ly peril if he lost sight of
the light flashed upon him. Again and again he called into the night.
After that, bowing his head in the fury of the storm, he plunged on
deeper into darkness.

A sudden wild thought seized upon his soul and thrilled him into
forgetfulness of the light and the snow-dune and his own safety. In the
heart of this mad world he had heard a voice. He no longer doubted it.
And the voice was a woman's voice! Could it be Nada? Was it possible
she had followed him after his flight, determined to find him, and
share his fate? His heart pounded. Who else, of all the women in the
world, could be following his trail across the Barrens--a thousand
miles from civilization? He began to shout her name.
"Nada--Nada--Nada!" And hidden in the gloom at his side Peter barked.

Storm and darkness swallowed them. The last faint gleam of the alcohol
lamp died out. Jolly Roger did not look back. Blindly he stumbled
ahead, counting his footsteps as he went, and shouting Nada's name.
Twice he thought he heard a reply, and each time the will-o'-the-wisp
voice seemed to be still farther ahead of him. Then, with a fiercer
blast of the wind beating upon his back, he stumbled and fell forward
upon his face. His hand reached out and touched the thing that had
tripped him. It was not snow. His naked fingers clutched in something
soft and furry. It was a man's coat. He could feel buttons, a belt, and
the sudden thrill of a bearded face.

He stood up. The wind was wailing off over the Barren again, leaving an
instant of stillness about him. And he shouted:

"Nada--Nada--Nada!"

An answer came so quickly that it startled him, not one voice, but
two--three--and one of them the shrill agonized cry of a woman. They
came toward him as he continued to shout, until a few feet away he
could make out a gray blur moving through the gloom. He went to it,
staggering under the weight of the man he had found in the snow. The
blur was made up of two men dragging a sledge, and behind the sledge
was a third figure, moaning in the darkness.

"I found some one in the snow," Jolly Roger shouted. "Here he is--"

He dropped his burden, and the last of his words were twisted by a
fresh blast of the storm. But the figure behind the sledge had heard,
and Jolly Roger saw her indistinctly at his feet, shielding the man he
had found with her arms and body, and crying out a name which he could
not understand in that howling of the wind. But a thing