It was no part of Polaris's program to take part in a hand-to-hand fight with the pursuers. There were seven of them remaining, and with nothing but his own safety at stake, he might have been confident of the issue; but he did not dare, under the circumstances, to take the risk of the encounter.
When he saw that a charge might be delayed no longer, he turned and ran swiftly along the curve of the ledge, the dogs racing with him. He, the fleetest of runners, now went at top speed. When he stopped, some hundred and fifty feet away, Garlanes and his men had barely rounded the bulge of rock to the wider part of the path.
They charged the neck of the way, and, finding the way widen, where there was nothing to take cover behind, they quite naturally hesitated for the next move of their foe.
That move came quickly. Garlanes, in the lead, heard something sing past his ear like an angry bee. The man next behind him felt something strike him over the heart, and he threw up his hands and crumpled to the floor. The walls of the mighty tunnel flung back a crashing echo to the sharp report of the rifle. Kneeling close to the wall, peering through the fitful light, Polaris watched the effect of his shot.
Vainly he hoped that superstition would come to his aid and hold the Sardanians back from the carnage. They were dismayed. By the intermittent flares of garish light from the throat of the volcano, Polaris could see their consternation in their faces and gestures; but he had not stopped them.
After a momentary examination of the body of their comrade, they came on, but slowly.
With loud cries of encouragement, Prince Minos and his men, summoned by the messenger from Garlanes, poured around the corner of the rock, and the entire body came on apace.
Again Polaris took up the retreat, running swiftly, and keeping well out of the range of the spear casting. Presently when he deemed that he must be nearly half-way around the rim of the crater, he came to another narrower part of the pathway where a large rock lay behind which he could crouch. There he decided to make his stand, and to retreat no farther until the summons of Kalin should tell him that the sledge was clear of the tunnel.
He refilled the magazine of the rifle, and waiting calmly for the flickering light to make his aim sure, he began methodically to pick off the foremost pursuers, making every bullet count. Under the pitiless accuracy of his fire, the Sardanians lagged uncertainly, but always they crept nearer.
Six times had the brown rifle sent its death unseen, almost unfelt, across the arc of the crater rim, when there was a stir among the dogs behind the marksman, a touch on his shoulder, a voice in his ear.
"Come, brother, all is ready. Haste thee before they close in!" called Kalin.
Not a score of yards farther they came to a passage in the wall, or, rather, a fissure through it, which seemed to have been floored by the hand of man at some distant time. It led at right angles from the crater shelf. As Polaris looked into it he could see that it was lighted dimly by the light of day. It was barely wide enough for the passage of the sledge, and it so twisted in the rock that it had been a slow and difficult task for the priest to drive the ponies through.
Circumstance willed that they were not to pass the tunnel without further mishap and bloodshed.
Slowly the enemy had crept up. When Kalin and Polaris broke cover and dashed for the mouth of the tunnel, the foremost of the Sardanians was only a short spear-throw behind. In the momentary pause at the mouth of the tunnel, men and dogs were bunched, and offered a fair target to the Sardanians leaping along the ledge.
With a scream of pain and rage, the dog Pallas leaped thrice her height from the floor and fell, writhing in her death agonies. A spear had penetrated behind the poor brute's shoulder, nearly piercing the body through.
Her death wail was drowned in the terrible challenge that came from the throats of the pack, and the cry of anger that rose from the lips of her master. Kalin stood alone at the mouth of the narrow way, holding the rifle that had been thrust into his hands. In the midst of his leaping, snarling dogs, Polaris, raging like a demon at the slaughter of his old playmate and servant, threw himself back into the teeth of the charge of Minos's men.
Clutching a heavy spear in his right hand, and whirling it like a toy, and with a revolver in his left, he swept down the ledge, thrusting and firing. Around him the six dogs of the pack fought after their own fashion, rending and snapping like devils.
In the face of that attack the Sardanians shrank aghast.
Thirty feet or more back along the pathway Polaris fought blindly for vengeance before his reason returned to him. In front of him the Sardanians were huddled in the path, backing away and obstructed in their flight by those behind who were pushing forward, under the threats and commands of Minos, the Prince.
Polaris's brain cleared. He heard the voice of Kalin calling to him to return. He turned and raced swiftly to the tunnel, over the bodies of the dead. Behind him the rush of pursuit gathered and came on again.
Through the tunnel they raced, dogs and men, and came out into the sunlight, which shone on crags and boulders and bare earth.
"Quickly, now; the rocking stone—tip it over!" gasped the priest.
Where the tunnel ended was its narrowest point. A man might reach out and touch both walls. On the rock above the entrance beetled what Kalin called the "rocking stone." It was an enormous boulder, the fang of some glacial jaw in the primeval, or a fragment spat from the maw of the volcano. Where it had come to rest, at the very verge of the tunnel entrance, it was balanced. So nice was its adjustment on its natural pedestal that the breath of a strong breeze caused it to sway, or rock gently; the hand of a strong man might increase the oscillation greatly.
"Tip it over!" gasped Kalin, pointing with his hand.
A glance told Polaris his purpose. In the passage swelled the clamor of pursuit. He sprang up the rocks, set his powerful shoulder under the belly of the immense stone, and shoved with all his strength.
Over swayed the stone—farther than it had ever swayed before in all the centuries that it had stood there. The solid rock of its foundation grated and crumbled. Over it swung but not far enough to fall. To the straining man, whole minutes seemed to be passing as the stone hung; then, despite his utmost effort, it shuddered—and swung back!
Polaris turned and set his broad back to the surface of the stone as it oscillated. He waited until its recoil swing was completed, and, as it again inclined toward the fissure, he straightened his doubled legs and put forth all the power in his magnificent muscles.
He heard the roaring of the leaping blood in his ears. He heard the uneasy crumbling of the rock at his feet. He shut his eyes and strained grimly—triumphantly! The resistance ceased, and he threw himself on his side to avoid falling. The huge boulder pitched into the tunnel, grinding and crashing, and settled its weight of tons squarely across the passage.
As it went down, there was a flash of white beneath it, and the body of a tall man shot through the portals that were closing forever, and fell on his face on the slope.
It was Minos the Prince! Outdistancing all his men, he had dashed through the passage, and hurled himself at the daylight not one second too soon to escape being crushed under the fall of the rocking stone. Behind his flying heels it closed down, grimly and solidly, splintering the walls at either side to make way for itself. When it rested on the floor of the crevice it completely filled the entrance. Not a squirrel could have clambered through.
Dully through the wall of rock penetrated the dismayed clamor of the Sardanians in the passage, and the muted sound of their spears smiting on the stone. No efforts of theirs could so much as shake the boulder. Nothing short of giant powder would dislodge it.
Desperate at his plight, made mad with fury, or surpassingly daring was Minos the Prince, for he picked himself up with a shout and charged headlong at the men and dogs who confronted him.
"This task to me brother," shouted Polaris to Kalin, who lifted spear to defend himself. Polaris had sprung down from the pedestal of the rocking stone, and he leaped unhesitatingly into the path of Minos.
With lightning swiftness he caught a grip on the haft of the spear which the prince whirled up to pierce him. For a moment the two men stood tense, with upstretched arms, battling fiercely, but without motion, for the mastery of the weapon. Then Polaris widened his grip on the shaft and twisted it sharply from his antagonist's grasp.
They stood breathing deeply, and Polaris cast the spear away, at the same time sternly ordering off the dogs which would have rushed on Minos.
"A trick," said Minos with a smile, glancing at his empty hands. "Another trick, O clever stranger! Now try a fall with Minos, where tricks will not avail." He flung his arms around Polaris.
His grip was of steel. In all Sardanes the "smiling prince" was known as the strongest man. Once, for a wager, he had trussed the legs of a full grown pony, and had carried it on his shoulders unaided, from the river to the Judgement House.
Round about Polaris his long legs tightened, and he tugged upward mightily, in an effort to tear his antagonist from his foothold and hurl him down. He would have plucked an ordinary man from the earth like a toy, but he was not pitted against an ordinary man. He was the strongest man in Sardanes, but Sardanes was small, and her strong men few. Polaris was perhaps the strongest man in the world.
He stood firm. Not only that, but he thrust his hands upwards, gripping the prince in the armpits, and slowly straightened his arms, despite the utmost effort of the struggling prince to pinion them to his sides. Strain as Minos might, he could not break that grip beneath his shoulders.
Slowly, very slowly, Polaris straightened his arms. As he did so, he bent his hands in from the wrists, exerting an ever increasing pressure at each side of Minos's broad chest. To his own intense astonishment, the prince, whom no man ever had mastered, felt his foothold growing insecure, felt his ribs slowly curving in and his breathing growing short and painful, felt his mighty arms slipping.
In vain he straightened up to his towering height and shook his sweep of shoulders. His terrible grip was broken.
Polaris suddenly loosed his hold, passed his arms up within those of the prince, and brought them down with elbows bended, freeing himself entirely. He caught Minos by the wrists, and exerting a strength that almost crushed the bones, he pressed downward swiftly and relentlessly.
The Prince of Sardanes knelt on the bare rock at the feet of the son of the snows.
No word had been spoken. Polaris let fall his enemy's wrists, and pointed along the mountainside toward the pass that led into the valley.
"Yonder lieth thy way, back to Sardanes, prince," he said gently. "Go back to thy people and rule them wisely, O Minos. Seek not to follow us. We go hence on a far journey, and will not be denied or turned. As to the strife that hath arisen, no man can regret it more than I. Farewell."
Minos answered not, and Polaris turned to the girl and the priest. He saw that all was in readiness for their going. Tethered to a tree below them in the mountain's belt of green were the snorting ponies. He threw out his arm in a sweeping gesture. "The way to the north is open," he said. "Let us be going."
For fifty miles Polaris and Kalin drove the Sardanian ponies along the Hunters' Road, while the dogs of the pack raced strong and free at the sides of the sledge. Alas, it was now but a five-dog pack! Octavius had given his life in the crater, in the mad fight to avenge the death of Pallas. Two Sardanians had fallen under his gashing jaws when a spear-thrust found his vitals, and in his death-pain he had leaped over the rim of the fire-pit to the molten lake in the depths.
Of the pack remained Juno, Hector, Julius, Nero, and Marcus, the giant leader.
Urged on by voice and crack of whip, the ponies tore along the snow-paths, mile after mile. Rose Emer rode on the sledge, and the men beside it with the dogs.
When they had traveled fifty miles or more, the little beasts showed signs of going to pieces, and Polaris halted them. Enough fodder had been taken from the valley to give the animal one good meal. The men fed them and made camp.
After the ponies were somewhat rested from their long pull in the snows, Polaris pointed their noses toward home and whipped them into the trail. Tossing their heads in the air, the little beasts set off along the road in a cloud of fine snow-dust upflung from their scurrying hoofs.
"Yonder goeth the last link with thy land, Kalin," said Polaris, as the men and the maid stood to watch the departure of the small horses.
"Aye," replied the priest and smiled. "Now bethyland my land. On to the north," and he pointed ahead with steady hand to where the massive ice barrier stood in their path, its glittering sides gleaming a steely blue in the sunlight. He turned to Rose Emer.
"Lady," he said in the halting English, of which he had acquired a surprising knowledge, considering the few days that had elapsed since he first had heard that tongue—"lady, Kalin—American—now."
"Yes," smiled the girl in answer, "am I not well guarded? Two American gentlemen to watch over me. I could have no better protectors."
Kalin caught the significance of her remark, and smiled his wonderfully sweet, sad smile—the smile that always struck to the heart of Polaris with a prescience of sorrow to come.
Inland they pushed, skirting the base of the towering ice-wall, seeking for some spot where they might pass over or through it. Disaster dogged fast on their heels, waiting to strike.
On the seventh day out from the valley the first blow fell.
They had passed the ice-ridge. After three days of groping along its base, they came to a place where the mighty wall was deeply notched and the slope was less steep. There, aided by a heavy fall of snow, which partly melted and then froze, giving a scant foothold on the ice-hills, they were able to pass.
One entire day was consumed in making passage. At length they passed the wall in safety, and found themselves in an apparently interminable stretch of plain and hummock and crevasse, where the going was slow and laborious and exceedingly perilous.
Then the priest fell ill.
Either the unaccustomed fare—their diet now consisted almost entirely of fish and boiled snow-water prepared over the little oil stove—or the rigor of the atmosphere and the exertions caused a sudden decline in the bodily powers of Kalin. Strive as he might, his waning strength became apparent, and he lagged in the journeying through the steppes of snow.
The capstone of trouble came when his eyes unused to the continual glare of the relentless sun on the fields of snow and the cliffs of ice, gave way to the dread snow blindness, thebête noirof all explorers in polar regions.
For hours he was able to conceal his blindness from his companions. With stubborn will bent to the task, he ran on with the sledge, guiding himself with his hand at its rail, after the last faint glimmerings of sight had vanished. He had a splendid will, and he made it dominate his weakening body long after it seemed that his muscular strength was unequal to the demand of the trail. It was impossible for them to travel as swiftly as they had, but he would not yield to his creeping weakness, and still ran on.
When the darkness fell he was undismayed and said nothing, hoping against hope that it would pass away. He could no longer keep up his pretense, however, at the first camping spot, and his companions saw him groping helplessly once he had quitted the side of the sledge.
His plight struck a chill to the stout heart of Polaris, who realized that in speed lay their only hope of earthly salvation. Bitter weather lay to the north of the ice barrier, and there was almost no game from which to replenish their stock of food. The days of travel had diminished it to the point where a fresh supply had come to be a problem demanding speedy solution.
Now, to accommodate their pace to that of the tottering blind man, or to carry him, nearly doubling the load of the dogs, spelled almost sure defeat.
He gave no inklings of his foreboding to either Kalin or Rose Emer, but cheered the priest as best he might in his affliction, and pressed on with what speed was possible. Three more laps on the journey they made before the steely fortitude of Kalin gave way, and he could no longer force his exhausted limbs to bear the weight of his failing body. In mid career across the snows, he stumbled from the path and fell prone in lee of a huge drift.
Polaris plucked him from the snow.
"Kalin is outdone!" gasped the Sardanian. "Thou, my brother, and the Lady Rose must go forward and leave me. On to the north, O brother! Kalin dieth!"
"Not so, Kalin," answered Polaris. "My breath will leave my body before I desert my brother. Didst thou falter in Sardanes, when all were against the strangers? And shall Polaris desert thee now?"
"But for the lady's sake, thou must," persisted Kalin. "Thou mayest not fail her, and delay is death."
"She would not buy even her life at such a price, O Kalin," said Polaris. "Together we will fare to the north, or together will we keep eternal watch here in the snows."
Unheedful of the protests of the priest, he carried him to the sledge and rearranged the load on the vehicle, making a place for Kalin at the rear behind the girl. Thus they took up again the tale of the journey, but more slowly than they had yet traveled, the load taxing the powers of the diminishing team-pack.
Once broken in the pride of his endurance, the priest rapidly lost hold on himself, and his vitality seemed to ooze from him with the passing hours. At the second stop after Polaris had made a place for him on the sledge the son of the snows discovered that one of his legs, which seemed to be paralyzed, was frozen from foot to knee; yet Kalin did not seem to know it.
At the close of a particularly trying march—their going no longer could be called a dash—Polaris made their camp at the sheltered side of one of the hummocks of rock and ice with which the land was sprinkled and all of them, dogs and humans, slumbered wearily for many hours.
Polaris awoke with a strange weight at his threat. It was the ilium necklace of Kalin, in which glimmered the red stones. He held it up for an instant in wonder at its presence there and then sprang to the priest's sleeping parka.
It was empty. Kalin was not in the camp!
Without arousing the girl, Polaris made hasty search. Some rods along the back trail, he saw a break in the snow at the side of the trail. There he found the priest lying on his back, with his face turned up to the sun and his keen-pointed dagger piercing his heart. He had stumbled thither as far as his endurance would sustain him. More joyful than ever it had seemed in life was the half smile at the lips of the dead man.
That smile was the only message he had left. He had been dead for hours.
Polaris drew the dagger from the dead heart that had loved him well and hurled it afar in the snow. He smoothed the dress of the priest and bore the body to the camp. Before he aroused the girl he placed the corpse again in the sleeping parka.
Then he called the girl and told her that Kalin was dead, but made no mention of the way the priest had taken.
"Ah, another brave heart stilled—and because of me!" she cried, and the tears came, for she had liked the priest well. As she wept, Polaris told her of the love the man had borne her.
"And, lady," he said, "wherever Kalin is, he is well content, for he has aided you toward your dearest wishes and his soul asked no more than that."
He dug with the blade of a spear at the foot of one of the icy monoliths, and laid the corpse of Kalin there, while the dogs, which always seemed to sense the presence of death, bayed a hoarse requiem above the grave. But neither then nor at any future time did Polaris tell the girl of the supreme sacrifice Kalin made at the last, not wishing to make her suffer more regret.
On the rude grave he had made he piled a few loose fragments of rock, and turned to the task of breaking camp for the next northward lap into the wild land.
Two hundred miles to the north and east, three men were gathered on the snow crust in a little valley, wrenching and thrumming at the wires and pinions of the first bird-machine that ever had penetrated into the fastnesses of the antarctic.
All was taut for the start. The wings were set. The engines responded to the power. The propeller thrilled the air. Into the seat climbed a lean, fur-clad young man, with a thin face, high cheek-bones shadowing deep-set, cold, blue eyes, and a wisp of drab moustache above thin, eager lips.
"Ready there, Aronson," he said, to a man standing by.
A second later Captain James Scoland sailed majestically away into the white mystery of the unknown polar land.
At the door of the snow house that had been their home for days, Aronson and Mikel, who had pressed with him to his farthest south camp, watched his going with shaded eyes. A tiny silken flag bearing the stars and stripes, fluttered from one of the canvas plane wings. Mikel watched it as far as it was distinguishable.
"An' here's hopin' he carries Old Glory safely through to the pole—an' back again!" he shouted.
Leagues farther to the north, in another tiny camp, three other men were waiting, also. Still farther on, in an ice-locked harbor, the good ship Felix rode day by day, the little company of its crew watching the slow passing of the hours, with every ear attuned to catch the first voice returning from the south that should tell of success, or of defeat and death.
And were that tale of success, those on the ship nursed a heavy sorrow, that would turn into bitterness all the glory of success. A glorious maid and two men who had been of their company had strayed from the ship and perished in the wilderness.
Silence.
As far as the eye could reach, a dull wilderness, stretching wearily under a leaden, sunless sky. A rolling plain of lusterless snow, cut sharply here and there by crevasses, gashed at intervals by rifts of unknown depths and tortuous gulleys. North and south seemingly without bounds; east and west, many a mile of bleak fatigue between low, sullen hills of gray.
A land without sound, without life, and without hope.
Yet, among the ridges in that dead and twilight chaos, something stirred. A dark speck crawled on and on, writhing along the brinks of the crevasses, skirting the yawning rifts, twisting in and out around the hummocks, like the course of some wriggling vermin across the cracked and gaping skin of a white, unholy corpse.
Northward, ever northward, the blot dragged its crooked way. Nearer would it resolve itself into two wearily plodding beasts, tugging, slipping, stumbling, but going on, the creaking straps of their leathern harness pulling a sledge with a heap of skins upon it. Still nearer—a fur-clad, haggard man with hollow blazing eyes glittering through an unkempt shock of golden hair and a gaunt gray dog with drooping tail picking their way with soundless feet through the white reaches, dragging their sledge; like a fantasy passing across the white and silent dream of the cold end of the world.
Once the dog had looked up into the face of the master, the dumb eloquence of sacrifice shining through its eyes, an age-old fire. The massive jaws slipped apart, but closed again; only a sigh was breathed from the beast's broad chest.
"Aye, Marcus, I know," muttered the man. "I know that you'll die on your four feet, if you can, and in the straps. And I, Marcus," his voice dropped to a whisper, "I'll die, too, Marcus, as you will—for the Rose—all for the Rose—But not yet, Marcus; for the Rose yet lives, and death is slow for the very strong."
Five luckless days had passed since the priest had laid his burdens by. One by one the cruel south had taken lives in toll, until only Polaris and the grim pack leader stood in harness to race with death on the course to the north.
First polar bears, made mad by hunger, attacked the party, and two of the dogs, Juno and Nero, died under the sweeping crescent claws.
A nameless distemper, from which no dog, however carefully bred, is quite immune, had seized both Hector and Julius. For hours they acted strangely as they ran, and then, at a stopping place, they went quite mad and turned on the man and girl.
Hector went down to silence under the crushing jaws of Marcus, who rose with a mighty roar to quell this insane mutiny; and Julius died on the spear of Polaris. There were tears on the cheek of the man as he drove the weapon home.
Refashioning the harness to suit his own wide shoulders, Polaris then took up the work of the lost dogs. For two long days of many marches he and Marcus had dragged the sledge. Now, with their stock of provisions dwindled away and their rations slender, the terrific strain of the journey was telling almost to madness on the man and the dog.
They came to rest in the shelter of one of the thousands of hummocks, and Polaris realized, with a chill at his stout heart, that their march had advanced them a bare score of miles from their last stopping place, when they should have covered at least twice that distance.
From her nestling place beneath the heap of furs on the sledge he gently aroused Rose Emer. The girl rode most of the weary miles in light and fitful slumbers, drowsy with the cold, and her brain at times benumbed by the prospect, now nearer and nearer, of almost certain disaster—a contingency which the man would not admit.
She came forth listlessly, and they prepared their poor meal over the fame of the little oil-burner, and ate it within the shelter of the skins which the man stretched to confine the heat from the stove. They divided their rations with Marcus, and girl and man and dog huddled at the side of the sledge, to sleep if they might until the time for the next setting forth along the terrible way.
Some hours later, when Polaris awakened her, ready for the next march forward, she shook her head wearily.
"No, my dear friend, you will have to go on without me. No," as he opened his mouth in quick question, "listen to me. I have thought it all out. If we continue on in this way we can proceed but a few miserable miles at the best, and then perish in the snow. I am the handicap. Without me, you and the dog could leave the sledge and go on alone, and, perhaps, save yourselves. You were born and have lived in this land, and you could get through alone; where, with me to look after, you will not succeed."
Polaris listened in silence, and a smile gathered at the corners of his mouth, as sad and wistful as any of Kalin's.
"Too much has been done and suffered already on my account," the girl went on. "I cannot let you make this sacrifice. You are as brave and true a gentleman as lives in the world to-day. All that human being can do, you have done for me. You must not die for me. You must go on and leave me—"
Her voice broke, and she hid her face in her hands. She felt the touch of Polaris's hand on her shoulder.
"Lady," he began, and his strong voice quivered. "Lady, what has Polaris done that you judge him so."
"Ah, no, no!" she sobbed, "you have been good and brave and true, even to the end—but the end is here. Oh, youmustgo on—"
For a moment the man stood and gazed down on her, as she sat with her head bent low. He started to hold out his arms toward her, then clenched his hands at his sides. Immediately he relaxed them, stooped, and swung her lightly from her seat on the furs, and tucked her tenderly in her place on the sledge.
"Dear lady," he said softly, "never did Polaris think to quarrel with you, and here, least of all places, is fitting for it. Yet speak no more like this. Polaris will, hemustgo on as he has gone. If he dies, it will be the death of an American gentleman, not that of a savage and a coward. Come, Marcus!"
He slipped his shoulders into the harness with the dog, and again they went forward into the gray unknown. Through tears the girl watched the strong back bending to its task ahead of her. In her eyes a great light kindled and burned steadily. Not all the antarctic snows might quench it.
They traversed four more laps across the snows, and were starting on their fifth when the final calamity fell.
As usual, they had camped close against the side of one of the larger mounds or hummocks. It was of rock, coated heavily with ice and frozen snow. On its beetling side, just above their little camp, a mass of rock had cracked away from the main body of the hummock. Its slow separation had been a matter of years, perhaps ages. That fracture might have been begun by the grinding fangs of a glacier five thousand years ago, and completed by the tireless and eternal frosts.
There it was poised, masked by the snow and ice, waiting its time to fall.
At the moment that the travelers turned their faces from camp, and Polaris started to assist Rose Emer to her seat on the sledge, the hour struck for the fall. Rock grated on rock above them, warning the man to spring back. He dragged the girl aside. A few pieces of ice rattled down. Then the fragment, a weight of tons, toppled squarely down upon the rear of the sledge, crushing it to splinters, and burying it in the loose snow.
They stared at the wreck, and Marcus growled and strained to free himself from the harness.
Polaris dug aside the covering snow. A moment's inspection showed that the sledge was nothing but shattered uselessness. Indeed, could he have repaired it, he had not the chance. It was beneath the mass of the fallen rock, too great a weight for even his powers to remove. Some of their vanishing store of provisions also lay under the rock.
"We still can walk, lady," Polaris said. "We will go on together."
"No, dear friend, we will not walk on," she replied. "See, my foot is hurt, and I can scarcely stand upon it. A splinter of ice struck it when the rock fell—"
Polaris leaped to her side and examined the extended ankle. He found it not broken, but bruised and swelling rapidly. It was true that she could not walk on it, nor would for many days.
He made no answer to her last argument. He tore several skins robes from the fore part of the sledge, and set her down on them. Then, as well as he could, he bandaged the bruised ankle, winding it with strips of hide, outside the girl's boot, for he dared not remove the coverings from the injured limb lest the cold do it irreparable injury.
His hasty surgery completed, he stepped to the ruin of the sledge and filled two skin sacks with the remains of the meat which he could come at. He strapped one of them on the back of Marcus, and the other he slung on his own shoulders.
With his knife he cut and fashioned at one of the skin robes. When he approached the girl again he wore a rude sling, which he had passed about his neck and shoulders, so that it hung across his broad chest.
He plucked her from the snow, wrapped her in a robe, and set her in the sling at his breast. He stooped, and with his knife cut Marcus out of the useless harness.
Unbelievable as it was that human beings so beset could continue to exist, they proceeded thus for the space of two days. At the end of each short march they huddled together in their robes—the girl and the dog and the man, and warmed with the heat of their bodies their frozen food, until they might chew and mumble it. Still closer they huddled for their fitful slumbers.
On the march the girl swooned many times with the throbbing pain of her swollen ankle. Always she awoke to find herself in the man's arms. They wound about her, a living barrier, which death itself could not pass. All the weary miles of the weary marches he carried her.
Under her weight, every muscle of his splendid body was racked with the pangs of torture, until the fierce pain was succeeded by a numbness that slowly enveloped his body and crept up to his brain. He felt that he had been transformed into a marching machine of unfeeling steel. He went on, bearing his burden, mile after mile, stolidly, doggedly, splendidly.
Two days passed. Polaris roused himself from where they slept huddled in a little hollow in the snow.
The mere rising to his feet was a matter of minutes, and he swayed uncertainly. Once more he fought fiercely with the temptation to acknowledge that this, indeed, was the end, and to follow the footsteps of Kalin. Once more his courage upheld his resolve. He would go on. He would walk until he could walk no longer. Then he would crawl on his hands and knees, drag himself forward with his hands, but he would go on.
As he stooped there came to his ears a humming, faint and far away. He arranged the robe and gathered Rose Emer gently into the sling. With immense effort he straightened his knees and back and stood erect again. Again the humming noise, nearer now, and louder! Marcus floundered out of the hollow, both ears pricked, and growled a weak, hoarse defiance. Polaris followed.
From a distant humming the noise rose to a shrilling; from a shrilling to a prolonged shriek. The man came out of the hollow, and his eyes sought the sky, whence came the sound. His heart bounded and threatened to burst in his breast.
Sharply outlined against the dazzling sky, sailing along on steady planes like a great white bird of the air, her engine purring and thrilling, and her propeller screaming, an air-ship passed athwart his vision!
Enthralled, his eyes followed it. It was less than half a mile away to his right. He tried to shout aloud, but his voice was feeble, and seemed to be thrown back at him from the air. Before he could rouse the girl, or convey to her senses what was occurring, the ship of the air had vanished. It dipped out of sight into the mouth of a little valley.
He looked again. No, his eyes did not deceive. Smoke was curling up from the valley, a thin blue spiral. The bird man had alighted there. There was a camp of men. Food and warmth, rescue and life for his precious burden—all were there in that little valley, a bare quarter of a mile away across the snow. Could he ever reach it?
Into his brain leaped a multitude of quick thoughts. Joy and the shadow of an old suspicion came together. He knelt again in the snow and aroused Rose Emer.
"Lady," he said very softly, "you are saved. Yonder," and he pointed across the snow toward the valley—"yonder is the smoke of a camp, and an air-ship from the south just landed in that valley."
Rose Emer strained her eyes across the snow. She saw the smoke and comprehended. For an instant she bowed her face on her arms. When she raised it her eyes were streaming. Out of hard despair tear time had come again. She caught his hand to her breast, and then raised it to her lips. He snatched it from her.
"Oh, but I thank you; words are too feeble to say it. I thank you for life, Polaris!"
"Lady," he made answer, "I am going to make a strange request of you. Yonder are those of your own people—the American captain and his men. It is my wish that when we come among them you will say nothing of my origin, of where you found me, or what has befallen us, more than is necessary to tell—"
"It is enough that you ask it," the girl broke in. "Never mind any further reason. I will do as you say."
He groped within the breast of his furred waistcoat and took out a small, flat packet, sewn in membranous parchment. "One more favor of your kindness, lady," he asked. "Please keep this packet until I ask it of you again. It is the message which I carry to the world at the north. Should I pass into the world of shadows, you will do me a great service if you will open it and send its contents to whom it is directed."
Rose Emer took the packet and hid it in her bosom.
"Now we will go on to the valley, before strength fails entirely," he said. He straightened up again, and bent to the toil of the pathway which he had marked out for himself. The girl leaned back against his straining breast. Once more, when she might have spoken, she kept silence.
They went on. Slowly, uncertainly, for Polaris staggered much, foot by foot, he fought his way across that bleak and endless quarter of a mile of snow.
Three hours after the air-ship had landed from its history-making dash in and out of the jaws of the antarctic, Captain Scoland and his two men were startled in their camp by an apparition.
Down the slope of the valley and through a circle of snarling dogs that rushed to attack and then slunk back affrighted, strode a grim-faced and silent man. On he came like a machine, or like one who walks wide-eyed at night. Behind him crept the tottering skeleton of a great gray wolf dog.
Slung across the breast of the man was a fur-wrapped bundle. With measured tread he walked on to the door of the shelter, paused, and with no word let his burden gently down into the snow. A corner of the robe fell aside and disclosed the face of Rose Emer. She had swooned, and lay like one dead.
Captain Scoland sprang forward with a strained cry of surprise and question. The strange man stood for an instant, his unseeing eyes fixed on the snow reaches beyond the valley. Then he tossed his arms above his head and pitched backward, inert and lifeless. The tottering wreck of a dog crept up and licked his face.
"They say the wild man is going to live," said a voice.
"Yes, Doc Clawson says he'll pull through all right," said another. "He's had a close call, if ever a man had. I wonder who and what he is."
"So do I," rejoined the first voice. "Do you believe that, that he is a wild man?"
"Dunno. What you goin' to believe?" The first voice became confidential. "I heard Doc tell the mate that he hadn't spoke an English word in all his sick ravings, except 'Lady,' which he might have learned from the girl. Then there's the knife. Captain's got that. It ain't like no metal any one ever saw. There's letters on it Doc says are Greek, but nobody here can read 'em. Doc says he believes what the chap jabbers is Greek too."
"He's got a queer necklace, too," chimed in the second voice. "It's made of the same kind of stuff as the knife is, and strung with red pebbles. Wonder what they'll do with him?"
"Sh-h-h! Don't you let your wonderin' run away with you. Cap's actin' queerer and queerer. Did you notice him when he came aft this mornin'—after the talk he had with the doc? I tell you somethin's gone wrong, all right—"
Scuffling footsteps broke the tenor of the voices, and they faded away to a murmur, and then to silence.
Those scraps of a conversation drifted to the mind of Polaris, where for hours and hours a tiny spark of comprehension had been struggling back into being. They were the first words that his returning consciousness had understood.
He opened his eyes.
Surely that knot in the oaken beam above him was an old friend, the one shaped so like the head of a horse. And that row of iron bolt-heads; how often he had counted them over! He lay in a white-covered berth in a small cabin, in which every seam and stitch and object was strangely familiar, but which his reawakening consciousness refused to recognize. Sunlight was streaming in through a partly opened port, and with it came the sound of the sea.
Slowly, for he found it required considerable effort, he turned over on his side and looked about him. Where was he? Above all, how had he got there? As he moved he felt something at his neck slip, and through the open throat of the linen garment he wore fell the heavy loop of the necklace of Kalin.
Wondering, he stared at the iridescent links of ilium and the dull red stones. Then the spring that held the tight-wound coil of memory snapped, and the past unrolled like an endless ribbon.
He was weak. He had been ill. Yes, now he held the key—that conversation he had just heard. The "wild man" of whom the sailors talked was himself. He smiled. Already his yellow beard had grown long and ragged, and covered his throat. The knife, and the necklace—all of the talk had referred to him.
And they said that in all his delirium he had spoken no word of English! He smiled to himself once more. So even when his conscious self had departed from control of his body and mind, he had held fast to his fanciful resolution. Rose Emer must also have kept her promise. Not a soul but herself guessed who he was.
But that last part of the sailors' talk? What did that mean? Whatwerethey going to do with him?
In an instant he was alert and bitterly suspicious. He was on a ship, a ship at sea. He was in the power of the American captain, the man who had sought and probably found the great and mystic pole; also the man who was the affianced husband of the girl whom Polaris had carried across the snow deserts in his arms. Now he had a duty laid upon him, which he secretly guessed would conflict sorely with the wishes of the captain. While he lived, he would strive to carry out that duty.
But why had he lived? At the end of his terrible journey darkness had fallen upon him in the camp; why had it ever lifted? If it had not, he had been freed of his promise, and would have been content.
What had happened since then? Where was Rose Emer? The gossip of the sailors had included no news of her; but so the inference was that all was well with her. Where was Marcus? How long had he been ill?
These questions remained unanswered. He could not know that he had lain heavy and inert on a sledge for days, with only the thickness of their fur parkas separating him from Rose Emer, while Scoland's men, abandoning all that did not make for speed, had driven dogs to death in their wild dash back to the Felix.
He could not know that he had been given up for dead by the men, and that, even then, that conclusion brought little of regret to the heart of the American commander. Nor could he know that Rose Emer would not have it so, and that, under her entreaties, the supposed corpse had been carried on to the ship, and to the good medical man on it, who found that somewhere in the fastnesses of the silent form stretched before him a tiny flicker of life still abode, and would respond to care.
That care he had received, and in good measure. To Dr. Clawson he most certainly owed his life—twice over. Having saved it once, the integrity of the physician withstood the hint, almost brutally direct, from Scoland, that the man would be better off if he were let to die quietly.
Polaris was the one fly in the ointment of the daring captain of the Felix. His vague suspicions concerning the origin of the stranger and his business in the snow land had become an obsession. From the girl he could obtain no satisfaction, and only food for more suspicion. She would say little of her rescue, and less of her rescuer, taking refuge from anything like investigation in the declaration that the stirring of the memory of those days in the wilderness was too much for her already overwrought nervous system.
Scoland was a man greatly daring; he also was a man who would scruple little to remove, by any means that seemed safe to himself, any obstacle which stood between him and that which he desired. He had striven for a great prize and won. Another prize lay almost within his grasp. Should an obstacle to either intervene, he would do his utmost to sweep it aside.
Was this strange wanderer an obstacle? Could he be one of a party who had penetrated the fastnesses of the snows, to wrest from jaws of berg and glacier the secret of the pole?
Captain Scoland had heard of no such party. When he thought of how the man came, proofless, he smiled at his own suspicions. And yet—might not others have waited for the return of this man, as the crew of the Felix had waited for himself?
Then there was the strange demeanor of the girl, her reticence and her almost rapt interest in the man. Even now she might have been haunting the sick man's cabin, but that Scoland had persuaded her that his mind was gone, and that he was well enough off as far as the needs of the body were concerned.
To do the captain justice, the attitude of the girl, her interest in the strange man, were the minor considerations. Everything must step aside for his glory as the discoverer of the pole. Already the press of two hemispheres was heralding his successful return, and the savants of the nations were awaiting his proofs. There must be no cloud on his title, no question of his right. He would make that sure.
An unsuspected cunning in dealings with other men had been awakened in the breast of Polaris. Suddenly awake to the full consciousness of his mental powers, he was swayed by his suspicion, by the warnings his father had given him long ago, his oft-repeated advice as to the intentions and possible actions of the first white men he was apt to meet.
He was awake from delirium, and his head was clear. To all appearances his mind still wandered. A little observation taught him when a sailor brought him food from the cook's galley, and when to expect the visits of the doctor. They soon found him changed in one respect. He accepted food, and once or twice they surprised him floundering weakly about the little cabin. But he showed them no brightness of mind. His glances were vacant, his manners those of an imbecile almost.
He bided his time.
His strength came back to him slowly, although he concealed that fact. They were far up the coast, not two weeks journey from New York, when he first came to a realization of being, after his long siege of brain fever and weakness. In those two weeks he took every measure to prepare himself against their landing on American soil.
He knew not at all what he should face, but he wished to be ready for it with all his old-time strength and agility. Not entirely could he disassociate his mind from the idea that opposition and trouble must be answered with the strength of one's body.
The man who brought the food and the physician who tended him came only in the day time. Therefore Polaris spent most of his days supinely in his berth. At night he was supremely active. Up and down the narrow confines he paced. He leaped lightly. He stretched and strained each limb and muscle.
Hour after hour he endured the severest "calisthenics"—not those taught in the gymnasium, but anything and everything in the line of the motion to which his surroundings lent themselves.
At length the Felix day in Quarantine. The next day they would dock. Scoland would meet and accept the homage of a nation which had gone temporarily wild over his exploits. Before that landing he would dispose of the living problem which lay and gibbered in the berth in the cabin that had been Burleson's.
Privately Scoland made arrangements with the authorities at a big institution for the care of the insane up the river. They were to send for the man. The captain explained that the patient was a member of his crew who had lost the balance of his mind due to the hardships he had endured.
That night Polaris checkmated all the captain's carefully made preparations. Tense with excitement, the son of the snows had realized that they lay near the land. Then he had seen it from the port. Snatches of talk of the sailors told him that it was New York at last—the city of his dreams. One scrap of conversation focused all his long-nursed doubts.
They had sailed to Quarantine through an almost continual blare of every kind of noise-making instrument on the decks of every ship they passed or met. With his head at the port Polaris caught, in a sudden interval of quiet, a few words from the deck above him. He recognized the voice of Captain Scoland, talking to the mate.
"They'll come for him in a launch at Quarantine," he said. "It's all arranged. Here's the cabin key. Better take a couple of the boys to help the keepers. He might try to make trouble."
That was all—and enough!
Soon after his return to consciousness Polaris had learned that the door to the cabin where he lay was kept locked always. It had been one of his earliest causes for suspicion. Some time after midnight that night he set his powerful shoulder to that door, and pressed his weight against it. Minutes he stood there, gradually increasing the pressure, until the lock sprung in its wards with a slight snap, and the knob yielded in his twisting fingers.
The man who had brought the food had left in the cabin a few rough garments such as the sailors wore. Polaris had donned them as he occasionally left the berth in the day time. He wore them now. Had any one met him, he scarcely would have been recognized as the "madman." He had found a razor in Burleson's cabin, and had shift to shave himself cleanly. He had hacked off the most of his long hair with the same instrument, and had disposed of the evidences of his tonsorial efforts by throwing all through the port into the harbor. Around his neck he wore the necklace of Kalin.
Only a half-defined notion of what he was about to do was in his mind, but there was no fear.
He stole along the silent corridor, and gained the deck and the rail, without being observed by the lone sailor on watch near the wheel-house. Ready to his hand, it seemed, were a short length of plank and a trailing rope, attached firmly to some part of the ship, but long enough and loose enough to serve him.
With the plank under one arm he clambered over the rail and let himself down with the rope. He could not swim a stroke, but he reached the water, and with one arm over the stout bit of plank, he struck out fearlessly for the glittering skyline of the great city that lay ahead.
Before many hours Scoland raged quietly when he found that his "wild man" had flown from the cage. But he was tongue-tied. He set cautious inquiry on foot to ascertain what had become of the refugee. He could do no more without publicity, which he did not court. His agents were able to tell him no more than did the broken door of Burleson's cabin on the Felix. Polaris was traceless.
Worried intensely at the first by the disappearance and still apprehensive of a blow at his fortunes from the hand of the snow wanderer, as days went by and nothing was heard from the missing one Scoland breathed more freely. Doubtless the man had gone overboard and drowned; or, if he had reached shore, he had wandered on his ways and would not be heard from again.
Concealing the anxiety she felt, Rose Emer also secretly endeavored to trace the lost Polaris. She met with no better success than had Scoland. Her great-hearted protector was gone.
Rumor had coupled her name with that of the hero of the hour, the discoverer of the pole,[1]and with the foreecho of wedding bells. Several times the subject was mentioned to her by the captain himself. He found the girl strangely silent on the matter that, before their trip to the south he had considered was almost settled. She did not speed his wooing, and he was too busy a man for the time to try and regain his lost advantage.
Dinners, receptions, fetes, and the lecture platform made continual demands on him, and then the summons came to go to Washington and lay the proofs of his polar discovery before the savants of the National Geographic Society.
Nearly a month had worn away since the Felix docked when Scoland journeyed to the Capital to place in the hands of the gray and critical members of the society the data of his explorations, that should fix him for all time in the firmament of famous discoverers—first man to stand at the southern pole.
More than two hours after he left the side of the Felix, Polaris propelled his little craft into an angle at the side of a long, low building that lay close to the harbor shore. He reached up, and his fingers hooked over a stone edge. Softly he drew himself up and over. He stood for the first time on the soil of his father's country.
With many a close escape from the wheels of ferries and the noses of propellers of other craft, of which a bewildering number were moving, even at that hour, but without being seen of any man, he had made the passage of the harbor. It was no mean accomplishment of itself. He was both weary and hungry after the toil. The second need must wait for a while. He saw near him the shrubbery of a little park. He crawled into the bushes and fell asleep.
Some three hours later, the dawn light shone revealingly on the soles of his bare feet, thrust from under the bush. They caught the eye of a policeman who was good-naturedly clearing the park of its "boarders." He investigated. The appearance of the man who owned the feet was so different from that of the ordinary "vag" habitués of the park, that the bluecoat decided he must "run him in."
Still sleepy and only half understanding, Polaris went meekly with the policeman. He knew that he was in the hands of a representative of the law of America, a law that his father had taught him must be reverenced and obeyed in all its manifestations.
With every instant unfolding to him a new wonder—from the startling height of a many-storied skyscraper to a belated messenger boy puffing at a cigarette—he was haled to a nearby station-house.
Because he could not, or would not, explain how he came to be in the park, and because his intense interest in the proceedings about him tended to make his answers casual, the judge dismissed him with a curt, "Ten or thirty." The son of the snows went to jail and knew no help for it.
He grew restive with the passing of the days in confinement. He had left but one object in life, and that was the delivery of his father's message. He had guessed for a long time that it had to do with a quest similar to that of Scoland. Now the name of the captain was on every lip. He had gone to Washington, to receive the official recognition of his discovery.
In Washington, Polaris would also liked to have been. And his message? He had given it into the keeping of Rose Emer. Where was she? Would she keep faith?
Then it struck him with the suddenness of a blow that his message might, even now, be in the keeping of the captain, the man who was to be her husband. When he was on the verge of delirium, he had put his most sacred trust into the hands of his enemy!
He laughed at the irony of it. Still, he would go to Washington. The rest was on the knees of the gods. She would keep faith, he knew, but did it rest with her?
Polaris learned much in those thirty days, for there is excellent wisdom even in the bowels of a jail. Came at last the day of his release, and found him in the middle of a puzzle. Not in all America was there a person to whom he could turn in his extremity. He was friendless and penniless. Under the circumstances, he could not bring himself to ask aid of Rose Emer, even if he knew where she was to be found.
Then it was that his dead friend Kalin raised up friends for him, friends and the power to carry out his project.
On the day of his release he was directed to the window of the property clerk's cage in the office of the prison. He found a small, dark-browned man talking with the clerk at the window, who eyed him curiously through thick, tortoise-rimmed spectacles of exaggerated size, that were perched on his high, curved nose.
"My necklace?" said Polaris, as he stood at the window of the cage.
For a moment the clerk hesitated, and he and the little man stared at Polaris. Up and down the little man's eyes roved, and finally a friendly gleam came into them.
"I have come down here to see you about that necklace," he said. "Mr. Atkins, here, he has seen nothing like that necklace of yours. So he has shown it to a friend of his who is one of my employees, and that friend has told to me so much about it that I have come all the way here once just to see it, and then again to see you."
He paused and looked steadily at Polaris, who returned the gaze with interest. What could the man want? Ah, he had it! Money! He would give money for the necklace of Kalin; and money in this land would do anything. It would take him to Washington. He could go as other men went. His face brightened.
"Your necklace," pursued the little man, "would you consider selling some of the stones? They are fine rubies, my friend, as no doubt you know. Now tell me, and I read it in your eyes that you cannot lie, are the stones yours? Would there be any legal question as to their ownership?"
"The necklace is mine," said Polaris gravely. "It was the gift of a friend of mine who died, in a foreign land. Do you wish to buy it? I will sell—"
The little man smiled and answered quickly:
"No, not even I wish to purchase the entire necklace. I should have to float a loan to pay its value. But I would like to purchase three or four of the stones."
The end of it was that Polaris parted with three of the smaller stones of the necklace at a price of seventeen thousand dollars—and glad enough the jeweler was, to get them at that figure. By a miracle Polaris had fallen into the hands of a man who could help him. He was one of the most noted experts in gems in the metropolis—and honest. Where another might have robbed him easily, this man gave him good value for the stones.
So it was that while the members of the geographic society were poring over the notes and records of Scoland, and plying the captain with many an admiring question, a young man broke in upon the deliberations.
"Never mind the name," he said to the clerk in the anteroom. "I came from the south with the Captain Scoland. They will wish to hear me."
That sufficed, and he entered the council room of the society. He was an exceedingly personable young man, he who thus strode into the den of the savants. He stood a good six feet from his soles, but he was so generously constructed as to shoulders and chest that he did not seem tall.
June had come, and he wore a handsome light textured suit. From the top of his flaxen poll to his shoes, he bore evidences of the best work of the metropolitan artists who had fitted him out in haste. A native dignity almost obscured the stiffness with which he wore the unaccustomed garments.
Scoland sat at the head of a long table. On either side of it were grouped the members of the society, the men of science who were weighing his claims to the title of discoverer of the south pole. As the young man entered the room the captain looked up quickly.
Their eyes met. For an instant the brow of the captain was wrinkled, as though he strove to recall a half-forgotten face. Then the interest in the eyes faded, and he turned them back toward the table. The metamorphosis was too complete for his recognition.
Testy old President Dean turned his leaping blue eyes on the stranger. At the foot of the table a little bowed old man with a puckered face and snapping bright black eyes leaned forward in sudden excitement and gripped the edge of the table until his gaunt knuckles whitened.
"Well, young man, who are you, and what do you want here?" rapped out the president.
"My name is Polaris, which, so far as I know, is all of it," replied the young man, and instantly the odd name he gave himself and the quaintness of his speech had drawn him the interest of every man at the table.
"That which I want here, it may be more difficult for me to tell you," he continued. "I came here from the far south in the ship of that man"—he pointed to Scoland—"bringing a message to the world from a man now dead, the man whom I believe first stood at the place of the southern pole. He—"
Polaris got no further. Scoland sprang to his feet in white rage.
"What's this?" he shouted. "Some crazy man has wandered in here. I never laid eyes on him before. Have him put out!"
For an instant there was silence in the room. At the foot of the table old Zenas Wright, who had put some marks on the maps in his own day, stared and stared.
"Steve, Steve, I thought you had come back to me," he murmured. "But you were a larger man, Steve, and that was years ago—years ago."
"Yes, you have laid eyes on me before," said Polaris, addressing Scoland. "A sick man came to your camp through the snows, bringing a member of your party who was lost. You took him to the ship, and your Dr. Clawson nursed him. You brought him to America. You thought him crazy and—But that matters not. I am that sick man, the man who disappeared. Any of your men will remember, or Dr. Clawson."
Scoland sank back into his chair with a troubled face. President Dean turned to him and said rather acidly: "You told us nothing of the finding of a strange man in the polar regions. Is the story of this man true?"
Quickly the captain thought. It was true what this man said. Any member of his crew would remember the "wild man." It would profit him not at all to lie.
"Why, yes," he assented. "There was such a man. But he could not, or pretended that he could not, speak English. He appeared to be a savage and an imbecile to boot. We brought him back with us. He disappeared the night we reached quarantine. Now that I look at this man, it seems that he may be the same, although he is changed greatly. He is undoubtedly crazy."
Scoland spoke confidently. Still, he felt in his heart a return of the forebodings that had warned him against this man since first he had set eyes upon him.
"Who are you, lad, and how did you come to be in the south?" old Zenas Wright spoke up from the foot of the table. His tone was kindly, and there was no suspicion, only deep interest, in the keen eyes he turned on the youth.
"As best I may, I will answer those questions," said Polaris. "I was born in the white south. My mother I never saw—only a grave with the name Anne above it. My father sleeps beside that grave, and above him is the name Stephen."
Zenas Wright started visibly and seemed about to interrupt the tale, but did not, and Polaris continued:
"Other names than those I know not that they had. My father reared me, and I never saw another human being until I met those of the party of Captain Scoland. My father died. He gave me a message to bring to the north—a message addressed to the National Geographic Society of the United States. In that message, he told me, was the story of a great discovery he had made—that would ring around the world—and in it also was the history of myself, which he never told me. We lived far to the south for many years, for my father hurt himself in a fall and could not travel.
"When he died and I came north, I passed and burned the ship in which he went to the south. Its name was the Yedda.
"This man has reached the pole. I do not wish to make his glory dim, but—he is not the first to stand at the pole. I have come here—"
He hesitated and glanced around the circuit of the big table. Every man there was leaning forward in strained attention.
"The message—the message your father sent?" queried President Dean, and held out a shaking hand. "Give us that message."
"I have lost that message," said Polaris quietly.
Scoland burst into a peal of derisive laughter. "A joke, gentlemen—a joke!" he cried. "I don't know who and what this young man is, but he has a rare sense of humor."
"Young man," continued the president severely, "this is a strange tale you have told—an almost unbelievable tale. Yet this society has listened to many strange tales. All that is lacking to make history of the strangest of tales is proof. You say you have lost your message. Without proof, no claim can stand before this society. I advise you most strongly to find that message, if such a message you have, and bring it before us. Until you do, the society cannot listen to you further."
He inclined his head and beckoned to the clerk at the door to show Polaris from the room. Polaris hesitated. There apparently was nothing more to be said. Still he hesitated. Then he heard two sounds behind him that caused him to turn like lightning. They were a quick little gasp and an astounded whine.
Framed in the doorway stood a girl and a great gray dog!