off is the freeze-up?" Latham asked McNeal.

"No one knows," the Scotchman said. "We may get ice to-morrow, if we get a calm and it's colder. It may be a month off if the winter's late."

"But probably?"

"Two weeks; some chance of three."

"Of open channels?"

"Or little ice."

Latham closed his lips tightly. "I thought so. With the channels as we found them ​going up, and no fog now, we can get back to Baffin Bay and Greenland with fair luck."

Margaret seized his sleeve. "But you aren't going to order it yet?"

"Of course I am. I should have done it weeks ago."

"Why?"

"The winter's coming."

"We—I'm prepared for it."

"If necessary, if anything goes wrong, or if there was any use in staying, I'd let you; but as it is I can't."

"You aren't thinking of me," she charged quickly.

"Yes, I am."

For the instant both seemed to forget that others were watching them.

She recoiled from him. "Yes, I know you are, and I know how you're thinking of me," she gasped. "But you can't make me give up Eric yet."

Latham looked from her. "McNeal, do you believe Hedon's alive?" he inquired point-blank.

​The Scotchman looked from one to the other and evaded: "I'd no say we'd not find him."

"But you have said so. I've heard you."

"You never heard me say that to you," the skipper charged.

"Then I overheard you. Koehler"—Latham turned—"will you say that Hedon's alive?"

"I'll say nothing about it," the doctor returned.

"But you have said something about it." Latham glanced to the others and turned back. "There's no use asking them in your presence what they think, Margaret," he said. "But they know what they believe, and I know it and so do you; and it's what you also believe. They're all weak enough before you to fill you with more hopes and keep you here through the winter night, but I'll not. McNeal, we start now full speed, without halt, to get to Greenland."

The Scotch skipper met his eyes fairly. "Do we?" he asked.

"I've said so. We do."

McNeal shot a glance at his mates. "Do we, ​Otto?" he referred. "Brunton? Michaelis? Do we?"

"What do you mean by asking them?" Latham demanded hotly.

"Aren't they men?" returned the skipper.

"But I pay them and I pay you." Latham lost control of himself as he was defied. "You do as I say."

"Do we?" repeated McNeal again. "Geoff Sherwood, do we?" He did not wait for the boy's reply. "We don't."

"You don't?"

"We don't give up Eric Hedon as long as any one wants to look for him." The Scotchman paused, and then, to anticipate the other's reply, went on: "With your pay or without it."

Latham, stiff in his struggle for restraint, stared about the party.

"What are you talking about? Do you know what you're saying?"

"Cut off our pay," the Scotchman defied. "Forget it. Do you suppose any man on this ship ever came into the Arctic for pay—but yourself?"

​"What do you mean by that?" Latham advanced.

"You make it plain that you know." McNeal stood his ground. "Stop our pay that's running on in your mind, Price Latham. You've given us none of it. Charge it all back to yourself. But if Eric Hedon's alive we'll cheat you of your pay yet." And he looked at Margaret. Latham retreated.

"You—you won't obey?" he stammered.

"Hit on the head!" McNeal jeered. "You've guessed it."

Latham looked about to the rest. Koehler, quiet, calm, observant, moved a little nearer to McNeal; Brunton and Michaelis were more puzzled, but as Latham looked to them he saw that they too sided with the skipper. Geoff also had drawn away; he was beside his sister and holding her arm. Margaret alone of the five did not meet his eyes as Latham looked toward her. Latham stared at her an instant, then back to the others, and turned and walked away.

"This much more before you go," McNeal called to him commandingly, and Latham ​stopped: "Since I no longer do what you say, you're to do what I say, whatever it is. Understand that!"

Latham, without making reply, moved on and disappeared down the companionway to his cabin. The six left on the deck looked into each other's faces.

"Wasn't that right?" McNeal questioned directly of each of the others, and got the direct reply from each till he came to the girl. She gazed at him an instant as he questioned her, and then without answering at all turned away. She went down the companionway which led to her cabin as well as to that shared by Latham and her brother. The men looked after her; then Geoff, with an abrupt word to the rest, followed her.

He found when he came to her cabin that she had not gone in there. The door stood open. She had gone into his cabin, and he heard her voice and Latham's.

"I see," he heard Latham saying to her bitterly; "you counted on something like this. You couldn't lose. If you found him, all right—good-bye to me. If you didn't find ​him—why, put me off again. You never meant to give him up."

"I don't give him up," Margaret's voice replied. "I don't know that I can ever give him up. In that, perhaps, you're right."

"I thought so."

"But wrong in this," her voice went on steadily. "I'll keep my word. I'll pay you."

"What?"

"My bargain with you was that we were to find Eric or proof that he was alive, or you could claim me. We've found what most people would say was proof that he must be dead; so I acknowledge your right now."

"Margaret!"

"You have carried out your agreement. You have made the search and we haven't found him. So I will keep my word. I'll marry you when we get home."

Geoff beat upon the door, then opened it and burst in.

"What's this, Margaret?" he cried.

His sister turned to him calmly. She extended her hand to Latham. He took it, gazing at her dazedly.

​"Geoffie," she said to her brother, "I want you to witness this. I promised to marry this man if he carried out certain conditions which now are complete. I give him my word that, no matter what we find in any later search which is forced on him, I will marry him, according to our agreement, when we return home."

"I'll witness no such thing!" Geoff cried, and struck their hands apart. "So that was the way of it, was it?" He faced Latham.

The man made no reply.

"Price," Margaret said, "I think we now understand each other. You had my word before. I've acknowledged your conditions fulfilled."

She went out and shut the door. Geoff stood dumb in the cabin with Latham. A shout from above summoned him up:

"To the engine room, one of you! We're getting under way."

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CHAPTER XIII

WINTER QUARTERS

THE course, as Geoff found when he returned to the deck, was being laid to the south; but this was only to search more shores. As Goeff moved among the men he was astonished to see how quickly outward expressions of hostility or antagonism against Latham had ceased. They found that Latham, for reasons which each man might guess for himself, made no longer a protest against the continuance of the search. Indeed, there was no open sign of change. McNeal always had been in command. Formerly it had been understood to be with Latham's approval; now it was known to be with his disapproval; that was all. And no reference was made to any trouble. In such a small party, confined closely in the little ship and facing an Arctic winter, every appearance of agreement must be maintained though agreement itself did not exist.

​So McNeal took the Viborg down the shores of new Arctic lands. As the ship crossed a channel and sighted another cape the chart did not even pretend to know of this land. Though the coasts east and west and even those directly north of it were chartered and described, here for two hundred miles only a dotted, hypothetical line on the map recorded the geographers' guess of the coast. Just ten days after McNeal's assuming full charge the Viborg reached that coast. For two days the wind had gone down; the sea was calm and the freeze-up beginning in earnest. Another day down this land and a tiny haven, land-locked except for one narrow entrance from the sea, promised the little Viborg the shelter required for winter quarters. The narrow entrance would block any great iceberg from entering and endangering the ship; the harbour's basin was small but deep. New ice already lay about the edge of it. McNeal, driving the Viborg crashing into this ice, brought his ship into a good position in ten fathoms of water a hundred yards from the shore. There he anchored.

​As soon as he was satisfied with his position he stepped overboard on to the ice and led half his company for a sight of the shore. The temperatures now were below freezing for the twenty-four hours; the sun scarcely showed above the horizon at noon. Every one in the party had tried on his skin clothing bought from the Greenland Eskimos; but the weather so far permitted their wearing the woolen clothes of civilisation.

Margaret still wore a woolen blouse and trousers and her wool-lined leather shoes and cap and ulster. Geoff and Latham likewise still were clothed as for a winter tramp through the Maine woods. McNeal and Koehler had changed only partly to Arctic costume; but this day, as they stood on the shore in the drifting snow and looked over the long, endless reaches of barren, drift-streaked rock and the freezing sea edging it, most of them shivered.

"I make this the northeast coast of Victoria Land," McNeal announced as they stood on the shore. "The whole of Victoria Land is a good deal bigger than Britain; and it's all Arctic, with the bulk of it lying below us. I ​think this coast runs down to Coronation Gulf, which cuts off the south end of this land from the continent. I make our present position about four hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. This land's so big that if Hedon got south of where we've been looking he'd have brought up here. He knew, of course, that some of Amundsen's men in 1904, when they were making the Northwest Passage, found Eskimos a couple of hundred miles below here. He knew Stefansson crossed the southwest end of the island and found more Eskimos; also shot caribou and saw big herds coming from the north. If the beasts have been about here they're moving out now; so if we want fresh meat we can't get after them too quick."

"It's like this farther south?" Latham inquired.

The skipper stooped and pulled some moss from under the snow. It was similar to that which they had seen on Mason Island and other shores which they had searched for cairns.

"There's your turf, underbrush and forests of Victoria Land," McNeal said. "That's about all you'll find from one end of this land ​to the other. That's what the caribou feed on. No one's been about here to tell us much of the scenery, but probably it's more mountainous toward the interior."

Margaret had been paying only scant attention. The words about Hedon had sent her into an abstraction. "Whoever hunts will remember to look for cairns," she said after a moment.

"Yes," said Koehler. "Two of us should hunt in one direction to-morrow morning, two in another.

"I'm on," offered Geoff.

"I," nodded Latham.

Koehler and McNeal consulted. In case of any accident to the ship while in winter quarters they were to establish a station on the shore. As they were planning the place Margaret moved off. Latham hesitated and then followed her.

Geoff watched them for a few moments as they walked together. They talked at times and then went on in silence. The sight of them together now and their accepted companionship disturbed Geoff in a more positive way ​than ever before. Of course his sister and Latham had been thrown into much close contact on the ship; but that had seemed forced, inevitable. Their being together on shore meant more; it meant that though Margaret might choose to avoid him Latham now was claiming her companionship as a right—as he later would claim her as his wife. Geoff was unable merely to watch them longer; he hurried to join his sister.

Almost immediately Latham left, and brother and sister walked up and down together. The snowstorm had ceased, and only light powder from the drifts blew up and whirled into their faces as the wind circled capriciously.

They went on without speaking over the rocky barrens, which undulated a little so that now and then the two sank out of sight of the others on the shore and out of sight also of the ship. The short Arctic day was almost done; the light was grey and nowhere was there any colour. The land had nonę, being black where the wind had blown off the snow; the rest was white. The sea was the cruel grey of ice, and ​there was no colour in the sky. The clothes of both man and girl were grey or dark.

"Look at me, Meg," Geoff said suddenly. His sister turned. "If it wasn't for your eyes and your lips," he said gallantly, "I'd say I'd gone colour-blind. But they're blue as ever, and red."

She smiled with pleasure, but her blue eyes looked quickly away. "Thank you, Geoffie," she said. "But don't again, at least just now. That's the kind of thing Eric used to say to me sometimes."

"And Price doesn't?"

"No," she replied. "No, not that kind." She stopped and stood a moment, looking about.

"What are you thinking of?" he demanded.

"Eric."

"Of course. But what about him?"

"Of his reaching this coast at last and finding this land, this terrible, bare shore, a goal to struggle toward and spend all his strength to gain. Think of him coming here alone, without a ship or companions, perhaps not even ​with his dogs. And if he got here alone he was alone all the way from Mason Land."

Geoff said nothing for a moment. Then: "You love him, don't you?"

"Love him!" Margaret drew in a breath and could not speak more.

"Then if we find him you won't keep that bargain with Price?"

"Geoff, I made it."

He knew her, and knew that was her answer.

"But Price won't hold you to it," he tried to persuade himself rather than her.

His sister seized his sleeve suddenly. "Geoff, don't make anything harder for me."

"You mean he'll hold you?"

"Geoff, you've seen how hard this sort of life, what he's had to do, has been for him. Do you think the passion that would drive him to that will allow him to let me off? Why, sometimes I've thought if we found Eric at Mason Land he wouldn't let me go."

Geoff stamped his foot. "Meg, how could you have done it?"

"I'd do it again," she cried.

"But——"

​"Geoff, before we started didn't you know that I must have made some such bargain?"

"Yes; but then I thought it was all right if he got you and——"

"Oh, brother, I'm not blaming you in any way. I promised what I did to get what I got. I've had it now and I'll pay for it. Let's not talk about it any more."

"But if we should find Eric now?" Geoff persisted.

"Come, let's run!" She sprang suddenly ahead of him, and he followed her up a little slope to a height which let them look south over miles of bare, low-lying land. They gazed up and down over the barren rocks. Nothing was in sight but the bare basalt, the snow and the ice of the sea.

"If caribou ever come into this country," Geoff said grimly, as he stared about, "certainly any sensible animal must be getting out of here now. If we're going to hunt 'em, McNeal is right—we can't get after them too soon."

"What was that sound?" his sister asked.

Geoff spun round and saw half a dozen dark ​spots running wildly about. "Oh, the dogs. Brunton's brought them ashore. They don't seem to have any quarrel with the land, do they?"

"Good fellows!" Margaret patted those that ran to her. "Good old fellows!"

"That must give you some relief—to get them off the ship, Meg," Geoff said as they turned back.

"Why, I haven't been thinking about that," she said, almost with surprise. They went on nearer to the ship.

"What are they doing there?"

A couple of men were coming ashore, tugging at something.

"Oh, a light anchor," Geoff made it out.

The men brought it ashore and made it fast there; then one ran a heavy line from the middle of the mast to the anchor, and it was braced and pulled taut. A pulley block ran on the line and carried casks and boxes for the station on shore and then was drawn back for another load.

Geoff came up to help.

"I'd rather you got to putting the ​engine-room and stores in shape," McNeal directed him. "I've just sent Latham to work there." His tone hinted that there had been trouble.

Geoff went out to the ship and down into the engine-room. Latham was not there, so Geoff set to work himself. He heard McNeal come aboard, and later some sort of quarrel on the deck. Listening he learned that it was between Latham and McNeal, and the skipper won it. Latham, half flung by McNeal, descended the steps into the engine-room.

Geoff bent close to his work and pretended that he had noticed nothing; but Latham knew, better. Now and then, as other business brought McNeal to the ship, he looked into the engine-room. With work to do, it was not so hard for Geoff to be with Latham as it was later when they were in the cabin. The thermometer had taken a sudden drop and it was clammy as well as sharply cold.

"It's the confounded lunacy of this whole business that gets on my nerves," Latham broke out. He opened a drawer under his bunk and took out a revolver.

​"What's that for?" Geoff asked, as he watched from the upper bunk.

"I'll give McNeal one more warning; then if he tries anything on me again I'll give him his," Latham threatened.

"No, you won't," said Geoff.

"Why not?"

"McNeal's right and you know it."

"Right?"

"Some one's got to be in command; the rest have to obey him."

Latham made no effort to discuss the right of McNeal to direct. "I won't be run like the cabin boy of a whaler."

"You won't have to if you do your part."

"You mean I haven't been doing it, damn you!" Latham burst out.

"Exactly!" said Geoff, and dropped down in his bunk, listening without rejoinder to the rest of Latham's remarks. At last the man threw himself into his bunk and put out the lantern.

Geoff, as on the night after his sister had declared herself before him, was unable to sleep in spite of his exhaustion. He lay awake ​with the ship now still and motionless, already firmly locked in ice.

The rigging and gear above creaked and hummed in the wind, and he could sense, or imagine that he sensed, the snow drifting up against the ship's side over the ice. Otherwise there was silence through the little vessel.

The cessation of action, of movement, brought to him more keenly than before the utter isolation of these seven men and one woman in the wastes of the North. For a moment fear, fear that made him shudder and clasp his covers with his hands, conquered him, and he realised the terror of trouble between members of this little company, so few and so weak even if united and in harmony.

And trouble already more than threatened. Since the mutiny there was no way except for McNeal to be in control and for Latham to obey. McNeal's manner toward Latham was caused, not so much by Latham's slowness to obey, but by the contempt which the Scotchman felt for him. Latham knew that; and that was the basis of the trouble.

So far they had met nothing like hardship ​in the sense that men who go into the North understand hardship. Their hunt of the next day, for which Latham had enlisted, would be only an autumn jaunt to an Arctic traveller. In addition, it had none of the worry of necessity for bringing in the meat; for there was no real need of provisions for men or dogs. Fresh meat now was desired only as a delicacy. The plan of the expedition of course counted upon securing a certain number of food animals—bear or seals, if not caribou, and perhaps a musk ox or two; but the securing of this food would not for many months become a life-and-death matter.

Suppose real difficulties and privations were to be endured? How would Latham act then? Price still took pains to hide his temper and to appear to what advantage he might before Margaret; but, as if he no longer needed Geoff's help, or as if he recognised that his former ally had turned against him and defied Geoff to harm him with Margaret, Latham now had ceased to play a part before his cabin mate. But if Latham had forgotten how ​essential it was to keep up appearances in such a party, Geoff must remember.

He waited and listened till he heard Latham turn over as one awake and then he leaned over the edge of his bunk.

"Price," he called down quietly.

"What do you want?"

"I was a fool," Geoff apologised.

"I know it."

Geowff waited a moment to control himself and then forced it out: "Forgive me."

"Oh—all right."

Geoff turned back, less satisfied rather than more. His blood tingled hotly as he thought of this man having the power he now held over Margaret, and he, her brother, though she did not blame him, still was in some way to blame. He would never sleep if he thought of that; so he drove his mind back to reviewing the work he had been doing. An uncertainty came to him and he sat up.

"What's the matter now?" Latham asked sharply.

"I say, did you look over the rest of the tanks in the hold?"

​After Latham had almost finished his work, McNeal had told him to empty gasoline from a leaking tank into a whole one; and later had directed that all the tanks which might have been damaged by moving about boxes in the hold be examined.

"I looked at them," Latham said, irritated at the recollection.

"All right?"

"Of course they were all right."

Geoff subsided and sank back, and after a while went to sleep.

​

CHAPTER XIV

THE BURNING OF THE VIBORG

WHAT time it was Geoffrey could not tell when he was awakened; but all was still black dark and the wind was shrieking outside when a scream, a man's scream of terrible alarm, startled him up. He listened for it again and it came with a word this time:

"Fire!"

It rang through the ship, and almost before it was uttered Geoff jumped down. He had got into his bunk with his clothes on, so he was dressed all but for his coat; his boots were against his feet as he sprang to the floor. He stooped and pulled them on.

"Fire!" he shouted, and now the smell of it told him the alarm he heard was real. "Price, fire!"

Latham was sitting up in his bunk. Geoff's hand, going out in the dark, found the man's shoulder.

​"I heard it," said Latham, and shook him off.

"The gasoline!" cried Geoff as he straightened. "Three thousand gallons of gasoline!" He beat on the partition between his cabin and his sister's. "Meg, are you up?" he called. "There's fire, do you hear?"

"I heard," his sister's voice came back strongly.

Geoff rushed out from the cabin and on to the deck. The tramp of feet and the commotion already had told him that the men from the stern of the ship were about. A black cloud of smoke, which he smelled and felt rather than saw at first, was rising from the engine-room. Now the red glare of a flame burst out below it and he saw men's big forms battling with buckets. He rushed to them to help; the apparatus and hose of the patent fire extinguisher tangled his feet. The extinguisher tanks were emptied; they had been tried and had been inefficient. McNeal, seeing Geoff, bawled to him to get into the bucket line. Overside on the ice, where he had chopped a hole, Linn was filling pails and handing them ​up to the fire fighters on the deck. Geoff seized one of these and threw it on the fire and Latham came up behind him.

It made too many men emptying the buckets for the one man filling them. McNeal's hand grasped Geoff's shoulder as he came to the rail and pushed him over to the ice.

"Help Linn!" the skipper commanded hoarsely, and Geoff bent to his work beside the cook. As he filled the pails through the ice and lifted them up, he counted the men snatching them from his hands and rushing with them away from the rail. There were five; all the men were there fighting the fire. Margaret came once to the rail with them, tried to raise a filled bucket, found that she could not and swiftly got herself out of the way. Geoff looked about as he lifted up the pails and no longer saw her; then toward the bow he heard the sound of something falling on the ice. The flame flared higher and in the terrible blazing light he saw Margaret throw over bundles of clothing and disappear to the forward cabins again for more.

There was no choice, as far as safety might ​be concerned, between her task in the still unblazing forward part of the ship and his and Linn's post on the ice at the ship's side. The flames in themselves were not the direct danger to any one; it was the tanks of gasoline—the hundreds and thousands of gallons still stored in the engine-room and the hold. They made the whole ship one great bomb, an explosive of total destruction for every one anywhere on board or near by, if the fire reached those tanks.

The fire was blazing hottest now in the engine-room, where the tanks lining the walls nearest the fire had been emptied by the demands of the engine. But the fire, in spite of all the water thrown upon it, no longer was blazing in the engine-room alone; it was creeping into the hold and burning among the boxes where the emptied spaces had made a chimney for the draft. There the gasoline was stored in great twenty and fifty and hundred gallon containers all about the sides of the ship. The flames were not yet blazing against them, but they could not be kept away for many more minutes. The two thousand eight hundred gallons of gasoline—as he stooped and dipped ​his buckets into the icy water desperately and straightened and handed up his buckets, seized the emptied ones and stooped and filled again, Geoff remembered the exact estimate of the amount remaining—two thousand eight hundred gallons of gasoline would go together.

Fear, terror, made him weak, and he dropped a pail he had filled. He tried not to think of it, but to work, work, work. As long as the men going down into the flaming hold would stay, he would stay. Linn, the cook, beside him, bent again and again steadily to his task. They could scarcely see each other now for the smoke, and could not see at all the men who seized the buckets from their hands. These groped, choking and calling for direction through the thick, black cloud. Geoff called back and Linn shouted beside him, and hands blundered down and felt for the filled buckets, lifted the weight from the men on the ice and went away. Either Geoff and Linn were working better or the smoke so slowed the work of the others that the buckets no longer were being emptied as fast as they could be filled; a row of full pails stood unseized upon ​the deck. Geoff yelled to the cook, sprang up and seized the bucket he had filled and took it and flung it on the fire.

Big, heavy men blundered by him, choking or calling direction and encouragement to each other. McNeal was there in the thick of it—big, hoarse-voiced McNeal, steady and swift with his strong arms. Michaelis, the Danish mate, fought beside him. Geoff made out Brunton and Koehler; then no more. The fifth man was not there now—Latham. Geoff could not see; he could not be sure; any one might be lost in the smoke. What had happened to Latham?

McNeal, as he passed now, missed him too and called for him.

"Latham!" his voice shouted. "Latham! Where are you? Are you all right? Latham, answer!"

He listened while he seized another pail of water and threw it, but no shout came back in return. McNeal shouted again; and after him Koehler.

"I saw him going down the last time I passed him," Koehler called.

​"To the hold?" demanded McNeal.

"Toward the hold," Koehler shouted.

McNeal emptied the bucket in his arms and seized a coat which had been flung on the deck. He bound it about his head.

"Keep on with the water, boys," he called. "I'm going down to look for him. Geoff," he turned and commanded, "get your sister away! The Viborg goes any minute now! Get that girl away!"

He dived into the thickest of the smoke and disappeared.

It was plain indeed that the ship must soon go—in any minute, as the captain said. The fire was gaining steadily. How near it was to the gasoline tanks could only be guessed, but it must be very near. There was no longer a chance of saving the ship, that was clear; but the men with the buckets would not yet admit it. Geoff dropped his pail and turned forward to look for his sister. In one way he had forgotten her while he worked with the water; in another way he had been thinking of her. There was no use in taking her away from the ship if the others all were to stay and be lost ​with it. It would mean for her merely slow death alone by starvation or freezing if the men and the ship were lost, instead of the instant destruction and annihilation with them when the fire reached the gasoline. But he stumbled forward to find her. He groped through the smoke and his hands found a figure.

"Meg!" he called.

"Geoff!" her recognition came back.

"Get off the ship!"

"When you all do!" she returned to him firmly.

"We're going in a minute—right away. Meg! Think of the gasoline!"

"I know!" She had her arms full with a bundle she was saving; she flung it out on the ice. "But I don't go till you do!"

McNeal's voice shouting in hoarse, choking command rang over the ship.

"Everybody get away! Get away!" he bawled. "The fire's got to the tanks; they're heating. Get away!" And he disappeared again below.

"What's he going down again for?" ​Margaret called, fighting Geoff as he tried to put her away.

"For Latham—he's missing. Koehler thought he might be in the hold."

Geoff felt his sister's grasp become convulsive on his arm.

"Call him back, Geoff!" she cried. "Oh, call him back! Price isn't below. Call him back!"

"Where is he?" said Geoff.

"Call him up—call McNeal up!" she implored wildly. "Tell him Latham's off the ship. I know it!"

Geoff dashed back into the smoke clouding from the hold.

"Jerry!" he shouted. "McNeal! Jerry, Latham isn't there. Come up. He isn't there!"

"Sure?" came from the hold.

"Come up!" Geoff reached down and his hand caught McNeal's and pulled him up.

"Off the ship!" he shouted then, as he came up through the smoke. "Everybody away! Get off! The fire's got to the gasoline!"

McNeal stooped and picked up something from the deck; then going round the little ship he saw that no one else stayed. He drove Geoff ​off before him and jumped down on the ice.

The flames burst higher from the little Viborg and threw over the ice about a ghastly glow of flaring red, a glowing circle that showed the scurrying figures of the Viborg's little company stumbling away over the ice.

"Father away! Faster!" McNeal made a trumpet of his hands and commanded; and the flames ran up the masts from below and flared out in the rigging. Then a roar and flash from lower down, and a mighty burst of blue, exploding flame smothered over the red and hurled through the air all about great billets of burning wood. A greater burst of flame followed this; and forward and astern, as the first exploding tanks blew up and lit the rest, the gasoline flew into flame, shattering and strewing the little wooden ship into fragments of fire, which shot high into the Arctic night and were scattered in all four directions far over the ice, while the ship burst and burst again with the detonation of the tanks till the last blue eruption strewed the deck boards, bits of beams and spars of the Viborg into blazing heaps or streaking splinters spluttering on the frozen sea.

​

CHAPTER XV

MARGARET EXPLAINS FOR PRICE

FOR a moment after the last explosion, as for the instant following the bursting of the first tank, the rush of the flaming gas seemed to smother the fire in the wooden hulk. But at once the red and yellow flames leaped up again, finishing their work of destruction of the oil-soaked wreckage of the ship and the supplies left in the frame of the hull. Figures, fiercely fighting to save some of these, came close and hacked holes in the ice through which to dip the buckets they had kept and get water to throw upon the roaring blaze.

These men were plainly recognisable in the glare from the flame. Latham was among them, Geoff saw; but some one was missing; there were only six.

He recognised Koehler next to him, and was about to call to ask him who the missing man ​might be when the doctor dropped his bucket and demanded of him instead:

"Where's McNeal?"

The skipper was the one not there.

"Where's McNeal?" Koehler called to others.

They ceased their useless work and looked about. McNeal certainly was missing.

A little distance from the ship in every direction big splinters of spars, broken boxes, other material scattered from the Viborg by the bursting of the tanks, blazed and smouldered on the ice. Beside one of these glowing piles lay a dark figure stretched out which, as Koehler recognised with a cry, was the figure of a man. He ran to it and stooped, pulling it away from the burning wood beside which it lay, and with his hands the doctor crushed out the sparks that still gleamed in the charred clothing.

"It's McNeal!" he announced to the others. He bent and made a quick examination. "He's not dead!" The doctor voiced his relief. "He must have been struck by that." He motioned to the burning wood scattered by the explosion ​of the tanks. "It knocked him out and set his clothes on fire; but there's still life in him."

Indeed, while the doctor worked with him the skipper of the burning ship stirred. As sensation first returned to him he writhed with the pain of his burns and cried out; then recovering himself, he opened his eyes and saw his ship blazing, and about him the faces of his crew.

"Go back!" he screamed to them hoarsely. "Get back and save what you can!" His voice cracked as he tried by his tone to enforce his command. "Every man get back there. I'm all right."

The doctor could do all that might be done for McNeal at that moment; so the other five went back to the ship, leaving only the girl with the injured man and physician. Yet the return of the rest nearer to the ship proved useless. The whole hulk of the Viborg was in flames, devouring food, supplies and gear, and cartridges popped in the blaze. All about the ship on the ice were boxes or fragments of boxes and other material scattered by the explosions. Most of these piles were burning, so ​the five men went about smothering these fires before they returned to the ship to watch, helplessly, the burning down of the fire till they could come close enough to poke and rake under the charred timbers of the smoking ruins for such supplies as might not have been destroyed entirely.

As the light of the fire diminished, the slow, dull dawn of the Arctic day was breaking. Koehler, having done what he could for McNeal, left the skipper in Margaret's care and joined the others about the ruin of the ship. Solemnly and silently the six searched the charcoal and ashes. As the daylight strengthened, Geoff for the first time considered his own state and saw the condition of the others. He was blackened from head to foot with smoke and smudge; his hands had been burned, the pain shooting up his arms at every move, and his fingers twinged and gave him agony. But his burns were nothing compared to those of Brunton and Michaelis. These men, however, worked beside him without mentioning their hurts even to each other. Michaelis merely turned his face away when some twinge ​of pain threatened to make him grimace; and Brunton, defying his hurts to disable him, hummed loudly to himself between his gasps.

Amid a smouldering heap Koehler now found a box of surgical supplies and medicine, most of which had been saved by the heavy steel case. He brought it to where McNeal lay on the ice wrapped up in a blanket and watched by Margaret.

Doctor Koehler treated McNeal's burns, then turned to attend to the others.

As Koehler required each man to be examined Geoff found himself estimating each by his hurts. Not only Brunton and Michaelis but Linn too had suffered seriously. Koehler himself was burned about his hands and face. Beside these Geoff felt shame as he came up. Latham did not come for examination at all. As Margaret rose from beside McNeal, Latham met her and they walked a little away. Geoff followed them and came close as they halted. He heard his sister speaking.

"You were overcome by smoke when they missed you," she was saying to Price. "I found you unconscious on the deck and pulled ​you up and got you down on the ice. Do you see? I got you down on the ice and you came to yourself there. That was how it was, Price!"

Geoff came no nearer. At first but one idea possessed him. Latham had deserted when the fire began getting dangerous; and Margaret was arranging for him an explanation of his absence when McNeal, believing he was below, had twice gone down to the hold to get him. Then as Geoff heard Margaret repeat her explanation it seemed rather that she must be telling Price what really had happened, and that Price had been overcome, as she said, and confused as to what had occurred till she now told him. Yet as Geoff recalled Margaret's words in the last moment before they abandoned the ship the first idea again seized him.

Geoff retreated from them. Latham and Margaret turned back to the others and, rejoining them, repeated their tale, which no one questioned. Indeed, it was not strange if Price had been overcome by smoke. Rather it was remarkable that the others, having taken the risks they had, still had escaped. For another period Geoff's doubts were removed; and yet ​again they returned. He could not mention them to any one else either to dismiss or to confirm them. If Latham really had been overcome and helpless, Geoff could not be forgiven for suggesting another idea; and if Price and Margaret were now lying it was better to let the lie stand.

What did Margaret's action mean if she was lying for Price and, knowing he had run away, was defending him before the others? It must mean that Margaret, having given Latham her word to be his wife, already was acting in spirit as his wife. What he did, she did; his honour had become her honour; and she, as his wife, not only would not bear witness against him but would deceive and lie to save him.

As Geoff realised this he knew that his sister would not tell him the truth about Latham even if he asked her. Margaret, when she gave her word to Price, had drawn away from the rest, even from her brother. She made herself one with Latham. Nothing more convincing could have told Geoff that when she pleaded for continuance of the search for Eric Hedon ​it had been without hope of finding him for herself.

Geoff, his burns dressed, set himself with the others to gathering together and counting up such salvage from the fire as might prevent their calamity from becoming complete. Besides, there was immediate need of setting up a shelter for McNeal.

The very small part of their stores that had been sent ashore the day before of course had been saved. If these had been selected with any anticipation of immdiate disaster they would have been better chosen; as it was, the men had taken off the first boxes that offered. Several of these contained dog feed; also there were a few cakes of pemmican and a few cans of fuel. These cans were the greatest treasures, as all the oil left on the ship had been burned. One portable aluminum stove was recovered in repairable condition. Of other essential supplies they regained a case of cartridges and a few rifles not seriously damaged. All the clothing had been destroyed except the little Margaret had saved from the forward cabins. The lack of skin clothing was most ​serious, and scarcely less so was the loss of the skins and materials for proper tents. Every one wore the garments he had worn the day before; but these were not Arctic winter clothing. Moreover, McNeal's clothes had been burned on him; and Brunton's and Michaelis' outer garments were charred through. Inventory showed that after patching and repairing all that had been saved, there was scarcely a single suitable winter outfit for each person. There were blankets that might be used as substitutes for the lost tents.

The seven dogs that survived out of the twenty-six taken from Greenland had been put ashore the day before and therefore were safe, and so were three sledges. After all food and other supplies had been gathered and inspected it was estimated that there might be proper provision and fuel for the whole party for something like two months.

"Of course that means," Koehler said quietly, as they finished bringing up the salvage to the station on the shore, "that we can't go through the winter on what we have. ​We've either got to live off this land or move to land we can live on."

"Live off the land?" Geoff repeated, looking up over the snow-streaked black rocks. If the caribou hunt had seemed to him fruitless yesterday when it was suggested to provide a delicacy for the party, now such a hunt as a necessity was dismaying. "I don't believe even an Eskimo can live here."

"Then we have to find where they are living and live like them—get our clothing as well as food from animals."

By unspoken consent Koehler had assumed command of the party after McNeal was disabled. The skipper was conscious continuously now and quite clear in his head but entirely unable to move himself. When he was brought into the hut built from the wreckage of the ship the operation was agony. Koehler would not commit himself as to how long it must be before McNeal might be about. Brunton kept on his feet and did his best to work, but it was plain that he would be of little use for a long time; and Michaelis used only one arm. But as these injured men went about ​their work, neither on that day of disaster nor later did Geoff hear any man inquire or complain as to who might have been to blame, by neglect or otherwise, for the fire. And Geoff understood the reason for that. The one who was to blame, must remain with the small party now facing privation, perhaps death, on account of the fault which caused the fire. It must be more than enough for that man himself to realise it. To bear besides even the silent censure of the others would be unendurable.

​

CHAPTER XVI

THE STONE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS

GEOFF often wondered what the others thought; for though they might not once speak of it, they must be thinking. To Geoff himself the cause of the fire was plain. It had broken out just where the heat of a lamp or spontaneous combustion from the oil of cleaning rags would have ignited gasoline leaking from the tanks which McNeal had ordered Latham to examine, and which Latham had said were all right when Geoff reminded him of them after their quarrel the evening before.

All day they worked, building the shelter of stones and wood and walling it up with such boxes and cans of their supplies as they had saved. Later in the winter, in an extremity, they might become Eskimos in the plan of their shelters; but now, building from the material of the ship, they divided their hut into two rooms for temporary occupation. With not ​enough dogs for two teams, with McNeal helpless and Brunton and Michaelis in bad shape, thought of transport to another position was impossible for the present. Hopeless as the land looked, they must stay there for the present and do their best to live off the country. That day for the first time there was actual suffering in the party. As they gathered for meals—McNeal, who was unable to sit up, was fed by Koehler or Margaret—for the first time the food had become rations, dealt out no longer without stint and in amounts up to inclination or appetite, but in measured portions estimated by Koehler as each one's proper allowance. And there were no more generous scraps and leavings to throw to the dogs, but these were fed as carefully from the supplies set aside for them.

Joking about measured portions was better than silence in pretended disregard of the new situation; but the jests, though made lightly, brought up always a vision of the few counted weeks in which food was sure. The jokes became forced and soon ceased. That night, as the wind howled without, it blew the snow no ​longer against the stout sides of a ship, but through the crevices and cracks in the walls and roof of an unsteady hut; and Geoff at least shivered as he lay at the end of the row of the seven in the larger room. Of what was his sister thinking alone in her little room just beyond?

Definitely that day she had identified herself with Latham. By her attitude now she made it impossible for any one, even her brother, to take her part against Price. Geoff remembered his speculation of just twenty-four hours before as to how Latham would face real hardship. Well, apparently that was about to be tried out.

The next morning he and Price, as the most active of the party, took the best two rifles and set out on the hunt. The temperature was well down toward zero, but with the day the wind again had gone down. As the two tramped over the snow-covered ground the day was not distinctly colder or in itself more uncomfortable than some when these two had hunted together for moose in the woods of New Brunswick or of Maine. There they had spent many ​days as vainly, in respect to getting game, as the days during which they hunted here; but there was no sport in this hunting. In place of the missing sense of sport Geoff felt a thrill and stir at the thought of the needs of the party looking to his rifle for food supply; but this did not in the same way seem to seize Latham. Geoff could not tell how Price might have acted if they had found game; for day after day they went out, separated, and each hunted alone farther and farther from the camp, but returned always after darkness with nothing or almost nothing.

"Saw some funny little whitish things like calcimined prairie dogs to-day," Geoff reported as he returned weary after a long day which had taken him many miles from the hut.

"Good. Next time you see them bring them in," Koehler directed.

"What are they?"

"Lemmings."

"What're they?"

"If you must know, a sort of ground rat; but call 'em lemmings. It sounds better and we may be eating them."

​The partly crippled men had set hooks through holes in the ice. They got some fish, but only a few. There were no signs of seals and, therefore, no bears on that part of the coast. On certain days Koehler substituted for either Geoff or Latham in the hunt. He had no better luck except in the matter of bringing in lemmings.

Each day the hunters kept a lookout for cairns; and each night, as they returned, Margaret questioned them whether they had seen any heaps of stones or sign that any man had passed. She never forgot this; but asked now merely in the manner of a loyal friend deeply concerned. Geoff, watching Latham, saw that her thought of Eric now stirred Latham as never before. The fact that Margaret had promised herself to Price and had shown in her attitude that she considered herself cut off from Hedon, though they found him, seemed only to increase Latham's jealousy.

But no cairn and no sign of any man's passing was discovered except once. Geoff and Koehler had been hunting all day together. Mile after mile they had marched over the ​barrens down the coast without sign on sea or shore of any life or of anything that stirred except the snow as the wind circled and sucked it up. They had chosen a direction of travel not taken by either of them before, but along the coast where Latham had hunted alone.

"He's right about this shore." Geoff referred to Latham, speaking to Koehler. "It's the most God-forsaken bit I've dreamed of; and since coming up here I've added considerably to my material for God-forsaken dreams."

Koehler smiled. "I don't think any animal, much less any people, ever could exist here."

Koehler led on quietly. The coast there was deeply indented, with rises of rock on the capes making bold headlands to be seen from far off. The doctor pointed to a cape ahead.

"Take your glasses," he directed, "and see what's on that point. No, I don't mean to look for any moving thing," he said, as Geoff whipped out his binoculars. "Is that a cairn there or what?"

"A pile of stones certainly!" said Geoff, handing the glasses over; "but not exactly like a cairn. Do you make it out?"

​"No," said Koehler, screwing down the glasses and swiftly leading the way toward the object.

A heap of stones it certainly was, and an artificial heap; but also it was not a cairn. The snow had drifted up about it so as to cover two sides; then, coming close and allowing for the shape of the pile under the snow, Geoff saw what the object was.

"A stone house!" he cried in astonishment to Koehler.

The doctor nodded and went up to examine it. A stone house indeed it was, standing all by itself on that grim, rocky point. It was about ten feet square, with a dome-shaped top and a door that was drifted full of snow. Plainly it was old, very old, and had not been occupied—or at least it had not been restored or rebuilt—for many decades; or, since time works changes slowly in the Arctic, that stone house might have stood in that condition for a century as well as for a decade. If it had been there a century, so also might it have looked over that Arctic ice a thousand years ago. There was absolutely nothing to denote its age ​or when last it had been inhabited. There it stood alone on that dreary grey coast; and as far as the eye could see in either direction there was not another structure or sign of habitation. The utter loneliness and desertion of it in that white waste brought Geoff's shoulders up in a shudder.

"What is it?" he appealed to Koehler. "An old Eskimo house?"

The doctor shook his head. "No Eskimos ever built that or lived in it. You've seen their summer tents in North Greenland; and you know in winter they live in snow igloos."

"Then who built it?"

"The Eskimos say spirits."

"Spirits?"

"Yes. What does it remind you of?"

"Remind me?"

"Yes; think of Greeland."

The mention of Greenland brought recollections. The stone house was in some features very like some dwellings that had interested him. Now he knew.

"Doctor, that's the sort of house the old Norsemen built in Greenland. That's the way ​the lost people of Greenland built on the hills behind Julianehaab!"

"Exactly," Koehler said. "I wanted to know if you'd see it. It's been commented on before."

"About this house?"

"As far as I know no one's ever seen this house before. Of course, I mean white people, modern white people. But there are other single, lonely stone houses like this in other places in the North. Amundsen saw one; Stefansson passed one south of here; others have reported them. They all agree that these aren't Eskimo houses; and the Eskimos who see them say the same. And, more than that, you can't get an Eskimo to go near them.

"The Eskimos call these the stone houses of the spirits and say that powerful spirits, the tunrak, built them before human beings came."

Geoff stooped and broke with his hand through the drift in the doorway. He felt down through the snow to the ground and found some objects there. He wrenched something free and brought it up. It was a stone and he dropped it and felt under the snow ​again. He brought up another stone and then he found something different. It was frozen so hard into the ground that he broke it as he jerked it away. He brushed the snow and dirt away from it, staring as he tried to make out what it could have been. It was a queer little implement of copper and wood, a round wooden bit about two inches long with a wheel of copper at one end.

For a moment Koehler and Geoff studied if with bewilderment, trying to identify the little implement with some use that it might have had in the hands of the builders of the lonely stone house. Then Koehler took it and holding it in his hands pointed out its use.

"Geoff, it's half an empty spool of a film camera!"

"What?"

Koehler repeated. Geoff still gazed dazedly. With his mind filled with thoughts of the ancient people of Greenland he was slow to recognise his find. His senses came to him and he knew that any bit of wood not left recently must have decayed; he saw the object was what Koehler had said, half of the spool upon ​which is rolled the film of a hand camera. As he himself exposed a roll of film and prepared his camera for another, he had seen scores of such little wooden and copper spools. And here, lying in this hut was one of them, which must have been manufactured in the state of New York within a few years.

Some one taking a snapshot had used up a film roll there, broken the spool, thrown it away after changing films, and gone on.

Geoff stooped again excitedly as he realised that and struggled through the drifted snow for some other object. He found the other half of the spool, which had been broken off; then nothing more rewarded him.

"Who dropped that, doctor?" he demanded, as he fitted the two halves together. "Who could have dropped that? Eric Hedon? Doc, who if not Eric?"

"That certainly was the size and pattern of the spool that fitted our cameras on the Aurora," Koehler said.

"Then Eric Hedon's been here?"

"And that," the doctor looked at the hut, ​"is certainly the sort of subject he'd use his films on."

They separated and searched under the snow about the house. In front of the hut, on the edge of a cliff, there seemed to be something under the snow to have caught a drift. Geoff examined and found only some scattered stones; a few feet off another patch of stones. He was leaving them, when all at once he realised the relation of the groups. The patches of stones were not cairns, but they lay in a line north and south, fifteen feet apart, the larger to the north! They were not cairns, but they might have been. If cairns, they had been built in the Aurora arrangement.

Geoff called the doctor's attention to it and together they searched the piles of rock.

"If they ever were cairns," Koehler summed up as they finally ceased to search, "these didn't tumble like that one on Mason Land. These were thrown down."

Geoff met him. "I got that too."

Was all that loneliness playing tricks with them? The spool under the snow told that some white man surely had passed there ​recently. If it had been Eric, had he built cairns there? Who then had thrown them down, destroying or taking away any message that might have lain there? Latham had hunted many days in that direction. It was strange if he had not seen the hut. If he had seen the hut, why had he not mentioned it?

The same thought was going through both men's minds at that moment; neither had need to suggest it more plainly to the other. And that thought betrayed others. Geoff betrayed one.

"When we were looking for cairns farther north, how much ground did Latham cover that no one else went over?" he asked.

"A good deal," Koehler replied quietly.

What were they thinking of? Could Latham have found Hedon's cairns on the island to the north and destroyed them without reporting? Their present discovery might cut very deep, and again it might all be a mistake. They hurried back to camp and showed the spool they had found. Of the patches of stone Koehler directed that nothing yet be said. ​Latham had not seen the house; he had not gone that far.

"Then Eric did come this way," Margaret said simply, as Geoff gave her the broken spool. She needed to say no more to make plain that never yet had she thought of Eric as lost. The discovery of the film spool merely meant to her that they were upon the same route that Eric had travelled.

And the next day, if the hours of grey twilight about noon now could be called day, the party broke camp and set out for the south. The complete failure to find game in the vicinity made it certain that any move must bring betterment. McNeal still was in no shape to travel; but now he could bear being drawn on a sledge. Brunton was partially disabled, but he could hold the pace of the sledge travel if not called upon for much help. So the seven dogs were divided, four to one sledge with Michaelis to pull with them, three to a second with Linn to help. Brunton accompanied Linn to guide the sledge in emergency. Koehler, Latham and Geoff, without dogs to aid, made the team for the third sledge, ​upon which McNeal was taken. Margaret accompanied this sledge to care for the sick man and in tight places give what aid she might.

The amount of provision, fuel and equipment remaining required at the start an extra relay of a sledge. So as the sledges started south over the sea ice along the shore the next morning, on the first trips they bore food and tents. They set up the tents and built snow shelters about them on the site of the new camp; then, returning, the one sledge brought up more supplies and another dragged McNeal to the shelters made ready for him. They travelled with two tents; and after that first day they always left the helpless man in one of the tents till the other was set up and banked with snow at the next point in advance.

​

CHAPTER XVII

"WE SHOT A MAN"

BETWEEN the two tents they divided evenly into four and four at night. The arrangement which Margaret herself had suggested and which was accepted was that she and Geoff and McNeal and Koehler should share one shelter, while Latham, Brunton, Michaelis and Linn took the other near by."

"I can help best by taking care of McNeal," Margaret said. "I'm in the same position as a trained nurse with my patient and his doctor and my brother in a hospital. There's nothing out of the way in a girl at home doing what I'm doing among men; and much less is that the case here."

So she did her part and permitted no special consideration. Protest by Latham amounted to nothing; and in the days that followed Geoff witnessed more and more evidences of his sister's sense and strength. Physically—that is, ​in her inability to right a loaded sledge that had overturned—she was lacking in power in comparison to the others; but her endurance of cold and fatigue was at least as great as that of the strongest. In first assigning measured rations Koehler had made Margaret's allowance the same as that of the men; but immediately she had cut down her portion. Now with hard, continuous trudging and sometimes tugging the sledge over rough ice, she thrived on half the amount given to each of the men.

Slowly but steadily the supplies on the sledges diminished as fuel was burned and food eaten. Even the dim grey twilight, which was the day, was failing; and the weather was colder and colder. Koehler, superintending the packing of the sledges, got all the remaining provisions and gear upon the first two sledges and on the third with McNeal. There no longer was need for even one sledge to make a relay.

"This means faster going now!" said Koehler, trying to cheer them as he and Geoff and Latham got into the harness to pull.

Latham shook his head. "We'll be lucky to ​keep up the pace with one trip that we did with two."

It was merely admitting that they were all losing strength. The dogs, though still being fed their prepared ration, tired even more quickly than the men. Upon that march the three men with the last sledge soon caught up with Linn and his three dogs, then with Michaelis and his four, though at first these had had no trouble in keeping ahead. The day scarcely lightened to twilight; only the chance that the sky was clear and the stars shining bright gave them light to pick their way for the first hours of the march. At two o'clock, by the watch Koehler carried, the sky clouded over and light was gone. A blizzard with black, blinding snow suddenly blew down from the north. The three men in harness, who had been making the trail, were half a mile ahead of the other sledges when the total darkness came. At once they stopped and made camp. McNeal had been on the sledge with Margaret marching beside him. While they threw up a snow shelter they shouted to guide the three men with the other two sledges; but both passed ​and circled before, after three hours, the whole party was together again.

The storm kept up, and under such conditions further travel was impossible. Even at noon light failed to penetrate the clouds; the world without the two tiny tents, now made into snow igloos, was all black wilderness. Only a crack of yellow light sometimes shone on the snow, which covered everything, to prove it was really white and not all inky like the sky. The dogs huddled close between the tents, buried in the snow.

Sixteen days this great black blizzard blew, days separated from each other only by recording the moving of the hands of a watch. The eight, crowded in their cramped shelters, cooked their rations over oil stoves and ate their food three times a day at intervals indicated by the watches. When the third of these times was passed and the watch told that it would be twelve hours before cooking a meal again, they stretched out and tried to go to sleep.

But sleep during such nights was slower and slower to come. The insomnia which attacks those confined and inactive in the long Arctic ​night seized Geoff at once; it mastered also McNeal and Koehler stretched out beside him. From the other shelter Geoff heard the sound of talk and sometimes the shrillness of argument during the hours which the watches said were night; and he knew the men there were sleepless too.

They tried to fight this sleeplessness; and in those periods of the darkness still called daytime they tied sledge ropes together and each in turn went out and, with one end of the rope fast in the tent, tramped away from the shelter and up and down, holding the other end of the rope, till the cold exhausted him. But still this brought no sleep.

Margaret, clothed in her Eskimo garments, took this exercise like the men; but she alone did not need it. Through the endless periods known as nights she lay just beyond Geoff, quietly and evenly breathing. He put out an arm sometimes and touched her gently; then he lay a long time wondering about her.

In a way she was the cause of all the hardship suffered, the dangers passed through, the death possibly but little ahead. She was to ​blame for bringing the party up there, but no one of the men who had been on the Aurora—not even McNeal at any moment of his suffering—showed sign of regret that she had made them come. On the contrary, when Geoff heard them mention the matter at all it was with shame that it had required her faith and determination to return them to the North for the rescue of their missing comrades. She had shown to them that Thomas and Hedon had not died, as they had supposed, but both had lived to reach Mason Land; and it was at least possible that Eric Hedon still was alive. They still might find him; but if they did, with their food all but gone and with a more alarming scarcity of fuel, they could not help him much. If he had any supplies at all he more likely would have to aid them. But it was more probable that Hedon, if he still were living, had descended the coast of this Victoria Land months before and reached the whalers or trading ships which sometimes came from Alaska into Coronation Gulf.

The Viborg party could not hope to follow that far without more food and fuel. Their ​hope during each march, while they dragged themselves south along the coast, had been to find the Eskimos supposed to be somewhere on those shores. But after each march the Eskimos and the land and strip of sea where food might be found still were somewhat ahead—always ahead, vaguely retreating before them as they exhausted themselves in their effort to advance, mocking them and drawing them on.

To Geoff, born and brought up under conditions in which he never could have considered actual want or lack of food as possible, it sometimes was incredible that he and his sister and the others would starve or freeze, actually die, from having no food and no fuel to keep them warm, after the last small supplies on their sledges were gone. The cutting down of their rations and their other discomforts still often seemed to Geoff as a voluntary matter, which they could end or alter at their will. Then at other moments the terrible reality of starvation stared like a spectre before him; he felt himself weak, cold, dying, and the realness of their necessity, their desperate extremity, overwhelmed him. He could understand how these ​same experiences of feeling must be seizing Latham. The man's ten years' advantage of Geoff gave Price no advantage in ability to bear their present privations. Rather Latham's longer possession of every luxury and of power to provide for himself left him more unable to understand that now he was helpless, that unless some fortune that he could not control should favour the party, he would starve, actually die from lack of food.

The realisation of this, when it came to Latham, sometimes frightened him as it did Geoff, but at other moments it angered him and made him burst out with ugly exasperation and rage that he could be threatened so. Geoff overheard expressions of this sometimes in the words which came to him in the night from the other shelter through the snow tunnel that connected the two.

"What did you expect?" Linn's voice was saying sarcastically in return to something from Latham. "A hot and cold bath and coffee and cantaloupe in the morning, sir?" Linn now was mimicking the subservience of a club waiter.

​"Shut up!" commanded Latham hotly.

"Very good, sir. Thank you, sir. Very good, sir!" Linn jeered on.

Latham's reply was inarticulate; evidently it was some action, for Michaelis sharply cried: "Look out!"

At the same moment Geoff felt McNeal's bandaged hand grasp him.

"Go in and stop that!" the skipper whispered hoarsely; and Koehler already was moving. But before either got to the tunnel, Brunton, in the other shelter, had interfered and quiet, if not peace, was restored. Geoff lay back in silence, thinking.

One fact was absolutely clear to him: If the party got through all right, some one was going to pay Latham for what he had endured. Geoff tingled hot in the rage of his helplessness as he realised what must be the result if, after all they had borne and might still endure, they got home safe. Latham would hold Margaret to her pledge; of that he was certain. Whether or not they found Eric Hedon, or upon return learned that he had reached civilisation safely, Latham would require his ​recompense from Margaret; and Geoff knew that his sister would force herself to pay.

Yet she was able to sleep. What peace could there be in her mind? Did she believe now that she was to die and was she content to give her life in the search for the man she loved?

Twenty-eight hours later, or about nine in the morning of the second day after this, the blizzard at last blew out; by noon the stars were shining and by three in the afternoon the moon appeared and spread its clear green light over the snow-clad world. All the party—McNeal with help now could limp a few steps—stood out before the snow shelters and looked over the land and sea.

The wind had gone down; it was still and very cold, and in all the world about there was no sign or stir of life. Everywhere was the glistening, green, shimmering snow. But the land and that shore of the sea seemed as favourable as any they had found or now were likely to reach for supplying them with food. There was no sense in spending their last strength in pushing on to another spot as bare as this. So instead of harnessing the dogs to ​the sleds Koehler took the beasts out over the ice. Four of the seven had been trained by Eskimos to smell seal holes in the ice under the snow. The doctor had tried the dogs at other camps without success; but now they had to find something.

In the same spirit Geoff took one of the best rifles; Latham took the other; Brunton bore the third gun, which had been repaired. They had hunted for weeks with the knowledge that soon their lives must be dependent upon their getting animals for food, but their want no longer was in the future; it was upon them. Geoff, as he hunted, felt the gnawing of hunger and the easy exhaustion from reduced rations. He searched for sight of something moving somewhere with sudden, unforewarned brute readiness to shoot and spring after the shot, to rush upon his quarry and tear it to pieces.

It was the second moonlit "day" of this hunt on the edge of the ice, while Koehler still led his dogs over the frozen sea in the vain hope of smelling a seal, that Geoff at last saw something away to the south. He stood and stared, ​sick and trembling. The "buck ague" he had felt when, in Maine, he had sighted his first big game was nothing to the weakness that assailed him now as he made certain of seeing a large animal and watched it come on.

Both Latham and Michaelis happened to be within hearing, but he was afraid yet to cry a warning lest, after all their weeks of nothing, his eyes were tricking him and the object far away over the ice was only an hallucination. Then he called and pointed it out.

The others saw it too. It was very far away and indistinct in the moonlight; but they saw it climb up over a ridge of ice and slip down. It disappeared behind a hummock; and as Geoff stared he was beginning to believe that after all his eyes had tricked him when it clambered up and showed itself again. Instantly the three men hid. The animal was up the wind, so no scent from them could betray them. It was coming toward them and they crept cautiously to meet it.

"A bear!" Latham now confirmed Geoff's recognition.

"Bear!" repeated Brunton, almost in awe.

​The animal continued to come toward them, showing itself now huge, almost monstrous, as it stood erect on the top of an ice ridge and, seeming doubtful of its direction, looked round. Then it slipped down, disappeared and came in sight again, always closer.

The three hunters, creeping toward it with rifles ready, exchanged their guesses of the pounds of meat it meant. They separated a little to trap the beast and half surrounded it as it came on. It now was within long-range rifle fire; but the moon was low, and with the long dark shadows the light was tricky and they might overguess or underreckon the range by hundreds of yards. The bear still was coming toward them, so they could afford to wait.

Then the baying of a dog behind them brought them about; another dog gave tongue, and from the rear, where Koehler had been leading the brutes over the ice, five of the beasts burst by. They had scented the bear and were rushing to meet it. Brunton shouted to them loudly, but they went on.

The bear had not yet noticed the dogs. In another moment they must be upon him and ​either send him scurrying away or, if he stood at bay, he must destroy the hunger-weakened dogs as they came up. They were gaunt, slow, in no shape to dodge quickly or to give fight. The big animal came up over another ice ridge. The three hunters called to each other, crouched, aimed and fired almost together, then fired again and again. The big animal seemed not struck by the first fire; only the roar of the rifles or now the noise of the dogs seemed to reach him.

He stopped and stood erect, a straight, distinct target, and the rifles rang out again. The tall beast toppled and fell. He tumbled forward and slipped down the side of the ridge. As he slid slowly the rifles emptied to make sure of the game; then the dogs rushed close and were upon the animal.

"Got him!" Latham cried.

"Got him!" Geoff echoed, exultant.

Brunton wasted no words. "The dogs! They'll tear it up. Quick!"

The three ran, stumbling and slipping over the hummocks. The dogs indeed had reached their quarry. The men could hear them ​snarling and fighting together behind the hummock back of which the bear had slid. The hunters ran closer and saw the dogs. They were not tearing the animal that had been shot. Two of the beasts seemed giving battle to the other three to keep them away from the still heap on the ice; the two large dogs fought off the three and themselves made no effort to tear the bear, but circled, uglily snarling and watching the other brutes.

Brunton bawled to these to call them off; the dogs came a little away and then ran back. The bear now seemed not so huge as when it stood on the ridge. It was much smaller, and as the hunters came closer and the moonlight showed it against the snow it was not so white.

Indeed, it was dark and with one paw—which was not a paw at all but a skin-clothed arm—stretching away from the body.

"Man!" Geoff cried hoarsely, and stumbled forward. "A man! We shot a man!"

"Man!" Brunton roared as he ran up.

The dogs now were about him and obeyed.

"Man?" Latham cried.

They all now saw a rifle, which had been ​slung over the man's shoulders, lying on the ice beside him; the man was on his face as he had fallen. He was garbed in skin clothing of the ordinary type of the northern Eskimo; the hood covered the back of his head; his hands were in mittens. A dark blotch of blood, flowing from somewhere under his hood, made a pool on the ice; and he lay very still. Now that the men had come up the dogs stood quieted, watching. The two largest smelled beside the body and sniffed, and looked up and put their noses down and sniffed again. Geoff recognised these two dogs and remembered that they were the two of their teams which had been on the Aurora.

"A man with a gun!" Geoff cried, and with the help of the other two he turned the body over.

The limbs fell dully and the body was all weight, inert. The blood from the wound in the head had already frozen in a dark streak down one side of the face. The blood hid the face above the brow and about the chin; but it was a face that one who had seen it would not forget. The eyes were closed—the good, blue ​eyes always direct, eager, interested; the lips were tight shut and the cheeks were thin, but—there was no doubt of his identity.

"Eric Hedon!" Geoff gasped. "Eric Hedon! We shot Eric!"

He heard the hard breathing and the groan of Brunton beside him. Geoff stared into Brunton's face and then at Latham. The man stared back at him; and for the moment there was sense in neither face. Then Latham looked down again.

"It is Eric Hedon," he said.

How he had come there, travelling alone over the ice to the north, they could not ask; he lay heavily, a weight in their arms.

A figure approached from the direction of the camp; it was Koehler following the dogs. He had heard the shots and probably seen the quarry fall. The three men looked at each other; then, leaving Hedon to the others, Geoff rose and went to meet the doctor. Koehler began running eagerly, thinking that game had been taken.

"Good work, Geoff!" he hailed. "You got him?"

​"Oh, doctor!" Geoff called. "Come quick!"

Koehler caught the tone; it was the cry of need for his help as a physician.

"What's happened? Who's hurt?" he asked.

"Hedon!"

"Hedon?"

"Doctor—Eric Hedon!"

"What?"

"That's Eric! We shot him. He's dead!"

The surgeon came up and saw. The others had no more to tell him; he had witnessed all that they had done. He took the body from Brunton's arms and pulled the hood farther back. A gush of blood flowed over the frozen streak as the physician worked; he felt under the coat and looked up.

"There may be a chance!" Koehler whispered.

"Of life?"

"I'll see." The doctor felt skilfully over the wound in the head; then he looked up. "Unless you've hit him somewhere else he may live!"

"May live?"

"We'll know better in a moment."

​Silently Brunton aided the surgeon in a swift search for other wounds.

"That's all!" Koehler cried at last. "I believe the bullet only grazed his skull. I don't think it pierced at all or fractured. Maybe it only stunned him. The cold stopped the blood."

Indeed as they spoke together the wounded man seemed to be sensible of their presence. He stirred a little and his lips parted. Koehler melted snow in his hand and poured the drops into Hedon's mouth.

"Move his arms and legs a little to warm him," the doctor directed. "Not too hard; we mustn't make the blood flow."

He reached within his own clothing and tore off a strip for a bandage. Hedon opened his eyes. He saw Koehler bending over him and recognised him.

"It's only a frostbite, doctor," he said clearly. "I tell you I'm all right. I can go on."

He closed his eyes again. None of the others spoke. The words were familiar to Geoff. He recalled a story Koehler had told of Hedon on ​one of the sledge expedition from the Aurora when Eric had frozen his feet. Hedon was speaking again.

"Who's here, Koehler?" he was saying. "Who's here?"

"We came for you, Eric," the doctor said slowly and distinctly. "We came back for you."

"I know. Thomas is dead." Hedon replied. "I buried him; he——"

"We know about that, Eric," Koehler said quietly. "We went up there and found your record—at Mason Land."

"At Mason Land!" Hedon repeated. "You went there? Who went?" he persisted.

Koehler tried to quiet him.

Hedon opened his eyes and moved so as to look past the doctor and saw Geoff and Latham, whom he did not seem to know.

"Hello, Brunton!" he hailed weakly. "I know you came up for me, doctor," he continued. "I heard that. But—you're all right?"

"We're all right." Brunton, bending over him, seized Hedon's arm, and moaned.

​"All right, Jules. My fault," Eric murmured.

His mind was completely clear now, and he seemed also gaining strength. "Doctor, who's here?" he demanded.

"Jerry and Brunton and Linn and I came back for you," the surgeon said. "Here are Price Latham and Geoffrey Sherwood, who came with us too."

Hedon repeated the names. "And—and anybody else?" he asked. His eyes had closed.

Koehler realised that in some way Hedon had word of the expedition. He was in suspense before the question which he dared not put direct.

"Margaret Sherwood came," the doctor added. "She's here too; we're all well."

Hedon's eyes opened and stared. "Say that again!"

Koehler repeated.

"She didn't come!" Hedon denied. "They—they said she was going to; but she didn't come up here with the rest of you on the ship. Koehler, tell me she didn't."

"She came."

​"Oh, Koehler! She came? Where? Where's the—the ship?"

"She's not on the ship, Eric. She's with us now; she's near here."

The wounded man struggled to rise. The surgeon half helped, half hindered him.

"I'm all right, Koehler," he insisted. "That didn't hurt me." He struggled till they let him stand, then he staggered and Koehler supported him.

"Go back to camp for a sledge," the doctor directed Geoff. "You'd better say nothing to your sister till we get him nearer camp; there's no use bringing her 'way out here."

The instruction seemed to bring to Hedon better realisation of the girl's nearness. "What?" he asked; then collected himself. "Yes. Don't—don't—that is, do as he says. But wait a minute."

Geoff hesitated, standing before Hedon, who was now held up between Koehler and Brunton. His recollection of Eric had been only a boy's impression formed four years before; now he knew that he never had known ​Hedon at all. Impulsively Geoff caught Hedon's shoulder.

"I'm one that fired at you," he said. "Perhaps I hit; probably I'm the one that did. I had a good gun."

"I might have known you'd be hunting," Eric said. "I almost shot a man once. I should have been careful. The Eskimos told me you were near."

"You were coming for us?" Koehler was able to restrain the question no longer.

"Yes."

"You knew we were here?"

"Yes."

"How?" Latham asked that. The doctor checked himself.

"The Kadiack, you know——"

"Yes, we know her," Koehler said. "The Canadian exploration ship."

"Yes. She left Nome about the time the Viborg started."

"Then you know about the Viborg?"

"The Kadiack came into Coronation Bay"—Hedon motioned south—"two months ago. She's wintering there. She brought news from ​Alaska that you'd started. They said Margaret too. I thought something must be wrong about that; but," he appealed now to Geoff, "she's really here?"

"She's here," Geoff assured. "I'm Geoff, you see. I'm her brother."

"I know you now," said Hedon. "I only wanted to be—sure. Then, if she is here, don't tell her—that is, you won't worry her about me?"

"Go for the sledge," Koehler again commanded Geoff.

Geoff started off for the sledge, hearing them still talking behind him. A hundred questions, a thousand wonders, rushed to his mind, but he put them off and hurried ahead. Wherever Hedon had come from and whatever he had gone through, he seemed to be strong and in fair shape. The wound in his head, even if not dangerous, would have more seriously disabled a weak man. As Geoff was climbing the first ice ridge toward the camp he saw figures before him. An empty sledge pulled by a man who must be Michaelis and another figure which must be Margaret were coming ​toward him. Evidently they had heard the shots and afterward had seen that something was wrong.

"Geoff," Margaret recognised and hailed him, "what is it?"

He stopped, panting, and let them come up. As they climbed the ridge they could clearly see Brunton and Koehler half carrying Hedon between them and Latham walking alongside with the guns.

"What is that? Who is that?" Margaret cried quickly. She saw that another man was there and that the trouble was not an accident to one of the hunters.

"Margaret, it's Eric!"

"Eric!"

"He was coming to meet us."

She had stopped, but now she was running ahead of the others toward the group. They did not see her coming, or at least only Latham might have. They were picking their way over very rough ice. Then Hedon looked up. As Margaret approached in her Eskimo garments he could not have known her at the distance, yet something made him certain it was she ​before either of the men holding him saw her. He freed himself from their help as though they only hindered him, and with a summoning of his strength he sprang forward and toward her.

She ran to him with a cry; then, controlling herself, she called to him to stop, to wait, and she called to Koehler to catch him. Hedon laughed and tried to shake off his helpers as they seized him, then he stumbled dizzily. The surgeon had his arm round him and was supporting him when Margaret reached them.

She had pulled off her mittens as she ran; and now, as she saw how Eric had been hurt, she put her bare fingers to his face and touched him softly. In his dizziness he clung to Koehler, his eyes closed; and for an instant after he recovered from his faint he seemed not to dare to open his eyes, as though if he did either she must vanish or he could not bear more emotion at that moment. So he clung to Koehler as he felt her fingers satisfy themselves as to his hurt and heard her quick breathing.

"Margaret!" he murmured. "It's really you? Speak to me again. Let me hear your ​voice. All the time she had been examining his hurt she had been repeating his name ceaselessly: "Eric! Eric! Eric!" till it ran into a murmur.

"It's I—Margaret!" now she cried to him. "Eric, open your eyes; look at me!"

He obeyed, and for the first second of his sight of her face he seemed strong again, but again he reeled and was weak as he tried to stand without support. She helped to hold him while Michaelis brought up the sledge. They set him on it and supported him there.

"Margaret, why did you come?" he repeated to her again and again, as Brunton and Koehler and Geoff put themselves into the harness with Michaelis and as they slowly and carefully drew him on toward their camp. Margaret marched on one side, supporting him; on the other side Latham walked. "They told me—I mean the ship that came from Alaska—that you started on the Viborg. But I couldn't believe it, Margaret. I couldn't believe it even a minute ago when they said you were here."

"Every one else said you were dead, Eric," she explained; and once having said his name ​to him she must speak it over and over again—"Eric, Eric, Eric. But I knew you must be alive. I believe if every one else failed I must find you. So I came."

"And I knew you had come when they told me," he confessed; "really I knew it was so. For I knew—you!"

So they brought him to their shelters. As they took him in and as he met McNeal and Linn, for the first time he sensed that disaster had happened.

"Why, Jerry, what's happened? Old fellow, you've—why, you—what's happened?" he appealed. "Why, you're all here!" he realised; "Linn, you and McNeal." He named over the others. "Koehler, where's the ship? Whom have you left on the ship?"

The doctor, unable to put off the news longer, met him. "There's no one on the ship, Eric."

"You mean——"

Koehler still hesitated; then Margaret, as though that were nothing now that she had found Eric told him.

"The ship's burned."

​"Burned?"

"Yes, north of here—two months ago."

"What?"

Now that she had started she saw no way except to tell him all.

"It burned with almost all our supplies."

"I see." Hedon looked at McNeal, then about the circle of men, and then round the little shelter. "Where were you going?" he asked.

"South to find the Eskimos."

He winced.

"What is it?" Margaret cried with concern.

"The Eskimos are south of here—just a little. You've almost got to them. It was one of them told me you were here. But"—now he hesitated, and looked from the girl to the others, and then told them—"I was trying to get to you to turn you back to your ship as soon as I could. For the Eskimos themselves are starving. The hunt was bad this fall and they're getting almost nothing this winter. They've not got food enough for themselves. There's no living on this part of the country this year."

​

CHAPTER XVIII

"YOU FOUND HIS CAIRN"

THE news that Hedon brought struck the party with a shock. Margaret alone was unaffected by it; indeed, it was doubtful if she heard it at all. Geoff would have said that his thought also had been entirely occupied with Eric and the fact that he had been found. But now he realised that concurrently he had been thinking of more than that. His thoughts had been running thus:

Eric must have been living on the country for at least a year. He spoke of the Eskimos and mentioned that they had seen the party; therefore the Eskimos could not be far away, and must have food and fuel.

So the finding of Hedon seemed to mean at least the putting off of starvation. But his news, as he gave it in greater detail, was most serious. In the fall and winter of the year previous, when Eric alone came down the coast, ​there had been more than the usual amount of game of all kinds. But this year, as the Viborg party already had reason to know, was one of those seasons in the North when, for reasons unexplained, animals seemed to desert great districts.

Hedon's story of his own adventures was simple and direct. As he had written in his record at Mason Land, he had left the hut in the spring of the year before, expecting to travel directly south over the ice before it broke up. Crossing the island, he shot a bear, and before leaving land built a cairn at the southwest cape and left there a report which, if found, would save any relief expedition from crossing to the cabin. He then had six dogs in good condition and one sledge. The ice broke up early, but by careful travel he managed to work his way down to the large Prince of Wales Land before the sea was entirely open. There he found plenty of game through the course of summer, and with the autumn freeze-up he crossed the channel to Victoria Island.

As caribou were plenty that fall he had an abundance of meat for himself and his dogs till ​he got down to where the Eskimos were, and he lived with them till the spring on deer meat and seals which they caught. Then he travelled to the south shore of Victoria Land and found a whaler, the Nares, which had been wintering there. He was aboard this vessel on his way south by way of Alaska and the Bering Sea when it met the Kadiack at the end of the summer. The Kadiack had come directly from Nome and brought reports of the Viborg's starting up to Mason Land by the original route of the Aurora. Hedon immediately changed from the Nares to the Kadiack and returned with it into Coronation Gulf, where it was to winter. Taking supplies from the ship on his sledge, and accompanied by one Eskimo, Eric returned more than four hundred miles on his trail as rapidly as he could to meet any relief party that might have found his cairns and be following his route.

On this trip he lived on the country after his supplies from the Kadiack gave out. For a while he found caribou; then game of all kinds became very scarce. The Eskimos he met were in want and having a very hard time. He gained a village about thirty miles below the ​camp of the Viborg people, where an Eskimo hunter told him of seeing a party which he had supposed to be the strange white kabluna travelling south over the ice and later going into camp after the storm. The Eskimo had been afraid to approach and had hidden. Hedon took this man and started with him and a sledge; but as they approached the camp of the kabluna the Eskimo lost courage and deserted, so Eric came on alone.

Many details were not then told; but what was related made plain that at least one of the cairns Eric built on his journey south had been erected upon a shore visited by the Viborg after leaving Mason Land. Geoff could not be sure, from Hedon's description of the place, whether the cairn which had been missed by the searchers sent on shore had stood in one of the spots explored only by Latham. But Geoff learned that it was Eric who had visited and had photographed the stone house near the spot where the Viborg burned. Further, Eric had built the Aurora cairns where Geoff had discovered the stones strewed in front of the lonely little hut. The message left there told ​simply that he had reached that spot safely and was traveling on south well supplied.

There was no longer doubt in Geoff's mind, after he learned this, that Latham had found both cairns and destroyed them. But Koehler was watching Geoff as he questioned Eric; and the doctor checked the boy as he saw Geoff's hot impulse to turn upon Latham with his charge. Koehler drew him away from the others gathered in the little shelter.

"He knew Eric had crossed the sea from Mason Land safely when he tried to make us all go home!" Geoff cried.

"We don't know that. We can't prove it," Koehler cautioned.

"Who but he could have knocked down the cairns before that stone house?"

"Animals—bears sometimes destroy cairns."

"You know they didn't destroy those!"

Koehler made no direct denial. The men of the party, except Latham, were coming out of the shelter, where they all had gathered to hear Hedon's story, and entering the second hut. Latham and Margaret were left with Eric Hedon, and after a few moments Latham also ​came to the other shelter. As he appeared Koehler signalled to Geoff to make no charges before the others.

"Come outside with me a moment!" Geoff therefore invited Latham.

The man, looking at him suspiciously, complied. The two walked out in the bitter cold alone. The moon was just setting, but the last green rays showed to each man his companion's face.

"What do you want?" Latham demanded.

"Price, how did you come to miss Eric's cairns?"

"What are you getting at?"

"You know what I'm getting at!"

"Tell me!"

"I will!" Geoff defied. "I'll tell you I believe you found—or at least could have found if you'd decently searched—one of his cairns on those first islands below Mason Land."

"You confounded——" Latham began.

"Shut up! I told you that because I'm sure of it. Either you found his cairn there or you didn't look where you said you did. But pass that; I can't prove it; I just know it. I know ​you found and knocked over and said nothing about his cairns before that stone house where we found his camera spool."

Latham waited menacingly for him to go on.

"Koehler and I found the stones of the cairns under the snow. We thought then they were Aurora cairns, but we weren't sure of it, so we said nothing. But now we know Hedon built cairns there; and that you found them and threw them down and then came back and denied you'd seen the place when we told about the house."

"That's exactly true!" Latham caught Geoff off guard with the sudden admission.

"Then you did it?"

"I found those last cairns, and I would have told you so myself in a moment," Latham returned.

"Oh, you would?"

"Anywhere else and under any other conditions I'd knock you down for what you've said," Latham faced him. "Call Koehler out here and any one else you've told that to."

Geoff hesitated, then obeyed. The three stood together on the ice.

​"Koehler!" Latham addressed the older man and now disregarded Geoff. "He's been telling me you found the cairns by that stone house knocked down. I want to tell you now I found those cairns and got the message saying that Hedon had passed that point almost a year before. I took it out and knocked down the cairns."

"Well," questioned the doctor quietly. "Why?"

"Because I felt that in our condition at that time nothing should influence our movements but our own interests. I could not trust the rest of you not to be fools and try to follow up a man who'd been by twelve months before. I acted in the interests of all."

"I see," said Koehler quietly.

Latham turned away and went back into the shelter with the other men.

In the farther little snow hut Margaret Sherwood and Eric were left alone. He lay on the sleeping shelf of snow where Koehler had commanded him to remain after his wound had been dressed and where he had told his story. Beside him Margaret sat. Now that ​they were alone he tried to rise, but she, instead of coming closer to him, drew away. He sank back a little and gazed at her with a question.

"My dear!" he cried to her softly. "My dear! Why, what is the matter? What has been the matter, dear?"

"Don't say that!" she forbade him, and shut her eyes as he stared at her.

"What? Don't say that anything is the matter, Margaret?"

"No; don't say—don't call me as you used to!"

"I don't understand! I have seen that something is strange, of course, Margaret; but—tell me, what is it?"

"Help me to tell you, Eric!" she appealed.

"Why, Margaret! Help you—now?"

"Oh, surely you saw!" she motioned dumbly.

"Latham, you mean?" he questioned. "Yes, I saw he stayed here after the others. He—there were other things in the way he spoke to you, looked at you, looked at me. I see, Margaret; then I did not just imagine them?"

"Imagine them—no!"

​"What do you mean?"

"How can I tell you, Eric?"

"They mean"—he and she both had forgotten what the surgeon had warned them; he drew himsef up now straight and faced her in his direct demand, the blood running hot to flush his face and a ruddy spot welling through the cloths of his bandage—"they mean he has some claim on you?"

Then she told him, beginning with the report of McNeal and Koehler and the others who came back from the Aurora that he must be dead.

"Yes!" he nodded to her. "I knew that, of course. At Mason Land I realised that they would tell you that I was dead. That's why I went over the ice in June—after poor Thomas was dead—and didn't wait till the freeze again. Margaret, I had to try to get to you."

"And every one was sure you were dead—every one, every one, Eric," she went on. "They all said I must forget you; I must give you up; I must marry him. My father and mother had wanted me to marry him, you know, and so did every one else. They said ​even if you came back I should put you away, but that surely you were dead. But I wouldn't believe it."

"Go on, Margaret!" he cried.

"Then came the message of the wild goose!"

"What?"

She told him of that.

"What a strange thing!" He stared at her for a moment. "And how nearly true that was!"

"It was true; that was it, Eric! Oh, my love—forgive me, but I had to say it that once—that message made me almost mad. I knew it mightn't be real—that is, I knew it might not have been sent by you; but everything in my soul told me that what it said was true. You were safe. You needed help. And I had to send it to you!"

"My poor sweet heart!"

"Eric, you must see how it was with me. I sent at once for my cousin—Mrs. Chandler, you remember her. She told me I was a fool and scolded me. I could get no money from her. I knew I should be laughed at in the same way by other people, and I had no time to seek ​other people. I had to do what I was to do at once, you see that, else I could have no chance of sending a ship for you that year."

"Of course I see, Margaret!"

"Then Price and Geoff came. They were against me, both of them, as I knew they'd be; but I was desperate. Eric, you see I thought of you starving, dying—perhaps dying a day before I could get a ship to you, because I delayed. I wasn't afraid to risk myself to save you."

She choked and halted again. "I must know it all now, Margaret!" he commanded her.

"Then Price made his offer to me. I didn't have the money; I couldn't get it. But he would give it to me that day, that moment, if I would give you up in case we sent a ship and couldn't find you. So we made the bargain."

"The bargain?"

"Yes. We arranged that he would give me a ship to send to you at once. I could have it and go in it myself to Mason Land; only, if I failed to find you there, I was to give you up and—and——"

She faltered.

​"Marry him?"

"Marry him."

"But," Eric cried, "there you found——"

"That you had been there and gone and were to build cairns if you got to the islands south. We searched them week after week, but you hadn't got there. I couldn't show that you'd got there. He said that your own message proved you must be lost and he ordered the ship south. He said there was no use in our looking for you longer; that he'd filled his part of the bargain. So he claimed me."

"Claimed you?" Eric let her go and his eyes glowed.

"The men turned on him and refused to go back. Then he said I'd tricked him; that I meant to cheat him all along; that I used the men to force him to stay beyond his bargain. Eric, it was true; from his point of view it was true. I didn't care about anything else but finding you; I was afraid he might make the men go back. So I told him he'd done his part and I'd do mine; but he must stay and search longer, no matter how hopeless it was. Then he did."

​"And you—you?"

"He has my word that he can claim me when we get home."

For another moment in silence Hedon stared at her, then shut his eyes and swayed in a faint. She caught him as he was about to fall and laid him down gently on the sleeping shelf.

"Margaret," he murmured to her, "I know how you offered it."

"It was because I couldn't think of anything beyond finding you that I did it," she cried to him. "And now—Doctor!" she called. Doctor!"

Koehler came in. He took Hedon from her and after a moment sent her away. Though outwardly she was controlled, inwardly she was beside herself when Geoff came to her and told her of the cairns.

"What?" she cried. "How do you know Price had found one of Eric's cairns before he tried to turn the ship back?"

Geoff told her how they had found the cairns by the stone house thrown down, and that Latham had admitted doing it.

​"But that can't help me," she cried; "that was too late. Nothing he did then could change my word of honour given him. But before I gave my word on the ship, Geoff, can we know he had seen a cairn of Eric's then?"

Geoff had no answer for that. No one could answer that question but Latham; and already he had given his answer. He had seen no cairn and had known no more than any of the others when he had required and taken Margaret's word, which now bound her to him though Eric Hedon was found.

​

CHAPTER XIX

SUCCOUR FROM THE STONE AGE

REALISATION of her position came to Margaret then; but the immediate emergencies of the party at least prevented her dwelling upon it. Though Eric had brought word that the Eskimos farther down the coast were in want, their condition was not so desperate as that of the whites. The eight from the Viborg had fuel for barely another day and full rations for less than a week. Seals were the only animals that might be got at that time of the year, and they furnished both food and oil. But the Eskimos had told Eric that the shore upon which kabluna had encamped was absolutely devoid of seals, and this had been shown to be true. The Eskimos had built their snow village on the ice of the best bay for seals, which was some thirty miles to the south.

Preparations were made at once, therefore, to push on to that bay; and immediately after ​moonrise twelve hours later the party started south. McNeal insisted on walking for a while, though the sledges now were very light. Eric had regained enough strength to hold the slow pace of the sledges.

He had lain in the larger of the two shelters, where Latham also slept. Margaret had not seen him alone again, and now on the march there was no time to talk, but she did not need to have him tell her how he felt. She had told him that she considered herself bound in honour to Latham; and he would do nothing and would take no attitude toward her which demanded breaking her bond. But he avoided Latham, as Latham too avoided him. She could see that Eric at times tried to conceal before the others his repulsion for Latham; but he did not succeed.

It was another moon day of great cold, but there was no wind. The march took the trail of Eric's tracks the day before, and the party came upon the marks of the Eskimo who had turned back with the sledge. They camped where Eric and the Eskimo had slept the second night before and moved on with the next ​rising of the moon. The trail took them out now over the sea and round a point beyond which lay a long bay. On account of the protection of the high shores on three sides, the water seemed to have frozen more smoothly there than elsewhere. Little rough ice appeared and few ridges, and all was covered deep with snow. As the nine white people turned into this bay, far ahead over the smooth snow showed a score or more of tiny snow roofs, and scattered away from these in every direction were dark spots—the Eskimo seal hunters watching for seal to spear for food for their hungry people.

The nearest of these figures sat, each upon a block of ice or snow; each held a spear in hand and bent with eyes fixed upon the ice in front of him where he was watching a hole to which a seal might rise to breathe. Apparently the Eskimo who had accompanied Eric almost to the camp of the kabluna had warned the hunters of the possible approach of strangers or at all times even in that remote and lonely desolation the Eskimos kept a sharp lookout; for as Eric led into the bay, alarm ran from man to ​man scattered over the ice till some thirty figures swiftly gathered, men armed with spear and bow and long knife, and standing, watching, silent and wary, the advance of the strangers.

"In this bay are just so many seals—enough, the Eskimos hope, to give them food to scrape through the winter," Eric said quietly as his party halted. "They don't know where other seals may be got; and they look upon those here as their own, as we would a herd of cattle. I'll go forward to meet the hunters; they know me. Some one else ought to go with me as a sample of the rest of us."

"Unarmed?" objected Latham, as he watched Hedon put down his rifle.

"Koehler or Brunton or you, Geoff, you'll go?" Eric disregarded Price.

The surgeon had already stepped forward; so he and Eric advanced slowly, their empty hands held out away from their bodies. Three Eskimos, in similar posture, advanced to meet them. Would the savages, themselves starving, take in nine strangers to share with them what they had? If they would not—but the ​parley seemed progressing favourably. The Eskimos, assured that neither of the strangers had knives concealed, approached and talked. Hedon stayed with them while Koehler came back.

"They aren't taking enough seals each day to feed themselves; they're living now on the last of the caribou meat they got in the fall," the doctor reported. "But they'll share with us while it lasts."

Hedon now motioned his party forward, and at the same moment the main body of hunters moved to meet them. Flanked on both sides by gaunt, swarthy savages bearing seal spears and long knives, the nine white strangers entered the Eskimo village.

Though Geoff knew that Eric recently had visited these people and found them not only friendly but hospitable, and though Koehler now had reported their offer to welcome the whites and give what aid they could, Geoff watched the Eskimos wonderingly as he halted with his companions in the snow village. The little, rounded dwellings, some score in number, stood in a rough crescent; before them the ​women and children of the hunters were grouped—silent, staring but smiling as the strangers approached and were proclaimed by the escort as visitors of good intentions about to become guests. Half famished and dying dogs skulked about and bristled at the smell of the visitors and their foreign dog teams. This was one of the tribes that had never seen kabluna till Eric Hedon came on them; but they had heard of the whites from other tribes.

Kabluna, in the reports of these people, were strange men with ways of their own. Sometimes they appeared in possession of monstrous wealth and in large ships well supplied, and then they gave to the Eskimos only in barter—a needle for a fox skin, another for a seal. But at other times the kabluna, starving and with empty seldges, sought out the Eskimos for fuel and skins. This was one of those times now; so, as other tribes had done before, the Palugmiut offered the hospitality of the village. Some of the hunters, putting down their seal spears, at once sent for their snow-knives; others who had armed themselves with bows and arrows at the first sight of the ​strange party now came from their igloos wearing building mittens. An old man, who seemed to possess authority or at least to be entrusted by the others with the direction of the housing of the strangers, discussed with Eric and Koehler where the dwellings for the kabluna should be erected. Meanwhile other Eskimos who had been in the escort to the village spoke to their women; these advanced now, smiling and curious, to closer, friendly inspection of the strangers and then retreated to their houses where cooking was commenced.

The Eskimo who had been talking with Eric and Koehler chose a spot at one end of the crescent of the village where the builders began cutting blocks for the new igloos. Eric returned to the others of his party.

"They will not let us help with the building," he said. "They will put up two houses for us; and they have invited us to go to the houses where meat is now cooking for dinner. They have been apologising for having little fresh meat; they have been depending recently upon the last of the frozen caribou meat saved after the fall hunting; but some of them have caught ​seals this morning." He turned to Margaret. "After our houses are finished, we will probably prepare our own food as we've been doing. Shall I make some excuse for you so you won't have to eat now?"

She shook her head simply and, as one of the Eskimos motioned, she moved off with Geoff. Latham followed her. The others went with different hosts.

Always themselves accompanied by their women in their travels and having no knowledge of any other people, the Eskimos showed no greater surprise or curiosity over the presence of Margaret than over the appearance of the men; indeed their expectation, as well as Geoff could make it out, seemed to be that so large a party of strangers would prove to include several women. Geoff went on hands and knees into the snow hut after his host; Margaret followed; Latham came afterwards. As Geoff entered and stood up, crouched a little—the snow-block dome was not quite high enough to permit him to stand erect—he gasped in spite of himself.

The snow house was snug and warm ​within—much warmer than the rudey improvised shelter which for the last weeks had served to protect the Viborg's people. Well built of evenly cut and closely fitted blocks, the inner walls had become lined with a layer of ice as the heat from the stone lamp, suspended from the dome, had started to melt the snow. Above the burning lamp, a pot was held by a thong; the pot was boiling; it was full of seal meat. But even the hot odour of this fresh meat cooking could not remove from Geoff his first shock as he entered the igloo.

Although he had known, since hearing Eric's account, that the Eskimos themselves were in want and although he had himself seen the condition of Eskimos in Greenland, still the recent struggle to reach some Eskimo village—the constant counting upon the gaining of such a village as a sanctuary promising at least temporary security—had made him picture an Eskimo house as a more definite improvement upon the rudimental shelters which he had shared during the retreat from the Viborg. But except for the tight, well built walls of snow which made this igloo really warm and ​except for the fresh meat boiling over the lamp, this Eskimo home could offer nothing. It was slightly oval—six or seven feet in one diameter and eight or nine in the other—and had on one side a low bank or shelf a couple of feet high and covered with caribou and musk-ox skins. This, the sleeping-shelf, was the only arrangement which might be called furniture unless one so considered the spears and spare bows stored overhead, the racks from which drying clothing hung and the pots and stone and beaten copper utensils for cutting up and cooking meat.

But, if the Eskimos possessed less than Geoff had expected, they offered to share what they had in no smaller spirit than that related of them. The woman who watched the pot boiling over the lamp smiled at each of her guests as they entered and, after nodding and staring about, seated themselves on the edge of the sleeping shelf. Two children who seemed to belong in the house crept in; and the hostess, removing the pot from the flame, passed portions of the meat about. The food was fresh, well cooked and generously given. So that ​dinner was supplied to the kabluna as guests of the Palugmiut; afterwards, as long as the strangers remained, they would have the right to share in each day's catch as members of the Eskimo community.

Koehler explained this when the new igloos were finished and the party of nine gathered in the larger one. A native stone lamp with animal oil burning in it hung from the roof, replacing the more wasteful oil stoves saved from the ship; the snow house was warm and tight.

"The Eskimos will include us, for a time at least, in their daily distribution of food. Every one who catches a seal will send some meat to us, as they do to others in the village who make no catch. When the fresh meat is insufficient, they will distribute to us, as to themselves, some of the stored caribou meat. Of course we are expected at once to try to provide for ourselves. And of course if we happen to have luck we must share with them; but we'll probably not get anything like our portion at first. We may learn. Shall we start now our watches at the seal holes?"

​So on that day upon which they reached the Palugmiut upon the bay of seals, Geoff with Eric and Latham and Koeher and the other men from the Viborg joined in the watch for seal. At that season the seal, of course, were living under the sea ice. As this ice had frozen over the bay the seals had gnawed holes in it for air, and as the freezing continued had kept these holes open by gnawing. These holes were now hidden under the snow, and the Eskimo dogs were used to smell them out. Beside each hole thus located a hunter stationed himself, sitting silent on a block of snow, spear in hand, ready to stab instantly when an animal rose. If the blow missed, the seal disappeared; if it struck home, the hunter had to hold the killed seal with his spear, while with ice-axe or knife he chipped the breathing hole large enough to pull the seal through.

Day after day, in the manner of the Eskimos, the eight white men sat, each on his block of snow, seal spear poised. Seal hunting offered their only hope of obtaining food, their only way of keeping alive. The feeling of incredulity that such a desperate necessity could ​be real now no longer came to Geoff, and he sould see also that no longer it came to Price Latham. Instead of this seeming some strange, impossible, outlandish dream of slow starvation, which one could banish merely by shaking oneself awake, now it was established as the only actual condition of existence.

As Geoff thought of his life at the club and at home, that life sometimes seemed not six months but six thousand years away, and not in the past but somehow far in the future. Among men of the stone age—living or dying according as to whether they were able to stab a spear through the brain of a seal as the animal rose for breath and before he dived again—Geoff and the rest had become as men of that age, with civilisation thousands of years ahead. They were not just a few weeks' journey north of the cities of America and Europe. They were living in Britain and France in the ice age when the glaciers crept down and filled the valleys, driving before them the men of the ice and snow—the Cave Men of a time so long ago that it was called by the name of a geological era. The bones of the musk-sheep ​lie in a trail across Europe following the prehistoric camps of the Cave Men, and the skins of the musk-ox now helped to furnish the sleeping shelf of snow on which Geoff lay. The stone arrowheads, the sewing-needles, the amulets and necklaces of carved teeth and the horn daggers, shown in museums as relics of the Cave Men of milleniums ago, were merely the ornaments and weapons of the families in the igloos there on the bay ice; the rude sketches of bears and foxes found on the old paleolithic tusks seemed simply the sketches of these Eskimos scratched on their walrus ivory.

The moon waned and was gone; and in the endless darkness of the arctic night, with only the aurora to light the sky, the hunters shivered and froze their faces, hands and feet as they sat at their seal holes. Each hunter, Eskimo or white, stayed out in the terrible cold as long as he dared; but all together brought back not enough meat to feed the village; and the few seals that were procured were nearly all caught by the Eskimos. The dogs, except a few spared to find out fresh seal holes, now were let die unfed; the people stared at each other ​from sunken eyes and their children cried with hunger. Yet the Eskimos shared alike with each other and with their white visitors.

The moon came back; but though the Eskimos moved their village once and then again to try different parts of the bay, the seal hunters found little success. The cold more quickly numbed men not half fed. The white hunters stubbornly stayed out through the moonlit period; then they retreated into their igloos, which the Eskimos' seal oil kept warm.

​

CHAPTER XX

CAN I STARVE LIKE A SAVAGE

FIVE of the men were gathered in one of the snow huts after an absolutely bootless day.

"We've got to get out of here," Latham said desperately.

"Where to?" McNeal questioned practically.

"We can't get through the winter here."

"Then we can't do it anywhere else. This is the Eskimos' country. They know it. If we can't get along with them giving us food, we'll be worse off by ourselves with no one to help us."

Eric Hedon looked about; he had been warming his fingers, which were frostbidden badly.

"It doesn't seem to me a problem as to whether we ought to get out," he suggested quietly. "I should say it was rather the ​Eskimos' problem as to whether they ought to put us out."

"They would if they were even half civilised," Geoff said grimly.

"Found that out?" Eric looked at him.

"Some one's got to make a try for the ship—the Kadiack," Latham persisted.

"What for?" asked Hedon.

"For help, of course."

"For himself?" Eric returned.

"What do you mean?"

"The Kadiack's over four hundred miles from here," Hedon replied patiently. The discussion was old. "Before any one gets there and back we'll need no help or be beyond it."

"Besides," said Koehler, "how many days' supplies for eight people would a sledge party coming from the Kadiack four hundred miles away have left when it got here? And what would you live on while you're getting to the Kadiack? That's the first thing."

"To-day some of the Eskimos had luck," Latham replied. "There'll be more than a sledge supply of meat and oil left to-night."

​Eric turned upon him directly. "Exactly what do you mean by that?"

"That the thing to do is for some one to take that food and fuel and make a try for the Kadiack," Latham replied.

"Take it?" repeated Hedon. "How?"

"Take it," iterated Latham indefinitely.

"When you ask the Eskimos to give you that food and fuel, the first that they've had ahead for weeks, what's the inducement you're going to offer them? Assuming they give you enough to see a man through to the ship, does he bring back from the Kadiack relief for all the Eskimos too? Or when we get our own food from the ship is it the idea to say: 'Thanks, savages, we've finished your food. Here's some of our own for us. Good-bye'?"

"Of course we can't bring enough for them," Latham answered angrily.

"Then how do you get their meat to take you to the ship?"

"Any way!" Latham defied.

You mean?"

"We'll starve here!"

​"Then," Koehler cut in, "let's try to starve like gentlemen."

Hedon shook his head and smiled. "You know better than that, doc," he said. "Let's try to starve like savages."

"Like savages?" Geoff repeated.

Hedon looked away. "If you've read the unexpurgated accounts of our own people starving in the North you'll know what I mean, Geoff. If we come to it—and I don't say we will, for we'll stand a lot of starving yet before we'll be finished—but if we do come to it, let's try to do it decently and as part of the day's work, like Eskimos."

Some one without the igloo shouted and entered, and the daughter of a Palugmiut hunter stood before them, bearing portions of a freshly killed seal.

"Here's our hand-out," said Geoff, as Linn took the meat and put it into the pot suspended by a cord over the oil lamp.

Geoff went into the small igloo close by, which had been built for him and his sister. He roused her, and after they returned to the large snow house the nine guests of the Eskimos ​dined, not with uniform delicacy, on the donated meat. The messenger who had brought the meal went out; and soon two seal hunters, old men, entered.

They squatted before their guests, one silently shaping a new wooden shaft for his spear, the other speaking with Hedon and Koehler, who understood his tongue.

"What have they come for?" Latham asked nervously.

"Don't worry," Koehler returned; "they haven't come with an eviction or to cut off our credit at the butcher's."

Eric spoke to Margaret, indicating the hunter working on his spear. "I asked him to come and show us the next time he was shaping a handle."

"Why?" She observed the man with closer interest.

"Look at his blue eyes. No Eskimo of pure blood ever has light eyes. See, his hair is not black, as usual. There's been no contact of this tribe with the whites in any historic time."

"Then how does he have light eyes?"

​"We can only guess; but perhaps the spear handle will tell us."

The Eskimo, pleased with the white man's interest in his work, looked up and then continued his cutting.

"You see, Otto," said Hedon, continuing with Koehler a discussion they had begun before, "counting this man, there are at least three people in this tribe with eyes and hair lighter than any true Eskimo can have. Stefansson met and described a number of such types in tribes to the south of here. He was positive that the blond Eskimo he met had not come in contact with recent explorers; and if we didn't know that these people had no memory of meeting white men, the age of these three light-eyed people would tell that they got their European characteristics far back. One of them is this man's mother."

"European characteristics?" Geoff repeated.

"Watch him," Eric warned quietly.

The Eskimo, having finished the shaping of his spear handle, turned it under his stone knife, and carefully, slowly and with precision carved upon it a few strange lines. When he ​had finished it he nodded and extended the spear handle to Hedon. Eric studied the marks and with a smile handed the wood to Koehler.

"What are you two looking at?" Margaret cried.

"What do you make of them, doctor?" Eric appealed.

"Runes!" Koehler announced.

"Runes?" Geoff asked.

"Runic writing—the kind of characters carved by the Norsemen at the time they were in Greenland!" Hedon cried. He took back the spear handle and, turning to the Eskimo who had carved the characters, he began asking him some questions.

"The writing of the Norsemen in Greenland?" Geoff stared from Hedon to the Eskimo.

"What are you asking him?" Margaret said to Eric.

"I was trying to find out if he knew what the marks mean. He says he doesn't. He didn't even understand that the marks should have any meaning."

​"Then why did he make them, did he say?"

"He was taught to; that's all he knows. In his tribe long ago—he's one of the survivors of a tribe that was almost wiped out by starvation; and he came to the Palugmiuts when he was a boy—he had been taught to scratch his spears that way."

"Then what do you think the marks mean?"

Eric looked at Koehler, who took the handle again and studied it. "They aren't real runes, of course," Koehler said conservatively. "They're only marks that suggest runes—as you'd expect runes to be made if they'd been taught from one generation to another after their meaning was forgotten. But when I first saw the marks they made me think of runes I'd seen on stones in Greenland spelling the name of Sigur."

"Sigur?"

"That was a powerful family in the old Norse colony there, one of the families that disappeared."

The man who had made the marks on the spear gazed about the circle, and seeing that his work had interested them so much he put ​forth his hand to receive his spear back. When it was returned to him he looked down at his carving and studied it patiently, and then, more puzzled, gazed up at the strange white people and smiled. His Eskimo companion rose to go and the spear-maker followed. For a moment, before crouching to go out through the low snow tunnel of the igloo, the man straightened and stood before his comrade, who was a dark-eyed, black-haired man of the short Eskimo type. The blue-eyed man was not much taller; but for the instant he seemed to tower over the dark-eyed native, and his figure was straighter. Suddenly there seemed a sternness, almost a majesty, in the spear-maker's bearing entirely absent from that of his companion. He looked once more about the company staring at him, and as he met their gaze a gleam of fire flashed from his eyes, his lips tightened and straightened. Then he stooped and on all fours crawled after his companion out of the snow hut.

The whites, left alone, looked at one another. Had they seen there before them a son of the ​old vikings of Greenland? If that was so, what a story was told in those scratches on the handle of the spear! First, as the wrecking of the ships cut off communication with Europe, the intermarrying and mixing of the Norsemen with the Eskimos; then, for reasons which no one yet could know, the travelling of white men with the Eskimos away from the shores of Greenland. The lonely stone houses scattered through the Arctic next took up the story. The Norsemen had mingled with the Eskimos and moved to other lands with them, but here and there a family still tried to keep up the traditions of their race and built a house of stone, which had stood through the centuries after the snow igloos of the Eskimos, which had been built beside it, had melted with the first summer's sun. Then, though the houses of stone still stood, no one lived in them any longer. The sons of the men who had built them lived in the igloos of Eskimos and stared at the stone walls and, calling them the work of spirits, feared to enter. But some viking's determination to keep known his name still persisted. He had carved it on his spear, and when his son ​shaped a spear he copied the carving. Then his son in turn did the same, and so on and on down the generations the custom held, and the men still bore their name upon their spears centuries after the name itself was forgotten and with it all tradition of the past of the people.

At least, that was the way in which Eric Hedon that night spelled the story of the spear. Whether it might be true, or only half true or not true at all, for an hour it furnished warm but friendly discussion and took minds away from the fears of famine. Then those thoughts returned.

Geoff, in the igloo with his sister, lay awake again for long hours. Eric undoubtedly was right; there was nothing they could do to relieve their situation. If all the food in camp were given them it would not be more than enough to enable one man to reach the Kadiack far off at the other end of the land. And over that distance no relief party could bring in sledges from the ship more food than would be needed to supply the sledge drivers themselves. The party must pass the winter where ​they were, trusting to their guns and the spears of the Eskimos to supply them.

Geoff wondered whether he could, as Eric put it, starve like a savage. Though for many weeks now he had recognised that starvation might be close ahead, still he could not realise it as a way for him to die.

In the Eskimo life, death by starvation was an any-day possibility, constantly and calmly considered. And when such death was inevitable it was met by these savage men with resignation. Geoff knew it was true, as Eric had said, that in parties of civilised men, starving in the Arctic, unspeakable horrors were done. As he lay in the dark he thought of Rae's report of the finding of the final camp of the last of Franklin's men who starved; of the subjects silenced in the public reports of some of the great expeditions; of the record left by another captain of the discovering of a plan among his men to kill their Eskimo hunters when they brought in no more food, in order that the remaining provisions need not be shared with those who had provided them. As he read the account at home such things had ​seemed to Geoff impossible for civilised beings to conceive. Doubtless even a few days before they were planned or done those deeds had seemed as impossible to the men who planned or carried them out.

Now he knew that there was nothing in a man's experience in civilisation to make any one certain what another might or might not do in the last savage struggles for self-preservation in starvation. Before the end would that party of whites determine to die decently? or must some one break under the test of the savage?

​

CHAPTER XXI

LATHAM'S ANSWER

JUST nine days later that question was answered. The meat of the seals killed by the Eskimos on their lucky day had been eaten; and for a week almost no food was to be had. Then came another day of fortune for the Eskimo spearmen at the seal holes, and for another twenty-four hours there was to be food and to spare.

The extra meat was stored away, and after a full gorge the Eskimo hunters slept soundly. The next morning, when they awoke, their meat—or most of it—was gone; and as the alarm spread round the village it was found that two men were missing to explain the absence of the meat. One was an Eskimo—the man who carved the runes on the handles of his spears—the other man missing was Latham. With them had gone a sledge and four of the dogs that had been kept in fair condition.

​Their trail over new snow which had fallen told plainly the tale of their departure. The man who toed out as he trod had gone first with the dogs and the loaded sledge; after him—how far behind him could not be told, but after him—followed the footsteps of an Eskimo.

Eric Hedon and Geoff, with two of the Palugmiuts, took the trail and followed it as fast as they could. Now it became plainer, by the proof that the Eskimo had been running and the other man had not, that the two men had not set out together; now it was plainly a case of pursuit, with the first man knowing that he was followed and trying to urge on his team. But the dogs, ill-fed, were tiring. Half a mile farther and part of the load of the sledge was discovered—seal meat and a bag of oil lay on the snow. There was nothing to show whether these had been thrown off to lighten the sledge in the race or whether they had fallen by accident; but the sledge seemed to have travelled faster from then on and the pursuing Eskimo apparently ceased to gain. It was another mile and more before anything else showed on the snow; and then it was not ​the carcass of another seal but the form of a man.

The Eskimos saw first from far off that this man had been of their people; it was the pursuer who lay dead on the snow with the stain of his blood about him. He had been shot through the head from close by; and before he died there had been a struggle. His body was frozen, for he had lain there some hours; but before falling he used his spear—the seal spear with the handle which he had carved before the whites in the hut. Only the shaft of the spear was in his hand; the head had been broken off.

The two Eskimos, straightening after examining the body of their tribesman, muttered to each other and looked toward the white men. Hedon spoke to them quietly and pointed to the snow beyond.

Geoff, following the direction, saw spots of blood on the snow. These accompanied the track of the sledge and the dogs and the man who went on; the two white men and the Eskimos followed them. Now the blood-spotted trail showed footprints of a man weakening and staggering; they climbed a little ridge and ​then stopped. The track of the sledge and of the dogs continued; but instead of the man's footprints now was the blur where a body had fallen. At the bottom of the ridge Latham lay.

Here the white men, ahead of the Eskimos, bent down and turned over the body—for Latham lay dead. The Eskimos came up beside the others and saw for themselves that their tribesman had avenged his own death; in the last struggle he had struck with his spear.

Geoff, gasping as he gazed up from the face of the friend who had been his hero, met Hedon's eyes. Eric could have had no associations with this man which, even at such a moment, could make for mercy; but as Geoff looked at him Eric answered the unspoken question.

"He was going in the direction of the Kadiack," Hedon said quietly. "He was going for help for us. We know that was what he believed some one ought to do. Of course the Eskimo couldn't understand that; he thought Latham was just stealing meat."

Geoff shook his head. "Eric, I know the ​truth. He was going to make sure of saving himself—then send back help to us afterward."

Hedon was looking down at the tracks in the snow. "What I don't see," he said, "is why he kept on going in this direction after he got that hurt. He must have known he couldn't go far; yet he went on with the dogs."

"He knew he'd killed the Eskimo. He couldn't go back," Geoff said.

"No, there's something else in this." Hedon said, unsatisfied. "See, the dogs went on beyond here after he died, or before. You'd expect them to stay near here or to have turned back toward the village. Come with me, Geoff."

They left the Eskimos to watch the body and followed on the trail of the unguided sledge. Soon they saw it ahead, overturned, the dogs tangled and snarled in the harness.

"Geoff!" Eric cried, as they came up and saw the snow where the sledge was overturned. "You see, Geoff? See! That's it!"

"What?"

"Look—those other sledge marks in the snow! See, two sledges, heavy and with strong ​dogs in good shape and travelling fast. The dogs here must have winded them after Latham shot the Eskimo, and they ran on this way. So he came after them. Then he fell and they came here."

"But"—Geoff stared down at the snow, weak and trembling as he thought of the possibility of relief coming from these sledges of men, strong and travelling fast—"what do these mean?"

"We can't tell yet; but we can soon find out. We've got enough in us to catch them, Geoff! We must! They can't have gone far and we can catch them when they camp. Come! Come on!"

About the Eskimo snow huts on the ice of the long bay the hunt for seals seemed going on that day as usual. Three of the Eskimo spearmen were missing from the blocks of snow where they had sat at watch for the seals; and three of the whites who also had sentineled the animal's breathing holes were gone.

The speamen still at their work looked up often over the sea ice to the south and along the snow-covered shores; and the women came ​often out of the igloos to look for signs of the return of the men who had stolen the meat and of those who had gone after them. But the moon was beginning to sink in the sky before, far away, some one saw four men with a team of dogs and a sledge approaching. Then behind it appeared three men and another dog team and sledge; then three more men and another team.

At the sight of these alarm ran round the houses and spread to the spearmen on the ice. The Eskimos gathered before the village and, excited and watchful, waited for the sledges to draw near. Before these came close, two of the men with the first sledge ran out to one side and signalled, so that the Eskimos knew that those two were their tribesmen and that they were returning with strangers, all friendly. When a short distance off, the sledges halted and four of the men came forward to meet four from the village.

Margaret stood beside McNeal and Koehler, watching the strangers approach for the parley. During the hours since the discovery that the seal meat had been stolen and Latham ​and an Eskimo missing she had gone about confused, unable to imagine the consequences to her and to the rest of the party of what Latham had done. She could not know whether or not it might be better for Eric and her brother and the Eskimos who pursued with them to overtake Latham. During her long hours of suspense she had pictured every happening, every possible result of Latham's flight and his pursuit, except the correct one.

As the ten men came in sight she had not doubted that only four could be strangers; and of course these four must be Eskimos met by some chance. But now, as the strangers came nearer, the Eskimo standing beyond Koehler saw that two of the sledges and the manner of harnessing of two of the dog teams were strange. He uttered a cry which told the news to his tribesmen and which Koehler understood.

"That's a party of white men!" the doctor announced to Margaret and McNeal.

"White?"

The strangers came closer. "There were six strange men," Koehler made out from the ​manner of the garments. "I think they all are white!"

"Six!" the girl repeated.

She sensed that if this was so two of those who had left the village were not now returning. Where were these two men? Why had they not come back?

The four advance men from the approaching party came near enough to be better recognised. Two were strangers—white men apparently, as the Eskimo and Koehler had said; one of the other men was an Eskimo who had gone with Eric and Geoff; the fourth man was Eric.

Now Margaret saw too that her brother was with the six men who had remained behind. So Geoff and Eric both had come back with the Eskimos who went with them in pursuit of Latham. The parley with the four men from the village was short and satisfactory. Some one signalled for the rest of the strangers to approach; and Eric left the parley and came on to the group before the snow huts.

As she saw him come toward her Margaret had a strange feeling that brought back to her the dread and suspense of the moments on the ​Viborg off Mason Land as she saw the party returning from the cabin signal to the ship good news and then bad. There seemed in one instant relief and triumph in Eric's bearing, then depression or constraint.

"Koehler!" he called, addressing the man beside Margaret, though his eyes were on her, "those are men from the Kadiack! The ship moved farther east after I left it last fall. It's wintering a hundred miles south of here—not almost five hundred southwest! It's well supplied and all right!"

Slowly Margaret sensed the news as Eric told it. The Canadian exploration ship, having found ice conditions favourable after Eric had left the ship at the point where it had planned to winter, had moved four hundred miles farther east. Reports had reached the vessel of the desperate condition of the Eskimos, so a shore party, well supplied, was sent to search for starving people, to supply some and bring others for relief to the ship. This was the party which Eric and Geoff had met and brought with them. So every one was ​safe, that was certain. They could travel easily to the ship, which was large.

"What about Latham?" McNeal was asking. And as Margaret looked at Eric he gazed at her and still for an instant was silent.

"Then where's Latham?" McNeal insisted. "Has he gone on to the ship?"

"No," Eric shook his head. "No."

The men from the Kadiack now were coming up, and as Margaret saw them and heard their voices the realisation that at last she and all the rest were safe came over her for the first time. With the sense of safety came also realisation of what rescue and return home would require of her. She knew that until this moment she had held that always far before her, and during the last weeks it had seemed an outcome no longer to be feared, so unlikely had it appeared that they could return to where Latham could claim her. But now that possibility again confronted her; and for some hours Eric must have been realising it. That was what took from the triumph of his return with his news of their rescue; that kept him dumb now as McNeal reminded him of ​Latham, and made him look at her, unable to meet her eyes.

"Then what about Latham, Eric?" Koehler persisted; and he too seemed now to understand.

"He's dead, doctor," Eric said quietly to him.

"Dead?" Koehler repeated.

Margaret, dazed, seemed not to have heard the word or not to have understood it. She stared at Eric, frightened, trembling. He turned to her.

"We have brought him—his body—back on one of the sledges," he said to her; then turned back to Koehler. Simply and quietly he related what he and Geoff and the Eskimos had found. Then he turned again to Margaret.

"He saved us, Margaret," he said to her. "Whatever he tried to do, he saved us. We must remember that whenever we remember anything else about him."

"Yes, yes," she repeated. "Yes."

"I have been thinking of what my father used to say, Margaret—you know he was a missionary. He said the greatest mistake in ​the world was to look for God always to select an angel to send on an errand. Of course Latham couldn't have known about the men coming from the Kadiack; but do you know if he hadn't gone just when he did, and drawn us after him, those men wouldn't have found us. They were turning inshore and going back another way, and they would have missed us by five miles but for him."

Margaret gazed at him, dazed. She heard what he told her and made out the words; but after the fact of their safety only one other realisation seemed to seize her.

"He's dead, you said," she repeated.

"Yes, Margaret; he's dead."

She stared past Eric over the snow to the men and the dog teams and sledges from the Kadiack. "But we will be saved, all the rest of us? All the rest—that must mean you and I, too, Eric—will be saved?"

"All the rest of us are saved, Margaret."

Her eyes closed and for a minute she was unsteady. Her hand groped and caught support from Eric. As she swayed, Koehler had started to her, but now he turned away. She ​opened her eyes again and gazed at Eric and then past him. "They are still there beyond you, Eric? I mean the men who have come and saved us. They are still there, the men who will take us home?"

"They are still there, Margaret."

"And you—you, Eric, Eric—you are still here with me! I still have you and we are saved? We—you and I—are going home now?"

"Yes, Margaret," he said to her gently. "Yes; we are going home."

​

CHAPTER XXII

"NOTHING UNLESS GOOD"

PRICE LATHAM was dead; and of the dead, says the adage, let nothing unless good be spoken. The adage rules—and should rule—those who return from the Arctic if it rules no others. For in the Arctic men are tried as nowhere else, and under the strangest conditions. Therefore, the deeds of the dead man, as told by his companions, were made to conform more closely to the requirements of decency and of honour than to the facts.

Accordingly it has been related in those records read by slippered people warm between their radiators and blazing log fires that Price Latham, the sportsman who led the Viborg party into the North, gave his life in a desperate attempt to reach the Canadian exploration ship Kadiack to bring relief to his starving companions. He died of exposure and exhaustion after suffering an accident. It added to ​his honour, rather than detracted from it, that when he set out on his lonely journey he must have supposed the ship to be many hundreds of miles away.

The news of Price Latham's death and the safety of the rest of the Viborg party, together with the news of the death of Ian Thomas and the return of Hedon, were telegraphed from Alaska early in August, when the Kadiack, with Hedon and the seven from the Viborg, reached Nome, after having been freed from the ice below Victoria Island in June.

Before the end of August, therefore, Geoff and his sister reached home; Eric came with them. Since Geoff and Margaret had given up their apartment before leaving for the Viborg, they now went to Mrs. Thomas' where Eric was invited also. He delayed there long enough to relate to Mrs. Thomas what he could of her husband's last year; then Eric went east to report to the society which had sent him to the Arctic. Margaret remained at the Thomas home. There she received Eric's telegram from Washington telling her of his appointment to a permanent position on the ​staff of the Smithsonian Institution with a salary which would be more than Margaret and he would need; and immediately after sending his news, he returned to her.

So in the same room in which he and Margaret met, they were married. On the days after the wedding, which was with few witnesses besides Koehler and McNeal and Brunton, Geoff moved down to the club to his rooms there. The suite assigned him was the one which, till the year before, had been Price Latham's; and after moving in Geoff lay in the window seat thinking of himself as he was the last time he lounged there and as he was now.

The newspapers were brought to his door and idly he opened them. Margaret's marriage, of course, had given the papers opportunity to review the stories of the Aurora and the Viborg. Besides the large picture of Margaret there was a small sketch of Hedon and a list of his explorations and scientific achievements. Mention was also made of new evidence found by him that descendants of the lost Greenland people still survive among the ​Eskimo tribes of the American Arctic, as other explorers had suggested.

However, he was entirely overshadowed on the page by reviews of the doings of Price Latham—his polo, motoring, golf and racket championships and records; his hunts after big game; finally his noble death under desperate conditions which daunted his companions long accustomed to the Arctic.

The tone of the newspapers was the same as the tone of the friends who had spoken to Geoff of his sister's wedding. It implied that Margaret could not have known her mind when, before going into the Arctic, she had preferred Hedon to Latham. Further it implied that Margaret must have found out her mistake too late, when there had been nothing for her to do but to marry Hedon.

Geoff crumpled up the papers and threw them on the floor. He looked at his watch and hurried out of the club and down to the railroad station. That afternoon Margaret and Eric were setting off for their honeymoon on Eric's assignment from the Smithsonian Institution to travel through China and Tibet.

​Geoff found them and said his hearty good-byes to Eric; and then he took his sister aside.

"Meg," he said, "what I want you to tell me is this: How did you know the difference between Price and Eric before we went into the Arctic?"

"You'll know," his sister said, "when the time comes for you to decide between girls."

He bent and kissed her. "Tell you one thing. If I'm doubtful, I don't marry till the girl goes with me into the Arctic. Good-bye, Meg! Good-bye, Eric, old fellow! Good-bye, both of you together!"

THE END.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.