sely, "I was
whipped--but they should have tied my hands first. It was not my fault I
didn't have that man's life. It was 'most a minute before three of them
pulled me off him, and he was considerably worse to look at then."

There was silence for a minute or two, and Wyllard, who felt his own
face grow warm, saw the suggestive hardness in Charly's eyes. Lewson was
gazing out into the darkness, but the veins were swollen on his forehead
and his whole body had stiffened.

"We'll let that go. I can't think of it," he said, recovering his
composure. "They put us on board the schooner, and by and by she ran
into a creek on the coast. We were to be sent somewhere to be dealt
with, and we knew what that meant, with what they had against us. Well,
they went ashore to collect some skins from the Kamtchadales, and at
night we cut the boat adrift. We got off in the darkness, and if they
followed they never trailed us. Guess they figured we couldn't make out
through the winter that was coming on."

So far the story had been more or less connected and comprehensible. It
laid no great tax on Wyllard's credulity, and, indeed, all that Lewson
described had come about very much as Dampier had once or twice
suggested; but it seemed an almost impossible thing that the three men
should have survived during the years that followed. Lewson, as it
happened, never made that matter very clear. He sat silent for almost a
minute before he went on again.

"We hauled the boat out, and hid her among the rocks, and after that we
fell in with some Kamtchadales going north," he said. "They took us
along, I don't know how far, but they were trapping for furs, and after
a time--I think it was months after--we got away from them. Then we fell
in with another crowd, and went on further north with them. They were
Koriaks, and we lived with them a long while--a winter and a summer
anyway. It was more, perhaps--I can't remember."

He broke off with a vague gesture, and sat looking at the others
vacantly with his lean face furrowed.

"We must have been with them two years--but I don't quite know. It was
all the same up yonder--ever so far to the north."

It seemed to Wyllard that he had seldom heard anything more expressive
in its way than this sailorman's brief and fragmentary description of
his life in the wilderness. He had heard from whaler-skippers a little
about the tundra that fringes the Polar Sea, the vast desolation frozen
hard in summer a f