weary men, but they lay still, with lips tight
set in tense suspense. What Lewson had had to face in the awful icy
wastes to the north of them Wyllard could scarcely imagine, and Lewson
could not tell, but he and his two other comrades had borne things
almost beyond endurance since he began his search, and now there was far
too much at stake for him to increase the odds against them by any undue
precipitancy. He was then in a dangerous mood, but he had laid his plans
with grim, cold-blooded caution, and he meant to adhere to them.

Very slowly the light faded, until the beach grew shadowy, and the
schooner's spars and rigging showed dim and blurred against a dusky
background. The rise that shut off the settlement was lost in drifting
haze, and the dull rumble of the surf on the outer beach came up more
sharply through the gathering darkness. The measured beat of the tide's
deep pulsations almost maddened Wyllard as he lay and listened, for if
all went right, in an hour or two he would be sliding out over the long
heave with every sail piled on to the crazy schooner.

When there was only a faint gleam of water sliding by below, he rose
stiffly to his feet, and Lewson stretched out a hand for the rifle that
lay among the stones. There was a sharp click as he jerked the lever,
and then he laughed, a little jarring laugh, as the magazine snapped
back.

"They'll treat us as pirates if they get hands on us--and I've been
lashed in the face--with a sled-dog-whip," he said.

Charly made no remark as he loosed the long seaman's knife in his belt.
Wyllard could not utter a remonstrance, for there is, as he recognized,
a point beyond which prudence does not count. After what Overweg had
once or twice told him, it was unthinkable that they should fall into
Smirnoff's hands.

Lewson and Charly melted away into the darkness. Wyllard and the Siwash
walked quietly down to the water's edge, a little up-stream of the
schooner, as the stream was running strong. As they waited a few moments
before plunging into the sea they stripped off nothing, for it was
evident that none of the rags they left behind could be replaced, and
they knew from experience that when the first shock is over a man
swimming in icy water is kept a little warmer by his clothing. For all
that, the cold struck through Wyllard when he flung himself forward and
swung his left hand out. It was perhaps a minute before he was clearly
conscious of anything beyond the p