he deliverance of you two
chaps. You mustn't take those risks again. It's tempting Providence."

"Why, I didn't think we were careless," said Bobby. "It was the sort of
thing that is always likely to happen."

Jimmy lifted his head.

"Hello!" drowsily. "Is it time to get up? I've been sleeping like a
stone."

"It isn't time for you to get up," cautioned Skipper Ed. "You stay right
where you are today."

"I'm all right, Partner!" Jimmy declared.

"Well, you've got to demonstrate it. We don't want any pneumonia cases
on our hands. Just draw some long breaths, and punch yourself, and see
how you feel."

"I feel fine," insisted Jimmy, after some deep breaths and several
self-inflicted punches. "It doesn't hurt a bit to breathe, and I don't
feel lame anywhere. The only place I feel bad is in my stomach, and
that's just shouting for grub."

"Very well," laughed Skipper Ed, "that kind of an ache we can cure with
boiled seal and hardtack."

And so, indeed, it proved. Their hardihood, brought about by a life of
exposure to the elements, and their constitutions, made strong as iron
by life and experience in the open, withstood the shock, and, none the
worse for their experience, and passing it by as an incident of the
day's work, they resumed the hunt with Skipper Ed.

All of that day and the next, which was Thursday, they hunted with great
success, and when Thursday night came more than half a hundred fat
seals, among which were three great bearded seals--"square flippers,"
they called them--lay upon the ice as their reward. They were well
pleased. Indeed, they could scarcely have done better had Abel Zachariah
been with them.

"Tomorrow will be Friday, and we had better haul our seals to Itigailit
Island to the cache," Skipper Ed suggested that evening as they sat snug
in the _igloo_, eating their supper. "We have all we can care for."

"I hate to leave with all these seals about, but I suppose we'll have to
go some time," said Bobby regretfully.

"Yes, and I'm wondering what I'll find in my traps when we get home,"
said Jimmy.

"You may have a silver fox, Partner," laughed Skipper Ed.

"I've been looking for one every round I've made this winter," Jimmy
grinned.

"That's the way with every hunter," said Skipper Ed. "He's always
looking for a silver, and it makes him the keener for the work, and
drives away monotony. He's always expecting a silver, though year in and
year out he gets nothing but reds and w