ve let him go that last time," he moaned. "If he
perishes it will be my fault! I'm older and I should have thought
further! I should have kept him back! But I'm so in the habit of letting
him go ahead! Oh, I should have held him back! I should have held him
back!"

And in this soliloquy Jimmy unconsciously admitted, though he did not
know it, that Bobby was his leader still, as he always had been, and
that Bobby's will and judgment dominated. Bobby had decided to go upon
that last attempt to find snow suitable for an _igloo_, and Bobby went,
and Jimmy could no more successfully have interposed his judgment
against Bobby's than he could have stopped the blowing of the wind.

"No," he admitted to himself at last, "I could not have done anything
more to find Bobby. In this terrible storm I would have perished, for it
is physically impossible to move about."

And so presently Jimmy, easing his conscience, permitted his better
judgment to prevail, though once he had been upon the point of digging
out of his retreat and throwing himself again into the maelstrom of
suffocating snow and darkness. And then he prayed the good Lord to
preserve Bobby's life and his own, and to guide them back to safety, as
only He could, for they were in His care.

Even under the snowdrift that had quickly covered him Jimmy could hear
the shrieking wind and thunderous pounding of ice and seas, and there
was little wonder that at last he fancied the floe rising and falling
beneath him, and he lay in momentary expectation of being cast into the
water and crushed beneath mighty ice pans.

But Jimmy was young, and nature's demands were strong upon him, and
presently, snug under his accumulating blanket of snow, a drowsy warmth
stole over him, and he slept.

How long he had been sleeping Jimmy did not know, when he awoke from a
dream that he and Skipper Ed and Bobby were in a snow _Igloo_ and the
top had fallen in and was suffocating him with its weight. For a moment,
until he marshaled his wandering wits, he believed it no dream at all,
but a reality, and then as the happenings of the previous afternoon and
night were remembered, he realized his position, and Bobby's going, and
he began wildly digging away the snow with his hands.

It was a hard task, but at last he made an opening through the drift,
and was astonished as he forced his way out to find that it was broad
day and the sun shone brightly and a dead calm prevailed.

But a wild terro