fissure growing
wider each second. We were saved; and, boys, never did I see the
finger of God more plainly than at that moment! I am glad I wasn't
ashamed to throw myself on my knees and thank Him aloud, and Frenchy
joined me with all his heart.'

'But,' began Alick wonderingly, after a long pause, 'how on earth did
you find your way back, you two, through all that frozen white country
with no landmarks?'

'How? Why, I s'pose you don't know the watchword of all Arctic
expeditions, young master? 'Tain't likely as you should, so I'll tell
you. The law out yonder is: keep your line of retreat open; and a
better rule couldn't be. It so be as you take heed to it keerful, you
can't be cut off from the world. So Pierre an' me, in due time, found
our way back to the ship, which was stationed in the Spitzbergen Sea.'

'And what about t'others, the rest of the expedition? They pushed on,
didn't they?' asked Ned eagerly.

'Ah! that's the queer thing that I be a-comin' to,' said Jerry,
speaking solemnly. 'In course they pushed on. But never a man of the
lot came back to tell the story of what they'd seen. They was too
venturesome; they went too far ahead, and must have perished of sheer
cold; leastways that's what I've heard. If you don't see a meanin'
under that, well, I do! And real grateful I feel to the Almighty. I
lost an arm, but them poor lads they lost their lives.'

There was another silence. Jerry industriously puffed away; Alick
stared up unblinkingly into a chink of blue between the tree-tops; and
Ned gravely whittled away at a tiny boat of wood, one of a fleet with
which he kept Miss Queenie so numerously supplied that it bade fair to
develop into a Lilliputian navy in time.

'Did you ever use any dogs on the expedition, Jerry?' asked Alick,
whose thoughts had been travelling along the silent white expanse of
the far-away North.

'Dogs? No, muster, we didn't in them days. But Frenchy used to talk
away, I remember, o' nights round the camp-fires, about the proper use
dogs would be on an expedition. There was one breed in pertikler he
spoke well off--the West Siberian, I think he called 'em.'

'Yes,' eagerly put in Alick, 'they're the ones, the West Siberian.
Father was speaking about them. They're considered to be awfully
useful.'

'I dessay!' assented Jerry, knocking the ashes out of his pipe before
carefully stowing it away in one of his many pockets. 'But 'pears to
me we've got to be