oke earnestly to his wife, instructing her to keep the team
in constant motion up and down the coast a rifle-shot in either
direction, and to listen for a signal of the return. Then he picked
her up as he would a babe, and she kissed his storm-beaten face.

"She's been a good squaw to me," he said, as they pushed their
dancing craft out into the breath of the gale, "and I've always done
the square thing by her; I s'pose she'll go back to her people now,
though."

The wind hurried them out from land, while it drove the sea-water in
freezing spray over their backs and changed their fur garments into
scaly armour, as they worked through the ice cakes, peering with
strained eyes for a sign of their friends.

The sailor, with deft strokes, steered them, between the grinding
bergs, raising his voice in lone signals like the weird cry of a
siren.

Twisting back and forth through the floes, they held to their quest,
now floating with the wind, now paddling desperately in a race with
some drifting mass which dimly towered above them and splintered
hungrily against its neighbour close in their wake.

Captain emptied his six-shooter till his numbed fingers grew rigid as
the trigger, and always at his back swelled the deep shouts of the
sailor, who, with practised eye and mighty strokes, forced their way
through the closing lanes between the jaws of the ice pack.

At last, beaten and tossed, they rested disheartened and hopeless.
Then, as they drifted, a sound struggled to them against the wind--a
faint cry, illusive and fleeting as a dream voice--and, still
doubting, they heard it again.

"Thank God! We'll save 'em yet," cried Captain, and they drove the
canoe boiling toward the sound.

Barton and Sullivan had fought the cold and wind stoutly hour after
hour, till they found their great floe was breaking up in the heaving
waters.

Then the horror of it had struck the Kid, till he raved and cursed up
and down their little island, as it dwindled gradually to a small
acre.

He had finally yielded to the weight of the cold which crushed
resistance out of him, and settled, despairing and listless, upon the
ice. Barton dragged him to his feet and forced him round their
rocking prison, begging him to brace up, to fight it out like a man,
till the other insisted on resting, and dropped to his seat again.

The older man struck deliberately at the whitening face of his
freezing companion, who recognized the well-meant insu