ow he determined to find out, though he
knew if he once crossed them there would be little chance of regaining
the hut before dark. It was a laborious climb, and several times he
slid back to the place of starting, but each mishap of this kind only
made him the more determined to gain the top. At length, breathless
and bruised, crawling on hands and knees, he reached a point from which
he could look beyond the barrier. As he did so, he turned sick and
uttered a choking cry.

[Illustration: He reached a point from which he could look beyond the
barrier.]

What he saw in that first glance was so utterly incredible that it
could not be true, though if it were it would be the most welcome and
beautiful sight in all the world. Yet it was only a ship! Just one
ship and a lot of men! The ship was not even a handsome one, being
merely a three-masted steam sealer, greasy and smeared in every part
with coal soot from her tall smoke stack. She lay a mile or so away,
but well within the pack, through the outer edge of which she had
forced a passage. The men, evidently her crew, who were on the ice
near the foot of Cabot's ridge, were a disreputable looking lot,
ragged, dirty, unkempt, and as bloody as so many butchers. And that is
exactly what they were--butchers engaged in their legitimate business
of killing the seals that, coming up from the south to meet the
drifting ice pack, had crawled out on it by thousands to rear their
young.

This was all that Cabot saw; yet the sight so affected him that he
laughed and sobbed for joy. Then he stood up, and, with glad tears
blinding his eyes, tried to shout to the men beneath him, but could
only utter hoarse whispers; for, in his overpowering happiness, he had
almost lost the power of speech. As he could not call to them he began
to wave his arms to attract their attention, and then, all at once, he
was nearly paralysed by a hail from close at hand of:

"Hello there, ye bloomin' idjit! Wot's hup?"

Whirling around, Cabot saw, standing only a few rods away, a man who
had evidently just climbed the opposite side of the ridge. He
recognised him in an instant, as he must have done had he met him in
the most crowded street of a great city, so distinctively peculiar was
his figure.

"David! David Gidge!" he gasped, recovering his voice for the effort,
and in another moment, flinging his arms about the astonished mariner's
neck, he was pouring out a flood of incoherent wor