Earthquake or volcano cut ship off from sea. Fear in great danger.Aronson,Felix.
Earthquake or volcano cut ship off from sea. Fear in great danger.
Aronson,Felix.
Directing the operator to answer that they were on their way north, Scoland gave the orders that hurled the cruiser on with redoubled speed to meet this new peril!
Icebergs floated along their sea path, but in diminished numbers, and in size far inferior to those whose menace had made the great southern drive and jam so perilous to the ship. When they reached the lower neck of Ross Sea, the passage that had taken twenty-nine days of weary and dangerous labor, blasting every rod of the way through the solid ice of the jam, was accomplished in four hours.
Wireless exchanges kept them informed that the position of theFelixwas unchanged. Scoland found her at the upper end of Ross Sea, cut off from open water. As islands appear suddenly from the depths of the South Pacific, so had the volcanic forces upheaved the Antarctic sea bottom. TheFelixhad ridden at anchor in a sheltered bay. Now she lay in a basin, surrounded entirely by land and rocks. A strip nearly two hundred yards across separated the ship from the tossing open waters of the sound. So shallow was the water where the ship was that the vessel had heeled over and lay on her starboard side, her decks tilted at a precipitous angle.
Scoland saw at once that his supply ship was hopeless of rescue. It would have taken tons of explosive to blast a channel to where she lay, and, that accomplished, there would be no water to float her. Off the edge of the strip of sea bottom that had been thrown up by the volcanoes, the water was some twelve fathoms.
Scoland laid the cruiser alongside the ledge, rigged carrying tackle, and spent two days replenishing the coal-bunkers of theMinnetonka, to the great satisfaction of Engineer MacKechnie, who was assured that, if the cruiser failed to escape from the jaws of the southland, it would not be from lack of coal for her engines.
Aronson and his crew, choosing between a swaying shore and a heaving sea bottom, had left theFelixand made camp among the rocks inland, where, instead of the antarctic rigors of climate to be expected in that latitude, they were oppressed by almost torrid heat, the result of their volcanic surroundings. Very glad were all of them to feel the decks of the steel cruiser beneath their heels; and would have been willing to chance the seas with depleted coal-bunkers to hurry their departure from a place where, as the Swedish ship's master said, "the Almighty had put them in dry dock, and they hadn't been able to figure out whether He was going to spill a new sea or build an island."
Leaving the sturdy oldFelixmewed up to be the prey of what chance or providence rules the ordering of volcanoes, the cruiser struck out for the north and America.
On a blustering March morning, Captain James Scoland sat in the reception hall of an ancient homestead in Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, and told his story to a sad-eyed young woman, a young woman who did not weep, but whose tightened lips and wistful gaze told of a grief that tears could not soften or relieve.
By cable and by wireless from South American shores, days before, had come speeding on electric wings the tidings of the failure of the Sardanian relief expedition. All America had been thrilled with sorrow and pity at the news, sorrow for the famous scientist who had lost his life on his chosen path, and for the equally famous son of the wildernesses, Polaris Janess, who had trodden that path to death with him; pity for the unknown nation that had been crushed out by inexorable nature, and pity most of all for the gray-eyed girl who sat alone in her Boston mansion, grieving for a hero-lover lost.
The captain finished his tale. "And so there was nothing to do but to come back," he said; "and I have come. And, Rose, is there nothing I can say that will bring back to your eyes the light I used to know there?"
Rose Emer did not answer him. She sat looking at the wall, seeing through it and beyond it. Many a thousand miles away her fancy pictured clearly a great plain of ice and rocks and snows, storm-swept by shrieking tempests. She saw a dismantled sledge half covered by the drifting white, and beside it a lowly mound, the monument above all the hopes and joy of her young life. She shuddered, and a little bitter cry of desolation burst from her lips. At her feet a great gray dog raised himself on his forefeet, rested his shaggy head upon her knees and whined uneasily.
Scoland arose and stood beside her. As if he divined the heart of the man, gray Marcus left his place at the feet of his mistress and stalked across the hall to the doorway, where he stood watching the visitor with gloomy eyes of distrust and menace. The hair around the great brute's neck was ruffled, and his powerful muscles were flexed. Neither the man nor woman took heed of Marcus. He stood quietly, but very watchful.
"Rose, dear Rose, can it be that this wild man from the wilderness held such power over you that you have forgotten all that we once were to each other?" Scoland said, his emotions fast carrying him beyond caution, or comprehension of the fitness of time or place.
Rose Emer raised her head suddenly and looked into the man's burning, brooding eyes.
"What do you mean, Captain Scoland?" she said with quiet dignity, but with a mounting flush on her cheeks and a flash in her eyes that boded rising indignation. "You forget—"
"No, Rose, I donotforget," he interrupted. "I shall never forget that you were mine first, and were stolen from me. Janess, who held you in the glamor of romance, is gone now. We have the present to face, with its things as they are—the future with things as they may be, if we will them so. Is it too much for me to hope that some time—not now, I know, but some time—we may take up our lives where they once seemed to be shaping and live them on—together?"
Before the girl opened her lips to speak, Scoland read her answer in her eyes, in the angry tilt of her chin. It maddened him beyond restraint.
"God!" he cried, "is that accursed barbarian to stand forever at each turn of my life and thwart me?" His voice rose into a shrill shriek. "No! No!" he shouted. "Not to be balked like this have I risked my eternal soul to hell fire! You were, you are, you shall be mine. Mine!Mine!"
Cast loose in his madness from all moorings of caution, he sprang at the girl, his arms outstretched to seize her and crush her to him.
"Stop!" The voice of Rose Emer rang out, clear and commanding. She leaped from her chair and backed against the wall, checking him with outstretched hand. Her deep eyes were aflame with anger. "You shall not touch me. You have insulted a noble man who is dead. Your words are an insult to me also. I will not listen to you. Go!" She pointed to the door.
Attracted by the loud voices, a gray-haired butler came hestitatingly into the room from the back of the house. "William," said the girl, "you will please open the door for this man."
But Scoland did not heed. It is to be doubted if he even heard her; and, if he did, her words fell meaningless on his ears. Whirled on in the rush of his emotion, he thrust the chair from his way and approached her. She struck him in the face with her clenched hands, but without effect. His arms were closing around her. She felt his hot breath on her cheek.
The butler, who had stood aghast for an instant, started hastily to cross the room to the assistance of his mistress, but he was not needed.
An eye more keen by far than that of the aged servant had watched the course of events, and a force more powerful than his now intervened.
Scoland's hand had just touched the girl's shoulder when a bolt of living fury shot across the hall and hurled him so violently against the wall that its stout oaken panels quivered, and he went down under the weight of gray Marcus. Over-leaping in his rage, the dog missed his aim, which was the man's neck. The gnashing fangs closed on Scoland's cheek below the left eye, and tore the flesh down to the chin. His victim down, the furious animal crouched on the body, worrying it horribly.
Instinctively, Scoland threw up his arms to protect his throat. The brute seized on one of his bare hands, and the bones crunched in the grip of the iron jaws. Screaming aloud, the man sought to roll over on his face. The sharp teeth ripped through his sleeves and deep into the biceps of his right arm.
Rose Emer stood paralyzed in white horror against the wall. Blood spurted from Scoland's mangled face and stained her skirts.
"Marcus! Back, Marcus!" she cried.
The fighting blood of the dog was up, and she might as well have commanded the wind. She threw her arms around the shaggy neck of the brute and strove with all her strength to drag him from the shrieking, slavering creature that had been James Scoland. Combe, the butler, came to her aid, bringing a heavy oak chair, a leg of which he thrust between the dog's jaws. Between them, the man and the girl finally tore Marcus from his prey, and his mistress led him, still snarling hideously, into another room and shut him in.
With the help of Combe, Scoland dragged himself to his feet and stood leaning heavily on a chair, his breath coming in great gasps. One glance Rose Emer had of his ghastly, disfigured countenance, and averted her eyes with a shudder. His punishment had been swift and horrible, more so than she knew. It was not alone the flesh that Marcus had marred. The brain had given way also.
Commanding his laboring breath, Scoland shook his uninjured hand at the shrinking girl.
"Curse you!" he cried, his voice rising into an unnatural screech. "Curse you and your devil-brute! May your heart rot in loneliness, waiting for your wild man. He'll never find his way back from where I left him. He'll die hard, for he is strong. He will starve and wander and go blind and mad—as I am going mad, and then he'll freeze—very slowly, and die—and come and haunt me—"
"What are you saying!" Rose Emer sprang toward him. She forced her unwilling eyes to look upon that terrible face. "Youlefthim, you say?Alive?"
Scoland threw back his head and laughed—the shrill, terrifying laughter of a maniac.
"Yes, I left him," he croaked hoarsely, "left him, alive, he and the doddering old man. Ha! ha! ha! I reached Sardanes and found them there, and they didn't see me. Ha! ha! I came away again, and they didn't know I left them, with a dead man to keep them company—in frozen, dead Sardanes—"
He caught sight of his face in a mirror, and his voice broke.
"My God!" he whispered. He held his arms out toward his reflection in the glass. "God!" he repeated, and collapsed on the floor in a fit of convulsions.
Combe and other servants brought ropes and tied him.
A little later men came and took Captain James Scoland away.
Like a far-flung, radiant ray of dazzling sunshine, one fact penetrated through all the horror of the moment to the heart of Rose Emer. Polaris, her Polaris, was alive! Alive, and living, might be saved—mustbe saved! She left the horrors of the hall on flying feet.
Before the madman was out of her house, Rose Emer had called up Washington on the long-distance telephone, and had spoken with the Secretary of the Navy.
Enough of English had the Sardanians learned to understand the words of Polaris, when he shouted that he had found a ship, and their glad exclamations were mingled with those of Zenas Wright, as the three sprang to meet the returning explorer.
"A ship, said I," Polaris said, lifting his hand, "but naught did I say of men or rescue. 'Tis theFelix, caught fast in the rocks by some mischance that is our great good fortune. She has been abandoned." He made haste to explain how he had found the ship. "Unless Scoland found means to empty her, which seems unlikely," he continued, "she has that on board to keep us four in comfort for years, if need be."
Breaking camp at once, they followed his lead through the mountain gap to the rocky shore.
Aye, there lay theFelix, right enough, and snug in her basin, but how were they on shore to reach her?
Polaris did not delay for long in solving that problem. Stripping Minos's sledge of hymanan wood of all its load, he set it afloat in the basin. It served him in lieu of a raft. For a paddle he took his long spear and poled his improvised craft out on the still waters of the miniature sea. It floated him safely, although his weight submerged it so that the water lapped at his ankles.
"Give me that flask, old Zenas Wright," he cried joyously. "I'll warrant you wait not long for the filling of it now, even if I have to desert this stout boat, and swim to the ship."
In a few minutes he had poled his way to where theFelixlay, her decks far aslant, but her rail still above water. To board her, he was forced to leap from the floating sledge. He caught the rail with his hands and pulled himself aboard. He clambered up the tilting deck and forced the forward hatch, which had been battened down by Scoland's men. Below decks he found all right and tidy. A glance into the hold discovered its stores of supplies almost intact. At least, he and his companions faced no menace of starvation.
Returning to the deck, he made his way aft, and opened the cabin hatch. He found the storeroom where the ship's supply of spirits was kept, and smashed in the door with a blow of his foot. Smiling as he did so, he filled the flask of Zenas Wright.
As he emerged on deck once more, he glanced shoreward. Danger, white, cruel, and desperate, was stalking his companions and they knew it not. From his position of vantage on the deck of theFelix, Polaris saw a moving mass that showed silver against its dark background in the rocks some hundred feet back from the shore of the basin, where his fellow travelers were waiting for him. Gliding among the boulders, with all the sinuous caution of a cat intent upon a group of mice, an immense polar bear was creeping to attack them!
Noiselessly, the great brute crept on in the cover of the rocks. The wind blew from the party, so that the keen-nosed dogs were unaware of the presence of a foe, and sounded no alarm.
Across the waters Polaris sent a warning shout. "A white bear!" he shouted, pointing. "In the rocks behind you! Ready with your guns if he charges!"
As he raised his voice a change in the wind or some other appeal to their finely attuned senses, informed the dogs that their foe was near. Gray runners and brown turned to face the rocks, every neck bristling. Stimulated by the brave demeanor of the fearless children of Pallas the huskies' ugly snouts were as snarlingly defiant as the others.
Over the rocks and into the open clambered the bear. His flanks were lean, and he was hunger-mad, to the point where numbers did not daunt him. He stood uncertain for but a moment, then broke into a lumbering, padded gallop, which, clumsy as it seemed, would have pressed a fleet runner hard to distance. A menacing roar answered the ear-splitting clamor of the dogs.
Wright and the Sardanian seized rifles from the sledge. Sternly calling back the dogs, they opened fire together. Minos, a novice in the use of the weapon, missed widely at the first shot, and in his haste jammed the lever of his rifle. The bullet of Zenas Wright, who was always an indifferent marksman, only grazed the flank of the bear, injuring him little and adding much to his rage. Again the geologist fired, but did not stop the great brute. The galloping monster was close upon them.
As he shouted his warning from the ship Polaris scrambled to the nearest davits that swung a boat. With no time to manipulate the ropes, he cut through them with his keen knife, and leaped for the boat as it fell. More by good fortune than else, the craft was not swamped. The son of the snows headed inshore, pulling so powerfully at the oars that their oaken lengths bent to his strokes. Swiftly as moved the boat, the drama ashore was played through before its prow touched the rocks.
Once more the scientist pressed the trigger in desperation, but a leaping, frenzied dog struck him from behind in the hollows of his knees, spoiling his aim, and sending him sprawling on his face. Minos's spear lay buried under the load that had been cast from his sledge. The third rifle was out of order and useless. Weaponless, he stood in the front of the charging enemy, except for his dagger and the light rifle, which he now clubbed and swung over his shoulder—a slight defense against the onset of the polar monster.
As the bear reached him, it reared on its hind legs, towering far above even the great height of the king. One vast forepaw, armed with its formidable talons, swung high to strike. Aloft also went the steel rifle in the grip of Minos. With the agility and eye of a trained boxer, the bear, even as it struck out with one paw, whirled the other with lightning quickness. The gun was torn from Minos's grasp, and spun through the air, to fall with a splash many feet out in the waters of the basin.
From the falling stroke of the crescent claws the king sprang back, snatching his dagger from his belt. Around him seethed the dogs, his own good gray beasts, no longer to be restrained from the battle, the huskies hanging doubtfully behind them. The white giant seemed to have marked the Sardanian for his prey, for, paying no attention to the dogs, he came on in a vengeful rush that they could not stop.
With his back to the sledge, Minos bestrode the body of Zenas Wright, who had struck his head against a rock, and lay stunned. Dark was the outlook. A woman's hand turned the balance. Tearing in desperate haste at the packs that had been thrown from their sledge, the Princess Memene strove to reach the spear of Minos, but found another weapon first.
Again the bear reared to attack, when over Minos's shoulder was thrust a broad and shining blade of ilium. With a shout, the king let fall the puny dagger, and gripped hard the hilt of the good sword under whose razor edge many a stout Sardanian had fallen. Swiftly he swung the great blade, and far out, all the weight of his shoulders behind the stroke.
Before the bear could strike again, the sword hit him in the side, well below the shoulder, and so deeply that he howled in agony, and fell to all fours.
Immediately he was all but buried by a wave of maddened dogs. Drenched with the blood that spurted from the sword gush, the king leaped to one side, whirling the heavy weapon aloft. Once more the bear essayed to rear, and to shake from him the swarming furies that hung at his sides, and clung to his jowls.
His mighty head, blood-bedabbled and fearful, rose out of the ruck of dogs. It offered a fair mark to the watchful king. Down came the glittering blade, the air whining under it, and struck on the bear's neck. The bones parted under the stroke. So deeply had it bitten, that the sword was wrenched from Minos's hand.
With a last convulsive effort that threw the dogs from him, the polar monster arose to his full height and toppled backward, crashing to earth, stone dead.
Zenas Wright came to his senses a few moments later, with an unmistakable tang of cognac in his throat, and an aroma in the air that made him smile, despite the pain of his bruised head.
"It's a brave spirit," he gasped. Then he got up and extended his hand to the Sardanian king. "I guess I owe my life to a braver," he added. "My friend, I thank you."
Minos understood a part of the remark. He grasped the proffered hand with a deprecating shake of his head.
Untroubled by the fears which had driven Aronson and his men from the ship, the members of the party took up their quarters on theFelix, drawing upon her inexhaustible stores for comforts which had long been denied to them.
For two of them, the ship was a revelation of wonders undreamed of. Machinery, books—a hundred and one things were marvels to the two Sardanians. They learned with an eagerness that was almost childlike, absorbing knowledge against the coming of that time, so hoped for, when they should become of the great world of their visions. That, having come this far, they would reach that goal of their desires, they did not doubt.
To Polaris Janess and the geologist the situation was more serious. They knew that the chances were few that any ship should penetrate into Ross Sea, perhaps in many years. The Pole had been discovered. The Smaley and Hinson exploring expedition had come and gone. There was no reason of which the scientist and his companion knew to call other men to brave the perils of the Antarctic.
"If we are ever to get out of here, we must help ourselves, lad," Zenas Wright said to Polaris, as they discussed their plight several days after their coming to the ship. He shook his white head. "It seems just about hopeless. There's only one way, and that's by water, and we're cut off from the sea, even if we could navigate the ship, which is doubtful."
"But a boat—" Polaris began.
"Suicide!" exclaimed the old man. "One of those shells wouldn't live for five miles. Even if it should, they are not large enough to hold the four of us and the things which it would be absolutely necessary for us to have. Once away from this volcanic neighborhood we have a long stretch of icy sea to traverse. The nearest land where we should find aid is New Zealand, and that is more than two thousand miles to the north."
"There's a large boat with an engine and a sail," Polaris said, "but it is in pieces."
"What's that!" shouted Zenas Wright, "an auxiliary launch? Lead me to it, boy! Pieces or no pieces, we can put it together. I know enough for that, with you two strapping big fellows to help. If there's enough gasoline aboard to run her when she's assembled, we will have to chance her. It's our only chance."
Without delay the two of them scrambled along the slanted decks. Aft of the deckhouse, under her tarpaulin, they found the launch. As Polaris had said, she was in pieces. Only the hull lay on the deck of theFelix, a stout twenty-five-foot craft. Her sixty horsepower engine and her auxiliary mast, sail, and jib were below decks.
Zenas Wright looked her over with flashing eyes. "If there's gasoline enough we may make it," he said. "We'vegotto make it!" He did a mental computation. "It's a rough two thousand miles to New Zealand. Let's see. If you can steer, son, and I think you can, running twenty-four hours a day, and using the sails to save gas when we can, we can make it in a month—if we meet no obstacles; which, of course, we will. We must provision for two months. If that doesn't take us through, God rest our souls!"
"Set us at work, for there is need for haste," Polaris said. "We must be out of this place before winter closes in above us." He called the Sardanian.
In the paint locker and the hold they found gasoline, twenty twenty-five gallon tanks of it—more than they could take with them. Under Zenas Wright's directions, they coaled the donkey engine on the forecastle head, rigged tackle to the mainmast, and hauled the engine up through the hatch. Many hours were spent in searching for various parts of the mechanism which they needed, but they found it all at last.
The patient mechanical knowledge of the scientist was equal to the task of installing the engine. With that in its place, they stepped the mast, hauled the gasoline tanks on deck and shipped their cargo. With spirits new in the hope their work aroused, they sang at their labors. Memene, who had drooped, regained her usual vigor and vivacity.
So stoutly did the two young giants set their hands to their task that within four days of the time they started they attached the sturdy launch to the davits and swung her over the side of theFelixby aid of the invaluable donkey engine. Zenas Wright immediately went aboard and tried out the engine. He spent the most of another day tinkering with the mechanism until it suited him, and then announced that they were ready for their perilous dash for the open sea and freedom.
The ring of rock that had made theFelixprisoner did not offer the same obstacle to the launch that it did to the greater ship. Near the north coast of the bay was a channel deep enough so that the launch could barely pass through to the sea. In a number of places it was so narrow that Wright and Janess were forced to use drills and dynamite, and blow away projecting rocks.
It was a great regret to the voyagers that they could not take their dogs with them. There was not room on the launch for the animals and food for them. Zenas Wright, now formally nominated the leader of the expedition, by right of his knowledge of navigation, compromised to the extent of carrying along two of the gray brutes of Minos, named Kalor and Thetis. But the old man conditioned that, if it came to a question of food scarcity, the brutes would have to be done away with. The rest of the animals they turned loose ashore.
Not forgotten in their preparations for departure was the wealth of Sardanian rubies. Finding a small leather traveling bag on board theFelix, Polaris packed it with the skin sacks in which they had placed the gems before they had left the cave on Latmos.
At last they bade farewell to the oldFelix, now doubly deserted, and put out for the open seas. It was nearly three months since the two adventurers had left theMinnetonkato find Sardanes, when they passed out of the enclosed basin and turned the bow of the launch northward. Around them roared the volcanic mountains. They saw the last of theFelixthrough a falling storm of impalpable ashes, so thick that it darkened the sunlight.
Four weeks steady progress, sailing when they could and using their treasured gasoline sparingly, carried them well above the Circle. Unceasing vigilance alone enabled them to make that progress, surrounded as they were by the menace of floating ice, collision with which would have crushed their craft like an eggshell. When they made use of their sail, Polaris took long spells at the wheel; but when it was necessary to put the engine into commission old Zenas Wright could neither rest nor sleep.
Came a day when the Princess Memene whispered briefly in the king's ear the burden of a pretty secret that she could no longer bear to keep from him. Close enfolded in his arms, she told him that which caused him to flush as radiantly as she.
"Another king is coming," Minos murmured low. "Hail to the king! But alas, his sire hath for him no kingdom to rule, unless indeed one may be won in the land whither we are journeying."
"Mayhap not a king, but a princess," said Memene.
Strong of the hope that was in him, Minos made answer. "Nay, he shall be a king."
And after thoughtful pause he added, "We will call him Patrymion."
Thus was another incentive added, bidding the wanderers bend every effort to reach with speed the friendly arms of civilization.
When they came again to the region of nights and days they were forced to do their traveling by sunlight mostly, and at night to drift. Twice the chill in the air warned them just in the nick of time of the proximity of icebergs, and they escaped them by recourse to the engine.
Then a storm came up from the southwest and hurled them north under bare poles, with the prospect of utter destruction momentarily before them.
"Let it blow," said Zenas Wright grimly. "If we can only keep afloat, it's helping us north fast enough, and, besides, it saves gas."
North they went, and east, far out of the course they had laid for New Zealand. For two days and nights the gale held, dying away in the dawn of the third day. The first gray daylight found them tossing on a choppy sea. When the light came, and Zenas Wright was able to figure out their position, he announced that they were somewhere in the neighborhood of the Tubuai Islands, a French possession, and they decided to turn the prow of their boat in the direction of these islands.
Taking the glasses, Polaris climbed a few feet up the mast and swept the sea. He was unable to raise land in any direction.
What he did raise, however, sent him clattering back to the deck.
"A ship!" he cried. "Straight ahead of us, a steamship! I can see her smoke!"
"Look again, lad," said the practical Wright, "and tell us which way her smoke hangs, if you can."
"To the north," Polaris shouted a moment later. "And she's headed this way, too!"
With a splendid disregard for their remaining gasoline, the scientist forced his engine to its best efforts, and they soon were making eighteen knots on their way toward the stranger.
Nearer and nearer came the two craft together, and finally those on the launch saw the steamship swing off her southerly course and point straight toward them.
They had been sighted.
Suddenly Polaris, who had been studying the approaching ship through the glasses, threw them down and sent up a great shout:
"It's theMinnetonka!"
It was.
In another half hour they were alongside. A line was thrown them and made fast. Canny even in that moment of excitement, Zenas Wright opened a locker near the wheel and buckled fast to his leathern belt the traveling bag that held the rubies of Sardanes.
While Polaris stood by with a boat-hook, fending the launch from the steel side of the cruiser, the other clambered up the ladder, Minos pausing to snatch up one of the gray dogs, climbing up with the animal tucked under his arm. Catching up the other dog, Polaris leaped into the ladder, and the deserted launch swung away from under him and passed out of their lives forever.
Once safely on the deck, Minos and his bride stood clutching each other's hands and gazing wonderingly at the scene, so different from that of the only other ship they had ever set eyes on. Then, as the officers and crew came forward in greeting, the Sardanian prince slid an arm protectingly about his princess and met them hand to hand, while Memene dimpled and blushed happily.
On the deck stood Lieutenant Everson, his eyes alight, his hands outstretched. Before the son of the snows could grip those outstretched palms, came flying feet.
"Polaris!"
In his dreams he had heard that voice, ringing nearly half way round the world. He opened his arms. His amber eyes looked into her long eyes of grey. Their lips clung.
"At last—my Rose Maid!"
This novel is the second in the trilogy which began with "Polaris—of the Snows." Each novel in the trilogy is complete in itself.
The third story is "Polaris and the Goddess Glorian."