oned, and they were put on short rations, and for all the thick
garments they had, they were but ill-equipped against the piercing wind
and inhospitable violence of this wilderness. The first night was spent
in darkness and without fires. The engines that had supplied power were
smashed and dropped far away to the south, and there was never a
match among the company. It had been death to carry matches. All the
explosives had been thrown out of the magazine, and it was only towards
morning that the bird-faced man whose cabin Bert had taken in the
beginning confessed to a brace of duelling pistols and cartridges, with
which a fire could be started. Afterwards the lockers of the machine gun
were found to contain a supply of unused ammunition.

The night was a distressing one and seemed almost interminable. Hardly
any one slept. There were seven wounded men aboard, and Von Winterfeld's
head had been injured, and he was shivering and in delirium, struggling
with his attendant and shouting strange things about the burning of New
York. The men crept together in the mess-room in the darkling, wrapped
in what they could find and drank cocoa from the fireless heaters and
listened to his cries. In the morning the Prince made them a speech
about Destiny, and the God of his Fathers and the pleasure and glory
of giving one's life for his dynasty, and a number of similar
considerations that might otherwise have been neglected in that bleak
wilderness. The men cheered without enthusiasm, and far away a wolf
howled.

Then they set to work, and for a week they toiled to put up a mast of
steel, and hang from it a gridiron of copper wires two hundred feet by
twelve. The theme of all that time was work, work continually, straining
and toilsome work, and all the rest was grim hardship and evil chances,
save for a certain wild splendour in the sunset and sunrise in the
torrents and drifting weather, in the wilderness about them. They built
and tended a ring of perpetual fires, gangs roamed for brushwood and met
with wolves, and the wounded men and their beds were brought out from
the airship cabins, and put in shelters about the fires. There old Von
Winterfeld raved and became quiet and presently died, and three of
the other wounded sickened for want of good food, while their fellows
mended. These things happened, as it were, in the wings; the central
facts before Bert's consciousness were always firstly the perpetual
toil, the holding and l