A Wild-Goose Chase (Balmer) Part 1

A WILD-GOOSE CHASE

CHAPTER I

THE FLIGHT OF THE WILD GOOSE

THE crack of the hard ball against the smooth, echoing concrete walls of the racket court, the resound of the rapid volley, then the scorer's shout and the rattle of applause, carried into the club dressing rooms and told that a fast and interesting game was going on. "Who's playing?" Geoffrey Sherwood called from his dressing booth to the masseur who was waiting in the locker room outside.

"Mr. Latham, sir, against Evans."

"I see. Mr. Latham leading?"

"I should say so, sir."

Sherwood completed his change to light athletic shirt, flannel trousers and rubber-soled shoes, and went out to the lockers to unscrew his racket from the press.

"I'll tell Mr. Latham you're ready, sir?" ​the attendant then inquired. "He said he'd take on Evans only till you came." Evans was the club professional.

"No, not yet," Sherwood forbade. The echoing rattle of another fast volley came from the court and loud and appreciative applause again broke out. "There's quite a gallery there. I'll watch the match for a while."

He climbed the stairs to the spectators' seats set over the back wall of the court. Evans, the professional, was just returning viciously. The ball flew like a bullet against the front wall; as it came back the amateur leaped, met it and struck it back with his racket. Evans dipped for it desperately; it ricocheted past him to the rear wall. The professional made one more trial to get the ball as it bounded back from behind him; but it bounced again on the floor, once, twice, and Latham had won.

The row of spectators rose in a clamour of congratulation.

"Hello, Geoff!" Latham hailed carelessly. "Want to begin now?"

Several of the men looked at their watches and started for the stairs.

​"No, I'll see you do it once more," Sherwood decided. The men put back their watches and settled into their seats. The new game rushed on. Geoff Sherwood leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, following the triumph of his friend with the envy which a boy, just at his majority, holds toward a man ten years older who can beat him at almost any game.

There were few men of any age, either amateur or professional, who consistently could conquer Price Latham in any gentleman's sport, whether it was rackets in the downtown club in winter, polo in summer, or yacht racing or aeroplaning. Geoff had no need to envy his friend's lithe, strong and symmetrical figure; but Latham's perfect command of himself, his easy, effortless expenditure of strength—as now at this moment when suddenly he took his opponent entirely off guard and scored a brilliant "ace"—was Geoff's despair. So, as in worship he watched his hero, Geoff wondered again what in the world was wrong with his sister that she still clung to the memory of a man to whom she'd merely been engaged four years before, and who had been missing ​so long that he surely must be dead, when Price Latham wanted to marry her.

"Mr. Sherwood! Telephone call for Mr. Sherwood!" a bellboy announced.

Geoff went down to the booth. His sister was on the wire; she had been trying to find him all afternoon and just had learned he had come to the club. He answered her irritably as she told her news before he sensed the unusual excitement in her voice.

"What?" he asked. "Say that again; and please say it slower. What? What? . . . You're crazy, Margaret! . . . Oh, dear, you know I didn't mean that—I meant don't fool yourself again. . . . What? . . . Oh, all right; of course I'll come right away, and I'll be awfully glad for your sake if it's so."

He jerked open the booth door and went back to the racket court and waited beside the door to the players' floor till the cannonading inside ceased. Another game was over. Geoff opened the door. The professional, beaten again, stood puffing apologetically. Latham turned, his dark hair hardly damp.

"Ready, Geoff?"

​"Let me see you a minute, please, Price."

They crossed into the dressing rooms. "Margaret just called me up," the boy explained. "She thinks she's got some word or trace or something of Eric Hedon, Price."

"What—word of Hedon?"

"She couldn't, of course, but she's all worked up. Something's made her think he may be safe or was safe. She couldn't say much over the telephone. She wanted us to come out as soon as we could."

"Us?" Latham repeated doubtfully. "She asked for me?"

"I think so," Geoff assured vaguely. "Anyway, you'll come with me, won't you?"

Eric Hedon's name for almost two years had been written on the records of those who had given their lives for the mysteries of the North. He had been engineer and ethnologist with the Aurora expedition under Ian Thomas, which had gone north four years before to explore and map the last lands toward the Pole and to study the people of those most northern icebound islands not yet known to civilised men.

Seven men had made up the party which had ​sailed in the Aurora from New York in May, four years before, had taken Eskimos and dogs from Godhaven in Greenland in July, and then had been lost for two years till a Scotch whaler picked up survivors of the expedition near Cape Sabine, Ellesmere Land, where Greely's men had starved to death thirty years before.

McNeal, the sailing master, Brunton, second mate, Koehler, physician and meteorologist, and Linn, the cook, were the four white men who, with three Eskimos, had dragged themselves to the shores of Smith Sound. They told how the Aurora had been crushed in the polar ice pack north and west of Mason Land, and how when the pack had parted the ship had sunk. The seven white men and five Eskimos while making their way back over the ice had been parted by a lead. Mullin, the first mate, and two Eskimos and a sledge team had gone through new ice attempting to cross the lead and were drowned. It was known that Thomas and Hedon, with their dog team and sledge, were upon the young ice of the lead at the same time. They were not seen to break through, as were Mullin and the Eskimos; but it was ​certain that neither of them crossed that lead. So either they must have returned to the polar pack and starved or been frozen, or in attempting to cross the lead they must have broken through and been drowned. The passing of months and then of years had made their loss a certainty.

Geoff reviewed this certainty again with himself as he finished dressing in the warm room by the baths. He jerked his tie irritably and went out. Margaret was worse than stupid and silly to keep on believing that Eric Hedon might yet be heard of. Geoff went down past the racket and squash courts to the elevator, and got off on the floor where Latham, who lived at the club, had his quarters.

He went into the man's room with the uncertain liberty of one who knows that he is being cultivated less for himself than for the sake of his sister.

"Sit down," Latham called cordially from the bedroom, where he was dressing. "You know where tobacco is. Papers just came in the mail there."

Geoff lounged luxuriously on the window ​seat and tore off the wrappers of the illustrated London weeklies just delivered. One of them contained an interesting article on the series of international polo matches projected and the possibility of Latham's this year playing by invitation with the American team in England. Latham's life was indeed the ideal one.

The mild April breeze was blowing in the open window and the clear blue sky and warm sunshine reminded one that winter was over. The club was one of those that stand on the lake front of Chicago, and from the windows of the floor where Latham had his rooms one sees only the blue lake to the east. A few white sails of small sporting craft already dotted the water beyond the great, grimy freighters streaming in and out from the harbour.

A flock of wild geese, bound back to the north after their winter flight to the shores of the gulf far below, sped over the lake. The two sportsmen in the club window looked after them, then descended to the street. Latham's roadster had been brought round to the door. They jumped in and drove north along the lake till they came to that part of the Lake ​Shore Drive, a few miles from the centre of the city, where great, handsome winter homes bound the beach, with here and there an apartment building, taller but no less handsome than the houses. Latham ran his car to the boulevard curb before one of these buildings. The two men went in together and ascended in the electric elevator to the floor where Geoff and his sister dwelt.

The large living room of the apartment, with its sun room overlooking the lake, plainly proclaimed itself as the dwelling of young people with many active interests. There were books, ornaments and pieces of furniture that told of a prosperous, cultured and vigorous older generation; but that generation had passed. It was represented directly only by a pair of quietly framed photographs of a date some three years before. Geoff's father and mother had been lost together in a train wreck; so he and his sister had lived there alone, governing themselves and each other after their own fashion.

The only person who could assert any claim to right of interference with them was then in ​the apartment. Geoff heard her voice, strident and severe, from the direction of Margaret's room.

"Cousin Clara is here," he commented to Latham.

However, she was concluding her interview, with Margaret. A door opened.

"All I can say of you is that you're mad, more than mad," the stern voice repeated. "But I knew that before. You can make a match that any girl in her senses would have snapped up four years ago, and you—you persist in ——"

Cousin Clara hesitated to gather breath for her parting denunciation and incautiously stepped too far outside the door. The bedroom door quietly but firmly closed—it was not slammed, just closed—and the key quietly turned in the lock.

A woman in silk—a gown that indicated an age at least ten years younger than her obvious fifty years—came down the hallway in a rage attained only by one who, possessing much money, has been defied by one with less. Latham, knowing her as an ally, spoke ​suddenly and loudly to Geoff to warn her that they were there. Immediately Cousin Clara controlled herself. Latham managed to turn about in surprise to see her.

"Mrs. Chandler!"

"I'm very glad that you're here, Price—and you, Geoffrey, if you can help your sister back to her senses."

"What's happened?" asked Geoff.

"More silliness about Hedon. "I'll leave her to tell you. But, Price Latham, I look to you to help me."

Latham bowed. A butler came through the dining room and stood by the front door. Cousin Clara went out. Down the hallway the key turned back the lock in Margaret's door, but the door remained closed. Geoff and Latham gazed at each other.

"Tell Miss Sherwood we're here," Geoff turned to the man.

"Yes, sir."

"No, wait. I guess I'd better get her myself. If you want anything, Price, tell Farley what it is."

​"Of course." Latham picked up a magazine and dropped into a chair.

Geoff went down the hall to his sister's room and rapped on the door, calling at the same time: "I say, Meg, it's I."

"Come in, Geoff."

"What the dickens were you getting Cousin Clara on her ear for again! And what is it about Eric Hedon?" he began belligerently as he entered.

Then he checked himself and quietly closed the door behind him.

His sister, as he understood vaguely from the manner of all men toward her, was an extraordinarily beautiful girl. At times Geoff admitted it. "One thing about Meg—I don't have to think anybody's after her for her chance at Cousin Clara's money."

For a girl she was not quite so tall proportionately as Geoff; and of course she was far slighter and more delicately formed. Yet one looking at the brother and sister would have said that the slender girl had at least as much power of endurance and nervous force as the athletic young man. She was not athletic at ​all; but she had been born with the knack of doing things easily, gracefully and well. One made this appraisal of Margaret Sherwood simultaneously with liking the fairness of her face, her deep, direct blue eyes, the glow of her cheek, the smile ever likely to light her full little lips, and the burnish of gold in the brown hair back from her white brow. She was twenty-four years old the month before.

She was sitting quietly beside her window, which looked over the water; at her feet was a large pasteboard box which, from the labels, had come by parcel post. She had opened it, but the cover was loosely laid on again. On the small table beside her she had pages of paper covered with handwriting, which Geoff recognised as the sheets of Eric Hedon's journal which McNeal and the others had brought back; and she was holding in one hand her best picture of Hedon.

She had not been crying during her interview with her father's cousin or afterward when she was alone; but now, as she turned to her brother, her lips trembled and her eyes filled.

​"Geoff, I don't know what to think. Brother, tell me what to think!" she appealed.

"Why, little Meg!" He bent beside her, one arm about her. "What's come?"

"That came!" she said, pointing to the box on the floor. "Just as I was going out this afternoon that came."

Geoff stooped and took off the cover and parted the paper wrappings inside. Below lay a white, soft mass of feathers—it filled the box—a large, white bird with web feet and broad bill, and with the gamy, fishy odour of the wild fowl. He took it from the box and looked at it.

"A goose!" he said wonderingly. "A wild goose!"

"Yes," she said. "That's it—a wild goose!"

"What about it, Margaret?"

"It was shot in Louisiana the day before yesterday."

"Well?"

"An old man shot it—an honest old man I've no doubt—an old negro. He brought it to the old gentleman—one of the fine old Southern gentleman—who had been his master."

"Brought what, Meg?"

​"The goose he shot—that goose."

"All right; what about it? Why did it come to you?"

"He sent it."

"Yes, but why?"

"It's an arctic goose, Geoff."

"Arctic?"

"Yes, the white wild goose of that kind. They're arctic. Eric told me about them once. I was sure I remembered. Besides, I looked it up just now." She motioned toward her shelf of books upon the Arctic. "They breed in summer above the Arctic Circle, Geoff, in the islands in the Arctic Ocean almost to the Pole. When winter comes there they fly south to the Gulf shores. This one was in Louisiana when it was shot."

"I see," said Geoff impatiently.

"He found this bound to its leg!" She held a hand toward her brother, but with fingers still firmly closed over the treasure they concealed. "You can see on the right leg there where it was bound. It looks as if it had been bound there when the bird was alive, doesn't ​it, Geoff; as if it had been there a long time while the bird was alive?"

He looked at the bird's leg to please her. There were marks upon it, indeed, as though something had been bound about the leg; but for how long he could not tell.

"Yes," he assured her. "Of course."

"This was there!" She unclenched her fist and showed him a tiny scrap of something which looked like oiled silk. He took it and saw that there was a series of perforations through it, making tiny letters which spelled words; and, feeling in his hands the tingle which one feels when fancying he sees another long supposed to be dead, he held the scrap to the light and read the characters.

"Send to Margaret Sherwood," he read. Then followed the address at which Margaret had been four years before. "Both reached Mason Land. Safe. Eric Hedon."

It was dated in August of the summer before. Geoff looked up at his sister, still tingling.

"What came with that?"

"That's oiled silk, you see, pricked through ​with a needle or pin or something. They took that material to cover records which might get wet. It was wound up and tied to the bird's leg. It could have come down from the Arctic so; I know it could."

"What came with it?" Geoff repeated.

"Oh, this. It came by post this morning; the box with the bird came this afternoon. Of course I couldn't make anything out of it till the box came, then I tried to telephone you all over town. But I couldn't find you till you went to the club."

Geoff took the letter which she extended. It was a square, ordinary envelope bearing the postmark, dated two days before, of a small Louisiana town near the Gulf. It was addressed in the careful, courtly characters of an old man. Geoff took out the inclosure and read:

"Miss (or Mrs.) Margaret Sherwood.

"Dear Madam: A darky of mine, Sam Negus, went goose shooting in the marshes about here to-day and brought back fourteen geese of two varieties. When he was showing ​them to me I noted an unusual appendage attached to the leg of one.

"Though I cannot judge of the matter, I have acted upon the possibility that the message upon the bird might be of concern to you, and accordingly I rewrapped it as nearly in the manner in which I found it as I was able to recollect.

"I take pleasure in forwarding to you, separately, the bird as brought to me.

⁠"Sincerely your servant,

⁠"Robert Massey."

Geoff turned the letter over slowly. His sister bent toward him tensely; then he looked up at her and for a moment she met his eyes. She looked away from him and, gazing out her window, suddenly she put her hand on her brother's shoulder and seized him.

"Before you say anything, look out there!" she pointed. "Look out there!"

He followed her direction in wonder. The blue, smooth expanse of the great lake lay warming in the spring sun after the winter's cold; a faint, irridescent film of evaporation ​shimmered up from the surface. An intake crib for the city's water supply, with the lighthouse above it, a few steamers and one or two of the tiny sail boats dotted the blue of the water; but it was none of these toward which Margaret stared.

Then he saw what it was—a long, faint V-shaped series of dots in the air, sweeping swiftly, steadily, evenly up from the south, passing over the ships below them as though the vessels were anchored and as motionless as the crib, flying on easily, exhaustlessly, altering the shape of their V to the cross of an X and shifting in formation back to V again—before, in barely a hundred breaths, the wild geese from the Gulf far away in the south slipped out of sight on their swing back to their summer breeding places on the shores of the arctic islands about the North Pole.

"What are distance and open water in the Arctic to them?" the girl asked. "In two days, or three at most, they may reach the last lands of the north; and we know that some of them do, and swing south again and then back in the summer to their tundra. They fly each year by ​thousands, by tens and hundred of thousands, up to the islands almost to the pole. A few might have been netted there or snared and then let go; and this one, at least, might have been shot in the south."

She looked down again to the wild bird in the box.

Her brother shook his head. "It is not possible!" he convinced himself. "No, it's not."

"You mean no one can tell! You can't! It's all so wonderful you don't know yourself what to think."

Geoff gathered up the box and carefully took the little scrap of waterproof silk and the letter.

"Price is here," he explained. "He came with me. He's got good sense. Let's talk it over with him."

"I'll come in a minute," Margaret said; and her brother went out.

 CHAPTER II

ERIC HEDON

MARGARET delayed over putting away the articles which reminded her of Eric Hedon. She knew it was not because of what the bird had brought that she believed Eric alive; she never at any time had allowed herself to think of him as dead.

If one has become accustomed to consider a missing person as dead one cannot think of that person's doing things; but if one pictures him as lost but still living, one can always look for word to come from him. No one knew better than Margaret Sherwood that most of the men long missing in the Arctic never return. She knew that theirs were the forms in the hewn graves in the ever-frozen ground with the lonely cairns of stone and the driftwood crosses above them buried by the blizzards of winter; theirs were the bones bleaching on the barrens never reached by another man; theirs ​were the bodies lying in the deep of the Arctic Ocean, ever to rest beside the thong-tethered teams of dogs and the sledges that broke through the young sea ice with them.

Yet she also knew that many men had remained unreported for a longer time than Ian Thomas and Eric Hedon and still had returned to civilisation safe at last. There were Greely's men, three-fourths of whom starved to death on their barren cape of Ellesmere Land, but seven finally were found alive by a relief ship; scores of others had come back after suffering disasters which it seemed they could not have survived.

Of course the explorers entering the Arctic in the last two years had made inquiry and search for the missing men. Rewards had been offered to whalers for information of the fate of Thomas and Hedon, rewards which Margaret herself had increased up to her means. Though these had brought her no news, the passing of the months still sustained her expectancy; nothing seemed able to destroy her hope.

Faith that Hedon must return to her seemed supplied to her as a need of her life.

​When she thought of her dependence upon Eric, sometimes it astonished her, as it always surprised others, to realise the power of her love for him. She never had heard of him till four years before; it was purest chance that they had met at all. Ian Thomas had been a friend of her father's; they had roomed together at a little Eastern college. Margaret went with her father and mother to dinner with Mr. Thomas a week before she was to sail with friends for France and a summer in Brittany. She was a very young girl then, just twenty. Ian Thomas met them in the hall as they arrived at his home.

"I'm keeping a young fellow who called on me this noon. He wants to go with me on the Aurora to the Arctic next month."

"As what?" Margaret's father inquired.

"He's offered to go as cook, seaman, mate or anything; he doesn't care," Mr. Thomas laughed. "And I don't care much either, as long as he goes with me. Come and look at him."

Mr. Thomas led them to his library, which was dark except for the blaze from the log fire ​flaming on the hearth. He did not turn on the electric light as he entered and he motioned to Margaret and her father and mother to come in quietly as he pointed to the figures on the floor before the fire.

A young man, whose straight shoulders and well poised head made a silhouette before the fire, was sitting on the hearth rug, his back to the door. A little boy of six—one of Ian Thomas's nephews—lay on the rug with his chin in his hands looking up at the young man; another little boy sat on the other side and before the three lay Thomas' collie. The young man was telling a story; and a wholly absorbing story it was to him as well as to his hearers. His voice was low but eager and his hands gestured now as he spoke; and suddenly, breaking from his narration, he sang softly, excitedly a strange, plaintive song—something which made Margaret, though she had just stolen close and had been able to make out hardly a dozen words of the story, see before her a circle of simple, primitive huts in a warm valley of sago and palm with a painted priest droning before the people prostrate in fear before ​thunder and lightning breaking upon the mountain overhead; then suddenly, the storm was gone, the sun was coming out and the people rising, smiling and happy. For the song ended and with it, the story.

The children stared up at the teller for a moment, still in the spirit and swing of the song; they had not yet come back from the village in the jungle valley; and perhaps the young man himself had not; but the dog before him looked up and past him. The young man turned around and leaped to his feet. The children came to themselves too and caught at him demanding, "Tell us that one again! Oh, that's only the first time you told that; and that song's the best of all! You've got to tell us that again!"

But their uncle switched on the light, took the boys in charge and sent them home. Margaret found herself unable merely to nod in acknowledgment as her host said, "Margaret, this is the new member of the Aurora party, Eric Hedon." Love at first sight—that, at her self-confident age of twenty, she had put down as an impossibility in a discussion with ​her most intimate friend only a few days earlier; but now, as she stood observing this stranger, a completely irrational in explicable impulse disconcerted her; she was conscious that her heart was pounding, colour was coming to her cheeks and forehead and, as Eric Hedon spoke to her, she offered him her hand and seemed to herself actually to seize his, as she said:

"Will you tell me all of that story and sing that song again with me in the dark before the fire sometime? I mean—I mean—" she stammered as she realised what she had said. "It should be told that way, shouldn't it?"

His fingers in hers did not linger an instant too long or press upon hers differently because she had thus forgotten herself. "It is the storm song of the Suwanese of the mountains of southern Sumatra," he replied to her simply. Not only his words but his tone accepted her attraction as having been solely to the song and not to him at all. And the next moment—after this display of herself which must have made her flee instantly from another ​man—she was cool and at ease beside Eric Hedon as they all went to dinner.

He was of just the height she liked in a man; he was quite as tall, if not taller, than Price Latham; but she discovered that, while she always was conscious of gazing up when she looked at Price, this man somehow spared her that feeling. At the table, where he was placed beside her, he did not consider it necessary to turn to her with each remark or reply and she took opportunity to study him.

He was not handsome in the definite, striking manner of Price Latham or of other men she often saw; but she wonderfully liked Eric Hedon's looks. He had firm lips, sensitive but with strength, a good nose and chin; his eyes—deep blue and always direct and expressive—particularly delighted her. His face was tanned brown and his hands also; these were excellently formed, well kept, unmanicured. The sun and exposure which had darkened his skin, had bleached his hair, but it was naturally light and bespoke, like his name, a descent from the boldest blood of northern Europe. A shield, a sword and an iron cap, Margaret said ​to herself, and he'd be a Viking. But for five generations his family had been American.

He told this in reply to a question from Margaret's mother as he also explained that, for most of the last five years, he had been "looking up" little known tribes in the interior of Brazil, in Papua and in Thibet and Nepal as field ethnologist for American societies. His hope in going to the Arctic was chiefly to come upon some settlements of Eskimos still in their primitive state before contact with civilised people.

Working as a field ethnologist—that explanation seemed to mean more to Margaret's parents than to her—evidently was not remunerative. For Margaret now saw that his grey suit, which seemed to look so well when she first saw him, actually was nearly threadbare and bore the marks of many careful mendings. She glanced across the table after she had discovered this and saw that her mother had noted it too. And Margaret realised better now the trend of the inquiries from her people. She had displayed impulsive liking of this stranger upon meeting him and, during dinner, she had ​shown that her attraction to him was continuing; so her mother was setting herself immediately to the proper task of ascertaining whether he was one who safely might be considered by a young girl. Margaret warmed with indignation when her mother's glance, after failing to find lack in Eric Hedon, seemed to direct Margaret to the faults in his well worn suit.

He, apparently, was completely unconscious of any particular scrutiny; he seemed simply to fear that, in his replies regarding himself, he might have exaggerated his account in the world.

"I don't mean that during all the last five years I've been regularly employed, Mrs. Sherwood. One doing my sort of work has to—and ought to want to—do a great deal of it on his own account. Even the Smithsonian Institution which sent me to Papua, and the American Museum of Natural History, which helped out expenses in Nepal, can't do all they would wish for every one. Usually some such institution or university or society is bequeathed a sum or appropriates a few thousand dollars for study of some primitive ​people or for exploring some unknown place to find whether people are there and what sort they may be. Then, perhaps, I'm sent for and I'm given the money or the credit which has to cover everything—ship passage, film and photographic supplies, and things of that sort and also expenses of publication of what you bring back with you. So it's pretty much put up to the man in the field to figure how long he can stay at work, if he can't make money for one year keep him for two and let him cover twice the area he hoped to looked at."

"And that is the way you are planning to go into the Arctic?"

"Yes. If I can get myself north, as now it appears I can," Eric smiled to his host, "I'm promised enough to buy dogs and gear and supplies to let me look for the people I want to find and stay with them and study them."

"You mean, Mr. Hedon, you are going to give the next two years, while the Aurora will be in the Arctic, just for the cost of Eskimo dogs and supplies there?"

"Mr. Thomas has been given only his ship and expenses and pay for the crew, hasn't he?"

​"Of course; but he—" Margaret's mother checked herself but she could not prevent her glance from referring to the comfortable furnishings of the room and then returning to Eric's coat. Margaret's hand moved toward his on the table.

"I think your work is perfectly splendid, Mr. Hedon!" she cried. "I would rather do your work and work in your way than do anything else I know!"

She brought the blood hot to his cheeks by that as hers warmed too when he turned to her in gratitude. And from that impulsive approval and defence of Eric, she never was shaken.

She met plenty of opposition. Her mother saw it would be a mistake to refuse to invite Eric to her house; on the contrary, she invited him cordially. She believed that Margaret, by seeing him often, would soon appreciate that, while nothing could be said against Eric, he was not situated to become more than an interesting acquaintance. He indeed was almost penniless. He was the son of a medical missionary, stationed at Samoa when Eric was ​born and later in the interior of China. Eric's mother died there. After the American occupation of the Philippines his father was sent as deputy administrator of a difficult, dangerous portion of a province in the mountains of Mindanao. There were seldom any white people in the district but Eric and his father who was held responsible for the good health and conduct of twenty-five thousand Moros. Eric's father had the knack of making friends with all sorts of people and he and Eric travelled safely through the mountains, stopping at the villages as the guests of the native chiefs. Eric alone happened to be visiting one of the most powerful chiefs when a scientific party of importance, under the escort of soldiers, came into the district. The natives surrounded the expedition and began an attack; Eric had the confidence of the chief sufficiently so that he was able to halt the attack; and after the truce, the soldiers returned unharmed to the coast and the scientists remained in the mountains for a month under the protection of the chief and as his guests until they had completed their work.

​Eric described that month as the greatest of his life. He had been fascinated, during his stay in the native villages, by the customs he observed, the legends and lore and superstitions told him and by the ideas and strange philosophies of life which controlled the primitive people. He had spent much time making notes of such things; but he had not imagined that this interest could lead him into work of account until now he found famous and honoured men come to those mountains to see what he had been viewing in the life of the villages and to learn from the people what they had begun to confide to him. The ethnologist of the party spent a good deal of time explaining to him the meaning and value of the incidents and characteristics which Eric had noted. The scientists invited him to accompany them when their work in the vicinity was over. They finally brought Eric to Washington where he prepared, with help of men at the Smithsonian Institution, for the work he had been doing ever since.

This never had involved him in a wish for money for himself till now. So dismay ​surprised him with the realisation of his position as their friendship became more and more important to Margaret and to him. For the first few days, he sought her at every opportunity and she let him see that she offered the opportunities as often as she could; then he knew that mere friendship could not continue between them and suddenly one evening, instead of his appearance at the house or his voice over the telephone, there came a short note—which in its very brevity betrayed much—saying good-bye to her. He had been called away for a few days on an important matter and he would not return to Mr. Thomas' or to the city until after she had left for Europe. He could not well express his appreciation of her companionship.

He sent with the note a flower pot containing a tulip from Sumatra—the extraordinarily beautiful and sweet-smelling flower of which he had once told her; he had found a bulb among his things.

That day Margaret decided finally that she was not going away. She did not try to deceive herself or her mother as to why she ​determined to stay. Her mother accused her, "Margaret! You are refusing to go away on account of Eric Hedon!"

She admitted quietly, "Yes, Mother; I care more about being with him than about anything else." And she would not go. So, when Eric returned to the Thomases, he found her; and he could not again pretend reason for going away.

It was more than a fortnight later that Eric left for the Aurora at New York. Margaret did not see him or hear from him in the morning of the last day or in the afternoon till she stole over late "to say good-bye to Mr. Thomas."

Eric was in the library with the others, listing up the supplies already aboard the Aurora and the remainder still to be expected. Margaret joined them and for a few moments worked with them over the lists; then she and Eric were alone. Mrs. Thomas had disappeared and her husband had vanished with her, and the doors were closed. Margaret and Eric stood side by side at the table over which were strewed the accounts, bills and invoices of ​the supplies for the Arctic. Eric had in his hand an invoice which he had been checking up and Margaret had been comparing with another. A moment before, his hand had been steady; he had even been able to meet her eyes once and again. Now the sheet he held trembled so that the figures were illegible though both pretended to study them.

She was the first to move. She took hold of the sheet as though to stop its shaking, then her fingers touched his. The paper dropped and he seized her hand.

"Yes, Eric," she looked at him now, "why do we pretend?"

He released her fingers and stood away in his dismay. "Margaret; I love you! Oh, I love you! And you know it!"

"Yes. I love you! You know that too!"

"But you should not!"

"Should not?"

"Margaret, you must not!"

"Love you, dear? I cannot help it."

"But nothing can come of it!"

"Of our love, anything can come, Eric!"

It brought him to his knees, frightened ​before her. He seized her hands and held them to his cheeks. "I have tried to think it out, Margaret. Over and over again, I have tried to think it out. I don't know of anything I could do at which I could expect to make money."

"To make money!" she cried. "Look at me, Eric! Look at me or I will kneel down too! There! Now what were you saying? What were you saying to me?"

"A man who loves and has love from a girl has to have money, dear. I haven't thought I had to have much money; Margaret, I know you well enough for that. But if we must love, we must marry and live. And if I give up my work to do something just to make money—"

"You wouldn't be you, dear, and I wouldn't marry you. If you did that and I let you do it to be married, we'd never be happy together."

"Then," he appealed to her; "then, Margaret, what is there for us?"

"We haven't got to know now, dear! At least, I haven't! You love me and I love you. Isn't that more than enough for us now? . . . To-morrow you're going into the Arctic to be ​gone a long time—at least two years, Eric! You ought to go; I want you to go, for it is about your work. So all we need to know to-night, dear, is just that we love; and now we've said it. So I know that you'll be going away only to come back to me; and you will know that no matter how long you are gone or whatever happens or whoever else comes or whatever any one says or does while you are away, I will be waiting for you!"

"You will be waiting for me!"

"For you, always, forever! . . . So kiss me now, Eric; Put your arms about me . . . Dear! Dear! Oh, Eric, how far away you're going and how long it will be! But—but you'll come back to me, won't you? For however long it is, you'll find me waiting for you!"

So she had given herself to Eric Hedon that evening. Later that night, he started away for the Aurora and she heard from him by letter only a few times before the Arctic engulfed him.

She told her father and mother the next morning what she had promised to do. They received the announcement complacently. ​Eric would be gone two years; long before that time she would come to her senses; Price Latham or some one like Price would bring her into her right mind.

Mrs. Chandler, upon whom had devolved the responsibility of Margaret's future, after the death of her parents, simply refused to discuss any possibility of Margaret's marrying Hedon, should he ever return. Geoff, too, was openly against her; and Price always seemed confident that he needed only a little more patience with her to make her completely forget her foolish infatuation.

Yet during four years, Margaret had refused to forget. She made no display of loyalty to Eric; only in her room she preserved the keepsakes and trifles connected with Eric which, now after Geoff was gone, she took up tenderly and put away. The blood red, tropical tulip which he had given her was blooming in its pot on her windowsill; it had a deep, sweet odour. She had found it flowering the morning after he went away and it had blossomed during every spring since. She stooped and smelled the flower with her eyes closed. ​The odour always associated itself with the feeling of her parting with Eric.

It brought back the sound of his voice as he spoke seriously to her, then his laugh and the light in his eyes. For an instant she seemed to feel the strength of his arm about her and now the final wild warmth of his lips against hers.

Gently she touched the blossom with her cheek; then she straightened. Bathing her eyes, she went from her room and down the hall to the living room, where her brother and Price were waiting for her.

CHAPTER III

THE BARGAIN MARGARET MADE

SHE saw as she entered that they had discussed the matter of the message between them and were prepared to oppose her. Yet for what she had determined to do she must have help; and if she could not get it from them she did not know where help was to be had. Latham rose as she came in and met her pityingly.

"I'd have given a good deal if that could have been prevented." He looked from her to the box which was on the table.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Of course when you offered rewards for information of Hedon and kept on advertising you courted a miserable trick like that. Sooner or later it was bound to come. Perhaps we're lucky that we've had so little of it."

"I see," Margaret met him. "You think that message is all a fraud."

​"I think it ingenious, very. The real possibility of the thing being genuine—the plausibility, one almost might say—is what makes it so monstrously villainous."

"The character of the letters, even in perforations that would wear out a little, are like Eric's, Price."

"Who hasn't been supplied with facsimiles of Hedon's writing to imitate in some such way?" Latham returned. "Since the Aurora was lost, every Sunday screamer in the country has been filled with the personal details of the party."

"The address is not the address we have now," Margaret persisted. "You see, the post office forwarded it. Mr. Massey took my address from Eric's message; that was the address at which we lived when the Aurora sailed."

Latham shook his head. "The man who was clever enough to frame up that fraud and use that bird to make a couple of thousand dollars wouldn't have slipped on the detail of your address at the time the Aurora left."

"But he asks for no money, Price. He ​doesn't even know who I am or what the message is about."

"You mean he pretends not to. I admit it is a mighty good fraud."

"I don't believe it's a fraud, Price!"

"You mean you won't, Margaret!"

"Why should I?"

"You know it." Latham moved nearer her. "Margaret, I would have given anything, I said, if you could have been spared this. It is too monstrous, too brutal. Eric Hedon is dead, and you know in your heart he is."

"No, I don't. That's just it—I know in my heart he's alive!"

Latham recoiled. "Then your head must know better," he corrected. "He's lost. Every man who was north with him is sure of it. Every man has told you so. It's not necessary to question whether or not you would have been happy with Hedon. He is lost. Since you loved him—or believed you did—it was right for you to wait as long as you have. But now to have this fraud start you to hoping and expecting again and waiting—I can't let you."

"I'm not going to wait any longer!"

​"What?"

"I'm going to do something now!"

"Margaret!"

"I'm going to send a ship up north with a search party to do nothing else but look for him—for them, for Eric and Mr. Thomas!"

Latham turned from her to Geoff helplessly.

"What in the world are you talking about?" her brother demanded of her.

"I'm going to do what I ought to have done two years ago; and now I won't put it off any longer."

Latham lighted a cigarette. "Surely before even talking over this mad idea any further you're going to prove up on that." He jerked toward the box with the wild bird.

"Of course."

"All right, Geoff. Look up the trains. I'll start south to-night."

"No; please don't, Price," Margaret interposed. "You're awfully good, and I thank you very much; but I'd rather you wouldn't."

"Me, then?" asked Geoff.

"No; you'd be the same as Price."

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

"You wouldn't go to Louisiana to find out whether or not that message might be genuine. You'd go down there determined to prove it wasn't—both of you."

"You're going, then?"

"No; I'm going to get to my real work right away. I'll have to send some one else."

"Who?"

"Any one you pay for that sort of work."

"Then if it's a fraud—as it is—you surely will pay for it."

"I'd be glad to."

"What are you saying?"

"Price—and you, Geoff—please don't bother about my being fooled or about that message being a fraud. I'm going to try to find out for my own satisfaction whether it is or not; but even if I found a man who admitted writing that message and preparing the trick and sending it to me in that way, still I'd pay him something. For that message, real or not, is going to make me do the only thing that can possibly make me satisfied afterward. I don't ​know whether Eric wrote that message or not; but I believe he might have. I believe he's alive somewhere up in the Arctic. And I'm not going to give him up till I've got the old Aurora men together again and a ship to send them back to the north, to stay there till they can bring back Eric and Mr. Thomas or bring me back greater certainty that they are dead."

Latham snapped his cigarette impatently.

"How can there be greater certainty that they are dead after four years or after ten than after two?" he said. "If they went through the ice into the sea the way Mullin did—and every one who came back believes that they did—a thousand search parties couldn't bring back more assurance."

"But if they were not lost in the lead; if they got back to the ice pack and went through the winter and then somehow reached the land—Grinnell Land or somewhere—and are waiting for us to try to reach them, believing we wouldn't give them up; suppose that is the case and we made no more effort to reach them."

"I can't suppose that," Latham returned ​coldly. "Nor can any one else. How are you going to get your ship?" he inquired.

"I can raise the money."

"Where?"

"I can promise my income to some one who'll give me what I need!"

"No, you can't," Latham denied. "You must excuse me, Margaret, but I've got to be plain and sensible to stop you from this foolishness. I know your circumstances, of course. You've a good income, you and Geoff; but it's an income which your father left in trust, as I understand it, as an income. You can't touch a penny of the principal, either of you; you can't assign it or borrow money on it any way. No note you'd give assigning an income from it to any one would be legal. Those are the conditions of the trust. It's almost as if your father foresaw some such plan as you propose, and was determined to prevent it. You can't borrow even a fraction of the money you would need to fit out an Arctic expedition."

"And you've already struck Cousin Clara, haven't you?" Geoff guessed. "I wager she gave you an answer!"

​The girl admitted it by her silence. "Still I'll find some one who'll send a ship, and if I don't I'll never give up Eric—never, never!"

Latham came closer to her and met her eyes directly. "I believe you," he said. "I believe you. So I'll send a ship, Margaret!"

"Price!" she cried.

Geoff turned toward Latham in his astonishment.

"Go into the billiard room a minute, will you, Geoff?" Latham requested. "I want to say something to Margaret."

The brother looked at the two silently and went out.

"What is it, Price?" Margaret appealed. "You said you'd send a ship!"

"I will—for your sake and my own."

"For yours too?"

"Margaret!" He came to her and took her hands and gazed down at her, his eyes opposite hers. "You know that what's for your sake is also for my own. I love you; I've loved you for years. You know that. I must continue to love you. If you won't give up Hedon till ​a ship goes up into the Arctic for him, I'll send that ship. I'll go on it myself."

He could feel her wrists becoming tense in his grasp. The fire in her eyes burned deeper and her lips trembled, but she still met him directly.

"Go on!" she said. "I heard that. You said you'd take up a ship to search for Eric. Go on; under what conditions?"

"Under the simple conditions that if the expedition reaches and searches the lands which he must have reached if he and Thomas are alive, and then does not find him or discover proof that he is alive, he becomes to you what he is—dead."

"You mean more than that!" Margaret faced him. "You mean that if you do not find him I shall marry you!"

"Yes." He held her close before him. "I do mean that."

"And if I agree to that there will be no delay? The ship will be ordered at once and will start in time to be sure to get into the Arctic this summer?"

​"I'll wire to-night to charter any ship you say."

"Price! You understand I don't love you!"

"I'm doing this because I know as soon as you get Eric Hedon out of your mind you will love me!"

She fought herself free from his grasp and, turning from him, looked down intently. Before her she saw Eric and his companion in the north—two men alone on a barren land, starving, desolate, dying, one of them at least still smiling, cheerful, looking day after day for signs of a ship coming up from the south.

She turned back. "I accept," she said quietly to Latham.

"You mean you promise?"

"But I, too, have one condition, Price!"

"Condition?"

"That I am the one to be satisfied, fairly, that Eric is dead. If I am to give myself for this ship into the north, I must go on it; and I must be sure that Eric is lost—if we don't find him. You are sure he is dead already."

"You go upon the ship, Margaret?"

"I must."

​"Into the Arctic?"

"Wherever Eric may be."

Latham gazed at her. Again he put his hands out and this time seized her shoulders and held her.

"Then it's a bargain?" he asked her almost fiercely.

"If I go upon the ship, yes."

"All right!" He drew his breath in deeply. "I'll take you!"

Geoff, in the billiard room, was knocking the balls about viciously, and in the process jammed off the tips from two cues before Latham joined him.

"I'm going to send a ship up to look for Thomas and Hedon," the man said as he came in.

"The devil you are!"

"And I'm going on it, Geoff."

"What?"

Latham repeated his statement as he chalked a cue deliberately.

Geoff gasped. "And give up your polo in England? Price, the Graphic says you're the ​first player in your position in the country. And I thought I was going with you too!"

"You can go with me if you want into the Arctic—in fact, I believe you're rather counted on."

"No!"

"Yes, for you sister's going."

Geoff stared. "Meg?"

"You might go see her."

Geoff rushed from the room.

"Good Lord!" Dazedly he joined Price a quarter of an hour later.

"Well—going?" asked Latham.

"Going? Sure I'm going. Entirely aside from the requirements of the position—decencies and all that—I've got to go. Sister going up into the Arctic while brother stays at the golf club. I witness myself surviving that. They'd cartoon me in curls. Confound girls anyway! Price, why the devil are you doing it for her anyway?"

CHAPTER IV

THE SHIP CHARTERED

FOR whatever reason Latham was doing it, Geoff soon found that he was proposing to do it thoroughly. That evening a man left for Louisiana to investigate Robert Massey; but Margaret awaited neither his report nor his return. Latham had left her authority to charter any ship, engage any men and make any other arrangements she considered best.

"I always knew I was going to send a ship north. I guess I knew I must go with it," she admitted to Geoff as they were at work at home that night. She had been busy for hours with letters, telephone, telegrams.

In her address book were the present whereabouts of the four men who had come back from the Aurora. McNeal, the sailing master, was in England. She cabled him, offering command of another ship. Brunton, the second mate, was on a whaling vessel in Alaska. ​She wired an agent at Nome to find him and furnish him funds for return to the States. Koehler, who had been physician and meteorologist with Thomas' party, was in a department at Washington; and Linn, the cook, was in the navy. She wrote to both of them, and at the same time to a senator and a cabinet officer who could arrange for their leave for an expedition to the North. Then Margaret revealed herself to her brother more astonishingly.

"Von Moltke, with his plan for the Franco-Prussian war all rolled up and ready to hand out when they woke him to say war was declared, certainly had little on you," Geoff admitted, as she proceeded with her arrangements.

In the book in which she kept the addresses of the survivors of the Aurora expedition also was the name, together with notes of the condition and equipment, and newspaper clippings giving other data, of every ship recently returned from arctic work or available for it. Also the addresses of agents, owners and other persons to be corresponded with had been copied down and kept up to date. The Danish ​exploration ship Vibork, at Copenhagen after completing work about Northern Greenland, seemed to be the best ship.

"Aside from matters of expense, the small ship and the small party have done the most in the Arctic recently," Margaret reminded.

The Viborg was of about seventy tons register, of the same size as the Aurora and a little larger than the Gjoa, in which Amundsen in three years accomplished the Northwest Passage. It was sloop rigged and had a gasoline auxiliary engine; the hull had been built and braced for work in ice. There were two or three of its crew who might be engaged again. Cables were sent to them and to the agents of the boat.

Margaret had copied or pasted into her book every important list of supplies and equipment that the different expeditions had taken. She went over these lists that night to see what must be ordered immediately.

"But then polar expeditions in these days have regular suppliers. You've really only got to send word to the right man and tell him where you want to go and how long you expect ​to be there, and he'll quote you a price for the entire outfit. We'll get our dogs in Greenland, of course. The Aurora people, on their way back, left theirs at Godhaven. We must be in Greenland in June; in July is our chance to get through Melville Bay, if we've luck with the ice."

So at two o'clock, when Geoff at last turned in, the voyage to the Arctic was a settled affair. He lay awake wondering about it and thinking of the complete change in his immediate future which had been worked so swiftly. If he was to go—as he certainly would if Margaret persisted—he had better be a leader rather than a follower. At eleven the next morning he met Latham at the country club to run their ponies for the first practice over the soggy field. Some other men were out and they divided into fours and ran through two rapid, rough periods; but as Geoff went back to the dressing room, bruised and shaken from two hard tumbles and strained from riding off heavier men, for the first time he took no great pride in his daring and endurance.

"I say, Price," he confided to Latham, ​"looks like we're going to the Arctic all right. Makes a polo tumble feel rather petty, eh?"

"Then Margaret's going through with it, is she?" asked Latham.

"Through with it? She's got down to planning the frills—our Christmas dinner, and a present for each man if we get caught in the ice and have to stay there through the winter."

The next day the man who had been sent to Louisiana wired a report that neither proved nor disproved the authenticity of the message brought by the arctic goose. But already the Viborg was chartered, half the crew engaged, and the date of departure for the north definitely set.

CHAPTER V

CAPE FAREWELL

THE Arctic continent of Greenland stretches down from Peary Land, which is the most northerly land known to exist, more than sixteen hundred miles to the south to Cape Farewell, which has been known to white men longer than any other land in the western half of the world.

More than a thousand years ago—the exact date is 872—King Harold, The Fairhair, of Norway, fought in the fiord of Hafurs one of the great decisive naval battles. He fought the jarls, or independent princes of his land, in a battle of viking against viking, at a time when the flaxen-haired men of the North were the mightiest warriors of Europe, when they harried at will the coasts of France, England and the Baltic and held broad duchies and kingdoms under tribute, and when they sailed their shield-sided ships into the Mediterranean and ​crushed with their axes the helmets of Magyar and Saracen.

These jarls and vikings were not men to submit when they were beaten. So, when Harold Fairhair conquered, they spread to find new lands of their own over the sea. Some conquered and occupied counties of England; some established themselves in Gaul; some at Dublin and Limerick; others overran Scotland, the Orkneys and Shetlands, and some sailed on to Iceland. Picked men these were, the strongest and most daring of the boldest stock of Europe.

Now, in the records of those vikings who reached and occupied Iceland it is written that in 876 a sailor named Gunnbiorn was driven by foul weather to a land still farther west, where his ship was caught in ice. He and his men managed to survive till the summer freed them and they returned to Iceland and told of the new land. But a hundred years passed before any one proved the story. Then in Norway one Eric the Red killed a man in a quarrel and ran to refuge in Iceland. Quarrelling again with his neighbours, he killed several and ​took his ship and his followers and fled to find Gunnbiorn's land in the West. He rounded that southern cape now called Farewell, and as it was summer he found the grass green and the land sunny and smiling. He settled and sent for more bold men, who came with their families and household goods and their cattle and founded the colony of Brattahlid on the west coast of Greenland which looks toward Baffin Land. Four hundred miles further north they established another settlement. The ships of these men were the first to find the shores of the continent of America. In the year 986, one Bjarni sailed from Greenland to Iceland to spend the Yuletide with his father; but his father had gone to Greenland. Bjarni, returning, found foggy weather and when he sighted land it was a wooded shore well to the west and south of his home. In the year 1000 Leif, the son of Eric the Red, sailed to that wooded coast and returned to Greenland with a cargo of timber. Seven years later the Greenland colony was strong enough to send four ships bearing one hundred and sixty men, many women and a cargo of cattle to colonise ​the newer coast; these stayed in America four years before the Indians became too strong for them. Two years after their return, another party sailed in two ships from Brattahlid and made a second attempt to settle the wooded land; quarrels destroyed this settlement, and it was abandoned. But the colonies in Greenland continued to thrive and to prosper for more than four hundred years. In their two settlements, the people numbered more than five thousand, one colony containing one hundred and ninety farmsteads and one cathedral and eleven smaller churches, two villages and four monasteries. The colonies became a separate diocese of the church and were sent bishops from Rome, and they paid to the pope their tithes in ox-hides, sealskins and walrus ivory and contributed to the Crusades. There was some culture as well as security in these colonies; a Brattahlid poet composed and bards sang a poem yet known in Iceland. Fifteen generations of Europeans lived and died on the west coast of Greenland before serious troubles came. Hostilities began with the Eskimos; and, with wars and difficulties in ​Europe, few ships sailed for the distant settlement; those which set out were wrecked and when after many years another ship came to Greenland, the fiords were deserted; the stone houses, churches, cattle barns and sheep pens stood echoing empty. The first men to tempt the Arctic had disappeared into it. Thousands of the sons of the boldest blood of Europe with their flocks and herds and horses had vanished; and no man remained to say how or where they had gone.

A few straggling Eskimos came to the coasts to fish and spear seals. Danes, who now claimed the land, arrived and married Eskimos. They left the old ruins of the Norsemen and built their own dwellings. These people form the present population of Southern Greenland, who kill the eider duck and prepare the skins, try out the seal and whale oil and take the polar bear and fox pelts which bring each summer to the settlements the ships of the Royal Danish Trading Company.

One of these vessels, flying the crimson and white-crossed flag of Denmark, was steering up the West Greenland coast from Cape ​Farewell when a steam yacht with the pennant of the New York Yacht Club at its peak appeared from the southwest.

The yacht—the Inca, owned by Howard Bradley of New York—was known in as many harbours of the world as any other ship sailing purely for pleasure. Her owner and his wife had taken the vessel to visit at least one port of every country with a sea coast; her keel had scraped the bars of a hundred tropical rivers, and a score of times she had scurried for shelter into the basins of equatorial atolls.

Lands to the north too were known to her—the Faroes, Iceland, Tromso; and she had come to this same Greenland coast four years before, when Bradley and his wife had been hosts to half the Aurora party as far as Julianehaab, as now they were entertaining on board four of those who were to go into the Arctic on the newly chartered Viborg.

These four—Margaret Sherwood and her brother, with Price Latham and Dr. Otto Koehler—now stood with their hosts at the bow of the yacht while Bradley pointed out the little islets and the fiords of the rugged, ​mountainous coast which they were nearing. The sun was high and warm in a clear sky; and as it was July the ice was cleared from the shore. The snow, save for a few protected patches, was gone; and the green of the grass, which had won for the land its name, brightened great patches of the hillsides. Three of the guests, Margaret and Geoff and Latham, gazed upon this land for the first time. Koehler, who had been surgeon on the Aurora, had been one of Bradley's guests on the Inca before.

"Settlements of the Julianehaab district—Eskimo, mixed Danish—are ahead there," the host pointed. "The trading ship seems to be making for them too." The Danish vessel was a little ahead. "The Eskimos have seen us from shore, of course. Here come the kayaks!"

Rising and falling with the sweep of the easy shore swell a line of tiny forms appeared within the green water. They dashed nearer and showed themselves to be long, sharp-pointed skin boats, only as wide as the waist of the boatman and driven swiftly by two-bladed paddles, plunged into the sea first to right and ​then to left by strong, skilful arms. A few of the kayaks turned to accompany the Danish trading ship; but most of them raced on toward the yacht, as it was the stranger and more curious visitor. Laughing and shouting, the Eskimos paddled up. They spun their boats about, and overturned and righted themselves unharmed for the applause that greeted them. The yacht slowed to the speed of the tiny skin craft and, guided by the Eskimos' cries and directions, steered cautiously toward the fiord.

"Ask them if the Viborg has been sighted," Margaret requested, and Koehler shouted down in the Danish-Eskimo dialect.

No. The Eskimos were familiar with the ship but did not know it was expected back. Doubtless the visitors wished to buy dogs?

The Danish ship reached protection and came to anchor. Already it was beset by clamouring natives. The Inca brought up its bevy of boats; the yacht's turbines stopped; the anchor slipped down.

A strip of civilisation three hundred and thirty feet long had been suddenly inserted ​into an Eskimo community. The people on that strip were still living as if in the most modern city, surrounded by servants, with bedrooms and dressing rooms and baths in suite, library and drawing-rooms. They dressed for dinner, as at home, and sat about a mahogany table laden with food that was cooked by a French chef and served by English stewards.

As Margaret and her brother looked over the rail at the sod and stone huts and tents on the shore and at the swarthy, semibarbarous seal hunters in their kayaks or on the shore, and then glanced back to the yacht, they knew that the journey into the North had not yet begun. Though in mere distance travelled more than half the journey was behind, the difficulties, the dangers, even all the discomforts, still were ahead. They had not left civilisation or any of its important luxuries; they merely had brought them a few thousand miles with them. Their expedition really would start with the arrival of the Viborg at that point.

The trading ship dropped a boat and brought to the yacht the Danish captain, who was familiar with the Inca's errand. His ship, ​the Laeso, had left Copenhagen after the Viborg had started, but had passed the smaller craft at sea two days before.

The Arctic vessel might be expected that night or by morning. All were well aboard. The Laeso was to take on at that point those of the Viborg's crew who were not going into the Arctic. Also the Laeso carried stores, mostly gasoline, for the little vessel. Hosts and guests from the Inca immediately went ashore. Latham and Margaret together went through the tiny settlement.

"This is Fifth Avenue or Michigan Boulevard of Greenland," he impressed upon her, as they passed the dwellings. A family feasted bloodily on the blubber and flesh of a fresh-killed seal. An Eskimo woman was chewing off the fat from the skin of eider duck, and then working the skin in her mouth to soften it by more chewing. "When men come back from the Arctic they thank Heaven to get to such a village."

"I thought it would be more primitive than it is," Margaret replied simply.

​"But surely you aren't thinking now of going any farther?"

"Price, we agreed before we left home upon what we were to do."

"I don't mean I want to call off our agreement," Latham said hurriedly. "But——" he hesitated, uncertain.

Margaret looked at him and he glanced away. They had passed through the village and were at the foot of the hills beyond it.

Sometimes, since they had made their bargain together, it had seemed to Margaret that Latham welcomed her condition that she must be upon the ship. He appeared to look forward to their being forced close together by hardship, perhaps by more than privation. At other times the condition he had accepted seemed to frighten him; and the present was one of those times. He spoke no longer on the subject. They walked on together past the settlement and came to hillsides at the very head of the fiord where the slope looked out south over the sea and where the green grass was thickly growing about the ruins of stone buildings—the ancient homesteads of the ​Norsemen who had crossed the Atlantic and lived on that arctic edge of the new world half a millennium before Columbus sailed his ships from Spain.

Geoff and Doctor Koehler and one or two of the sailors from the ship were there ahead of them, moving about among the ruins. The stone walls of the old viking houses still stood and the foundations of the churches—the churches which in the eleventh century sent across the sea of darkness walrus ivory as tithes to Rome. The ancient byres and pens for the cattle and sheep and horses lay traced upon the ground beside the ruins of the barns, drying houses and larders. There had lived in that district something over one thousand people. Behind, the mountains rose bleak, bare, cheerless; in front was the sea, green and white, blotched with great icebergs drifting by. From the high hillside they could see the ships down in the fiord.

Geoff came up close beside his sister. "How many ships these stones have seen go by to the north," he said, caught for a moment by the drama of the spot.

​Latham looked quickly about. "And how few return to the south," he said.

"To-morrow, likely enough, old boy"—Geoff addressed the stone tower which his hand touched—"you'll see the Viborg come in sight down there where you first saw Frobisher, Baffin, Davis and the rest of the fellows who wanted to see what's up there in the ice. You ought to know by this time who's coming back. Are we coming back or not?"

"Shut up!" Latham stopped him. "You're not only foolish; you're dismal"; and he pointed toward Margaret.

She laughed. "I was thinking about the same thing," she said. "If these stones could tell the stories of the ships they've seen pass by! If they could tell only the story of the old Norsemen who lived here and then disappeared!"

"They're flying some signal on the Inca," Latham said, his glasses to his eyes.

"The recall to dinner." Geoff looked at his watch. "Let's beat it back. Evening dress, Meg, to-night for the last time and champagne and anchovy and a steward behind your chair."

CHAPTER VI

QUARTERS FOR THE ARCTIC

THE next morning the Viborg arrived. Plainly the ship had been built for strength, and not for either beauty or accommodations. As the party on the yacht watched the little arctic vessel come up and anchor Geoff closely observed his sister.

The Viborg, as it measured itself beside the Inca, was not half the yacht's length. A long bowsprit only aggravated the stubbiness of the bruised and battered hull; a single stout mast with brown sails bent upon it composed the visible means of propulsion. The auxiliary engine, driven by gasoline, required no stack that showed. There was a large hatch for the hold amidships, a hatch to the forward cabins and another to the engine room and cabins aft.

Heavy anchors and chains and other gear encumbered the forward deck, and appearances had not been helped by the circumstance that ​a large seal recently had been killed and cut up on the deck. As a foretaste of the time when dozens of dogs must be kenneled there, five of the best beasts of the last Viborg expedition, which had been shipped at Denmark, were running about, smeared with the blood of their seal feast and barking at the nearness of land.

Half the crew of six men who had worked the vessel across the ocean busied themselves with scrubbing and cleaning to prepare for the visit of the Viborg's new owners. Geoff, watching his sister, saw her glance once at Latham, who shook his head; but she, without waiting for the cleaning on board the other ship to be finished, went down to the boat beside the yacht. Geoff and Latham and Koehler entered the boat with her and rowed to the Viborg.

Captain Jerry McNeal, of the lost Aurora, met them and showed them about. He had been informed by cable and by letter, when he went from England to Copenhagen to take the Viborg, that one of the cabins was to be occupied by Miss Sherwood. He had not entirely credited the information, but had kept one ​cabin clear and unoccupied on the voyage over.

There were two cabins forward of the hold; one had been shared by McNeal himself and Brunton, now first mate. They were ready to turn this over to Latham and Geoff, for the cabin next to it was the one which was best for a woman and was the one which had been unoccupied. The after cabins, abaft of the engine room, had accommodated four men on the way over and would easily bunk the five men who, besides the two to be cabined forward, were to go to the Arctic.

The hold and all the spare space in the engine room had been stored with supplies. Both sides of both compartments were lined with tightly built in, specially constructed tanks containing the gasoline supply for the engine—something upward of three thousand gallons. The hold was laden to the hatch also with wooden cases manufactured to fit together to fill every inch of space. These cases contained dried vegetables, pemmican and other food supplies estimated to last three years.

"That is, we shall be provisioned for three ​years after we take our deck load from the Laeso. We're going to take more gasoline too, besides filling up the tanks we've emptied getting here. When do we move out, sir?" Captain McNeal addressed Latham.

"The Laeso goes up as far as Godhaven," Latham replied. "She'll give you your freight there. I'm going to get the Inca to go a little farther too, if the sea is free from ice. So we won't come aboard just yet."

Margaret made no comment till they had returned to the saloon of the yacht.

"You're putting off changing to the Viborg, on my account?" she asked.

"Chiefly."

"Then please don't."

"Bradley'll be glad to go up as far as the ice lets him. He would have offered, but really he didn't think you'd go beyond here."

"Please don't ask him. He and Mrs. Bradley have done too much now. I can't let you ask him to do more on my account."

Latham turned to Geoff. "What do you say?"

"If she goes on board now and can't stand ​it, she can get on the Laeso at Godhaven and come back. She'll have time to get sick of it—if she's going to—before it's too late to return," Geoff suggested.

"How about taking the freight from the Laeso now?" Latham asked.

"Taking a deck load before we have to would be running a needless danger," Margaret returned. "Going on board now is merely an inconvenience."

"All right," Latham agreed, and went out and gave his orders.

Immediately men began transferring to the Viborg the personal effects, scientific instruments, medicine and other supplies that had come from the States on the yacht. The extra men brought over from Denmark as engineers went aboard the Laeso. Good-byes were said that night and thanks given to the owners of the Inca. That same night—the sun was shining now almost twenty hours—the Laeso started north, the Viborg following

"Arctic trim, eh?" Geoff said cheerfully, as he crowded into the cabin which he and Latham ​were to share together. Latham looked about the narrow quarters dubiously.

"No, we haven't half our dogs yet," he reminded grimly.

Geoff went out while his friend changed his clothes. The transformation from the club life on the yacht to the cramped, ill-lit quarters, discomfort and necessity for doing for yourself whatever was done, had been sharp and sudden. Geoff met his sister in the companionway. She was dressed in sweater, trousers and slicker; her hair had disappeared under an oilskin cap. She smiled at him.

"It's getting nice and nasty on deck," she suggested. "Let's go up."

She looked surprisingly small in the man's outfit, and delicate and nervy. Geoff seized her impulsively and stooped and kissed her.

"'Scuse me," he apologised. "Won't do it again. Forgot myself; but—you're all right."

She flushed red with pleasure and went up with him to the deck. The wind was blowing up from the north, and a cold, sloppy rain was falling. The sea was rising with great, heavy swells. Jerry McNeal, in his oilskins, was ​standing his watch at the wheel. All sail was spread that the little ship would stand, but the Laeso was slipping away.

"If you and Latham"—Jerry McNeal already had dropped the misters—"have assigned yourselves to run that gas engine when we need it, we need it now. Get busy below, either one of you or both of you. Get the engine going; then stand by below for signals."

Geoff returned to his bunk. Latham had finished changing his sea clothes. The two went upon the slippery deck, staggered aft to the engine-room hatchway, dropped down to the engine-room and set to work.

The gale soon blew out, and with the sea encumbered only by floating icebergs and no pack ice the work of the Viborg for the following days was easy and simple, as it followed the course of the Laeso up the West Greenland coast. Crossing the Arctic Circle in the middle of July, the sun now was shining continuously when the sky was clear, only grazing the horizon at midnight.

The coast which they skirted was still spotted with small, scattered settlements of ​Eskimos and Danes; and seal hunters' kayaks often darted out from the fiords. Two hundred miles above the Arctic Circle they approached their next halt and the last port for the Viborg till its return, the tiny town of Godhaven, from which the Danish Inspector of Northern Greenland governs the lands from the Arctic Circle up the ice-clad coast to where even the temporary snow-hut camps of the migratory Eskimos cease.

Before Godhaven, as a harbinger of battles with the ice soon to come, barriers of grounded bergs blocked the channel. The Laeso, still leading, found a way in; the Viborg followed, and, anchoring beside the trading ship, replenished its gasoline tanks and took the deck load from the Danish ship. There last calls upon the Danish authorities were made; the dogs left there by the men from the Aurora, and other dog teams and sledges, were brought on board with supplies of the Northern Eskimo skin clothing for winter.

At midnight, in bright sunlight, the Viborg bumped out between the icebergs, alone, deep laden and heavy, and steered on up Baffin Bay.

​"Now to get as far as we can while the ice may give us a channel!" McNeal cried to his engineers. "Full speed all the time till the ice tries to stop us; and then we'll just begin really to use the engine."

The Greenland shore for many miles yet was dotted with encampments of Eskimos; but these no longer offered supplies. The Viborg, under power and with sail spread, steered on north.

CHAPTER VII

"NOTHING'S THE MATTER"

THE plan of proceeding, until Mason Land was reached, was simple. West of Northwest Greenland lies a great island best known as Ellesmere Land. West of this the next great arctic island is called Heiberg Land, and beyond this a small archipelago of frozen islands rings the polar sea and takes the landward crush of the great polar ice pack.

One of these islands, known as Mason Land, had been used as a base by the Aurora expedition, and upon its northern shore the Aurora men had built a shack and left there a large depot of food, fuel and supplies in case accident happened to their ship in the polar ice and retreat was forced. The four men who returned from the Aurora reached this depot and waited there two months, sending back search parties to look for Thomas and Hedon. No trace was found; so the four white men ​with the three Eskimos provisioned themselves from the station and managed to reach Smith Sound, where they were taken off by a whaling ship.

If Thomas and Hedon, or either of them, had not been lost in the lead but had regained the ice pack and somehow had got through the winter there, it was certain that they would make every effort to reach this spot on Mason Island. Indeed, if it was found that neither of them ever did reach this depot, it would be practical proof that both must have been lost; whereas, if either got to the station on Mason Land, he undoubtedly would either remain there or leave a message stating his subsequent plans and the direction of his travel to guide any relief party.

Mason Island, therefore, was the first objective of the Viborg. It was the land mentioned in the message sent by Robert Massey. If there were no message at Mason Island and no other indication that either man had reached the station, the plans of the expedition would be governed by circumstances. Of course the ​finding of any message would control the later movements of the relief party.

In the year in which the Aurora went up ice conditions were such as to give fair channels; but during the later seasons the whalers who had been attracted by rewards for finding Thomas or Hedon had met impassable barriers of ice two hundred miles short of the island and had turned back

The smallness of the Viborg, however, promised it favours from the ice such as the little Aurora had found in fighting its way up through narrow, closing channels. And those handling the Viborg were men to get a ship through where any hull could squeeze.

The ship's people, besides the three in the forward cabins, were five. In the first cabin aft now was Captain Jeremiah McNeal, bluff, able, stubborn, sincere, forty years old and without wife or bairn. He had shipped before the mast of a Scotch whaler at the age of eighteen, and had spent just sixteen of the intervening twenty-two years of his life within the Arctic Circle. He was a short, square, stocky man, smooth shaven as are most who live long ​in the North. No danger of the seas or ice, of cold or starvation ever had affected him. Geoff remembered him at the time he came to Chicago to report to Margaret his belief of the loss of Hedon. The skipper who had led his party on less than an inch of new ice, crackling at every step, over two miles of the Arctic Ocean, held back before plunging into the traffic on the city streets. He was miserable in the crowds of civilised places.

Cabined with him was Dr. Otto Koehler, a Bavarian and McNeal's best friend. Koehler was a year or two younger than McNeal, but with Arctic experience scarcely shorter. The men had met when the Scotchman, as master of the whaler Cabot, had rescued the survivors of a lost German expedition from the ice near Franz Josef Land. McNeal had taken Koehler to his cabin, and cursed him while he cared for him because the doctor was nearly dead from having given his ration of food to another.

Koehler, in contrast to McNeal, was tall, thin, almost gaunt, taciturn but always cheerful. His few words invariably expressed optimism. Besides being surgeon and ​meteorologist, he had the knack of languages. He understood Eskimos and made the Eskimos understand him.

Jules Brunton, first mate, was ten years younger than these two, and had been skipper of a Cape Breton fishing smack till he entered under McNeal in the Aurora. He was a big, powerful man, friendly and smiling; and he possessed a fine barytone voice in which he sang French ballads. Appearing in the morning, he had a word for every man and dog in sight; and he could be heard humming to himself in the night when he stood his lonely watch at the wheel.

Olaf Michaelis, "the melancholy Dane," matched Brunton in size and endurance. He had been a stranger to the others till they took the Viborg at Copenhagen. Michaelis' Arctic experience had been entirely on that vessel; he had been in the crew on both of its earlier voyages into the Arctic. He was a quiet man with a reputation for sticking to his post in trouble. Given an order, he obeyed implicitly.

Hugo Linn, the cook, was the fourth of the present crew who had been on the Aurora. He ​had been in Thomas' pay and accompanied Thomas more out of fidelity than out of any spirit of adventure; but once having been north, the lure of the Arctic caught him. He was about thirty-five and a little inclined to be fat. Under Thomas' tutoring he had developed an interest in zoology, and blew, without breaking, the shells of eggs of eider duck brought him to fry, and preserved also the skeletons of any unusual fish that he cooked.

He and Koehler also were able seamen as well as the others. With so small a crew, a storm meant all hands on deck except the man who might remain below at the engine.

The dogs, now twenty-six in number, overran everything, slept on the hatches and quarrelled and fought over the cases and boxes piled below the swinging boom. They left no peaceful spot on deck in which to lounge when the Viborg was sailing through smooth and unobstructed waters.

The woman of the party alone had no definite duty assigned to her, but found each day a hundred things to do. She learned from Koehler how to make meteorological ​observations and keep records of air and water temperatures, wind directions and velocities and magnetic variations. When she would be in the way on the deck, patiently for days on end she kept herself in her stuffy cabin.

As the Viborg buffeted its way against hard seas and slipped and squeezed between the icebergs of choken channels, Margaret constantly was studying the men about her. She noted with a thrill of admiration how the men accustomed to the Arctic steadied to their work and seemed to welcome, indeed invite, difficulties and obstacles for the triumph of overcoming them. They were more cheerful in exhaustion as more and more endurance was required of them; they loved the dangers that made them dare more, they gloried in the constant challenge of the elements.

Margaret saw with pride that her brother already was catching some of the sense of this challenge and was responding to it. A storm which had kept all hands above for thirty hours blew out; and Geoff, staggering with exhaustion, passed her on the way down to his bunk. Within half an hour, as the gale was ​blowing up again, he had to be called. She liked the way he came up on deck, with hands clenched, teeth set and smiling grimly.

Latham also came back on deck with Geoff. He had been on duty as long; he was almost as exhausted as the boy, and he was returning without complaint to his work. But it was plain to Margaret, as she met him, that Latham was driving himself to his tasks in a different spirit from the others. The Arctic work—hardship and privation, obstacles ever to be overcome—in itself did not appeal to Price Latham at all; and such work never would. He was forcing himself with his will power to endure exhaustion that he hated and that made him keep tight control over his temper in order to get the work through with, that he might demand his pay for it.

Margaret, of course, knew the pay he expected to require. As she faced him at such a moment as this, suddenly it frightened her to realise how firm was his determination to possess her if he would drive himself thus to gain her.

"Like this?" she asked him.

​"You know I don't," he returned to her.

"I'm sorry."

He put his hand upon her and seized her. "I'd do more for you!" he said almost savagely.

"You mean to get me," she corrected calmly.

He released her and went on. She saw then, as she had realised many times before, that Latham had not the least idea that they might find Eric Hedon. The expedition meant to him merely a necessary hardship, a labour of Hercules, to be endured before he could claim her. What would Price do when Eric was found? For Margaret never for an instant let herself believe anything but that they must find Eric Hedon.

So far Latham had kept his irritation under control in her presence; but Margaret more than guessed that Price was not so careful before her brother. Geoff, alternating with Latham in the engine room, indeed seldom saw him except for a few moments. They were in their cabin together only on those rare occasions when, with the sea somewhat free from ice and with a favouring wind, the engine was ​stopped to save fuel as the sails alone promised progress.

"What would you give for a shower-bath, hot, and a rub at the club afterward?" Geoff suggested incautiously on one of these occasions.

"You idiot!" Latham burst out at him almost savagely. "Got that carbon cut out of the first cylinder?"

"Pretty well. I say, Price, what's the matter?"

"Nothing's the matter. Look here, young fellow, you be mighty careful not to say anything's the matter. Do you understand?"

"Oh; I understand," Geoff said queerly. He was worn out, but just then he preferred the deck to the cabin. He had been understanding for himself for some time that there were infinite differences between racing a two-hundred-horsepower boat one hundred miles in three hours over smooth water, and then turning the craft over to mechanicians for cleaning, carbon scraping, overhauling and repairs while you lunched triumphantly at a club, and running a twenty-horsepower engine an indefinite ​number of days at four miles an hour, cleaning and chiseling carbon yourself, and then dropping, unbathed and unmassaged, into a clammy bunk.

Geoff met his sister carrying down toward their cabin a pail of coffee and some hot food.

"Thanks, Meg." He took them from her. He saw that she had heard at least the tone of Latham's last threat and that she was worried. "Oh, everything's all right between us," he assured her hastily. "My fault, I guess. I'll see it doesn't happen again."

CHAPTER VIII

OFF MASON LAND

THUS the first barriers to the advance into the North were passed in July. A score of vessels, ice-crushed and split, lie at the bottom of these Arctic channels; but the Viborg at last turned, in fog that was dense, dark and all-obscuring, westward to work between the islands opposite Greenland to the goal on the shores of the west polar sea.

Day after day the Arctic fog shut out the sun and the sea and blanketed icebergs ahead and alongside. The weather was not cold as thermometers show temperatures, but its penetrating dampness chilled men through and through. McNeal, tough Arctic sailor though he was, shivered at the wheel. The men on watch—and now lookouts were needed on watch everywhere, besides a man constantly to cast the lead—were near perishing with the cold, and stamped their feet and beat their ​hands in the endeavour to keep warm. The fog settled down and drenched everything it touched. When it lightened, heavy rains—cold, black, dreary rains—poured down and made sheer misery even for the dogs, who would not lie on the soaking decks but stood about day after day surly and dejected, too spiritless even to fight, and took their sleep on their feet. Disease broke out among them; and each morning for a week a rifle rang out, to put dying beasts out of pain and prevent spread of their infection to others.

Slowly, painfully, with infinite risks and dangers the Viborg forced its way on through the fog.

Days came again with the fog cleared. The grey plateaus and wild, rugged heights slipped by; at one spot crosses indicating graves appeared on the shore—crosses well known to Arctic men and that need not be examined. They marked the first of the graves of the six score of Franklin's men who starved to the last man on those shores sixty-five years before.

There the little crosses stood, alone in that dreary land. Ten years had had to pass, ​Margaret remembered, and a dozen expeditions were made into the Arctic, before the fate of Franklin's two great ships and his hundred and thirty men could be learned. Might the little Viborg with its crew find two men alone in all that northern wilderness?

Lost men, in passing down a shore, would build cairns on headlands to tell their line of travel to any other party. Now and again, as piles that might be cairns appeared, the Viborg halted and a boat took men ashore to search the heaps for messages. But only one might have been a cairn built by man; and that was too old and not of the Aurora cairn type. It gave no message if it ever bore one. The fog closed over the channels and the ship forced on. The shortening days and the sinking of the sun now warned of the nearing of winter; there was no time to waste while ice conditions in the channels favoured the vessel.

"Stop! Full speed ahead! Reverse; full speed astern! Full speed ahead!" The signals, with the bumping and scraping and battering against the ice in the closing channels, marked the mile after mile that the Viborg ​achieved. Once, in a spot where the chart of the only ship which had previously traversed that channel showed deep water, a ledge suddenly shot up from the bottom and the Viborg was forced on to it at full speed. The wind and sea drove it harder on. It cost the deck load and too many hundred pounds from the boxes in the hold before the Viborg, with engine full astern and all hands pulling on the anchor, got clear. For fifty hours no one slept. But now the goal was nearing. The sea and wind went down; watches again could be divided. Geoff, in his turn, went to his bunk. Toward morning, Latham opened the cabin door and threw himself on his bed.

"McNeal's given it up," he announced. "We're somewhere off the south end of Mason Island, with the ice between us and the shore."

CHAPTER IX

THE CROSS ABOVE THE CABIN

GEOFF jumped up and went on deck. The morning was clearer and the sun was breaking through the mist, showing a sea choked with ice. For mile after mile ahead and on both sides ice shrouded the water. A few streaks of green showed here and there a narrow crack between the floes; but they were closing constantly and changing.

"'Tis that we were aiming to get through all yesterday." McNeal indicated the ice grimly. "Yet if the fog hadn't cleared I'd not have given up trying. Yon is Mason Isle."

To the left of the bow, in the direction the Scotchman pointed, a shadow of an outline of a rocky shore rose. The mist thinned a little more and now showed it plainly—a black, bold, barren ridge of rock, stretching far back and rising to a height of some fifteen hundred ​feet and running as far to the north and west as the eye could follow it.

"The South Cape!" Koehler confirmed the identification. Brunton and Linn, the other two who had been on the Aurora, stood also staring toward the shore.

Geoff watched these men closely. What recollections was the sight of that shore bringing back to them? A part of their hardships, their dangers, there had been told. But Geoff knew that they had told only a part of the experiences which that land must recall.

Geoff looked beyond the men to his sister. Margaret stood at the rail a little away from the others. She was wearing the heavy blouse and the trousers and coat that she had worn almost constantly since she had been aboard the Viborg. But this morning she seemed dressed with more particular care, as for an occasion. And as her brother looked toward her he wondered with a deeper feeling of sympathy what the occasion for her would be.

Her eyes were bright and her lips closed firmly together, and her little hand clenched at her side as she gazed toward the shores that ​must tell her whether her lover might yet be alive. Would this land by its silence say that Eric Hedon and his companion had been lost long before and lay with their dogs and sledge at the bottom of the Arctic sea? Or might it tell, instead, that they had gained that desolate place only to die there? For a moment, as she looked at the black barrens ahead, fear of what might be found seized her. Her blue eyes dimmed, her lips trembled, her hands unclenched. Then quickly she banished her dread and her doubt and turned about, hopeful, confident again and smiling. Latham had come up beside her and stood looking from her to the beach.

Geoff watched them, understanding but vaguely the bargain between them. Latham, he knew, was paying for the expedition to prove that Hedon was dead; and up to the time that they went aboard the Viborg Geoff had looked upon the proof of Hedon's death as the best outcome for his sister. He had been a boy away at school during most of the time that Hedon had been in Chicago. Hedon had been to him, therefore, only a vague, stubborn ​obstacle between his sister and Latham—an obstacle that every one had deplored. When the change had come with Geoff he himself could not tell; but, as he looked at Latham standing with Margaret, Geoff was aware for the first time that he wanted to find Hedon.

"The cabin is on the other side of the island," Margaret was saying quietly to Price.

"So I understand—about fifty miles away."

"We can't bring the vessel in closer with any safety." McNeal joined them and reported impersonally to both.

"But a boat can make it?"

"Well handled," McNeal qualified. "Who goes?"

"I, of course," said Latham.

Geoff intruded. "And I."

Koehler and Brunton were chosen also.

"It's no Arctic work," McNeal deprecated. "A row of a mile or so with plenty of stout ice to step on to if you're clumsy. And then a tramp of a day or so on shore. You'll take dogs, doctor?"

Koehler shook his head. Of the twenty-six beasts which had been on board on leaving ​Greenland seven remained, and only five of these were in good condition. There was no snow for a sledge journey at that season, but in the manner of the Eskimos' summer travel the dogs might carry packs.

"There'll be only one camp between here and the cabin each way; we can pack our own supply," Koehler decided.

The four for the shore party went about their preparations—blankets, a light silk tent, food and fuel for four days, rifles and cartridges. As they loosened their boat in its davits, Margaret kept close to them.

"I'm not going to ask you to take me," she assured over and over again. "I'd slow you and make it harder. But you'll try to signal me as soon as you can about—what you find?"

"How?" asked Geoff.

"We'll be watching all the time from the ship. You four will probably all come back together. If you've good news, walk abreast about five paces apart; walk two and two together if it's bad. If one comes ahead alone to give us news or—or ask for help or anything else, let him run to the right and then back to ​his path if it's good news; to the left if it's bad."

"You've thought out everything, haven't you?" Geoff grasped her and kissed her.

Price, with pack strapped for the march, halted beside her. The others busying themselves, turned away.

"Do I have a kiss too?" he asked.

She looked up at him startled. At that moment full realisation of one result of their search seemed to come to her. She had fought it off before, not letting herself believe that they might not find Eric Hedon alive. But now, with the final arbitrament so close, she drew back from him; yet, according to her given word, if they found that which must show her that Eric was dead this man must be her husband. And they might find that within the day.

She drew toward Latham trembling.

"For good luck?" She raised her lips.

"For good luck." He kissed her and went back to his place with the others. The boat dropped to the water and the four men sprang in. All rowing, they made good speed down ​the little channels between the ice. Koehler steered for a bit of sloping beach and brought them to the foreshore upon which they could drag the boat above the tide. They climbed up and waving good-bye to the Viborg, they set off on their tramp to the old Aurora depot.

As they followed the shore about the cape and the ship sank out of sight, there was no place Geoff had ever seen with which to compare in barrenness and desolation this piece of Arctic land. Off shore as far as the eye could see there was ice, and the black rock upon which they marched was as barren. Naked of soil, no bush or twig or shoot of tree or shrub found any root there; nor was there grass or herb. In cracks in the rock shreds of grey moss and lichens grew; nothing else. Mile after mile was marked with no change but the shifting of the lines of the rugged rocks rising in the interior and a different indentation of shore.

Yet this was the land toward which, after the Aurora was lost, the four men who returned had struggled on and on and the gaining of which at last had saved their lives. Here ​Thomas and Eric Hedon must have come if they now were alive.

"There is where we took to the sea ice again to sledge south." Koehler pointed out another cape.

They came to it and kicked upon the ground the rusted cans emptied there and left by the four men two years before.

"We came down that shore with sledges," Brunton told in greater detail, motioning with his arms. As he glanced far ahead suddenly he stared and stooped.

"What is it?" Geoff asked, and then looked at Latham who had halted and already had his glasses to his eyes. Far up the bare shore a speck of white showed; and the others now saw it also.

"A skeleton!" Latham decided.

"What?"

Latham handed his glasses to Koehler. The doctor too made out the whitened bones.

"A man's?" asked Geoff.

"Can't tell. Animal's probably."

"Of course."

But as they went on now the four doubled ​their pace. Two hundred yards away. Geoff broke into a run.

"An animal!" he called back, as he came close enough to see the claws of the feet and the shape of the skull.

"Animal?" It was Latham close behind him.

"A bear!"

"Yes, that's all."

The two slowed and walked, panting. A change from the tenseness of the first sight of the bones had come over both. Geoff watched Latham and drew a little from him. When Price had seen the skeleton first, had he hoped it was a man's, with one chance in two that it was Eric Hedon's?

Geoff himself once had been ready to believe that Eric was dead—that is, when at home he had been told that Hedon probably had been drowned five thousand miles away, he had chosen to accept that probability. But up here, seeing a skeleton on the shore and wishing that it was Eric's—well, that was different.

Koehler overtook them as they walked more slowly. He stooped beside the bones.

​"A bear," he confirmed; "killed by a bullet through the head."

"Bullet?"

The doctor pointed; there was no doubt of it. Two small holes were opposite each other in the skull. "He was shot by a rifle bullet—last year, I should say. We know this was not here when we went away. Did we kill a bear here, Brunton?"

"Not a bear," the Canadian confirmed. "A seal on the ice, that was all."

"Couldn't you forget?" Latham asked him. "You must have killed it here."

The skeleton had changed from proof that one of the men sought was dead to evidence that one of them at least had reached this land.

Brunton shook his head positively. "None of us will ever forget where we got our fresh meat on that march south," he said. His keen eyes were scanning the outline of the hill farther on. "Besides, we built no cairn here. What do you see there?"

Two piles of stone stood on the promontory farther along the shore. In their concentration upon the animal's skeleton the others had ​missed them till now. The piles stood north and south, the northern heap plainly the larger. They were separated, apparently, by about five paces.

"An Aurora type of cairns!" Koehler also recognised. "Two, fifteen feet apart, the larger to the north."

The four hastened, Geoff as before leading, and this time Latham came with the other two.

"The larger would contain the message," the doctor called as Geoff reached them.

"I know." He was tearing the stones away; now the others helped him.

"Look for anything which could be sealed; a little bottle, can, thermometer tube or anything that would keep out water."

Geoff picked up the fragments of a small glass tube.

"Here's something that might have kept out water, but hasn't."

The doctor, taking it, recognised it as a section of barometer tube which had been sealed at both ends, and, judging from the pulp upon the glass, once had contained papers. But the tumbling of the stones in the cairn had broken ​it; the melting snow and rain long before had made a mush of the paper. Nothing could be read from that.

"But we now know that Hedon or Thomas must have got here," Koehler said, as he put down the pulp at last.

"That's not certain," denied Latham.

"Not certain; no." The doctor looked at him. "But we'll find out at the cabin who was here."

That some one had been on the island was more evident every hour. Scraps of gear and cans told the passage of a man—or men—by a route different from that travelled by Koehler, Brunton, McNeal and Linn on their retreat two years before. They slept that night where apparently another camp had been. Starting off early the next morning, by noon they reached a slope which looked down on the northern shore of the island and showed far off on the edge of a little bay the dark dot of the Aurora depot shack facing the endless white wastes of the polar sea.

There was no movement about it, and as nearer and nearer they came, still they saw no ​sign of any habitation of the little cabin more recent than that of two years before. Externally it showed to Koehler and to Brunton no difference or disturbance; but now, as they looked up on the hill behind the cabin, there was something new, something that of itself spoke as clearly to the strangers to the little cabin as to the men who had sought it before in refuge and left it again in their retreat to the south.

A rude, wooden cross—a single, lonely cross marking a grave—stood on the slope behind the cabin looking out over it to the sea. Koehler and Brunton had no need to tell each other that it had been raised there since they had left. As far as one might see the lonely cross its message was plain. Two men—Ian Thomas and Eric Hedon—had reached that cabin. One had died there; the other had raised the cross over him.

Which man lay under the cross? And when the other had buried him and raised the little battered cross above the grave, how long had he survived? The hut ahead surely would tell that at least. Geoff again ran ahead of the ​others, gained the door of the hut and, hammering back a bolt, opened the door and went in.

CHAPTER X

THE RECORD IN THE CABIN

AS Geoff entered the little cabin the interior lay dimly dark and still before him. Most of the light entered from behind through the door which he had flung open. There was one window, small and high, with glass dimmed by a hundred storms.

The main room of the cabin was about twenty feet long and little more than half as wide, with shelves for benches or bunks on both walls. There were a petroleum stove and lamps, cooking utensils and other equipment in evidence. The smaller room beyond had been a storeroom and was filled with boxes and crates. Everything was neatly arranged.

As Geoff stepped in and looked down at the floor he started back. A heap of fur clothing lay in one corner, like a man lying there face downward. Geoff stooped and pulled at the heap and saw no man was there. Still, when ​he straightened, he looked in awe about the silent house for the form of the man who had buried his comrade on the hill.

The coming up of the others and Koehler's question as to how he had found the door brought Geoff's senses back. It was plain that, since he found the door bolted without, the other man could not have died within. He had gone out to die—or to live? At least he had left all in order behind him.

"They—or one of them, anyway—lived here for a long time," Brunton said simply, as he examined the room where the stores had been. "We took away all we could load on our sledges, but we left more than enough supplies for two men for a year."

He showed the empty casks and cases.

Koehler nodded silently. He was searching for the container which would hold the account of what had happened there. Brunton turned over the clothing and blankets left behind; they might have belonged to either of the missing men. There was nothing to tell who had lived last.

"Bandages gone, and antiseptics!" The ​doctor was inventorying the surgical supplies remaining. "Some one was hurt."

Latham, assisting Koehler, took a tin can from a shelf. It was empty, judging from its lightness, but was tightly closed. He pulled off the cover.

"Here's their message!" He pulled paper from the tin. "Thomas was the one that lived last! This must be his writing. It's not Hedon's."

The doctor took the paper from him. "That's neither Thomas' nor Hedon's," he said shortly. "That's mine."

"Yours?"

"Our message we left here. I wrote it and sealed it in that can. Thomas and Hedon—or whoever got here—undoubtedly opened the can and read that, then put it back. They'd write their own report independently, not knowing what a storm might do to this hut. They've added nothing to this."

Latham went to the door.

"Where're you going?" asked Geoff.

"Up the hill to the cross to see if it tells anything."

​Geoff had an impulse to go with him, then turned back. Latham went out. Koehler continued his search, but it was Brunton who, in the semidarkness, found the second tin, seemingly empty but sealed. He cut a hole in the tin with his knife and pulled out a paper. As he brought it into better light under the tiny window Koehler and Geoff crowded beside him. Brunton spread the paper and displayed writing.

"Eric Hedon's!" Geoff cried as he saw it, and the surge of hot blood to his face let him know fully for the first time how hard he had hoped it. He looked to Koehler and to Brunton. They had been comrades to both the men who had come here after them; one had been their leader. This writing, being Hedon's, told them that their commander was the one lying under the cross on the hill. Certainly as much for Thomas' sake as for Hedon's had these men been glad to return to the North.

"Ian, old comrade! Ian!" Koehler repeated hoarsely to himself, as the realisation of Thomas' death there came to him. Brunton bent his head a moment. Yet the next instant, ​as the men looked at each other again, Geoff saw that there was in a way relief in their manner. If at the start of the expedition they could not have chosen which of their two mates they would wish to find if they could find but one, now it seemed better that it might be Hedon.

They turned about. Latham again had come into the hut; he moved less quickly.

"The inscription on the cross says that it is Thomas who is buried back there," he reported to the others as they looked at him. "It says he died a little over a year ago." He gave the date. "That's all."

"We've just found Eric Hedon's report," said Koehler. Latham gazed at it.

"Read it," he directed.

The doctor held the sheets straight and read slowly and carefully.

"'Captain Ian Thomas, commander, and Eric Hedon, engineer, of Aurora expedition, returned to this place on May second'"—there followed the date of the second year previous—"'finding from records left here and replaced in same order as found that Jeremiah McNeal, ​sailing master, Dr. Otto Koehler, Jules Brunton, mate, and Hugo Linn, seaman and cook, and Eskimos Natsakat, Uluso and Tanniack arrived here safely upon the tenth of March of same year. They reported loss by drowning of Richard Mullin, mate, and Eskimos Panniuk and Akrut, by breaking through young ice with sledge and dog team attempting to cross lead on retreat from wreck of Aurora, which was crushed in polar pack on the first of February about two hundred miles N. W. This confirms our observation of same accident to Mullin and Eskimos, who undoubtedly were drowned.

"'Dr. Koehler, in his report written for the other party, expresses belief that Thomas and the writer also must have been lost at the same time crossing lead—'"

"We know all that," Latham urged impatiently.

"Hedon is properly reporting briefly what he himself observed," Koehler explained. "He could not assume that we got back home; and no one with any experience in the Arctic leaves any message assuming that any other, even in ​the same cairn with it, will be found in good condition."

He continued reading:

"This was supposed with good reason, especially as they waited for us two months and did not move on till they were convinced we must have been lost with Mullin. However, though unable to cross lead which they got over safely, we were able to regain the pack ice and, remaining upon it, were driven north by drift. We fortunately shot one polar bear and two seals, and with supplies saved from Aurora we managed to live on the ice, building Eskimo snow shelter. After five weeks wind and direction of drift changed, northerly winds blowing pack south and closing leads ahead of us. By cautious travel and good luck we crossed ice till within two days of this depot. Not being fortunate in finding either bear or seals and without fresh meat and other food failing, Thomas suffered seriously from exposure and exhaustion, and upon April twenty-ninth, when crossing very rough ice, he fell heavily and fractured his right hip. As our dogs were in condition to give some help, ​I was able in four days to sledge him to this cabin where reset hip as well as could.

"'Here we found good amount of supplies remaining, except fresh meat, which was able to procure by hunting seals. Owing to Thomas' weak condition and poor setting of fracture, his hip was slow to knit and it was midsummer before he could be moved. Sea then was open, and, having no boat, we waited for the winter freeze-up to cross the sea ice to the south. Freeze did not come till October, when Thomas, attempting to travel with leg stiff, again fell on rough ground and was so badly injured that he had to brought back to this depot. From effects of this second injury blood poisoning set in. He was very ill all winter; seemed cured from blood poisoning, but after some secondary infection finally died on June first. Buried him, reading service and erecting cross on hill behind this cabin. To-day, June fifth, am starting south from here with team of four dogs in fair condition and sledge. My plan is to follow coast south to open water, cross channels on ice to lands directly south.

​"'Open ice conditions coming early this year, believe this plan better than route announced by McNeal, Koehler, Brunton and Linn to the east, according to their record left here. Am taking with me records of expedition which Thomas and I had been carrying, also diaries and copy of messages left here and all personal papers and letters written by Ian Thomas. On prominent headlands upon shores reached will build cairns of Aurora type containing brief reports as agreed.

⁠"'Eric Hedon.'"

The doctor lowered the paper and looked about the quiet, dim little room. Left in order and locked without, it told no more of the long suffering there of the leader of the Aurora party now lying under the cross on the hill; it told no more of the year's vigil of Eric Hedon beside his dying comrade.

"Well," said Koehler at last, "that accounts for more than a year of the time Hedon's been missing. We knew he didn't go south from here till a year ago last June."

"Or start south," said Latham.

​"This isn't quite clear." Koehler referred again to Hedon's record. "He speaks of open ice conditions early last year."

"And from what we've heard on the way up we know that's true," said Latham.

"So he may have had to change his plans after leaving here. If he built that cairn near the bones of the bear on the south shore and left a message there, he did it after leaving here, or otherwise he surely would have mentioned it in this report."

"You mean something must have gone wrong with him after he left here?"

"Not necessarily. He may have built those cairns just to record some alteration in his plan on account of ice conditions, or for any other reason."

Latham took the report from the doctor.

"We've got to look at this sensibly," he said. "This tells us that Thomas and Hedon got back to land here and Thomas died. It also tells us that Hedon left here alone to try to travel south over the ice before it broke up. He seemed to expect, even before he started, to have difficulty in travelling south."

​"What are you getting at?" Brunton asked directly.

"This: His record here of course is proof that he got here safely and started away in June; but it takes away the only evidence that we had that he was living at any time later."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Look at the date on which Thomas died. Thomas was dead and buried here more than two months before the date of the message taken from the bird reporting both men safe here and well."

Koehler looked at him keenly. "I see your point. There may be more to discover on the island. We'll look."

CHAPTER XI

THE SIGNAL TO THE SHIP

ON the Viborg, off the south cape of the black, barren island, Margaret Sherwood had waited for three days and now through the morning of the fourth for news to come from the cabin on the shore of the polar sea. With but three men left on the ship after the shore party had gone it had not been possible for her to land. She knew that she had done the best thing in staying on the ship. Only in case of the party's finding the missing men at the cabin in dying condition could she have helped in any way by going. And she knew that that chance was very, very remote. The shore party either would find that the missing men had never reached the island or that they had come there and gone on or attempted to go on; and in this case the men alone would find the record more quickly and return to the ship more rapidly without her.

​So she argued with herself again and again during the long hours of the days. Yet as she gazed on that land, bare, black and lifeless, a thousand times she pictured the party finding the two men there—or their bodies. Would this last be worse than never to know, never to know?

Margaret recollected herself. If they found no trace of Eric here or elsewhere, and if they never found his body, she now was committed to acknowledge him as dead. So a dazed stupor sometimes seized her as she looked over the ice-choked channel to the grim heights of the shore. If they found Eric dead and brought his body to her, or if they returned to take her to his grave, then she later could carry out her promise to Latham. If she should see Eric once again, though he were dead, or if she had found his grave, she would not have sold herself to Price for nothing. But suppose the shore party brought back no news! That would be proof to the rest that Eric was lost; and she must accept it as proof of his death and give up Eric and marry Price, ​though Eric somehow, somewhere, still might survive and return to seek her.

So on the fourth day she stood at the bow of the little Viborg, looking for the dots that would be men marching over the rocks. How would they appear, two together or four abreast, walking five paces apart? Or would six men, instead of four, show on the shore, or five? No, she knew that was almost impossible; but it was not impossible that the four should come in sight separated and abreast in the signal that Eric and his comrade had reached this land safely. And if they brought back that word, she would rejoice that she had not gone with them, though she would not have learned the news for two days after they knew it. For they would reach the ship the quicker without her; and, with the winter now fast approaching, every hour counted. If the four brought from the cabin an indication of where Eric and Thomas might be found they could not follow on that course too soon.

She moved about the deck and tried not to stare too long, then returned to the bow and stood, eyes fixed on the shore. The sun shone ​clearly now at noon; but the rocks made a bad background for men darkly clad. Yet at last Margaret made out one speck and then another moving, then two more following over a ridge.

"There they come!" Her cry brought McNeal to her side. "They're neither walking together nor separated."

"They're no trying to signal us yet," McNeal said simply. "They'd no think we could see them."

The girl and the man stood together in silence. Below Linn was about his cooking. Michaelis, who had been busy, came up quietly, and stood a little away.

"Now they must know we see them," the girl said when the men were plainly in sight.

"Then they've no news," McNeal asserted.

"That would be bad news, and they'd signal it. They promised."

"Dip our colours and raise them again," McNeal commanded the mate. Michaelis obeyed.

"Ah, there they signal now!"

The four figures, far away on the shore, separated and walked at even distances apart.

​"Good news!" Margaret cried. "Good news!"

McNeal raised his glasses to his eyes and put them down. "What do you make of that?" he complained.

The four figures which had been advancing separated and abreast now joined in twos and walked together; but again they spread out separately.

"Good news and bad, they must mean." The girl trembled. "They bring both."

There was no doubt about it. Once again, in the same way, the four men on the shore signalled. They came on more rapidly and now reached their boat left on the beach. They launched it and slowly and cautiously brought it out between the lumps of ice now rising and falling uglily with the sea swell.

The four on the deck of the Viborg—Linn had joined the others—stood silent, watching the boat draw nearer, with the oarsmen turning at times to see if they were near enough to shout. Margaret made out that her brother and Latham were rowing the bow oars. Geoff, ceasing to row, swung about and shouted ​twice; but his voice came merely as a sound without articulation. Then: "Hedon! Hedon!" The echo of the word reached.

What were the syllables lost afterward? Was she unable to hear them because they told her that Eric was dead? But at least they had found some word; they had learned something. She strained forward.

"Hedon! Hedon!"—the words came again—"reached land safe!"

She caught at the rail to steady herself as she trembled. McNeal put his hand upon hers. She looked to him and saw that he had understood the same.

"Thomas!" he shouted back to the men in the boat. "What of him? What about Thomas?"

"Both reached the cabin safe. Thomas died there. Hedon buried him and went on alone!"

"They got to the cabin," McNeal was repeating incredulously to himself. "They got to the cabin; and Thomas—poor Ian—died there."

"Poor Mr. Thomas," the girl reiterated. "But they said Eric was safe. He went on?"

​"Listen," said McNeal gently. "They're telling us more."

"Hedon left here alone a year ago last June to try for the south over the sea ice!"

Then the boat was alongside, and Geoff, with the messages, jumped up and was pulled upon the Viborg's deck. Margaret seized the sheets of Hedon's record and stood staring at them, tears in her eyes at first making her unable to read, able only to know that the pages in her hand bore Eric's writing. She lifted the sheets to her lips and kissed them; and, as Latham came and stood beside her, she met his eyes.

"You see he's alive!" she said to him, half in the humbleness of grateful joy, yet half too in defiance. "You see he's alive. I knew he must be alive."

"He was alive," Latham said quietly, with something of the tone of a correction.

She seemed not to hear him. In triumph, tempered by sorrow as she came to the report of the leader's death, she read aloud the record as Koehler had read it to the three others in the cabin.

​"Now what else?" she cried, hugging the sheets to her when she had finished.

They told her all—of first finding the skeleton of the bear shot through the head, the cairn with the lost message, the cabin with the rude, lonely cross above the grave on the shore of the polar sea.

"You did right not to try to bring back Mr. Thomas' body," Margaret agreed with them. "I know that Mrs. Thomas and his friends and those who were proud of him will like to think of him buried where he left his work."

Koehler told her then of their search after leaving the cabin. The cairn on the south shore, which had contained the destroyed message, probably was built to tell some change in Hedon's plan. They had looked in every probable place for any other cairn that might have preserved a message or for any other trace of Hedon's course after leaving the cabin; but had found nothing. The girl again unfolded the sheets from the report in the cabin.

"But this is perfectly clear," she said. "He went over the ice to the south a year ago last June."

​"Exactly," said Latham, "a year ago last June."

"And would have built cairns on the shores south of here."

"You've seen, of course, by the date of that record that the message from the wild goose was what I said it must be, a fraud?"

"But you've seen what I knew all along—that Eric Hedon is not dead. He is not dead!"

Latham turned without a word from the land and looked back over the sea to the south. The morning was clear and sunny, and as far as the eye reached only open water stretched; and all knew that for mile after mile beyond the grim, green horizon was water where the ice must have broken up early and treacherously in the spring of the year before—the ice over which Eric Hedon alone must have tried to travel.

"If he reached land again south of here," Latham said quietly, "we will find his cairns. He was very definite about that in his report."

"So let's follow him as fast as we can," Margaret cried.

McNeal looked at Latham, who nodded. They pulled up the boat and lashed it again to ​the deck. The wind was blowing from the north and the sea beginning to surge higher. There was a breath of winter in the air.

"Did you build our cairns on the shore, Otto?" the skipper called to Koehler.

The doctor looked up.

"What cairns?" Margaret asked.

"The Viborg expedition cairns, of course," McNeal said shortly, "as Koehler arranged with the Arctic Society in New York. Our cairns are to be two, about fifteen feet apart, in a line east and west, the larger to the east and to contain the message."

"What for?"

"For those who may come to look for us," the Scotchman said simply. "Did you remember, Otto?"

"I didn't build cairns, but left a record at the depot," the doctor replied.

"What did you leave?" Margaret asked.

The doctor gave her his copy sheet, and she read aloud.

"'The Viborg expedition, under direction of Price Latham and consisting of Jeremiah McNeal, sailing master, Jules Brunton and Olaf ​Michaelis, mates, Geoffrey Sherwood, Sherwood and Latham acting as engineers, Otto Koehler, physician, and Hugo Linn, cook, and accompanied by Margaret Sherwood—purpose, the relief of or finding records of Ian Thomas and Eric Hedon, missing from Aurora expedition of four years previous—arriving off the southern cape of this island August sixteenth'"—there followed the year. "'On same day, Latham, G. Sherwood, Brunton and Koehler landed and found on shore bones of bear shot by rifle near cairns of Aurora type containing indecipherable message. These were not there when McNeal, Brunton, Linn and Koehler crossed island on retreat from Aurora wreck. Party crossing island reached this spot on the seventeenth, discovering grave of Ian Thomas and report of Eric Hedon telling of Thomas' death at this point and Hedon's plan of travel south. Copied his report, leaving copy and taking original. All in good health, returning to ship, and doubtless will endeavour to follow Hedon's projected course as closely as possible.'"

​"That'll do." McNeal glanced over this after her. "Then let's be on Hedon's course as quick as we can."

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